#the promise: kilgharrah explicitly states on multiple occasions that a) arthur will unite the land of albion | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

merlinmeta · 4 years ago

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It's absolutely possible to tell an interesting, meaningful, well-written story that tells its audience "this is destiny; this is the goal of the story" and then breaks that promise, challenges that destiny, and changes that goal, but Merlin is pretty clearly Not That Story when the same character that makes the promise in the first place later says "congrats! you did it!" with absolute sincerety despite having no narrative evidence supporting that claim and then flies off into the sunset, leaving his depressed, bitter, hollowed-out shell of a destiny-vessel with nothing to show for a decade of sacrifice in the name of that promise

#not to be bitter on main again but that ask made me think of this #and i wanted to point to a story that does this well: Netflix's She Ra has a destiny/sacrifice storyline #that ends up in places i did NOT expect going in #it is a deliberately constructed narrative about self worth and sacrifice and mentorship and a lot more #maybe if you squint merlin could be a tragedy about the futility of fighting destiny #but that still doesn't really make sense because his ''destiny'' WASN'T really fulfilled; kilgharrah just kinda said it was #the promise: kilgharrah explicitly states on multiple occasions that a) arthur will unite the land of albion #and b) WHEN arthur becomes king magic will return to the land #and he makes it pretty clear that the rest of camelot (especially uther) can fuck off and die as long as arthur frees magic when he's king #but arthur dies and magic is still punishable by death in the eyes of the law #even if gwen changes it that happens offscreen without arthur's involvement at all since. yknow. he's dead.#also lmfao i saw people trying to defend the merlin finale when people were comparing it to spn's finale #but really they're both just bad in different ways #spn completely fulfilled the promises it made in season one when it really shouldn't have #whereas merlin completely failed to fulfill the promises it made in season one when it really SHOULD have #merlin #mine

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