pendragonsclotpole

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In most BBC Merlin analyses, and sometimes, mine included, we often talk about how much Merlin forgets himself and who he is, in the later seasons, his personality and character and beliefs, and how he gets replaced by something heavier, by a person who’s literally the other side of Arthur, who can’t think on his own, if he doesn’t consider him first.

But what I personally think we get wrong is when this happens. Because Merlin confesses to Arthur, “I’m happy to be your servant, ‘till the day I die.”

And that happens so early, and what does Arthur do, if not fall irremediably in love? It’s not even a fall, it’s a continuous precipice, a tumultuous one, where he doesn’t know what to hold onto, if not on the one man who unfolded that truth to him, only after a few months of knowing him.

Merlin was ready and did lay down his life for Arthur, mere days later to their first meeting.

No matter their choices, whatever they are bad or good, they can’t do it otherwise, even if they want to, they can’t decide differently, because theirs is not love: it’s destruction, it tears them apart, yet they can’t stop picking up the pieces, one after one, until they’re all again.

Merlin is woven in the fabric of the world, and if Arthur is born of that magic, then he can’t help but feel drawn to him. It doesn’t matter if Merlin is his servant or not, because he would have found a way to serve Arthur no matter the circumstances. He uses his magic only for him because he doesn’t know otherwise. Arthur writes rules and laws based on what Merlin tells him to because he doesn’t know otherwise.

They listen to none but each other, they fight for none but each other, they love none as deeply but each other.

It’s more than devotion, it’s a risk, and Merlin and Arthur took it as soon as they laid eyes on one another.

“Do I know you?”

Perhaps, Arthur did, perhaps, he felt that pull of destiny, that part of him he never understood that had awoken on Merlin’s command.

They are one and the same, and that’s more than love.

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one day, i’ll write a fanfic called the three lives of arthur pendragon and it’ll just be a prologue for another fic where he’s finally revived and remembers all of the ways he tragically died in his three past lives and….

i have nothing right now but i’ll get there

bradley james dying in historical dramas: a trilogy 

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i read this as “Say, you husband was just a little gay, wasn’t he?”

just a little guy

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oh my god i love this

commission work. Haven’t watched Merlin but I’m looking forward to

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also for all you newbs, major news is reported on this website using the destiel “i love you” meme format.

for example, if some major tea level drama goes down between the tech ceos attending the inauguration and you can read lips, please post your lip reading as a long text in front of a photo of jensen ackles as dean winchester responding to misha collins as the angel castiel’s declaration of love for dean.

i don’t make the rules, but some of us on this site are only destiel-meme literate (it’s me)

For those who’ve migrated from TikTok: there’s no reward for harassment on Tumblr. You won’t gain a heavy amount of likes, reblogs, and followers for leading harassment campaigns; if anything, it’ll make people block you.

On Tumblr, there’s no popularity contest because many don’t care about the amount of followers, likes, and reblogs you have. A lot of users even hide their likes and who they're following. Users heavily encourage blocking people and filtering out tags. This is why online discourse is more confined to its bubble instead of being so widespread on this website: because people curate their experiences.

If you want to have an enjoyable experience on Tumblr, then you need to use the block button and filtering system. If you don't, then you're going to be extremely miserable.

EDIT: Interesting additions to the post-

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i, for one, was not prepared for the sheer horror of seeing 2025 in the updated date of my fanfics

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Just a little something I'm playing around with this evening...

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It’s Tumblr’s 2024 Year in Review!

Hello, Tumblr. Welcome to your Year in Review. Grab a slice of hear-me-out cake and some tea or other beverage of choice, and settle in for another year’s worth of sweet, sweet data—brought to you by the folks behind your weekly Fandometrics lists.

How does it work, you ask? Well, each year, we collect and categorize data from every post you made, each search, all the tags you used, and each and every like and reblog—to see what you yelled about the most. Lists are grouped by topic using 365 days of data between October 21, 2023, and October 20, 2024. Rankings are based on volume of appearance—not sentiment, importantly—so you might see list entries you Do Not Like that Tumblr as a whole has been vocal about Not Liking this year. We don’t tend to include on-platform events, so while you all booped and BOOped each other to distraction, that won’t show up here. Those joys are simply unquantifiable.

But what can you expect to find? It’s been quite a year. Alongside supporting each other through and discussing world turbulences, you rallied around the things that bring you joy. You polled the heck out of pretty much everything and anything you could think of and created more fanart and fan fic than we could wave a moderately shaped wizard hat at. It's also been another huge year for fictional characters—arguably the best characters out there—so this Year in Review, you’ll find new and returned rankings of fictional characters from movies, video games, TV shows, and anime & manga. And finally, we've made the lists longer, which means you'll have more chance of seeing some of your more niche fandoms reflected in them this year.

That's all for now! And so, without further ado and absolutely no gilding of lilies, thank you for another Big Year on Tumblr, Tumblr. Please enjoy your Year in Review.

Top 24 of 2024 Ships TV Shows TV Shows Fictional Characters Movies Movies Fictional Characters Celebs Books Anime & Manga Anime & Manga Fictional Characters Video Games Video Games Fictional Characters Web Series Web Celebs Musical Acts The 'Blrs

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TV Shows

Gods, angels, demons, dragons, vampires, and a bunch of first responders in LA.

Gravity Falls +56

Hazbin Hotel

Good Omens -2

Doctor Who +11

Interview with the Vampire +12

House of the Dragon +13

9-1-1 +18

Bridgerton +37

Percy Jackson and the Olympians +31

Supernatural

The Owl House -9

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -7

Avatar: The Last Airbender +19

Danny Phantom +4

Stranger Things -12

Dead Boy Detectives

Hannibal +9

Our Flag Means Death -12

Fallout

House MD +43

The Bad Batch +23

Loki +13

Ninjago +24

The Eurovision Song Contest -8

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir -18

Adventure Time -17

Agatha All Along

Star Trek: The Original Series +51

Steven Universe +12

Criminal Minds +37

Lego Monkie Kid +7

The Umbrella Academy

Merlin

Arcane +14

Heartstopper -15

The Last Of Us -32

Obi-Wan Kenobi +12

Star Wars: The Clone Wars +17

X-Men '97

The 2024 US Presidential Debate

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine +20

Smiling Friends

Game of Thrones +23

Young Royals -13

The 81st Golden Globe Awards +20

The Bear +30

Phineas and Ferb +44

The Acolyte

South Park -13

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

Outer Banks +19

Sonic Prime -19

The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish

Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake -43

The Boys

Yellowjackets -29

The Muppets +12

The Sandman -29

Succession -51

Gotham +29

The 96th Academy Awards +7

Blue Eye Samurai

The Terror

Voltron: Legendary Defender

The Untamed -7

Buffy the Vampire Slayer +22

Invader Zim +33

The Sanremo Music Festival +29

Shadow and Bone -56

Total Drama

Ninjago Dragons Rising

The Dragon Prince -33

The 2024 MTV Video Music Awards

The Mandalorian -60

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

What We Do In The Shadows -53

Community +5

Teen Titans

Young Justice

The Walking Dead +16

The 76th Primetime Emmy Awards

Metalocalypse -43

Transformers: Prime

Star Wars Rebels -11

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -25

Teen Wolf -49

Supergirl +7

The Witcher -67

Pit Babe

The 66th Annual Grammy Awards -3

Classic Doctor Who

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

Breaking Bad -43

Super Bowl LVIII

Amphibia -20

Abbott Elementary -50

The Simpsons -23

My Adventures With Superman -47

Twin Peaks

Over the Garden Wall

The number in italics indicates how many spots a title moved up or down from the previous year. Bolded titles weren’t on the list last year.

Love Hazbin Hotel? There's a Community (or 50) for that.

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now give it a kiss

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me laughing over here with my apple music 2024 replay

everyone waiting for spotify wrapped, trying to guess when it'll come out, i've seen some guesses at the weird genres they'll have this year...

what if they just don't do it this year. that would be so funny imo

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Galactic Discourse #5 interior art

Signe Landon 1987

poetry by Judy Darnell

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reblogging because i was about to follow you to keep up with your progress, op, only to realize i already follow you.

i await you, op.

It is funny to me that a week or two ago, I was thinking about making a really moving/hopeful fanvid for Kirk and Spock set to Born to Run (if not Thunder Road or Badlands because they deserve it and if there are any songs I ought to obsessively listen to, it's those), and what am I doing now? Instead of finishing anything else (edits, meta, etc.)? Going back through an old chat with a friend and pulling out an idea that has been rattling around in my brain since August: a fanvid set to Protect Me From What I Want as a meditation on how Kirk and Spock deny themselves love throughout TOS, using quotes from Charlie X ("There are a million things in this universe you can have and a million things you can't have. It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are."), The Naked Time ("Love. You're better off without it and I'm better off without mine."), Amok Time ("He does not know. I will do what I must, T'Pau, but not with him! His blood does not burn. He is my friend!" / "After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting."), and potentially Metamorphosis ("You can't join. You can't love." I have a lot of feelings about that speech and what it means for Kirk to be the one to say it, despite struggling to put it into words. Maybe some day I will dive into that episode like I've been meaning to.)

I've thought about making the parallel post and actually getting into the details of how this issue lurks in the background between them (and how they reject it when the other is in danger, showing what they truly desire, even in a high-stakes, life-or-death scenario when what they decide is coming from impulse and snap-decision), but the more I collect the images, the more the idea of crafting a video makes better sense, despite all the work that it will take (processing audio clips twice over, collecting the right clips, trying to match the song lyrics and not include a single bit of humor to it because that will destroy it, etc.).

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THIS IS SO CUTE!! Hi everyone, i am laura and i will 100% be bringing the mashed potatoes. this year my family massacred the classic mashed potato dish and i will be salty for the next 363 days until this is rectified. the correct way to eat mashed potatoes is with the skin on and with soft pieces of potato. anything smoother is puréed and wrong.

i am so thankful for all of my moots and the lovely people i interact with in this space. i have been a fan of merlin since like 2013, literally mere months after the show ended, and i always felt like i missed out on the community UNTIL NOW. i get to see how active the merlin community remains and other communities too! Hannibal, star trek, etc. It’s wonderful, esp. after a hard year.

let’s see, two extremely lovely people have already tagged me and thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday so now i will tag as many people as i possibly can before real life calls me back

@thisisjustmefangirling @imnotacreepijustlikeyou @is-arthur-back-yet @achillesuwu @strawlessandbraless @lxvenderjewel @lemonlinelights @emrysofealdor

Happy Mootsgiving, everyone!

So, technically, I know Thanksgiving is an American holiday… history… yadda yadda. However, this is not Thanksgiving.

This is Mootsgiving, and what I say goes ‘cause this is my holiday. Anyway! Mootsgiving is all the basic ideas of Thankgiving but better because I’m great like that.

I just wanted to show everyone how grateful I am, since gratefulness is a key principle of Thanksgiving.

I want all my moots from different countries to be able to have the picture-perfect movie-esque Thanksgiving of being surrounded by friends and family with all the care and love and gratefulness that can be poured into a single human. And, as the ever-dramatic Runar, what better way to do that than to organize a huge event?

So! Rules!

State what food you brought

State one thing you’re thankful for

My name is Runar, I brought the eggnog, and I’m grateful for each and every one of you 💗🫶

Really sappy and really long paragraph/speech under the cut!!

Soooo… to start off my big long speech… *clinks my fancy wine glass that’s filled with a mysterious substance* (It’s eggnog)

When I first started this blog, it was off a whim. I wanted to do something, something that involved putting my work out there, as I was just starting out. I wanted to mean something. In any sort of way, I wanted to leave a sort of mark. Not just any mark, though, no. I wanted to add a bit of joy, a spark of life that comes from creativity, and adding words and love into the space we occupy on this floating rock in space.

I wanted to write because it made me happy, and I wanted there to be a possibility of someone who was who got joy from reading to maybe stumble upon it, and get joy from me. Get joy from something I was able to provide for them.

I was also incredibly lonely. I had no friends, I had nothing, pretty much. I didn’t talk much. I was reclusive. I was okay, but I was empty. I didn’t have a purpose. And while I wasn’t expecting much, nothing at all really, I was overjoyed at the prospect that maybe just one person would stumble upon something I wrote and for a moment of their day, maybe they got peace from it.

Maybe they felt a little less lonely. I would have been at peace with just knowing the possibility of it was out there. And then… it did. And I got more than I bargained for, even, I got a friend. My first friend.

From there, everything… clicked. Slowly, but ever so surely, things were falling into place. I was gaining something that had not even crossed my mind. A family.

So, my silly dream born from a whim became friends, connections, and family, it became life-altering. It had ups, it had downs, it had in-betweens. It was beautiful and messy and happy and sad and fucked up and so wonderfully… human?

Yeah, this is online, this is a silly mootsgiving idea I thought up three hours ago because I wanted people to know I love them.

But to someone who had nothing, this is everything. You are everything.

Even if we’ve only talked one time, you have a special place in my heart. The character growth has been… one hell of a ride. I’ve gone through many eras, and made new friends in each and every one of them. So, with the end of the year closing soon, I suppose in a way this is not just a silly mootsgiving.

My bigger end goal, really, was to make sure as we get to the end of this ear, you know how genuinely important this whole year has been to me. How important you have been. I got an anon ask,

What does it feel like to be wanted?

It was beautiful poetry. I replied, said I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be wanted. But really? I think maybe I do. I think it feels like having enough people that you love to organize and invite everyone to a huge event online, to write out this heartfelt paragraph and trust that at least one person will care enough to read it.

My beginning goal has changed so much, and not at all. My biggest purpose in life has been, and I think will always be, to add something into this world.

Creativity, joy, happiness, compassion, I want to ensure that no matter what, as long as you know me, you know you have one person on this earth who loves and cares about you with as much feeling that can physically be felt by one person without exploding into a bunch of tiny little runar pieces.

But moreso, I think maybe my goal has changed from wanting to put stories out there, to putting myself out there. I don’t want to write stories that are just fiction, just crafted ideas meshed together to create a blob of fiction.

I want to write pieces of myself into everything, which i think might genuinely be impossible to not do. I want my heart to pour out of my fingers into the things i type out for you, and i want to not only feel things, but to maybe make you feel something too. Something warm and fuzzy, something good, as good as you deserve.

Aaaaannnd…. to end this….

I love you guys, thanks for being here <3

@marauding-almond @percyweasleyapologist @yesiamprocrastinating @dieatthealtar-deactivated @caramel-covered-apples @thatoneslytherinnerd @thatoneslytherinnerd2

@hedgehog-troops@circe-butbetter @stars-on-my-bedroom-ceiling @l1ve-l4ugh-lov3craft @aidens-ocean-galaxy@rainystarsx@liggy-not-potter @goformoony@i-still-got-love-for-you @definitionoffuckup@mairon-goth-minion

@weewooooweew @residentdisaster @matty-os-blog @starkissed-mars @printershorts @the1970sdeadgaywizard-regulus @lesbian-disaster-tm @star-dust-shark @enbysiriusblack @sadnappo @kawaiibarty @hershey-not-the-chocolate-maybe

@jamespotterbbg @scrumblewonk @seekmemystar @rins-batcave @utterqueerdisasterthesimp @gasolinehornet @asters-tempo @here-am-i-sitting-in-a-tin-can @permetutotheworld @theprongspotter @sotiredimbored @yourlocalbadgerscales @raeprise @burgundykicks @whydousernamesevenexist @jaydove-writes @the-stars-drowning @inara-tries-to-survive @saturnsconstellation @royallygray

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lol i feel so weird and out of pocket for admitting this but “foot powder” because i recently learned a lot of body related powders are corn starch based or should be in the case of my fellow ladies!! corn starch, no talcum powder especially for certain areas. okay let’s see

@achillesuwu @thisisjustmefangirling @imnotacreepijustlikeyou @lxvenderjewel

last google search, go

um. Tag four people.

what do they make sewer tunnels out of

@ncc1701ohno @affixjoy @the-magpieprince @twinkboimler

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Ygraine and the sword make beautiful babies i guess🤷🏽‍♀️

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you have the best, most informative posts that explain weird things ive noticed. 🥹

Your daily reminder to use « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon » despite the fact that it seems to have less fic, it currently look like it has « 7049 », and not « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) » (33619) when searching for fic because Merlin/Arthur Pendragon include « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) » but « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) » exclude older fic that used « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon »

Example :

Here is the number of fic if you filter using Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) aka 33,619 fic

And here is the number of fic you get if you filter by using Merlin/Arthur Pendragon aka 38,899 fic

It also happen for tag such as bottom arthur pendragon, you get more fic if you filter by using bottom arthur instead.

824 fic for bottom Arthur (with the Merlin fandom filter) vs 717 fic with the bottom Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)

Btw it isn’t the case for Merlin since bottom Merlin is a « Tags with the same meaning » of Bottom Merlin (Merlin)

Also I just noticed but this mean that there is actually MORE (tagged) bottom Arthur fic lmao