#uther and merlin's protracted break up + war

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I feel the same way - she’s got more going on than Weeping Monk/Lancelot but it’s pretty thin on the ground. 

The rest of the characters though are a whole lotta fun. I mostly watched it for them. Like Morgana’s whole plot is interesting - though I wasn’t super satisfied with the end, but perhaps that will be addressed in season 2. Kaze I want more of. Arthur’s fun and I like the mercenary approach to his backstory. Gawain is a square and dumb as bricks but his tension with Arthur is delightful and they should kiss already. Uther and Merlin are walking disasters and I ADORE it. 

But yeah, I really wish Nimue didn’t suffer from the Heroic Strong Female condition. I want to see her and Kaze interact more. I think Kaze’s interesting and has so much potential as a character and I like their dynamic. 

/sorry for hopping onto your post/

i wish writers could give nimue more character. i really want to like her, but for now she is just okay to me, cause there is almost nothing interesting about her character.

i have hopes for second season and some character development.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I was thinking about Nimue and critiques I’ve seen of her, and that I have as well, most of which revolve around her being seen as suffering a bit from Heroic Strong Female Lead. So, a bit shallow on depth of character, moments that strike one as unrealistic etc. etc. 

Anyway, ran across an older post that discusses the whole thing around female (and minority in general) power fantasies. And there was an addition that I think is super relevant: 

So, there’s this interesting thing where a certain degree of saturation in stories will train the audience to just accept stuff that’d normally strike them as bizarre or unrealistic, and move on without questioning it. It’s sort of like ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, except that phrasing doesn’t really encapsulate it precisely. It’s more like… commonality breeds acceptance.

For example, a humble young boy who rises to prominence and becomes a hero is such a standard piece of storytelling, that virtually no one ever sits down to watch a movie and actually goes ‘well, but, this is just a young farm lad - surely he can’t do a single thing to help stop the Forces of Evil!’ People in the movie might do that. But unless the audience is very, very young, or has somehow managed to avoid most books, movies, songs, comics, television shows, and oral traditions for the whole of their life, they’re going to sit down and think ‘ah yes, here’s our guy’.

Even though, in real life, it actually IS still pretty far-fetched for Ye Humble Village Lad to turn out to be the only thing standing between mankind and destruction.

The interesting thing, though, is that if you change enough elements of what is so common as to be thoughtlessly accepted, the image you present will no longer resemble the familiar narrative. Even if, below the surface, the other components are exactly the same.

This, along with the above-mentioned misogyny, is another contributing factor to the Mary Sue thing.

Because there are fewer female heroes who are just unabashed power fantasies, embodying unlikely rises to success or mastery of untold skills, if you take a very typical story that stars a dude and swap him out for a lady, the elements once rendered invisible by familiarity, are now noticeable again. The audience is jolted out of complacency, and begins to think more critically about what they’re being asked to believe. (You can accomplish the same thing with other demographics, too, i.e. putting characters of colour in roles typically given to white actors, or having LGBT+ characters with the same abundance as straight ones, and so on and so forth.)

So even people who like to think of themselves as totally fair and unprejudiced can end up enforcing double-standards in entertainment. Because if you don’t catch yourself, you will not even realize that you managed to sit through three Iron Man movies without ever questioning the premise of Tony Stark’s genius, but somehow Shuri in Black Panther just struck you as ‘unrealistic’.

[Full Post for reference] 

Because this is focused on Nimue, and not Arthur (or another knight of the round table, as we are generally used to seeing), those tropes around “strong leader finds magical item that secures their already clear right to leadership” and “humble to hero” are glaringly obvious. Had it been a show about Arthur, I’m not sure we’d have as much discussion around it. 

It’s something I also see in comparison to Weeping Monk | Lancelot who has considerably less character development than Nimue. All of his basically comes in 2/3 scenes in the ninth episode and 2/3 scenes in the finale. Compared to Nimue who we have gotten to know over the course of all 10 episodes. But I know I’ve raised his lack of depth as something that makes it hard for me to find him interesting and people have rebutted with “well no, i think he’s got plenty of depth/has got some characterization happening” etc. and that’s not supported really, by the show. 

The text, if we want to call the show that, demonstrates the opposite. This isn’t to say you can’t like or enjoy the Weeping Monk, it’s just to say there’s a reason his glaring lack of depth is brushed over while people spend time analyzing Nimue’s. And it’s because we’re used to seeing the Strong Silent Mysterious Male trope. In terms of villains with depth, Iris and Carden have more going on. But the Weeping Monk fits, in one degree, a power fantasy we’re used to seeing. 

In addition, compared to Nimue, Weeping monk is more of a blank slate which makes him easier to project onto. Which is half the point of how these unrealistic power fantasies work. Nimue allows that to a certain degree, she’s bland enough I think a lot of people could read themselves onto her. But she’s got just enough characterization, just enough back story, where she’s not a tabula rasa. 

Anyway, this show is really rife with moments where, as fans, we can catch ourselves doing that double standard of “why do we accept X for one character but not the same for another”. Obviously, with this show, in addition to gender there’s also race to consider. 

Just some thoughts. I’m not going anywhere in particular with them. 

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

so many people out here shipping the weeping monk with everyone (well, mostly Nimue and Gawain) and I'm like "but where's my arthur/gawain dumb-of-ass big-of-heart fics? my Morgana/Nimue/Kaze Power Triumvirate? Uther/Merlin as Walking Disasters?"

/le sigh/

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Also delightfully complicated by the fact that Merlin is his own ALL KINDS of fucked up and questionable life choices.

Ugh it’s all so, so good and I love it.

Season 1, or, the very messy protracted quasi-break up of Uther and Merlin. Also war?

-

Addition: like I’m not sure Merlin is “worthier”; like he’s a stronger man than Uther and knows himself more than Uther does, but I hesitate on the concept of worthiness.

But yes! I love their messed up dynamic and how very clear Uther’s attachment issues are. It waters my crops and feeds my cows.

anyway I watched Cursed and the thing that is clear to me is that Uther has a big uncomfortable fucked up crush on Merlin and

I'm so into pathetic weak men - often burdened with debilitating and oversheltered upbringing - with unhealthy crushes on other much "worthier" men who look to them with pity and mild mockery and play on their insecurities. IT'S A DELICIOUS DYNAMIC 🥂