#‘arthur can’t NOT be a bigot! he’s been hurt by magic!’ okay well then uther can’t not be a bigot. we woobifying him too?

[sneakyboymerlin]

Fandom will be like “Arthur wouldn’t have been so bigoted if it wasn’t for [that EVIL Merlin trying to fulfill the prophecies through Arthur to create a long-lasting future for his kin. oh and Uther] the actions of everyone else around him” bro it doesn’t sound like much accountability is being held for one’s own actions :/ bro

[fishoutofcamelot]

Merthur

[Send me a ship and I’ll give you my brutally honest opinions about it]

Hooooo booooyy you really wanna open that Pandora’s Box? You really wanna go swinging at that can of worms, my good sir? Well alright...

Okay! So since I respect the fact that people probably don’t want to hear me riff on their otp for a million years, my Brutally Honest Opinions will be located under a cut-off.

Tldr: every ship has flaws and it’s important to see value in the human-ness of that - but while Merthur is an objectively good ship, most of its flaws happen to be ones that personally make me very uncomfortable. If you don’t feel the same way, that’s perfectly fine because we’re all entitled to our own opinions and preferences.

I’ll preface this by saying that every relationship, fictional or otherwise, has some level of problematic-ness to it. People are messy and imperfect, and our relationships reflect that. Lack of communication, codependency, distrust - for the sake of simplicity we’ll call these things ‘Problem Factors’. And these Problem Factors play a big role in determining who/how we ship. That is, each person can tolerate certain Problem Factors while finding others uncomfortable, which leads them to shipping or not shipping certain things. You might tolerate secret-keeping and ship Merwen, while you might not tolerate heteronormativity and not ship Arwen.

I know that the fandom largely likes Merthur, and it’s easy to see why. It’s an objectively good ship - excellent buildup, chemistry, and overall dynamic. They have amazing scenes together and their banter is simply electric. So I don’t blame the fandom for adoring this ship so dearly, and under any other circumstances I probably would too. HOWEVER. It just so happens that Merthur hits up on a LOT of my personal squicky Problem Factors. And if it doesn’t hit up on yours, then great. More power to ya.

I could harp on about codependecy, Arthur’s occasional harshness and violence towards Merlin, fanon interpretations, oversaturation, power imbalance, or even the amatonormativity of the soulmate thing. Those would all be valid things to critique, and have probably already been critiqued to death at this point. So I’m not gonna talk about that. Instead, I’m going to address another elephant in the room that makes me far more uncomfortable than probably anything else:

The Minority Metaphor

I’ll be the first to admit that BBCM’s discrimination metaphor is...shoddy, at best. The victim-blaming, victim-antagonizing, and fascism-apologizing are some major issues that make this show unpleasant to rewatch at times despite it being one of my all-time faves. However, it’s also oddly relatable.

I make it no secret on this blog that I’m an American Muslim. And as a Muslim who lives in a very non-Muslim region of the world (seriously, I’m so deprived of Muslim interaction that I get visibly excited whenever I see one in public), I’m no stranger to discrimination.

When I watch magic-users be harassed for the actions of a rare violent few, despite the majority of them being peaceful people who just want to be left alone - when I watch magic-users constantly feel they have to apologize for being who they are - when I watch magic-users be antagonized in the eyes of the public - you can bet your fricking biscuit that I relate.

I couldn’t imagine falling in love with or being put into a relationship with an islamaphobe/bigot. Even if they’ve changed their views and reformed, it would still be a point of contention for me. Because I’ve been screamed at and harassed, and to think of my love interest having once been on the other side of the fence...I don’t think I could stomach a romantic relationship with them.

Now I love Arthur as a character, but we can’t ignore the fact that he’s part of the oppressive ruling class that has discriminated against and subjugated Merlin’s people for decades - and when he became king, Arthur himself contributed to that same oppression. And though he felt remorse for it, though he was just a young and impressionable child at the time, Arthur also still has that druid camp raid on his conscience (not to mention that he promised the druid ghost he’d make changes, we never see any of that happen on-screen).

Yes, his prejudices were the result of ignorance and his father’s propaganda/conditioning, but he’s not a child anymore. He can’t blame his mistakes on anyone but himself. He had moments of questioning magic, questioning the morality of the Purge, but ultimately fell back to his father’s rhetoric every time. You can blame Merlin and Morgana and his environment for manipulating him in that direction, but he’s still a grown man capable of forming his own opinions, not a pile of clay to be molded by the whims of others.

I sometimes try to ship Merthur, because it has a lot of appeal - but then I remember scenes where Arthur told Merlin that magic was evil straight to his face, and I can’t bring myself to be okay with that. If someone called me a terrorist to my face - and people have - I’d probably cut them out of my life then and there. “Oh but they’re a good person deep down.” Tell that to the people they’ve hurt and offended, Patricia. We can only excuse the bigotry of others because we have not yet found ourselves in the position of their victims.

Of course, canon has shown that Merlin is a far ‘better’ person than I. And by ‘better’ I mean that a lifetime of propaganda and subjugation, as well as the impression of Kilgharrah’s destiny-heavy rhetoric upon him, has brainwashed Merlin into being complacent in his own oppression. He’s okay with supporting and defending his oppressors, choosing the tyrannical ruling class over his own kind, because that’s how his mind has been twisted (not that that excuses his actions either, of course). And though Morgana kinda went off the rails, her heart was arguably in the right place with wanting to overthrow Camelot’s current government. If you’d put me in her shoes, I’d probably want to kill Uther too.

Nevertheless, I can accept that Merlin has more room for forgiveness in his heart, and could somehow find it in himself to love someone who was once (and maybe still is) in a position of oppressive authority over him. Like, I get it. If someone changed their ways, I’d probably be able to be their friend and get along with them, but to be in a relationship with them? Even if Merlin could conceivably fall in love with Arthur, I can’t in good conscience ship it.

Okay, what about shipping them but only in aus? Well, rock meet hard place. I can’t bring myself to ship them in canon because of everything I just talked about, along with the other uncomfortable Problem Factors I briefly touched on earlier. And I can’t bring myself to ship them in aus because I feel that if you have to change things about the ship to make it work, then maybe it wasn’t a good ship to begin with. Plus I just don’t generally like fanon interpretations of Merthur for reasons I do NOT have the time to get into unless you want me to write a full-length dissertation on fandom trends.

So...yeah. Those are my Brutally Honest Opinions about Merthur. I hope you’re prepare to contend with the tides of discourse this will likely spark.

Thanks for the ask! <3