#honestly if we had him sitting in a cafe and sketching arthur then i'd be so much happier

[lit-in-thy-heart]

i think part of the reason that nobody has quite healed after the finale of merlin, as well from lack of closure, is because it is unsatisfactory in literally every way.

obviously arthur dies which is a bit of a bummer. but it's never confirmed that gwaine is still kicking, so there's that ball of angst that's dangerously close to dropping. sure, gwen becomes queen and that's amazing but we never see her ruling. who knows what the fuck happened to aithusa. morgana's death is anticlimactic to the max. and we have no idea if merlin returns to camelot. like obviously they're framing it as everything stops when arthur dies but...it doesn't? the show is called merlin for crying out loud, they could have provided a bit more of a definitive ending.

of course you can argue that it's left with nothing really tied up because they are just waiting for arthur to rise again, which is a valid argument and absolutely adds to the lack of closure because it technically hasn't ended yet.

but the most unsatisfactory thing, the thing that makes me want to scream at the writers as this dawned on me this morning, is that merlin never recovers.

there have been posts about merlin breaking more at the end of each season and it makes me so mad. the writers gave him lancelot, then snatched him away, only to throw him back in and rip him out again. lancelot essentially serves the same purpose as will. a friend that merlin can completely trust and then can completely ruin him (not that we really see merlin's grief explicitly) when they die.

as the seasons progress, merlin begins to deteriorate. he's constantly on edge from threats to arthur's life from every direction, he's having to support arthur because that's what his destiny is, and on top of that he can't put one toe out of line in terms of magic in case he loses all his friends or his life. by season five, merlin has isolated himself and has accepted that his happiness isn't important. you can see just how much of himself he's given in the finale when he tells arthur he won't be coming to camlann. it must be years since merlin has refused arthur anything.

and that is what makes me mad. the writers didn't give him one single good thing, in the end. merlin had suffered so much and not received much support at all for four years, then he essentially loses his magic (yes it came back but that is definitely a traumatic experience), fails his destiny, watches arthur die in his arms, then probably has to watch everyone else around him slowly die. as the show ends with that scene of him walking past avalon in the modern day, it provides absolutely no comfort. merlin is still fucking miserable, and his life is still not his own. because he is still putting arthur first. the writers really went and sculpted his whole character around arthur and having to hide his own magic, and we never get to see merlin recover from that.