#as i was writing this i had the hilarious concept of like. divorcees oberon/merlin.

[zeravmeta]

I actually fucking love how disingenuous Merlin really is. Like for someone who is dedicated to observing the truth and feeding off stories he’s also an incredible liar. Merlin can feel emotions despite what he says but he doesn’t trust his own emotions to be real because his nature as a half incubus means that he’s detached from the process of feeling said emotions, so he’s always hyper aware of his emotional state and hand-waves them away as his own incubus nature feeding off them. It’s part of what caused him to isolate himself in Avalon, because he genuinely grieved for Artoria but couldn’t handle said emotions, and it led to a self-loathing over how his involvment could make things worse. 

It’s part of what makes his parallels with Oberon so interesting: Oberon is a living lie but Merlin’s only “lie” is to himself. Oberon and Merlin are fundamentally incompatible because Oberon represents the stories that Merlin feeds off of, and Oberon can’t accept someone consuming a story without understanding its value, while Merlin’s role as someone who observes and enjoys stories purely on a surface-level value for consumption means he can’t percieve Oberon. Oberon is a living lie fighting for the fictional Lostbelts because he can’t accept that they are reduced to lies, in essence arguing that they are as “true” as PHH, while Merlin represents the truth in PHH being PHH, the story that he lives in and observes thus being the only “truth” among them, yet he holds the lie of he himself being a neutral arbiter. It’s telling that Merlin has the capacity to become a Beast despite his insistence on being unemotional, because he genuinely does love the humans he watches, yet it’s that disconnect and self-doubt from his emotions that keeps him from consuming them outright as a Beast. 

You can even relate this to their dynamics with their respective Artorias. To Merlin, the only Artoria is the King of Knights who chose her own end, but every Artoria is thus made his Artoria because she always chooses to take up the sword in the end. While he recognizes the distinctions between them, all Artoria’s are still the same girl he raised and led along to her destiny, one that she chose and one that shattered him. Even Castoria, who spent the entire Lostbelt fighting against the selection prophecy because she couldn’t accept the cruelty and burden that PHH forced onto one young girl, made the same choice, a choice made to save the world and to be a hero. 

Oberon finds PHH disgusting. He hates Avalon Le Fae for being a bastion of unending cruelty, he hates PHH for having the audacity to exist as the “truth” meant to stamp out the Lostbelts “lies”, he hates nearly everything about everyone and himself, but he doesn’t find it entirely meaningless. Even though his words and actions are turned into lies because they are made devoid of meaning, he still finds value in the small bits of genuine kindness and empathy present throughout. Even knowing what Castoria was within her own Lostbelt, he presents himself as his most hated opposite because if Oberon isn’t allowed to care about Artoria, he knows that Merlin is. Even while falling through the endless abyss after having lost, he see’s the clear blue sky of PHH and finds it so beautiful it makes him sick.

The only time “Merlin” is allowed to directly intervene and care for Artoria is as Oberon, because Merlin does love her and thus Oberon can wear that role by his nature of being a piece of living fiction. Oberon loves Castoria but cannot express it as himself, because if he did then it would become a lie and that bond would dissappear. Castoria dissappears right before Oberon can reveal his nature as Vortigern because he can’t be the loving figure of “Merlin” anymore as the composite whose going to destroy PHH, the world that made Castoria take up the sword regardless. When Castoria is made to take up the sword again, the lie that Merlin was able to raise Artoria as a normal girl disconnected from her destiny is made meaningless once again, and all that’s left is the rotting corpse of a monster that fights against the idea that that love and care was meaningless.