#we’re not on an Arthurian quest
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Hmmmmmmmm
nah
#this isn’t 1350 you know#we’re not on an Arthurian quest#also this is very purity Christian culture adjacent to my reading at least#dating apps#hell distilled
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All three! Apologies. I want to learn as much as I can about him.
You got it!
The first text that Galahad appears in is the Vulgate. His predecessors and legacy are first described in The History of the Grail; then he’s conceived, born, and raised during the Lancelot books; finally in Post-Vulgate he’s a knight on Grail Quest where he achieves his life’s purpose and passes away. Additionally, here’s A Companion to The Lancelot-Grail Cycle which may help you navigate the text.
Another book I suggest for your Galahad research is The Legend of the Grail by Nigel Bryant and Norris J. Lacy. It’s got a lengthy introduction about the history of the Grail story and touches on all the characters who’ve achieved it throughout Arthurian literary history including Perceval, Gawain, and of course, Galahad. Each chapter is taken from a different text and newly translated by Nigel Bryant for this publication. It’ll give you an idea of the progression of the Grail story which eventually led to Galahad and introduce you to some adjacent texts that may be of interest.
The next medieval text that includes Galahad is La Tavola Ritonda. It’s mostly a Prose Tristan story, but does cover the whole Grail Quest with a fun Italian Galahad named Galeazzo/Galasso. I enjoy this one a lot! Regarding Galasso specifically, it’s an interesting take on the character—he’s described as very gracious and he wields a cool named sword. Plus his purity grants him necromancy powers—at one point he convenes with the dead and doesn’t bat an eye. Just keeps on adventuring. Focused. In his lane. Pretty neat!
After that comes probably the best known Arthurian text, Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. I’ve attached the version of this story abridged by Keith Baines. It’s much easier to read with proper formatting to add quotation marks to dialogue and tighten up the prose. This one also comes with A Companion to Malory which I found exceedingly helpful in breaking down the sometimes convoluted plot threads and character dynamics present in Malory’s story. Many of the essays I’ve attached below relate to this text specifically.
Lastly I would be remiss to exclude The Arthurian Handbook by the goats Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe. This volume not only covers medieval texts, but much of the art history that goes hand in hand with Arthurian literature too. There are many paintings, tapestries, stained glass windows, and murals featuring Galahad highlighted in this book. It also includes family trees, heraldry, and maps which can help you conceptualize things detailed in writing throughout the Vulgate.
Now I’m going to list essays without descriptions since there are so many and the titles are pretty self explanatory.
Absent Fathers, Unexpected Sons: Paternity in Malory’s Morte Darthur by Cory Rushton
Born-Again Virgins and Holy Bastards: Bors and Elyne and Lancelot and Galahad by Karen Cherwatuk
Constructing Spiritual Hierarchy through Mass Attendance in the Morte Darthur by David Eugene Clark
Disarming Lancelot by Elizabeth Scala
Galahad, Percival, and Bors: Grail Knights and the Quest for Spiritual Friendship by Richard Sévère
'A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood': Galahad's Asexuality and its Significance in Le Morte Darthur by Megan Arkenberg
Gender and the Grail by Maureen Fries
Malory and Rape by Catherine Batt
Mothers in the Grail Quest: Desire, Pleasure, and Conception by Peggy McCracken
Seeing Is Believing and Achieving: Viewing the Eucharist in Malory's 'Sankgreal' by Sarah B. Rude
Wounded Masculinity: Injury and Gender in Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur" by Kenneth Hodges
And that about covers it! This should give you plenty to work with. Beyond these, we’re left with literature outside the medieval era, which is a different conversation. No doubt Alfred Lord Tennyson had a huge influence on how Galahad is perceived today, but that’s irrelevant to a discussion regarding medieval source material, and a topic for another time. Hope this helps you out and you learn all you want to about Galahad!
Take care!
#arthuriana#arthurian legend#arthurian mythology#arthurian literature#sir galahad#galahad#resource#ask#anonymous
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An Introduction to Arthurian Paganism
Hey, everyone! I’m back with another practice-related post. This time, we’re talking about Arthurian Paganism.
It should be noted that I am still researching and learning about the Arthurian Canon, and Tumblr’s #Arthuriana tag has been, unironically, extremely helpful. They have massive blog posts with links to copies of books that have been published and translated, abridged or unabridged, compilations and separate short stories, etc. which are becoming quite useful to me in my research. And for that, to the people who post and follow the Arthuriana tags, I say thank you. Your work—be it memes, academic compilations of sources, or artwork—has made this not only easier, but very fun.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the Arthurian Pantheon, starting with what it exactly is at this point in my research and spirituality.
What is Arthurian Paganism and How did I get here?
The what and the how are where I want to start. Simply put, I think this is the easiest thing to understand before we go down the rabbit hole of me assigning correspondences, working with festivals, etc.
Plus, anyone, especially in the Western World, has some vague understanding of what the King Arthur story is about. This gives us some equal playing field for a good understanding of the jumping off point of my spiritual path with the Arthurian Pantheon.
So to begin, the Arthurian Pantheon is the characters of King Arthur Stories being honored as deities.
I stumbled across this accidentally when I was trying to worship the Lord and Lady of the Land. A lot of how envisioned these deities came across as King Arthur and Lady Morgan Le Fay—and I was quite intrigued and confused. I had done some honoring of Morgan Le Fay in the past, but not much, and yet could not shake the feeling that there was something here for me to explore.
And as a child, I was always in love with the King Arthur stories and retellings I came across.
It took me a few months to fully embrace, but, by the time Lunasdagh arrived, I began considering in earnest how to honor King Arthur and Lady Morgan within their respective mythos.
King Arthur Pendragon is a mythic King of Britain. While there’s no real historical evidence that states he was a real person, to my knowledge at time of writing, we can trace his story specifically back to Wales as a folk hero in the Mabinogion. Here Arthur is usually portrayed as a vaguely supernatural entity who helps other travelers on their quests.
One such notable one is of Arthur helping his cousin win the hand of a giantess in marriage, if I remember correctly.
His time as a Welsh folk hero is discussed, briefly, in the Mythillogical podcast’s episode on YouTube. The link can be found here.
This version of Arthur is quite different from what he will become, as he is a wanderer and has a lot more agency in these tales. King Arthur tends to lose a bit of focus and agency over the overarching story of Camelot as the Canon grows both in characters and gets codified over time.
This loss of agency or lack of focus, whichever you prefer to call it, reminds me quite a bit of the human life cycle. Arthur, as people add on to his legends starting with Geoffrey of Monmouth and his Welsh Counterparts going all the way up to the modern day, goes through the cycle of birth, childhood, young adulthood, adulthood, elder, death, and finally rebirth. He represents a very human experience—from making mistakes (sleeping with his sister Morgause and in a fit of regret and anger at what he did goes to try and drown every child born on May Day in order to not eventually die at the child’s hand) to just trying to be a genuinely good man and king (his attempts at trying to persuade his Knights and Lords to have Mercy on Queen Guinevere when she was falsely accused of murder and rightfully accused of adultery).
King Arthur is very human and that is necessary for a chief god of a pantheon that I believe in, because I could never get behind a perfect god or a supposed son of god who is meant to share a human experience to understand us better but yet simultaneously is meant to be perfect.
So King Arthur became a comfort as a chief god, even if I haven’t really worked with him yet.
I do say good morning to him every morning though, because I associate King Arthur with the sun.
I mainly got here through Lady Morgan Le Fay, though. She reached out to me about a year ago through a vision I had while working at my part time job. I saw myself following her through mists in an indigo cloak with silver embroidery. So I began to honor her the best I could—I even picked up the Mists of Avalon, and read it for a while, to get her perspective on Arthurian Canon. Then, as the stress of finding a full time job and then having two jobs all began to bubble up, I fell off.
(Which I will get back to the novel eventually. I’m going to be reading a lot of Arthurian books and romances for the foreseeable future.)
Recently, through the attempt at honoring the Lord and Lady of the Land, I found my way back to Lady Morgan. When I reach out to a goddess in divination, I ask for her. When I do my kitchen witchcraft, I do it in her name. When I think of making something for my craft, I think of making it for her.
I wanted to do this seriously and the best I can.
Doing so led to me realizing that it’s not just King Arthur and Lady Morgan who gained spiritual/magickal/etc. independent being status through the centuries of rewriting, retelling, and rediscovering the Arthurian tradition again and again. They all were alive in their own way. Entities in their own rights with their own domains and their own things to teach us, the characters of King Arthur’s stories are alive.
And I had that realization relatively recently. Just a bit before my “Sir Gawain Type of Day” post.
So that’s how I got here.
Now let’s talk about my recent experiences.
My Experiences with the Pantheon:
This section will be quite short as my experiences aren’t much in the grand scheme of things—and a few are a bit personal. The findings are rather few as of right now, but I am starting out and the Arthurian Pantheon as a whole requested that I focus on the research aspect first as a way to honor them before I do anything big like celebrate Sabbats and stuff.
Lady Morgan also reiterated this fact with me last week, and reminded me that I do need to practice patience with myself.
And I’m trying, promise.
For my experiences with the pantheon, I’ve mainly interacted with Lady Morgan. She helped me pass my excel certification exam which allowed me to get my current full time position, and I asked that of her because I thought I’d be quitting my part time job once I got a full time position. I would have more time for the craft, which I promised her that I would make. However, the current state of the economy, and the cost of living where I live specifically, required me to work both jobs in order to pay bills and save up for an apartment.
So, I never really kept up my end of the deal—despite trying to for a while.
Lady Morgan’s energy never seems to give much away about her emotions. I’ve only ever felt an ancient patience and kindness with her. Much like a dusty old library on a misty spring morning, Lady Morgan’s energy is that of learning the art of patience and being okay with waiting—leading you down the path at your own pace.
Her energy also is heavily linked to the moon, mists, and rainstorms from what I’ve found.
The moon is something that she always radiated to me. Lady Morgan guides the way through the night, providing light and guidance through moonlight and stars. The moon tends to show its phase in a very different way if I’ve just been speaking to Lady Morgan earlier that evening and the stars seem much brighter despite the light pollution.
In my limited dealings with Lady Morgan, I’ve also found that, if I did something she was particularly proud of, a morning mist greeted me the next day. I feel the most comfortable in the mists, especially in the morning, so I always appreciate that little treat.
Lord, or more accurately, King Arthur has a different energy that I am sometimes able to connect to in the mornings.
King Arthur’s energy to me is very much the sun. It’s bright and welcoming and even protective to an extent. He’s constant, strong, and reliable. I also associate him with stags, not only because of the whole White Stag search that may or may not have ruined his wedding to Queen Guinevere (depending on the version you’re reading), but also because deer are quite common where I live. Does are definitely more common than stags, yes, but the few times I see a Stag I just immediately think it’s King Arthur.
I think this association began with the Mists of Avalon. Especially when there’s a whole trial by deer that Arthur needs to go through in order to be accepted by the Tribes and it results in his son with Morgaine, Mordred.
Beyond that association, stags tend to be connected to nobility and dependability in our modern media symbolism shorthand, with the most prominent example coming to mind being Elijah Mikaelson from the Vampire Diaries extended universe. Elijah’s nicknamed the Noble Stag for being a Mikaelson the people can trust to keep his word to the letter. He usually acts as the consciousness of his brother, Klaus, and tries to put family above all else.
In my mind, King Arthur is much the same. His energy is that of a stag—a man who keeps his word, puts the people he loves before himself, and is a just king.
And, finally, I felt Sir Gawain’s energy once. I wrote a blog about it, just a small musing really. But to me Gawain’s energy is that of liminal tidings. His energy is soft and comforting as the wheel of the year turns and we shift from one season to the next. At Yuletide/Winter Solstice, he deals the blow to the Green Knight—which rings in the warmer half of the year. And at Litha/Summer Solstice, he faces the Green Knight once more to bring in the colder half of the year.
Possibly.
I think this may change as Sir Gawain is definitely a god of the seasons and their shifts, but I can’t tell if it’s Sir Gawain who rings in the different parts of the year, or if it’s King Arthur, or someone else I have yet to interact with, or no one in the pantheon at all.
But, for now, I will say it’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that ring in the colder and warmer halves of the year.
But that is the extent of my experiences with the Arthurian Pantheon thus far. I am reading up on them still, as a part of my research and way to honor them.
My Recent Findings on the Pantheon:
Through my research, as I currently read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” as translated by Jessie Weston, I have found that King Arthur likes to hear stories of great feats from his knights and/or songs, or see a good game before he eats a feast, so that will be implemented during times I offer some food up to him. He also refuses to eat until everyone at court is sitting and served when hosting a grand feast, so if I invite people over I will try and do the same. King Arthur and The Knights of the Round Table love to have feasts with dried meats and honey wine ( AKA mead ).
When I get my apartment, I will practice making honey wine for libations to the King and his Knights.
My time browsing the Arthuriana tag on Tumblr, and the abridged version of Le Morte d'Arthur read by Derek Jacobi, indicated that Sir Gawain loves apples. So when I honor Sir Gawain specifically, I’ll see if I can make apples ready for the occasion.
The abridged version of Le Morte d’Arthur previously mentioned also pointed two days that I specifically took note of: Arthur’s birthday, being around December 24th, and Arthur’s king making which was on Candlemas, February 2nd. So I will definitely be celebrating Candlemas, and King Arthur’s birthday, which falls during Yuletide.
The Mists of Avalon audiobook that I’m listening to on Spotify indicates that Lady Morgan is knowledgeable in herb lore and is gifted with the Sight. So any form of herbalism and divination could be considered devotional acts to Lady Morgan. Or working with the Fair Folk, as in that telling of Arthurian canon has Lady Morgan descended from the Fae Folk of the British Isles.
And that’s all I have at the moment research wise. I haven’t had time to sit down and finish “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in order to move on to the next pieces of Arthuriana on the docket.
Conclusion:
As you can see, I don’t have much in the way of research or experiences yet. Really, this Introduction to the Arthurian Pantheon is just me trying to get my thoughts and early findings down on paper so I can continue forward.
I really can’t wait to learn about and from this very large and very diverse pantheon.
I’m not even sure if I’ll get to everyone—or if this counts as Celtic or Pop Culture paganism! I tag it as Celtic since these stories tend to be leaning more Celtic in nature and its birth in the British Isles.
But I hope you guys enjoyed this introduction into the pantheon and my experiences with it! I’ll make a more comprehensive and scholarly introduction when I have more time, knowledge, and experience under my belt with the pantheon if necessary. For now though, this is where I end the introduction post.
Until next time!
#arthurian paganism#deity#arthuriana#witchy tumblr#celtic paganism#chaos witch#deity worship#introduction#introduction to pantheon post#pop culture paganism#not sure if it counts as pop culture paganism or Celtic paganism#so I tagged them both#my bad guys#it’s super long#sorry#this post is 2425 words long
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Title: Between Two Fires
Author: Christopher Buehlman
Genre/s: horror, historical
Content/Trigger Warning/s: body horror, depictions of the Black Plague and its effects on people and society
Summary (from author's website): The year is 1348. The Black Death ravages France, leaving fields and rivers choked with unburied dead and causing whole towns to disappear. Thomas, a disgraced knight, roams the land with a band of thieves, living by the sword; when they encounter an orphaned girl in a dying village, Thomas has just enough humanity in him to save her from his colleagues. No ordinary child, this girl sees angels and talks to the dead. She tells Thomas that Lucifer and the fallen angels have risen in a new war on Heaven, that the kingdoms of men have fallen behind the lines of battle, and that he must now shepherd her on a holy quest to tip the scales in favor of good. Between Two Fires invites you on a journey that is at once a fool’s errand into great danger, and a violent man’s first, uncertain steps toward redemption.
Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/between-two-fires-christopher-buehlman/15286104
Spoiler-Free Review: GodsDAMN this was good! Strange in parts but GOOD!
This is really interesting to read given the way the world is right now - not least because we’re still not quite out from under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic (not that it really ended). While the portrayal of the Black Death in this book might read a bit more grotesque than might seem realistically possible, I think the exaggeration is meant to capture how it felt to be caught in the moment of the plague. It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come in terms of our understanding of science and medicine, compared to the medieval period. (This just makes it even MORE annoying that anti-vaxxers exist; all that advancement, and for what?)
It’s also interesting how the novel doesn’t start out as supernatural at all, or at least doesn’t give that impression. Initially I thought the hints of supernatural activity were more a representation of the worldview of people from that specific historical period, but it soon became VERY clear that the supernatural was indeed at work, and it is very definitely nightmarish. The author certainly knows how to create truly horrific monsters, setting up encounters in an episodic manner as the characters travel towards Avignon. Two in particular stand out: the first monster in the river, and the monsters in Paris.
Speaking of the characters, I think they are the heart of this novel, moving it forward as much as they themselves are moved by the plot. They share echoes with other, similar characters from the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, but especially the latter, since the Decameron’s frame story is about a group of people fleeing the Black Death in Italy. But they’re also well-drawn characters in their own right, as opposed to roughly-drawn sketches; Thomas of Givras, in particular, is a standout, and the young girl who accompanies him will quickly bring Joan of Arc to mind, while also being entirely unique in her own way.
As for the overall structure of the plot, it shares some parallels with the Arthurian questing tales, and even to literature from later periods like Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy, and Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s clear the author’s drawing from a deep literary well here, and those who’ve read those works will be rewarded by finding their dark shadows in this novel. Readers who are expecting something more straightforward might find this novel a bit slow, but readers who enjoy a slower burn will not find this a problem.
One of the most visible themes a reader might be able to uncover in this novel is how difficult it is to do the right thing, especially when one’s own survival is at stake. The world got (continues to get) a glimpse of how this works in real time during the recent (ongoing) pandemic, and this book, published in 2012, makes it clear just what people are willing to do - and what they’re willing to ignore - when survival, or personal comfort, for that matter, is at stake. But this book makes clear that, even when conditions are harsh, it is still possible to be good, to be kind, to be generous. It won’t be EASY, but being good and kind and generous when the world is harsh and deadly is not just possible, it is absolutely necessary.
But what if one can’t do any of that? We are all only human, after all; when crisis hits, survival is top of mind. Surely one can be forgiven for not being as good and kind and generous as one would normally be in times of safety and plenty? Surely one can be forgiven for not having the strength of will to continue to be good in the midst of extraordinary hardship? And this book says: yes, yes one can be forgiven for such things, and maybe even worse besides (there’s a scene towards the end of the book that, in my opinion, drives this point home). Forgiveness is a vital theme in this novel: both being a giver of, and recipient thereof. It’s hard forgiving others, of course, and the way this book goes, that forgiveness definitely has to be earned. But it’s just as hard accepting forgiveness too - especially when one is convinced that one does not deserve it. Forgiving is hard, but accepting it can be just as hard.
Overall, this is a horror novel that definitely has many scary moments, but those moments hide a core of gentleness that shines through via the characters and their interactions with each other and the world they inhabit. Some readers might not take well to the story’s slower pace compared to other novels in the same genre, but the pace enhances both the horror and the characters’ development in very good way.
Rating: five sorrel leaves
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I like that since the dawn of imagination it has always taken hundreds of hours to get peoples characters and stories correct and even after getting it 100% correct they go back to it to staple something else on cause they heard a bard in a tavern and now imagined an EPIC FIGHT or MOMENT OF INTENSE SORROW to a ballad.
Like the Epic of Gilgamesh. He’s just the BIGGEST fucking asshole, so the Gods send down a dude to fight him and so they fucking FIGHT but oh no it looks like fighting was the way to become the BEST OF BROS! Hey bro, go sleep with my head priestess. Oh man, bro. The Gods won’t talk to you now!? LETS GO ON A BRO TRIP AND DEFEAT MONSTERS WITH OUR SWOL GAINS! OH NO! MY BRO! HE’S DOWN! BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...oh no we’re...both okay actually, lets continue this adventure elsewhere.
or the Arthurian Legend
So there was this kid who was CHOSEN by a SWORD OF GREAT POWER! So he formed a great BROLLIANCE! WITH HIS BROS! But one his bros slept with his wife so the entire BROLLIANCE was destroyed and behind his back his...aunt...mother...sister...A WITCH FROM BEYOND THE REALM HAS MADE A BASTARD HALF SON OR...Brother or...something...AND THEY FIGHT! AND THEY KILL ONE ANOTHER! But as the chosen bro king dies, his bro takes his sword and returns it to a tart laying in a lake which became their system of governace...but though he was KILLED! He’ll be back to rule his bro kingdom someday...hopefully...to be continues...Arthur and the Swol Kingdom [WIP]
And then with D&D
Alright everyone we’re about to partake in an EPIC QUEST! FOR DUNGEONS, LOOT, AND GLORY! But first sit down and spend 17 hours on your character sheet, coming up with back story, rolling out traits and choosing what you want to be.
And then with roleplay
Yeah, I could just CREATE the coolest character and write their entire story down over the course of a week to 20 year process...but what’s life without a little...AU!?!
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Sonic and the Black Knight And Arthurian Legends: Brief Explanation of ‘Canon’
Hello there! I’m Rook! I run this blog, an archive dedicated to collecting all the wonderful Sonic Storybook-inspired works! All the great art, writing, headcanons, gifs, etc.! The majority of which is Sonic and the Black Knight (SatBK)!
I have noticed there is a some confusion in the SatBK fandom about what is or what isn’t ‘canon’ to the Arthurian myths and legends. SatBK was what got me into reading Arthuriana/King Arthur texts, so I wanted to throw my two cents based off of what I’ve read and studied.
TLDR; Arthuriana is a lot like the Sonic franchise- there are many different authors using the same characters to tell different adventures. In the same way Archie!Sonic and SonicX!Sonic and Boom!Sonic are all canon, emphasizing certain characteristics and relationships more than others, so too does Arthuriana change the relationships and personality of each knight to fit the story being told.
You’ll find a more thorough breakdown under the cut! C:
1. What is Arthuriana?
It’s exactly what it sounds like: everything related to King Arthur and his Knights!
“That sounds like a lot!” You are probably thinking, and it is! And this includes everything from medieval Welsh texts (Culwch and Olwen) to medieval Dutch texts (Roman van Walewein) to medieval French texts (Perceval, or the Story of the Grail) to early Renaissance English texts (Le Morte d'Arthur) to Victorian poems (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King) to modern movies (Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail) to even more modern tv shows (BBC’s Merlin) and everything in between! All of this is Arthuriana!
2. What are the ‘canon’ tales?
Short answer: Technically, there are no ‘canon’ tales because they’re all canon!
If we’re talking about like ‘original’ medieval texts, there are a lot of different texts by different authors from different time periods and different countries! And as expected of a massive body of work like this, a lot of it is contradictory and/or super different from each other.
A lot like the Sonic franchise, actually! For example, Archie-Comics!Sonic, Sonic-Adventure-Era!Sonic, and Classic!Sonic are all Sonics, right? You can recognize them all as the same character (blue hero hedgehog) and they have similar core traits (very fast, fights bad guys, some attitude) that tie them together. But they all have different personalities, they face different enemies and struggles, and have different relationships with other characters that impact them in different ways. Some of them have friends who don’t exist in other media, like Sticks and Sally, who change the dynamic and show different sides of them.
Arthuriana is the same! The Sir Gawain that appears in the poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is different from the Sir Gawain we see in Sir Thomas Mallory’s “Le Morte D’Artur”! And these Gawains are different from the Sir Gawain we get in Chretrien de Troyes’ “Perceval, or the Knight of the Grail.” They are all Sir Gawain at their core, but they show him at different points in time, having different adventures, and emphasizing some character traits more than others. But it’s all Gawain, and they’re all valid!
Naturally, some of these stories change the dynamics up a little or a lot, which is how you can get a lot of different situations and relationships. Percival and Lamorak can be related in one text, and complete strangers in another! Percival is the Grail Knight in one text, and Galahad is the Grail Knight in another! Which of them is the ‘true’ or ‘right’? What’s canon? Whatever works in that particular universe! Whichever one you like best!
That being said, there are some recurring elements, events, and themes associated with certain characters that you see a lot. For example, a lot of times Lancelot is known as the knight of the lake, Gawain is related to King Arthur and/or politically powerful, Percival is connected to the Grail, etc. But these elements can be emphasized, de-emphasized, ignored, or not mentioned at all depending on the author’s interest and what story they want to tell. Some knights may not even exist in certain media, or only be mentioned in passing!
Ultimately, it’s different for everyone what kinds of characterizations, adventures, relationships, and versions of events they enjoy the most.
“But Rook,” I hear you ask, “ What about ‘Le Morte D’Artur? Isn’t that as ‘canon’ as it gets?”
Well! I would argue it is certainly the most popular and well-known text! It’s the text upon which an overwhelming amount of modern Arthuriana is based upon! And it’s the text I started with (Shoutout to my man Keith Baines for making a very accessible and fun translation!) so I have a soft spot for it! So, while I would recommend reading it, I don’t want to call it ‘canon,’ because he drew on a lot of other Arthuriana sources to create his own narrative.
Variety is the spice of life! Don’t constrain yourself to only one telling of events as ‘canon’.
3. What is Arthuriana to SatBK?
Look, I love SatBK a lot, but it’s pretty barebones in terms of what it actually takes from Arthuriana.
Off the top of my head, the names and titles of the characters, the Lancelot and Gawain feud causing the end of Camelot, Percival the Grail Knight, Caliburn being the sword in the stone and kingmaker, the lady of the lake giving King Arthur the sword and scabbard, Excalibur being a different (Kinda) and more powerful sword altogether, and the Excalibur scabbard protecting the wielder from death and bleeding too much. That’s... that’s pretty much it.
There are a lot of happy coincidences that I think make the characters fit their Arthurian counterparts really well, but I don’t think any of it was really planned that way. And unfortunately, we don’t really know much about the relationships between the Arthurian counterparts.
Is SatBK drawing upon the Vulgate tradition to make Sir Lancelot the Lady of Lake’s ward/son? Is SatBK drawing on L’Morte to make Sir Lamorak and Sir Percival siblings, and Sir Galahad Lancelot’s son? Is SatBK drawing on Chretien de Troye’s Perceval to make Sir Percival the Grail Knight? Who knows!
In the end, SatBK is it’s own contained universe, and takes a lot of liberties to tell the story it wants to tell. It picks and chooses from a lot of different ‘canons’ to create its own universe.
So, as fans, we should feel free to do the same!
#sonic and the black knight#satbk#writing#informative#i don't know what to tag this as uhhhh#mun post#i guess??? idk i'm just really passionate about arthuriana ebcause of satbk and think it's really confusing to know what is canon and where#to start so like. i just wanted to give a little explanation of the way i see things. i know i just threw some names of texts out there with#like no explanation but i hope to elaborate soon on good starting texts and links and stuff for those interested in getting into the stories#behind satbk! again tho everything is canon!!! :D and if you have any questions about any of this or whatever my inbox is always free!! so#happy to be able to talk about these things haha#i'm hoping to soon drop little bits of trivia and facts from some of the different texts i read for fun! lots of nice and fun details to get#creative juices flowing and all that stuff. i've been v busy lately but i love checking on tags and seeing what's going on C:
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The Green Knight: A Ramble Through the Field of Honor
So I talked in an earlier post very glancingly about the line “Why greatness? Is goodness not enough?” and how it fits into the idea that Gawain has no idea what true greatness looks like, and I think, dovetailing into that, we kind of have to talk about how Gawain is...not a great guy.
And I’m not even talking about the way we begin the movie with him in a brothel, though I am going to use that to spring off here and talk about his conduct toward Essel. Knightly stories are full of these ideas of chivalry particularly around women, and I think Lowery is using Essel to make the point that Gawain is not doing that, not even remotely. Essel is a working girl, sure, but she’s also, as its shown throughout the movie, devoted to him, and cares for him far beyond his ability to provide for her. She even tells him that she has his gold, when she asks to be his lady, but she wants very simple things--to sit by his side at the fire, and have his ear, and be his lady. In full fairness to Gawain, I suppose, he never pretends even for a moment that he has any intention of doing that. Gawain is not interested in whatever he might owe her, because in seeking his greatness he utterly passes by this goodness.
We see this again in “A Kindness” where he repeatedly tells the scavenger that he is “Just passing through” when asked if he is a knight, not dodging the question, exactly, but allowing the scavenger to think this untrue thing. The scavenger talks about how he has brothers out there, the wide field of bodies like the fallen trees, showing us the lumber that Camelot is built upon, but Gawain does not have a moment for sympathy or pause. He fails to see this kid as a human being, and the narrative allows us to glance over it too, fixated in the same way Gawain is on the destination and not the journey.
Even when he is given instructions about how to get to the Green Chapel, when it’s been shown he has only the roughest sketched ideas of the way--and we can argue that the instructions may be false, but I’m not sure I think it matters--all he offers this scavenger, this BOY, is his thanks, despite being told he’s lost his family, was almost lost himself. He has to be shamed into offering a single coin, when Excalibur itself was offered to him when he needed the help.
This goes back to the idea of a test, and of Gawain’s repeated failures to have honor, to be great. He can’t see that mercy and generosity are a part of what it means to be a knight, to bear that mantle of goodness that I would argue underlies the knightly ideal.
This is why, when he’s captured and his things taken from him, he asks for the GReen Chapel and is told, “You’re in it.” This is a test as surely as kneeling before the Knight himself, and he’s failed, not only the test of generosity, but of courage, as he pleads with them that he’s not a knight, and he never said he was, and it’s true, that he isn’t, and so he’s stripped of all the trappings that make him a knight--his horse, his arms, his shield--because if he will not behave a knight, if he will not meet the world with the courage and honor he’s meant to have, then he may as well have none of it at all.
Gawain is pretty much a world-class fuckboy until the Tale of St. Winifred, until he truly connects with the natural impulse within him in the form of the fox (More on this in a much longer later post)
The tale of St. Winifred is his chance to begin his redemption, really the first time that he’s been willing to take any real instruction on the nature of becoming a knight--he sure as shit could not be bothered to listen to Arthur--and so this is where he earns back the axe. He earns back the right to even have this quest in the first place.
I don’t know how much the audience knows about the tale of St. Winifred, but the details are changed from the usual telling of the story in order to support the themes of the film. St. Winifred is also, in one sense, a tale of beheading and of virtue. That in upholding her ‘purity,’ she lost her life and her head. This is why I think it’s not actually a foregone conclusion that Gawain is spared at the end--I think Lowery makes the point that sometimes our values must be paid for in blood.
The flexible nature of honor is addressed directly in Winifred’s story. From the beginning, when she tells him not to touch her, that “a knight should know better,” there’s a sort of restarting the clock on his ability to be that knight. He just failed the last test, but as people, we are not who we are in one moment, whether that is terribly virtuous, or terribly cowardly, but the accumulation of who we are in all the moments. Each story is the chance to start again, and that’s why you’ll see so much menton of his being a knight at the start of each ‘section.’ It’s his chance to begin this anew.
In that way of, just tell the audience what’s going on, when Winifred is telling her story, of a man who came and desired to lay with her, and says, ‘Perhaps he was thee,’ that’s not just speaking to the sense of circles and repetition of nature in the movie--though not unrelated--but the idea that Gawain could be that man, could still, in a sense, choose to be that man. That he can always fail this test, too.
“If I go and get it, what will be my reward?”
It takes you aback, just for a moment, when he asks her that, until we realize that we were all asking ourselves that too. Reading into the traditions behind knights and saints, I think we’re used to the idea that a boon will be received for dong the right thing, and Lowery asks us to evaluate all that in Winifred’s reply:
“Why would you ask me that? Why would you ever ask me that?”
Harkening back to when he didn’t give the kid more than just a single coin, and telling him, “my thanks”--does he really have the right to ask for such a thing when he couldn’t manage to reward kindness himself-- but also the idea that honorable tasks should be taken up for their own sake, and not in order to have a reward. Can you truly be said to be acting with chivalry and honor if you’re doing it for a reward, or even notoriety?
Going back to my larger theory that Lowery is trying to bring forth the idea in all of this that there is no such thing as being a “knightly” sort of person at rest, while still holding that the decisions of a moment can cement the sort of person we continue to be, it makes sense that he would ask if we can say Gawain passes this test, if Winifred regards him.
“Now I can see thee,” she says, because this is a baptism of sorts, and being a saint, she can only see a soul in clarity. This is the direct opposite to the moment that Arthur tells him he has mud on his face, this is in direct opposite to his behavior with Essel, this is him doing the right and kind thing for a woman, without a thought to reward, and in that, he is cleaned, and Winifred can see what’s underneath, the sort of man he can be under what he’s accumulated.
ANd this is why he gets back the axe. It gives him leave to continue his quest, even though just a bit earlier, when asked where he was going, he simply said, “home.” But the show of the axe let him know that honor was not yet lost to him, that there was still a chance to be the sort of person he might have been.
WHich, by the way, does not makes things clear to him still. Life is not that simple, and I am very very resolute on my idea that a lot of what this movie is about is about the journey of our own lives to meet death and live with honor inasmuch as we can overcome our own cowardice and shitty behavior to do so, and even at the end of it all, about to meet the Green Knight, asked why he’s doing it, expressing that honor is why a knight does what he does, and then, pressed, says:
“Honor is a part of the life I want.”
This is Lowery pretty firmly taking aim at the old Arthurian texts, wherein honor very often good be a sole raison d’etre, saying that for most of us--and I would argue the whole reason Gawain is a fuck up is that he’s meant to represent most of us--that isn’t enough. There needs to be something more.
I also don’t think, for all I’ve talked about tests, that Gawain’s cowardice with the Green Knight had to be the end of the story. I think Essel’s pregnancy, and his cruelty, was a test. I think lying about what happened in the Green Chapel and accepting a knighthood was a test. I think there are multiple tests in that little interlude, but you see, the problem is, the more you do something, the more you’ll do it. As he makes these choices, this more and more becomes the man he is, as these choices stack up like stones, it gets harder and harder to knock down that wall. This is why his green sash--his cowardice--has become a physical part of him by the end of that interlude, bleeding as he draws it out.
Honor isn’t set, and it isn’t enough. Life is a confusing journey, rife with difficulty to do the right thing with consistency not because of outside influence so much as ourselves. Gawain’s great antagonist in al of this is not the Green Knight, but himself. Such as it is for all of us, as we TRY to be good people, and risk sometimes redefining honor, or greatness, what it means to be “a knight” in order to convince ourselves that it might be true.
“Is this all there is?” Gawain asks, before the axe is laid down, and I want to give Dev Patel a lot of credit here, though I’ve mostly been focusing on imagery and story. I’m not sure this would work as well if he hadn’t made it feel quite as human as it does, when he says it. It’s the question I think all of us ask, as we contemplate our own deaths, our own struggles to even up with what was right. Is there no way of knowing what comes next?
Life is a series of tests. A measure of honor. And what else ought there be?
On Doc and The Green Knight
#Green Knight shit#hi please enjoy two thousand words where I'm still not sure I said all I wanted to
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Dev Patel and the Green Knight
I finally got around to seeing The Green Knight. Overall, I enjoyed it--David Lowery does a good job capturing the essential weirdness of the tale, which is very much about taking a mundane circumstance (a Christmas feast) and suddenly catapulting the reader into a mythic otherworld through the intrusion of the alien and monstrous, and the fantastical costumes, dramatic lighting, and dissonant score all contribute very well to a sense of otherness that permeates the original story.
But I find it interesting--and, I'll admit, a little frustrating--that no modern film adaptation of medieval literature is really capable of taking the story it's adapting on its own merits. This isn't an objection to modifying the source text, or taking it in new, non-literal direction. I can think of plenty of adaptations of work that play with the source material in interesting ways, and are better for it. Even very faithful adaptations like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings are inevitably going to alter the source based on the need to adapt it for the screen and the whims of the director. But when it comes to medieval classics, texts like Beowulf or Gawain and the Green Knight are always held at arm's length. An ironic layer is always interpolated into the original story, and even in modified form the story is never allowed to stand on its own.
Contrast, for instance, modern retellings of Arthurian legend; or Wagner's Nibelungenleid; or something like Neil Gaiman's book of Norse mythology. These are all adaptations of much older stories, all medieval; and the authors typically happy to let the stories operate on their own terms. In fact, that is often a selling point: dipping into these tales is a way of sampling an alien culture, one that is remote from us in time rather than space, and part of the sense of heightened drama is the understanding that these stories do not necessarily depict the world in the same way that modern realist prose does. They are fairy-stories, in the Tolkienian sense, and something not quite even like "high fantasy," which, although it is a genre which owes much to the mythic tradition, is usually *told* in the same manner as other realist fiction. And you could take these stories and re-cast them in a realist mold--that's definitely been done with Arthurian legend, either via anachronism or trying to place them in an era-appropriate historical context, and even that yields something quite like the original in tenor, even if the language used to relate the story is often very different.
Watching this movie, I was *strongly* reminded of Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, in that this did not feel like an attempt to adapt Gawain and the Green Knight for the screen. It felt like an attempt to tell a story *about* Gawain and the Green Knight (the text), a story which does not stand on its own. You don't have to have read the text to understand the movie (although I think some directorial decisions would be a bit mystifying if you hadn't), but the movie definitely situates itself *as a response* to the text. Which is an odd choice! Actually, another good point of comparison is Spike Jonze's Adaptation. It started life as an adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, but Charlie Kaufman sort of gave up writing that halfway through and wrote a movie about the difficulty he was having writing *that* movie, and the result is something very weird (and very good) that is full of metafictional elements that depend on the existence of this other work, in a way that a straight retelling of The Orchid Thief for the screen obviously would not. And while The Green Knight isn't that extreme, it is definitely playing on the structure of the medieval poem, and replying to it.
The core of the movie (as I understood it) is a tension between young Gawain's aspiration to knightliness, his ambition which is born at least in part from his mother's encouragement, and his own failure to live up to the heroic ideal of greatness. Not chivalric--this is a movie in which the ethos of chivalry makes not even the briefest of appearance, which is weird given that it's nominally an Arthurian romance, and that the chivalric ethos is extremely important to the original text. Instead we have a generic greatness being described, one which is associated with renown, with taking part in mythic events, and with achieving high rank and honor. In the service of seeing her son obtain all this, Gawain's mother seems to cast some kind of spell, whereupon the titular Green Knight appears at Arthur's Christmas-feast; and as in the poem, a game of beheadings is proffered. Gawain accepts the challenge, beheads the knight, and the knight rides away, promising he'll meet Gawain a year and a day hence at the Green Chapel. So far so straightforward. When Gawain sets off a year later to meet the knight, his mother gives him an enchanted belt to keep him safe from harm. Gawain goes on to have a couple of side-of-the-road adventures and mishaps, the kind of thing that's par for the course when you're telling an Arthurian romance, until he arrives at the house of a mysterious benefactor, just about a day away from the Chapel, who grants him hospitality until the day of his challenge.
Now, in the original story, this is where Gawain gets the magic belt, and it's hugely important: Gawain and his host promise to exchange anything they might receive at the end of each day, when the host has been out hunting all day and Gawain has been in the house recuperating from his travels. During this time, the host's wife repeatedly tries to seduce Gawain; and Gawain is trapped between the imperative not to sleep with his host's wife (a major violation of the rules of good chivalric conduct!) and the imperative not to offend the woman (also a violation of those rules). He succeeds, for the most part; he is forced at one point to give his host a kiss at the end of the day, since the wife kissed him; this is shown as him holding nothing back and acting in good faith on the vow he made to his host. When Gawain finally rebuffs the wife for good, she insists that, even if he won't sleep with her, he should at least take a magic belt she has woven that will keep him from harm. He does; but he does *not* give this to his host. When he finally goes to the Green Chapel, the Knight returns the original blow as promised--but only nicks Gawain lightly. He reveals himself to be none other than the host who was sheltering him; the nick was his reprimand for withholding that final gift, but because of his good conduct he is otherwise left unharmed. The whole thing was a test of sorts, one which Gawain passed. Despite flinching at first from the blow, and keeping the belt secret, he shows himself ultimately to be a man of good (albeit not perfect) conduct, and *that* is why he wins honor from the whole affair.
The movie takes this basic narrative and alters it in key places, completely changing the valence of the whole thing. First, Gawain gets the belt at the beginning of his quest, as mentioned; he loses it on the way, but when he reaches the castle, the wife of his host (who succeeds in seducing him with a handjob) presents it to him as if she had woven it herself. He does not actually engage in the game of exchanged with his host, who is *also* not the Green Knight. And we're treated to a monologue about the color green from the wife that feels beat for beat like it's been ripped off from someone's undergraduate essay about Gawain and the Green Knight, which is a little weird even in the context of the rest of the movie. Finally when Gawain reaches the chapel, the knight goes to return the blow--and Gawain completely chickens out and flees. We are then treated to an extended sequence of Gawain returning home; being feted as a hero; earning his knighthood (presumably by lying about what happened); succeeding Arthur as king; him abandoning his low-class beau once she bears him a son, and marrying a princess; going to war; his son dying in a war; and finally, as an old man, being trapped in his throne room as a besieging army breaks its way inside. Just before they do, he removes the magic belt from around his waist, his head fall off, and bam--we're shown this has been an Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge thing this whole time, and the Green Knight has not yet landed his blow.
Gawain finally takes off the belt, throws it aside, and tells the knight to go ahead--and the knight bends down and congratulates him. In context, the reading seems to be this: the belt is a talisman of Gawain's mother's influence, of external expectations for what kind of man he is. The Knight is Arthur or perhaps an agent of his, and the test in *this* case is whether Gawain can be his own person. All the events leading up to this point are perhaps a part of the original magic Gawain's mother cast, an effort to Lilith Weatherwax her kid to greatness by putting him into an epic story. Implicitly, then, the Gawain and the Green Knight we all know is the false version of the tale, the tale as Gawain's mother would have it told.
This is all very clever. But I'm afraid it's so clever it falls apart in the end. Because the structure of the original story that this depends on is dependent in turn on taking the whole notion of chivalric virtue seriously, which this movie plainly does not. Gawain is shown as irreverent and lustful and a bit of a party animal--lovable and good hearted fundamentally, but definitely not an Arthurian hero. That's fine, but that's a very modern sort of character, one that feels out of place in a movie that is trying very hard also to be tonally unmodern, firmly embedded in a mythic otherwhen of Arthurian legend. Moments of slice-of-life mundaneness, while charming, strain mightily against the epic tone the movie tries to take in other places, and strange events like a ghost seeking her lost head or immense giants striding the landscape. We are jostled: are we in the land of myth? Or are we in historical Britain? We cannot be in both!
And this is a movie that was definitely made by people who had read the original text; not just the original text, but also a great deal of criticism *about* the original text. The movie namechecks the theme of fivefold symmetry that's incredibly important to the structure of the poem; there's the aforementioned undergrad essay about colors about 3/4th of the way through; and there's the fact that the structure of the original plot (down to Morgan LeFay in disguise as an old woman in the host's castle) is present in altered form in every detail. But none of these details add up to much. There's a weird homoerotic kiss with the host that implies that in fact *he* wanted to sleep with Gawain, in addition to his wife; the ghost Gawain encounters early on tells him the Green Knight is in fact someone he knows (and therefore *can't* be the host; I think it's implied to be Arthur, like I said, but this is never quite confirmed), and while all these things *about* the original poem are shown, none of them ever get integrated thematically into the plot.
I think as a result, whatever Lowery was going for, the whole movie kind of falls apart in the end. And that's a pity, because somewhere in there is just a really weird, visually striking, really gripping, embellished-and-polished-for-modern-sensibilities-but-also-thematically-true-to-the-source retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight. And that would have been a much better movie! What are we to make of this, a movie that purports to be telling a story-behind-the-story, but one that leaves no room or context for the original? After all, Gawain in the end does *not* flee, does not return home a coward and a liar; presumably, he earns his honor, and can be honest about what happened. But if he is honest, none of the rest of what we have been shown makes a lick of sense, or has any point.
One feels a bit as if modern directors, when confronted with medieval texts being a bit weird, a bit alien in their worldview, instead of realizing that's actually something people like some of from time to time, feel like they have to construct an artificial bridge between the Middle Ages and the present day. But because it is invariably metafictional and self-referential, as if to say "don't worry, we know nobody REALLY wants to watch a bunch of boring medieval shit played straight," it comes off as cringing and ashamed of its source material. This isn't a plea for historicity! Gawain and the Green Knight is not history. But one does occasionally want to see an adaptation of one's favorite works without directors being ashamed of the text they are adapting! And since most people will not have read the original, I am rather confused about what the director intends for the audience to get out of all these references that are dependent on it, but don't stand on their own merits within the narrative of the movie itself.
The acting was good, the set design and costumes were terrific, I loved the slow and measured pacing and the weird score, and the design of the Knight himself, and the landscapes and almost everything else about the movie. So I don't think it's a waste of time, especially if you have read and enjoyed Gawain and the Green Knight, in the original or in translation. But it's definitely a pity to see a movie that was, well, *almost* great, but ended up merely OK.
#gotta put that undergraduate degree to work from time to time#we spent a *lot* of time on this poem
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people of color in arthurian legend masterpost
hi! some people said it would be cool if i did this, and this is something i find interesting so. yeah! are you interested in king arthur and the knights of the round table? do you like to read about characters of color, especially in older lit? well, i hope this can be a good resource for people to get into stuff like that, especially poc/ethnic minorities who might feel uncomfortable or lonely getting into older media like arthuriana. this post is friendly to both those who prefer medieval lit and those who prefer modern stuff!
disclaimers: i am not a medievalist nor a race theorist! very much not so. i am just a 17 year old asian creature on the internet who wants to have an easy-to-reference post, if i’m not comprehensive enough please inform me. i’m going to stay closely to the matter of britain, as well, not all medieval european literature as a. this is what i’m more familiar with and b. there’s so much content and information and context to go along with it that it would really be impossible to put it all into one tumblr post. (however there’s always going to be overlap!) also, please do not treat me or any other person of color/ethnic minority as a singular all-knowing authority on anything! we’re all trying to have fun here and being made into an information machine on things, especially what is and isn’t offensive isn’t fun. with that out of the way, let’s get into it! (under cut for length!)
part i: some historical context (tw for racism and antisemitism discussion)
fair warning, i’m going to start off with some discussions of more heavier history before we talk about more fun stuff. while pre colonial racism was far more different than how it is today, there still...was racism. and it’s important to understand the social mien around nonwhite people in europe at the time these works were written.
to understand how marginalized ethnicities were written in medieval european literature, you have to understand the fact that religion, specifically catholicism, was a very important part of medieval european life. already, catholicism has violent tenets (ie, conversion as an inherent part of the church, as well as many antisemitic theologies and beliefs), but this violence worsened when an event known as the crusades happened.
the crusades were a series of religious wars started by the catholic church to ‘reclaim’ the holy land from islamic rule and to aid the byzantine empire. while i won’t go into the full history of the crusades, (some basic info here and here and here) its important to understand that they had strengthened the european view of the ’pagan’ (ie: not european christian) world as an ‘other’, a threat to christiandom that needed to be conquered and converted, for the spiritual benefit of both the convertee and the converter. these ideas of ethnoreligious superiority and conversion would permeate into the literature of the time written by european christians.
even today, the crusades are very much associated with white supremacy and modern islamophobic sentiment, with words such as ‘deus vult’ as a dogwhistle, and worship of and willingness to emulate the violence the crusaders used against the inhabitants of the holy land in tradcath spaces, so this isn’t stuff that’s all dead and in the past. crusader propaganda and the ignorance on the violence of the catholic church and the crusaders on muslim and jewish populations (as well as nonwhite christians ofc) is very harmful. arthuriana itself has a lot of links to white supremacy too-thanks to @/to-many-towered-camelot for this informative post. none of this stuff exists in a bubble.
here’s a book on catholic antisemitism, here’s a book on orientalism, here’s a book about racism in history that touches on the crusades. (to any catholic, i highly reccommend you read the first.)
with that out of the way, we can talk about the various not european groups that typically show up in arthurian literature and some historical background irt to that. the terms ‘moor’ and ‘saracen’ will typically pop up. both terms are exonyms and are very, very broad, eventually used as both a general term for muslims and as a general term for african and (western + central) asian people. they’re very vague, but when you encounter them the typical understanding you’re supposed to take away is ‘(western asian/african) foreigner’ and typically muslim/not christian as well. t
generally, african and asian lands will typically be referred to as pagan or ‘eastern/foreign’ lands, with little regard for understanding the actual religions of that area. they will also typically refer to saracens as pagans although islam is not a pagan religion. this is just a bit of a disclaimer. the term saracen itself is considered to be rather offensive-thank you to @/lesbianlanval for sending me a paper on this subject.
while i typically refer to the content on this post as having to pertain to african and asian people (ie, not european) european jewish arthurian traditions are included on this post too. but, i know more about poc and they’ll feature more prominently in this post because of that, lol.
part ii: so, are there any medieval texts involving characters of color?
i’m glad you asked! of course there are! to be clear, european medieval authors were very much aware that people of color and african + asian nations existed, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. even the vita merlini mentions sri lanka and a set of islands that might (?) be the philippines!! for the sake of brevity though, on this list i’m not going to list every single one of these small and frequent references, so i’m just going to focus on texts that primarily (or notably) feature characters of color.
first of all, it’s important to know was the influence of cultures of color and marginalized ethnicities that helped shape arthurian legend. the cultural exchange between europe and the islamic world during the crusades, as well as the long history of arab presence in southern europe, led to the influence of arabic love poetry and concepts of love on european literature, helping to form what we consider the archetypal romance. there are also arthurian traditions in hebrew, and yiddish too, adding new cultural ideas and introducing new story elements to their literature-all of these are just as crucial to the matter of britain as any other traditions!
when it comes to nonwhite presence in the works themselves, many knights of color in arthurian legend tend to be characters that, after defeated by a knight of arthur’s court join the court themselves. though some are side characters, there are others with their own romances and stories devoted to them! many of them are portrayed as capable + good as, if not better than their counterparts. (this, however, usually only comes through conversion to christianity if the knight is not christian...yeah.) though groups of color as a general monolith created by european christians tended to be orientalized in literature (see: mystical and strange ~eastern~ lands), many individual knights were written to be seen by their medieval audience as positive heroes. i’m going to try to stick to mostly individual character portrayals such as these.
with that all said though, these characters can still be taken as offensive (i would consider most to be) in their writing, so take everything with a grain of salt here. i will also include links to as many english translations of texts as i can, as well as note which ones i think are beginner friendly to those on the fence about medieval literature!
he shows up in too many texts so let’s make this into two bullet notes and start with one of, if not the most ubiquitous knight of color of the round table (at least in medieval lit),-palamedes! palamedes/palomides is a ‘’saracen knight’’ who (typically) hails from babylon or palestine and shows up in a good amount of texts. his first appearance is in the prose tristan, and he plays a major role there as a knight who fights with tristan for the hand of iseult-while he uh. loses, him and tristan later become companions + friends with a rivalry, and palamedes later goes off to hunt the questing beast, a re-occurring trend in his story.
palamedes even got his own romance named after him (which was very popular!) and details the adventures of the fathers of the knights of the round table, pre arthur, as well as later parts of the story detailing the adventures of their sons. it was included in rustichello da pisa’s compilation of arthurian romances, which i unfortunately have not seen floating around online (or...anywhere), so i can’t attest to the quality of it or anything. he appears in le morte darthur as well, slaying the questing beast but only after his conversion to christianity (...yeah.) in the texts in which he appears, palamedes is considered to be one of the top knights of the round table, alongside tristan and lancelot, fully living up to chivalric and courtly ideals and then some. i love him dearly and i’ve read the prose tristan five times just for him. (also the prose tristan in general is good, please give it a try, especially if you’re a romance fan.)
speaking of le morte d’arthur, an egyptian knight named priamus shows up in the lucius v arthur episode on lucius’ side first, later joining arthur’s after some interactions with gawaine. palamedes has brothers here as well-safir and segwarides. safir was relatively popular, and shows up in many medieval texts, mostly alongside his older brother. i wouldn’t recommend reading le morte of all things for the characters of color though-if you really want to see what it’s all about, just skip to the parts they’re mentioned with ctrl + f, haha.
the romance of moriaen is a 12th century dutch romance from the lancelot compilation, named for its main character morien. morien, who is a black moor, is the son of sir aglovale, the brother of perceval. whilst gawaine and lancelot are searching for said perceval, they encounter morien, who is in turn searching for aglovale as he had abandoned morien’s mother way back when. i wholeheartedly recommend this text for people who might feel uncomfy with medieval lit. though the translation i’ve linked can be a bit tricky, the story is short, sweet, and easy to follow, and morien and his relationships (esp with gariet, gawaine’s brother) are all wonderful.
king artus (original hebrew text here) is a northern italian jewish arthurian text written in hebrew- it retells a bit of the typical conception of arthur story, as well as some parts from the death of arthur as well. i really can’t recommend this text enough-it’s quite short, with an easy-to-read english translation, going over episodes that are pretty familiar to any average reader while adding a lot of fun details and it’s VERY interesting to me from a cultural standpoint. i find the way how they adapt the holy grail (one of the most archetypal christian motifs ever) in particular pretty amazing. this is also a very beginner friendly text!
wolfram von eschenbach’s parzival (link to volume 1 and volume 2-this translation rhymes!) is a medieval high german romance from the early 13th century, based off de troyes’ le conte du graal while greatly expanding on the original story. it concerns parzival and his quest for the grail (with a rather unique take on it-he fails at first!), and also takes like one million detours to talk about gawaine as all arthurian lit does. the prominent character of color here is a noble mixed race knight called feirefiz, parzival’s half brother by his father, who after dueling with parzival, and figures out their familial connection, joins him on his grail quest. he eventually converts to christianity (..yeah.) to see the grail and all ends happily for him. however, this text is notable to me as it contains two named women of color-belacane, feirefiz’s black african mother, and secundilla, feirefiz’s indian wife. though unfortunately, both are pretty screwed over by the text and their respective husbands. though parzival is maybe my favorite medieval text i’ve read so far i don’t necessarily know if i’d recommend this one, because it is long, and can be confusing at times. however, i do think that when it comes to the portrayal of people of color, while quite poor by today’s standards, von eschenbach was trying his best?-of course, in reason for. a 13th century medival german christian but he treats them with respect and all these characters are actually characters. if you’re really interested in grail stories (and are aware of the more uncomfortably christian aspects of the grail story), and you like gawaine and perceval, i’d say go for it.
in the turk and sir gawain, an english poem from the early 16th century, gawaine and the titular turkish man play a game of tennis ball. i’m shitting you not. this text is pretty short, funnily absurd, and with most of the hallmarks of a typical quest (various challenges culminating in some castle being freed), so it’s an easier read. it’s unclear to me, but at the end of the story the turkish man turns into sir gromer, a noble knight, who may or may not be white which uh. consider my ‘....yeah’ typical at this point, but i don’t personally read it that way for my own sanity. also he throws the sultan (??) of the isle of man (????) into a cauldron for not being a christian so when it comes to respectful representation of poc this one doesn’t make it, but it does make this list.
the revenge of ragisel, or at least the version i’ve read (the eng translation of the dutch version from the lancelot compilation), die wrake van ragisel, starts off being about the mysterious murder of a knight, but eventually, as most stories do, becomes a varying series of adventures about gawaine and co. one of gawaine’s friends (see: a knight who he combated with for a hot sec and then became friends and allies with, as you do) is a black knight named maurus! he’s not really an mc, but he features prominently and he’s pretty entertaining, as all the characters in this are. i also recommend this highly, i was laughing the whole time reading it! it’s not too long and pretty wild, you’ll have a good romp. this is a good starter text for anyone in general!
i’ve not read the roman van walewein, which, as it says on the tin, is a 12th century dutch romance concerning some deeds of gawaine (if only gawaine was a canon poc, i wouldn’t need to make this list because he’s so popular...). i’m putting it on the list for in this, gawaine goes to the far eastern land of endi (india) and romances a princess named ysabele. i can’t speak to ysabele’s character or the respectfulness of her kingdom or representation, but i know she’s a major character and her story ends pretty well, so that’s encouraging. women of color, especially fleshed out woc, are pretty rare in arthurian lit. i’ve also heard the story itself is pretty wild, and includes a fox, which sounds pretty exciting to me!
now the next two things i’m going to mention aren’t really? texts that feature characters of color or jewish characters, but are rather more notable for being translations of existing texts into certain languages. wigalois is a german 13th century romances featuring the titular character (the son of, you guessed it, gawaine!) and his deeds. the second, jaufre, is the only arthurian romance written in occitan, and is a quite long work about the adventures of the knight jaufre, based on the knight griflet. what’s notable about these two works is that wigalois has a yiddish translation, and jaufre has a tagalog translation. wigalois’ yiddish translation in particular changed the original german text into something more fitting of the arthurian romance format as well as adding elements to make it more appealing for a jewish audience. the tagalog translation of jaufre on the other hand was not medieval, only coming about in 1900, but the philippines has had a long history of romantic tradition and verse writing, so i’m curious to see if it too adds or changes elements when it comes to the arthurian story, but i can’t find a lot on the tagalog version of jaufre unfortunately-i hope i can eventually!
this list of texts is also non-exhaustive! i’m just listing a couple of notoriety, and some to start with.
part iii: papers and academic analysis
so here’s just a dump of various papers i’ve read and collected on topics such as these-this is an inexhaustive and non-comprehensive list! if you have any papers you think are good and would like to be added here, shoot me an ask. i’ll try to include a link when i can, but if it’s unavailable to you just message me. * starred are the ones i really think people, especially white people, should at least try to read.
Swank, Kris. ‘Black in Camelot: Race and Ethnicity in Arthurian Legend’ *
Harrill, Claire. ‘Saracens and racial Otherness in Middle English * Romance’
Keita, Maghan. ‘Saracens and Black Knights’
Hoffman, Donald L. ‘Assimilating Saracens: The Aliens in Malory's ‘Morte Darthur’
Goodrich, Peter H. ‘Saracens and Islamic Alterity in Malory's ‘Le Morte Darthur’
Schultz, Annie. ‘Forbidden Love: The Arabic Influence on the Courtly Love Poetry of Medieval Europe’ *
Hardman, Philipa. ‘Dear Enemies: the Motif of the Converted Saracen and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’
Knowles, Annie. ‘Encounters of the Arabian Kind: Cultural Exchange and Identity the Tristans of Medieval France, England, and Spain’ *
Hermes, Nizar F. ‘King Arthur in the Lands of the Saracens’ *
Ayed, Wajih. ‘Somatic Figurations of the Saracen in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’
Herde, Christopher M. ‘A new fantasy of crusade: Sarras in the vulgate cycle.’ *
Rovang, Paul R. ‘Hebraizing Arthurian Romance: The Originality of ‘Melech Artus.’’
Rajabzdeh, Shokoofeh. ‘The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure’ *
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. ‘To the Well: Malory's Sir Palomides on Ideals of Chivalric Reputation, Male Friendship, Romantic Love, Religious Conversion—and Loyalty.’ *
Lumbley, Coral. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Race’ *
Oehme, Annegret. ‘Adapting Arthur. The Transformations and Adaptations of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois’ *
Hendrix, Erik. ‘An Unlikely Hero: The Romance of Moriaen and Racial Discursivity in the Middle Ages’ *
Darrup, Cathy C. ‘Gender, Skin Color, and the Power of Place in the Medieval Dutch Romance of Moriaen’ *
Armstrong, Dorsey. ‘Postcolonial Palomides: Malory's Saracen Knight and the Unmaking of Arthurian Community’ (note this is the only one i can’t access in its entirety)
part iv: supplemental material
here’s some other stuff i find useful to getting to know knights of color in arthurian legend, especially if papers/academic stuff/medieval literature is daunting! i’d really recommend you go through all of these if you can’t go through anything else-most are quick reads.
a magazine article on knights of color here, and this article about the yiddish translation of wigalois.
this video about characters of color in arthurian legend!
the performance of the translation of arabic in Libro del Caballero Zifar, and how it pertains to the matter of britain
a post by yours truly about women of color in parzival
this info sheet about palamedes, and this info sheet about ysabele-thanks to @/pendraegon and @/reynier for letting me use these!
this page on palamedes as well
this post with various resources on race and ethnicity in arthuriana-another thank you to @/reynier!
part v: how about modern day stories and adaptations?
there’s a lot of em out there! i’m not as familiar with modern stuff, but i will try to recommend medias i know where characters of color (including racebends!) are prominent. since i haven’t read/watched all (or truly most) of these, i can’t really speak on the quality of the representation though, so that’s your warning.
first of all, when it comes to the victorian arthurian revival, i know that william morris really liked palamedes! (don’t we all.) he features frequently in morris’ arthurian poetry, (in this beautiful book, he primarily features in ‘sir galahad, a christmas mystery’ and ‘king arthur’s tomb’. he has his own poem by morris here.)
and some other poems about palamedes, which i’d all recommend.
for movies, i know a knight in camelot (1998) stars whoopi goldberg as an original character, the green knight (2021) will star dev patel as gawaine.
some shows include camelot high, bbc merlin, disney’s once upon a time, and netflix’s cursed, all featuring both original characters of color and people of color cast as known arthurian figures.
for any music people, in ‘high noon over camelot’, an album by the mechanisms, mordred is played by ashes o’reilley, who in turn is performed by frank voss, and arthur is played by marius von raum who is perfomed by kofi young.
i’ve also heard the pendragon and the squire’s tales have palamedes as a relevant character if you’re looking for novels, as well as legendborn and the forgotten knight: a chinese warrior in king arthur’s court starring original protagonists of color!
part vi: going on from here
so, you’ve read some medieval lit, read some papers, watched some shows, and done all that. what now? well, there’s still so much out there!
if you have fanfiction, analysis, metaposts, fun content etc etc about arthurian poc, feel free to plug your content on this post! i’d be happy to boost it.
in general, if you’re a person of color or a jewish person and you’re into arthurian legend, feel free to promote your blog on this post as well! i would love to know more people active on arthurian tumblr who are nonwhite.
this is really just me asking for extra content, especially content made by poc, but that’s okay! arthurian legend is a living, breathing set of canons and i would love love love to see more fresh diversity within them right alongside the older stuff.
a very gracious thank you to the tumblr users whom i linked posts to on here, and thanks to y’all for saying you want to see this! i hope this post helped people learn some new things!
#finny.txt#arthuriana#arthurian legend#matter of britain#medieval romance#arthurian literature#arthurian mythology#<- :/#but necessary#also ITS DONE ITS DONE ITS FINALLY DONE#PLEASEREBLOG THIS WRHSFSHDFDHSFSDF#2K PLUS WORDS..
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Sonic may actually be lost royalty
I keep going down these rabbit holes I shouldn’t go down BUT! Although this theory is one that I don’t fully believe in (unlike the infinite/solaris theory and the chaos emerald theory) I still have a good argument that I want to talk about very bad.
I also tried to make this as short as possible but there’s a lot of ground to cover, but at least it’s not the infinite/solaris theory. But I have a TLDR at the end.
[Spoiler Warning for Sonic and the Black Knight]
let’s start with a ✨numbered list✨
1. Blaze the Cat
Blaze is the biggest caveat for this theory, but I think it’s best to start with her.
Now, firstly I need to clear up some things.
[Eggman: My world...]
[Eggman Nega: and my world...]
[Eggmen: are in a manner, inextricably linked!]
[Blaze: Like two Eggmans?]
Part of the Blaze’s world is that it’s a parallel universe. Parallel Eggmen, Parallel emeralds, Everything else that isn’t stated outright. Like how Tails and Marine are definitely counterparts. Seeming as Tails came from South Island and Marine came from southern island, Tails is definitely based on a kitsune and Marine, in theory, based on a tanuki.
And, although not stated completely, Blaze and Sonic are universal counterparts.
[From Sonic Wiki: Blaze was designed as a charater who was equivalent yet and alternate version of Sonic’s character.]
Much like the Sol and Chaos emeralds, Sonic and Blaze are a mirror version of one another, although slightly different.
Alright, now that we have that out of the way:
Looking at the connections between the others, Sonic and Blaze seem, a bit too different.
The Sol and Chaos emeralds fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a similar story. Tails and Marine fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a similar story. The Eggmen fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a similar story.
Blaze and Sonic fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a... completely different story.
Blaze was born to a royal family, and set to protect the Sol Emeralds and the Jeweled Scepter as her birthright, and it’s somewhat hinted that her powers may also be a birthright. Sonic, on the other hand, has no known past, and seems to have just run into the Chaos Emeralds by accident.
You could claim that Blaze does take on the role of both Sonic AND Knuckles, which is fair and stated on the wiki, however Knuckles is also never stated to be any kind of royalty, and certainly doesn’t have that kind of past, his past being one of the more tragically alone ones.
And here’s something interesting.
Time has warped our vision of Blaze. We all know her as “Princess Blaze the Cat.” But from watching Sonic Rush, her opening game... she is never mentioned to be a princess until the very end.
[Burning Blaze: As princess, it is my duty to protect the Sol Emeralds...]
From what I remember, this is the FIRST mention of her royal status.
From this game’s viewpoint, they reveal the mirror status of the dimensions. They then show both Blaze and Sonic having mirror super transformations using their emeralds, highly implying that Sonic and Blaze were mirror versions. (also this was implied already by just Blaze’s shoes.) and then it’s revealed that Blaze is royal, and a princess.
So if she’s the mirror of Sonic, what does that mean for Sonic? Especially right after showing the two of them being, well, mirrors.
2. King Arthur
SATBK is much less transparent about the counterpart universe thing.
Now this is an alternate universe, set up by Secret Rings, and surprisingly not just a story Sonic told as an elaborate excuse.
They don’t hide obivous Sonic characters being put into roles, and their in these roles for a reason.
Blaze and Silver as Percival and Galahad, the knights who quested together for the holy grail. Knuckles as Gawain literally only because of “Gawain and the Green Knight” But I respect that so much. Jet as Lamorak because of Lamorak’s fiery temper and competitiveness. Shadow as Lancelot because he’s the “closest knight to the king” stated in game (👀) Tails as a Blacksmith because that’s p much the medieval version of a mechanic. Amy as the Lady of the Lake because like. Fuck she’s the most powerful one there. (but seriously, in forces she’s shown to be the most level headed leader and strangest, especially in Sonic’s absence. As well as “sensing” that he was still alive and having a past in tarot.) And Merlina as Merlina because... well that’s a whole other theory.
(all my theories are being brought up in the post. like i know the first two were expamples of theories I fully belive in but damn this is like a avengeners, ok,)
But Sonic as King Arthur makes sense when it’s revealed. Although he wasn’t anyone’s counterpart in Secret Rings (because secrets rings was confused as hell) He is in this game, and as the ring leader of everyone following him in SATBK, it makes sense.
Although something that was never brought up...EVER is the Knight’s backstories, which are EXTREMELY important not only in Arthurian legends, but for the knights in Sonic lore. All of the knight’s mentioned backstories are important to their character, in both contexts. Although their never brought up.
*DEEP BREATH* Alright. The similarities between Sonic Character/Knight backstories.
Shadow and Lancelot have pretty simmilar backstories when getting down to it. Shadow/Lancelot were both raised for greatness, but still outshined by Sonic/Arthur. Although remaining loyal to them, even if for Shadow it’s only in times of need. Shadow doesn’t want to admit he’s a supporting role to Sonic, although Sonic generations kinda throws that Idea out of the water when Shadow cheers Sonic on while watching from the sidelines, much like early Lancelot.
For Blaze and Percival, in multiple interpretations Percival is of noble birth. Upon meeting Sonic’s Gang/The Knights, Blaze/Percival get’s inspired by their heroics and eventually joins them.
“Lancelot and Percival prove morally superior to Gawain who follows the rules of courtliness to the letter rather than the spirit.“ Is an actual quote from Wikipedia. Although it is VERY hard to find a concrete backstory for Gawain other than “separated from his home”, I think this proves enough. As well as the Gawain and the Green Knight story (in which Gawain tries to slay the green knight and then he picks up his head and says “see you in a year” is pretty representative of Knuckles constantly breaking the master emerald in a comedic light.)
Lamorak/Jet are known for challenging Arthur/Sonic to competitions.
Galahad/Silver are searching for an object/person aided by Percival/Blaze
So now that we’re all good, do you see the similarities between part one.
Although everyone else has given backstory similarities, Sonic is given none, seeming as, as far as we know, Sonic HAS no backstory.
But isn’t it interesting that King Arthur’s backstory is being lost royalty? And the secret son of the king? Wack.
3. Sonic Fucking Underground
Now, most of you are probably unfamiliar with Sonic Underground. Good.
If you’re not, you watched it as a kid and you’re nostalgic, and let me tell you I watched the entire show recently and it’s not as good as you remember.
But Sonic Underground’s quality and history could be a post on it’s own, it doesn’t matter here. What matters is the plot:
[From Sonic Wiki: Sonic, Sonia, and Manic are the children of Queen Aleena, the rightful ruler of Mobius and are pursued relentlessly by Doctor Robotnik and his bumbling bounty hunters sidekicks, Sleet and Dingo. As infants, the siblings were separated and placed in hiding to fulfill a prophecy made by the Oracle of Delphius (a spoof of the Oracle of Delphi of Ancient Greece) that the triplets would grow up to find their estranged mother, overthrow Robotnik and take their places once more as Mobius' rightful rulers.]
FORGOTTEN ROYALTY YOU SAY.
Now, Sonic Underground is VERY SEPARATED from Sonic Lore, and nothing has ever taken from it besides Manic appearing in some comics, although from what I know he’s never mentioned to be Sonic’s brother. So This is the part I always take with a grain of salt, however;
4. In conclusion/TLDR
We have Two Instances of Sonic being lost Royalty (One in a separate reality and one in a separate continuity) We have Two Instances of Dimentional Counterparts of Sonic being Royalty (Blaze and King Arthur) We have zero given backstory for Sonic We have Three instances of Sonic, or a counterpart, being royalty
And from what I remember hearing, three’s a pattern.
#sonic the hedgehog#theory#sonic theory#royalty theory#sonic rush#sonic rush adventure#sonic and the black knight#satbk#sonic underground#sonic wiki#Not only is this a deep dive into sonic#but I accidentally did a meta abput the satbk round table and their simmilarites to the og knights
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INTRO TO ARTHURIANA MASTERPOST
under the cut for absurd length
HOW TO GET STARTED WITH ARTHURIANA
The Arthuriana fandom is very broad and there's no one piece of media, which can be confusing for people just getting into it! There’s no right way to engage with arthuriana, and no minimum level of knowledge or reading you need to attain to qualify.
The basis of the Arthurian Legend is a body of hundreds of texts written across the medieval and early Renaissance period in dozens of languages and cultural traditions. Which can seem pretty overwhelming, but there are a lot of modern vernacular translations-- you absolutely don’t have to learn old French or anything. I’ll go more in depth on where to get started with texts further down.
You also don’t have to read texts at all. As I said, there is no minimum basis-- if you prefer to engage with modern adaptations, or want to engage with medieval arthuriana outside of reading texts, that's also cool!
In terms of modern adaptations there is a wealth of choices, which I am very much not an expert in lol, so I’m afraid I can’t give much in the way of reccs. Books I have heard good things about are, Exiled from Camelot, Idylls of the Queen, The Buried Giant, the Squire's Tale series, and Gawain by Gwen Rowley (warning that this one is apparently erotica? Good for him). I trust @princesslibs for modern book reccomendations. and if you speak French Kaamelott is purportedly a very good tv show. Frankly no modern adaptation will ever be better than Spamalot to me, but that's just my personal take.
If you are curious about engaging with texts but (understandably) don’t want to read a ton of dense medieval literature, one really cool resource is Norris J Lacy's New Arthurian Encyclopedia, which you can pick up at most used bookstores for under ten bucks. It’s a very thorough easy to look through reference of characters stories and texts. I know a lot of people like the Nightbringer wiki, though I personally am wary of it because it basically never cites sources. It’s a good quick reference though and a lot of people like it, I’d just take it with a grain of salt. Sparknotes also has a lot of summaries of the major texts like Le Morte D’Arthur and the romances of Chrétien De Troyes. You are not a fake fan for doing this I promise. And of course you’re always welcome to send me an ask <3
Finally, getting started with texts. Quick glossary of terms:
--Verse Romance
A verse (poem) story which can vary a great deal in length. These deal with the adventures of individual knights, usually Gawain, and tend to have a great deal of magical elements and the stereotypical monster slaying, questing, damosel rescuing knight adventures.
--Prose Novel or Romance
A non poetic narrative, more like a modern novel, more likely to deal with the fall of Arthur, sword in the stone, Mordred, fall of Camelot sort of affair. They are usually quite long. Most famous of these are Le Morte D’Arthur and the French Vulgate, but there are a slew of late medieval Prose novels floating around. Eluding Rey.
--Pseudohistory
I’m gonna b real these are boring I think. These are, as the name suggests, written as accurate depictions of history. They very much are not, but they claim to be. Most famous of these is Jeffrey of Monmouth, Mr Jeff Mouth himself, and his History of the Kings of Britain, which I haven’t read because it bores me. You can if you want. It’s in Latin. Whatever. These tend to be some of the earliest texts, and include the “lives of saints” stories. Life of Gildas is the only funny one.
--Ballads
These are only arguably texts, as most of them were written after the time of the “canon” being composed. But I like them. These are songs telling stories, recorded by people like Francis Child and Thomas Percy. They are very short and fun and include stories like The Boy and the Mantle, Kempion, and King Arthur and the King of Cornwall.
--Lai
A specific type of French verse poem, usually quite short. The most famous collection of lais are those of Marie le France, including things like Bisclavret and Lanval.
--Traditions
Since Arthuriana was written all over, there are different literary traditions across time and space. The French tradition is one of the most famous, including works like the vulgate, Chretien and a lot of verse romances. The English tradition is one of the most influential on modern adaptations, including the Morte D’Arthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There are also Welsh, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Greek, Belarussian, Scottish, Irish, Breton, and probably even more. There’s a lot. It’s very cool and sexy.
A note that there is also a big tradition of Victorian revival Arthuriana. I wrote a starter guide to that here, it’s all very fun and like, aesthetic.
Alright, now, which texts do you start with?
If you’re a little intimidated by long texts or medieval lit, starting with short verse romances in modern translation is a great place to start. These include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is very good and gay and well known, Lancelot and the Hart With The White Foot, which is very good and gay and underappreciated, or Lanval, which is homophobic but funny.
If you want to start with what is considered the oldest King Arthur Story, Culwch and Olwen is short and fun!
If you want to read about the grail quest, you can start where it started with Story of the Grail or Percival, then the four continuations, Essenbachs Parzival, the vulgate version of the Grail quest which you can buy paperback for like 5 bucks (I can also scan my copy for you just shoot me an ask <3)
If you want to read about the fall of camelot, I have the Vulgate death of Arthur section scanned here. There’s also the Alliterative and Stanzaic mortes, which are in middle English. I have scanned Simon Armitage's Alliterative Morte translation here. I’m working on my own translation of the Stanzaic but it’s not done lol. If you want the first third or so DM me lol. King Artus is very short and readable and it’s a Jewish text which is really cool.
If you want to read about Lancelot, Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot is his first text. He also has a whole long vulgate section, the first part is scanned here by val <3, and there's Lanzelet, Sebile is in it so it’s probably very good. He’s also basically the main character of Le Morte D’Arthur which I might as well talk about here uhm. It’s long and fun in places and boring in others but it does have like the version most modern adaptations take from and tells the whole story of Arthur and Camelot from beginning to end. The Keith Baines version scanned by val is the most readable but it is an abridgement I believe. people who like le morte usually read this version so its probably the best choice lol
If you want to read about Gawain, good news! He’s in basically everything. Even texts that aren’t supposed to be about Gawain are doomed to become The Gawain Show Featuring The Protagonist Of This Text As A Sidekick. Which is so funny of him. The Roman Van Walewein is very funny and long and Gawain™. I also recommend, L’atre Perilous, Diu Krone, Sir Gawain and the Turk, and I could go on but for brevity's sake let's start there.
If you want to read about Tristan, go shoot an ask to Valentine @lanzelet on tumblr because Tristan scares me.
Thank you to rey @gawain-in-green for helping me find links and put this together! They are also a super great resource for stuff and very cool and nice <3 They have a tag on their blog for full text resources so deffo look at that if you want more scans and links, and an info tag and tons of cool shit that is way better organized than my blog lol
Okay finishing this off, if you want content warnings for any texts, feel free to shoot an ask! I know medieval lit can be A Lot and there aren’t a lot of good warning systems, so if I’ve read it or know someone who has I can give you warnings if you want to read something but are understandably wary . <3
In terms of tagging, Arthuriana and Arthurian Legend are the main ones on tumblr. Arthurian Mythology is also used but tbh shouldn’t be. On Ao3, we’re trying to get our own Arthurian Literature tag but <3 its a whole thing. Anyway the tag is Arthurian Mythology, but I’ll b real, it’s kind of flooded with stuff that doesn’t really belong there, because even though it’s a fandom tag other people unknowingly tag stuff as Arthurian Mythology when it’s like, a knight au. Which is not their fault bc it’s confusing but, ah, alas. ANyhow, feel free to drop in my inbox anytime with questions, suggestions, reccs, etc!
Okay godspeed!! Have fun reading, watching, browsing, etc!
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The Voyage So Far: East Blue (Part Two)
east blue (1 | 2) || alabasta (1 | 2) || skypiea || water 7 || enies lobby || thriller bark || paramount war (1 | 2) || fishman island || punk hazard || dressrosa (1 | 2) || whole cake island || wano (1 | 2)
this is one of my favorite little character beats in east blue. sanji and zeff have an entire conversation and then zeff mentions, “by the way, that kid can’t swim” and sanji is like “WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU TELL ME SOONER!!” and is in the water in like three seconds flat.
and, of course, zeff’s fond expression once sanji isn’t around to see.
we don’t see sanji smile like this too often- and when we do, it’s most often related to food in some way (like when he feeds gin, or in his wci flashback when sora says his food is good). it does things to my heart.
kind of reiterating myself from the last post, here, but usopp really does do a lot of cool things well before his water 7/enies lobby character development, just not as many when compared to his crewmates. which is his problem, really- he can’t stop comparing himself to them long enough to recognize he’s pretty cool by any reasonable metric, he just happens to be on a ship with nine of the most badass people on the planet and so his metric is completely skewed.
anyways he shoots a fucking bomb into arlong’s face and that’s completely sick as hell.
zoro left alone in arlong park is so funny. he got nearly cut in half like two days ago, and instead of just leaving like a normal person when nami gives him the chance, he chooses to wipe the floor with all the fishmen around and then hang out on arlong’s throne. also, that shirt isn’t his. he stole it. presumably off one of the guys whose asses he just kicked.
there’s really something to be said about nami’s expressions in arlong park. she’s clearly acting to an extent in most of her scenes prior to her breakdown, but at the same time, god, it really doesn’t look like it. nami in this arc is a really great example of reread value- on a reread, all her coldness and cruelty becomes barely-restrained pain and desperation.
i really, really love one piece’s sibling relationships. and there might be a little bit of bias here, because i’m a big sister myself, but i love how varied they are, how real they feel, both adopted and biological. nami and nojiko don’t agree on everything, and they come into conflict more than once, but at the same time it’s plain they love each other so so much.
bellemere is up there as one of my favorite flashback characters, together with corazon and roger. i love her a lot.
i’m not even doing a thorough reread for this post, just skimming through volumes and picking out moments, and genzo telling nami that she’s fought well and there’s nothing more she can do still made me cry.
nami has been fighting on her own for eight years, with the lives of her entire village and her only remaining family resting on her shoulders, with them unable to do anything but watch as she runs herself into the ground for them. this is where they decide they’d rather all die than have to see her start all over from scratch for them.
arlong park is an amazingly written arc, and it pummels my heart in a new and different way every time.
i really like that zoro, sanji and usopp all follow luffy’s lead in how he chooses to handle the arlong park situation. luffy waits for nami to ask for help, and as soon as she finally does, it cuts around to show that it’s not just luffy there- all four of them were just waiting for her word. it’s the first time the crew is entirely united for a common goal, and it feels really good.
i really am never gonna shut up about usopp’s character development, huh.
i really like the way the scene of him getting up the nerve to face down chuu is constructed- him rehearsing excuses and explanations cut together with memories of his crewmates (and on the next page, later the cocoyashi villagers as well), moments of theirs that he obviously admires. the one that hits me the hardest is him thinking of nami, in the moment she stabbed herself to save his life. that’s how he gets up his courage- from his admiration and respect for his crewmates’ bravery.
i think about this moment a lot. it’s one of my favorite luffy moments, and also one of the ones i think is most representative of him as a character. he’s such a delightful, laid-back person most of the time, but he loves the people he’s decided are his so much, and god help you if you hurt them.
i think about this a lot, too.
luffy is dumb as rocks in a lot of ways, but he’s pretty damn intuitive when it comes to people. he handles nami’s situation in exactly the right way, by waiting for her to ask for help instead of just barging unasked into the war she’s been fighting alone for years, and he handles this exactly right, too- by destroying what’s effectively her prison cell in a permanent, visible way, where she can see and know that she’ll never have to sit at that desk ever, ever again.
i just- i love luffy, so much.
i talked about oda’s use of negative space to emphasize heavy, impactful moments in the last post, and this is maybe the best example of it yet in the story. look at this panel: the future pirate king, the stand where the last one died, and absolutely nothing else but empty space and luffy’s words: this is where the great pirate era began.
the theming of beginnings and endings in loguetown is so, so good, and it could almost be summed up with this panel alone. it’s at once the ending of the story’s east blue prologue and a new beginning- the beginning of the crew’s infamous reputations, of the quest for the one piece proper, of the entire wider story that opens up with the entry into the grand line. the end of roger’s era, and the start of luffy’s.
i love the atmosphere of loguetown so dearly. the thunder strike at the last moment, maybe a rescue and maybe sheer luck; the raging storm, the vow over the barrel, the declaration of dreams. i’ve said this before- there’s something so romantic about it, in the old-fashioned arthurian sense one piece uses the word.
and we’re off for the grand line!
#the voyage so far#one piece#opmeta#long post#arc: baratie#arc: arlong park#arc: loguetown#not japanese
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What are your thoughts on the ending of the green knight? Little disappointed with it.
Ahhh thank you, my anonymous hero, for giving me the opportunity to ramble about this movie. I saw it last night and I’ve been thinking about it pretty nonstop. Disclaimer before I get into this: I’m not a proper medievalist. I am, however, an English student with a focus on British literature, so I’ve read a few different translations of the original source material and studied it fairly in-depth.
That being said, my first reaction to The Green Knight was… well, that it’s not really Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Which is fine! Mostly. Every movie adaptation changes things from the source, but this one changed so much, so drastically, that I can’t really think about it as the same story. In the original poem, Gawain is a good (if inexperienced) knight who consistently keeps his promises and retains his honor right up until the very end of the story, when he lies about the green belt and refuses to give it to his host, Bertilak. The storyline of the movie seems to flip this? Gawain doesn’t start off as a good knight, or even as a knight at all, and in the movie he consistently fails to live up to knightly virtues throughout his quest. However, at the end he succeeds where the original Gawain did not, and voluntarily removes the belt (after that memorable flash-forward sequence).
To me, this is a fundamentally different story from the original. And I’m not mad about the character changes! A movie has to create a self-contained character arc in a way that the anonymous Pearl Poet did not have to. So to me, the movie seems to present the story of someone who must learn to accept death. Death (and rebirth) is certainly a major theme in the original, too, but I’ve always interpreted the og poem as placing more importance on honesty, chivalry, chastity, humility, and shame.
So the movie is telling a different story, with different themes. With that in mind, I guess it could make sense to skim over the 3 days of Christmas games and the kissing exchange in the original poem. However, even if it does make sense, I’m mad about it because I really liked the Christmas games and the kissing exchange in the original poem. I would’ve swapped out Gawain’s existential flash-forward sequence for a few good kissing exchanges in a heartbeat.
That being said, with the story the movie seems to be trying to tell I’m not terribly mad at the ending? Maybe? I’m still conflicted. I suppose the problem is that the themes feel very confused to me. The strongest one I can latch onto is the inevitability of death/ the importance of embracing the natural cycle of the world. With that in mind, Gawain’s vision of the future could be his realization that his life will, eventually, end, no matter what he does in the green chapel. His decision to remove the belt and face the green knight without its protection can then be seen as an acceptance of death, and the decision to die with honor and dignity. I’m not unhappy with where his character arc ends up here, considering he’s been framed as a screw-up since the beginning of the movie, but I’m left repeating #notmygawain because this is, again, a fundamentally different character arc from the original story. Again, I understand why they changed Gawain’s character for a movie. I just don’t like the changes very much.
I’m also not a huge fan of the cliffhanger (although I did love the final “Green Knight” title card!) mostly because all elements of cliffhanger are removed if you’ve actually read the original poem (or even just checked Wikipedia). Like, we know that the knight doesn’t kill Gawain. It’s not a new story. Although? I suppose this version of it is. So who’s to say whether he dies or not? I suppose the cliffhanger could work in the context of this adaption because, if we’re going with the ‘accepting death’ theme (which I’m still not sure about!), the outcome of Gawain’s decision doesn’t matter as much as the decision itself. We’ve seen him drift around the kingdom for almost 2 hours, breaking chivalric code, lying to his host, and overall being a pretty self-absorbed knight who’s terrified of his own mortality. The decision to accept death and embrace honor is the culmination of a character arc and seems like a fitting end to the movie. But I do wish we had gotten to see Gawain work more towards this growth through the events of his quest, rather than simply achieve it through a flash forward in time.
And I still think they should have left in the full three days of Christmas games.
Overall? This adaption was beautiful. Dev Patel is hot. And, more importantly (to me), this adaption felt right. The blending of Catholic imagery with pagan Celtic influences, the weird vibes, the use of title cards and the vaguely disconnected adventures was fun, and it felt more “Arthurian” than any other round-table-related movie I’ve ever watched. But I’m still not entirely sure what the story was trying to say, or if it said it. If you’re going to deviate from the source material this much, it’s my opinion that you’ve got to do it for a clear reason, to make a clear point, not just to subvert audience expectation. I’m not quite sure what the point of these changes were, or how the ending of the movie revealed the movie’s core thesis. It felt a bit more like a “gotcha!” from the director than a genuine end to Gawain’s story.
But, I mean, at least Dev Patel was hot.
#if this sounds wishy washy it’s because I’m still making up my mind#but thank you for the ask!#I’m seeing the movie again tomorrow hopefully I’ll be able to decide what I think about the ending by then#at the moment I’m not sure whether I loved it or hated it#it was so pretty! Dev Patel is so hot!#but like… the Christmas games. why would you cut the Christmas games?#let me know what you thought! I am desperate to hear how other people view this movie#also let me know if y’all had different interpretations of the movies themes or even the themes of the original poem#I’m not an expert I’m just an overly thoughtful English major with a new obsession#the green knight#sir gawain and the green knight
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Review of The Green Knight
As a lover of Arthurian legend and medieval reenactment and a once-upon medieval literature student, the new movie The Green Knight of course was on my to-watch list. Especially after reading qqueenofhades’ excellent essay. I finally watched the movie last week. And I have some Thoughts to share.
There are a lot of things to like about this movie. It was delightfully non-sensational and devoid of GoT-like violence and political power struggles. There was some really beautiful cinematography, partly thanks to the beautiful Irish mountains this movie was shot in. I love that TGK not just adopted, but instead reworked the legend. The main moral themes and outcomes, while not a literal copy, felt authentic to the Christian medieval context of the poem, involving questions around honor, courage, hospitality, greatness, humility and what it means to be a good knight, or even a good person. The movie made it beautifully clear that Gawain’s main problem could have been avoided had he just given the Green Knight a scratch, but because he chose to behead the knight while said knight was lying kneeling and harmless at his feet, there is no escaping from facing the consequence of that action, which is neatly echoed throughout the movie. The green knight, the knight with the green belt and the lord who goes hunting in the green. The lover, the saint and the temptress. What you give, you will receive, and the other way around. The cast was great (too asexual to be thirsty for Dev Patel, though, sorry). The messing up of the mistaken image of medieval europe as just white is also always appreciated. I too liked that the film didn’t care to explain some of the wonders and mysteries, like the giants and the saint who lost her head, they just were accepted as part of that world. Being somewhat puzzled and enchanted is sadly rare in media nowadays where everything has to be explained or else it’s a ‘plot hole’. The liberty this movie takes with time, with multiple possible versions playing out and the reoccuring circular motives were impressive. However, the film as a whole didn’t quite work for me and I don’t really care to rewatch it. I think there are two fundamental reasons why.
The first is that the viewer isn’t given reason to care about the main character. I think this choice is deliberate, as we see Arthur asking Gawain to tell a tale of himself to get to know him, and Gawain replies that he has none, and after Gawain takes on the Green Knight’s challenge as an opportunity to gain a tale for himself. Questions about telling and re-telling tales and achieving greatness are a central theme. However, this narrative choice poses a problem, as it results in a movie where we see Gawain wrestle through difficulties on his quest and he’s this strange identity-less puppet, escaped from the children’s puppet show. We as audience are set up to be detached from him, which makes it hard to root for his success or even his survival, despite how pretty and sad Dev Patel may look in a dirty-and-distressed state. This could have been solved without removing those identity themes by giving Gawain, if not great deeds, at least some establishment of his character at the start of the film. He doesn’t have to be likable, but he has to be something more than a drinker and brawler with a faint sense of wanting to prove himself. That is just not enough to make us attached to Gawain’s wellbeing and involved in the quality of his decision making. The rest of the movie doesn't quite build Gawain’s character either. We get that he’s uncertain and afraid, yes, but his actions remain inconsistent, his motivations unclear. His main character arch - that he needs to give up the protection of the enchanted green belt, needs to face fear and consequences rather than to rely on the treacherous protection of witchcraft - doesn’t come off the ground because we only learn close to the very end that the belt is a problem to the completion of his quest. That’s no arch, that’s an exhausting flat march and a sudden steep slope right before the finish line.
The second problem ties into the first. Namely, you don’t need a strong emotional tie to the characters if there’s a light tone, an adventure with a side dish of some fun and humor perhaps. This movie, however, is anything but light. It’s dark. It’s grim. It’s cold. It’s wet. There’s exactly zero humor. Above all, it’s slow. So slow. Apart from an emotional connection, you also need a sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat amount of story tension for this kind of dramatic tone and slow pace to work, and the script just doesn’t build that tension. A shot of Gawain riding through the moor after he leaves his home is just that: the confrontation with the Green Knight is still far away, there’s no looming threat we’re aware of, there’s nothing else to be told or resolved. Together with our emotional detachment it makes for a movie that switches between boring and ridiculously overdramatic, while occasionally looking stunning and taking on deeper questions and parallels. Overall it just makes for a frustrating viewer experience that lacks impact. I was left with a thorough “meh”. Which is a shame, because this movie is very interesting and could have been so good. That clever panning shot showing Gawain as a tied up skeleton should have been devastating. I should have been shouting “No DON”T do that, you IDIOT!” at the screen the moment Gawain scares away his adorable guardian fox. Instead, I couldn’t care less. Come on, Green Knight. Off with his head.
Some final details to note: erotic movie scenes are normally already awkward, but the scenes in this movie take the usual akwardness next level. At least it’s handled consistently - whether straight or homoerotic, it’s basically all a dissapointment. (That cum shot has scarred my brain forever). Which has its own merit, I guess, but does make for an odd contrast to the camera’s loving, even somewhat objectiving depiction of Dev Patel and the way about every character tenderly touches his face. I’m left wondering what the point was of this choice. It tells something about Gawain’s failure to meet chivalry standards, maybe.
The scenes which show witchcraft was used to make the Green Knight appear were rather cliché and I don’t think they added anything, as the Christian morality and consequences of relying on witchcraft are already addressed in the theme of the enchanted green belt. Also, it’s frustrating to keep seeing scratched-in runes used as literal magic. As far as our limited knowledge goes, runes were a whole writing system, magical only in the sense that writing something down can have a power of its own. Please, movie makers, think of something original.
Also, torches are terrible for indoor lighting. They burn out quickly and are horribly sooty, so it’s lanterns or candles you want indoors. But the use of the pentacle shown as a common talisman for protection rather than a specific symbol for evil or magic was nice. I’m not equipped to comment much on the choice of costumes and they didn't try to be accurate to a specific historic period and place anyway, but would have loved to see more men in long robes like the beautiful ones they gave king Arthur. Somehow, medieval themed movies only seem to go for the pants and knee-length tunic style for men, while long dress-like garments were in fact very common. Gawain’s beautifully patterned yellow mantle was the brightest point of the entire movie.
#the green knight#Dev Patel#movie#film#review#medieval#history#medieval literature#chivalry#arthur legend#movie critique
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Images taken from The Devil’s Historians
It’s an uncomfortable truth, but we need to acknowledge that the medieval world - and Arthuriana in particular - can act as an escapist fantasy for nationalists and white supremacists.
As individuals and as a community, we need to learn how the right-wing uses (and misuses) ideas, themes, and imagery from the stories that we love and share. We need to learn so that we can be on the lookout, and so that - if you’re like me and you’re white/culturally Christian - we can reflect on how our own worldviews may cause us to overlook or perpetuate harmful ideas, even by accident.
(I want to acknowledge here that people of colour/faith have been educating and explaining this stuff for years - I’m not exactly breaking new ground. I just want to use my tiny corner of time-space to boost the signal.*)
Arthuriana should be a safe space for everyone, and having these discussions is a part of making that happen. And as other people have said, everyone deserves to see themselves represented in the media they love, including medieval lit**.
Islamophobia warning under the cut
The last few years of global politics have shown us just how insidious right-wing ideology can be. The images and language that are used in Arthuriana - especially when we talk about the medieval literature - can (very understandably) come across as a big red flag to certain groups of people, who may already be exposed to bigotry and hatred in the mainstream media. It can also act as a smokescreen for other groups and their agendas.
For example, the Arthurian Holy Grail stories often carry language, ideas, and art taken from the Crusades, which a white supremacist can use to talk about how much they long to go back in time and become a knight to “save Europe” from Muslims (hint: that’s twisting history past the breaking point 🙄 have y’all heard about the First Crusade?). I’ve seen fucked-up content like this within the last month, and I’m not exactly adventurous on Tumblr.
I bring this up this because, while I adore Arthuriana and I can’t imagine ever stopping, the content we’re working with isn’t static, neutral, ancient history. It’s real and it’s alive.
The horrifically islamophobic Christchurch shooter in New Zealand quoted Crusader slogans; Donald Trump’s son posted a photo of himself with a gun, inscribed with the same quote, days after a US drone strike in Iran.
So we shouldn’t stop engaging with Arthurian content - a) it’s awesome, and b) it’s not something that we want to leave to the fascists. By learning how to unpack what we read, watch, and create, we can also get better at spotting the same tactics when they’re used in the world outside of Arthuriana.
* [Disclaimer: I’m white and culturally Western Christian - while I try to do my research, I’m very capable of putting my foot in it, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if I’m getting something wrong ❤��� Also, I hope this doesn’t come across as trying to make people feel bad or guilty - no one is born knowing this stuff! God knows I still have so much to learn, but I think it’s important that we don’t leave all the work of educating each other to those who are most affected (although of course their voices should always be prioritised)]
** [It’s also important not to forget about uplifting diverse Arthurian characters and stories, if we truly want to make Arthuriana a safer, more enjoyable space for everyone. So we can’t forget to enjoy, create, and share content featuring (e.g.) Priamus or Morien, and not just leave it at discussing (e.g.) islamophobia in the Vulgate’s Quest for the Holy Grail. Again, other people have said this better than I can.]
#Arthuriana#racism#fascism#islamophobia cw#medieval history#Arthurian legend#arthurian literature#*#the devil's historians
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who woud you want to have as the 2 remaining love interests to bring MMCs routes up equal to FMCs?
...we're talking Ever After Academy, yes? Okay, let's consider this.
We’re a bit short on male side-characters who’d work for this, honestly, but the two frontrunners so far both come from Ezra’s route - Edward Berdot and Sir Galahad.
While Galahad is my least-favourite Arthurian knight, and might be a bit too close to both Lucas and Abel’s routes, given his characterisation as an honourable, duty-bound questing knight, I still like him a lot as he’s portrayed in this game and I do think there are ways to make him distinctive. Maybe emphasise his feelings of loss and disconnection at the fracturing of the Round Table, and trying to figure out how to do the duty he has devoted his life to in the face of the structures that supported it falling apart? Unlike Lucas, Galahad has already been disillusioned, so a journey of finding hope again and what to do when your plans for your life collapse around you, as opposed to Lucas’s arc of learning to choose his own path rather than accepting the future laid out for him, might be interesting. This would also put him in contrast with Abel, who has a very decided view of his duty and sees his role as woodsman as a form of redemption, as opposed to Galahad still believing in the cause he fought for, but being let down by the structures that upheld it. It might also be an interesting foil for M!MC’s own shattered plans for his life after law school, and the way that his failed relationship has wrecked his confidence, watching them figure out where they go from here together. Also - knights! Love a knight.
I’ve already talked about Edward as a potential LI, and I do think he’s very well set-up for it. However, I do think that, assuming a Galahad route, he also provides a useful foil to the other romances on offer. Edward is an amoral mercenary with deep emotional baggage about being trapped in his human form and feelings of being profoundly unlovable. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but as an exception to the rule of M!MC’s love interests being generally strait-laced, honourable types, it might make for an interesting route, and it’s definitely a good place to start for character development. Edward is profoundly amoral, and what he misses is the bestial form that let him let loose his emotional frustrations. M!MC is...generally doing his best to help everyone around him and support people, and very rarely gets to express any sort of frustration, which would also set them up very well as foils, and as two people with no real outlet for the very stressful situations they are in, but choose to deal with this in completely different ways. I think a good writer could make it work.
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