#The Matter of Britain

[tiodolma]

Gwenhwyvar and Arthur's Hunting Dogs in Geraint the Son of Erbin

@gawrkin

there's this subplot (and also my favorite tidbit) in Geraint, the Son of Erbin where Gwenyfher asked Arthur that she wanted to watch him and the lads hunt the famous stag.

Gwenyfher did not wake up when Arthur was getting ready for the hunt

And Arthur wondered that Gwenhwyvar did not awake, and did not move in her bed; and the attendants wished to awaken her. "Disturb her not, said Arthur, "for she had rather sleep than go see to the hunting."

She woke up a bit later.

And after Arthur had gone forth from the palace, Gwenhwyvar awoke, and called to her maidens, and apparelled herself. "Maidens," said she, "I had leave last night to go and see the hunt. Go one of you to the stable, and order hither a horse such as a woman may ride." And one of them went, and she found but two horses in the stable, and Gwenhwyvar, and one of her maidens mounted them

She and her maiden went to the woods themselves in order to catch up the hunt. They met Geraint on the way, and she asked him to accompany her since he was not with King Arthur's group. (geraint actually did not know where the hunt was)

anyway Gwenhwyvar wanted to see the hunt from a prime vantage point coz she liked watching the dogs go. XD

"I was asleep, and knew not when he went; but thou, O young man, art the most agreeable companion I could have in the whole kingdom; and it may be, that I shall be more amused with the hunting than they; for we shall hear the horns when they sound, and we shall hear the dogs when they are let loose, and begin to cry." So they went to the edge of the Forest, and there they stood. "From this place," said she, "we shall hear when the dogs are let loose."

My awesome Queen Gwenhwyvar was like "watching the dogs be good doggos is fun."

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Please make that post

In reference to this post here and the larger point from this post.

So, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has two big fundamental problems in its premise, added onto by a whole load of sub-problems like 'Alan Moore has not met a woman character he can't insert a sexual assault storyline into yet', 'We're in that age where comics have to be juvenile to prove they're adult' and 'Alan Moore is the Grumpy Old Man Eternal'. These two problems are endemic of all fiction on the scale that League is operating on, and why I say it may be unintentionally the greatest critique of Event Comics in the world. These problems are

You cannot have experienced every work of fiction you are playing with (particularly in League's case: Alan Moore has not read every book and watched every movie in the entire world). Subsequently:

You will inevitably end up drawing mostly on what you are familiar with and let other things fall by the wayside.

This is endemic to Event Comics - even with a Shared Universe as rigorously pruned as DC or Marvel, your average comic book writer cannot have read every single comic featuring every single character in that universe, which inevitably means you are going to be able to tell which ones they have read - if you're lucky the ones they haven't read get bit parts, if you're unlucky you get Wonder Woman in Infinite Crisis. It's not even explicitly a problem, it's just a fact of event comics that we've all had to accept.

When it comes to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, this flaw gets amplified - which makes sense, since this flaw is proportional to the size of the source texts you are drawing from* and Alan Moore is drawing from all of fiction. As a precursor because we need to get this enforced more, the comics are extremely Anglocentric. Like, look at The New Traveller's Almanac from the back of Volume 2, and note how often a story actually from Africa, Asia or even Europe and America is mentioned, versus a story from Britain about those places. Hell, The Journey to the West, one of the most influential pieces of literature in the world, gets all of three references in this series.

It's a huge problem, and honestly makes me want more than ever a series like League by people from Africa and Asia - I'd be horribly confused reading it, but that'd be great, it'd expand my horizons all the more.

But that's not the gripe I want to bring up today. No, even after all that complaining about the Anglocentrism of League, I want to be a little more Anglocentric myself today. If you're not down for what is inevitably almost 1000 words of petty fanboy whining, please leave now, hope you enjoyed the actual salient criticism! Sorry 'bout that, but it's time: let's discuss Will Stanton at Hogwarts.

Bit of background for people who need it: in Volume 3 of League, the protagonists are trying to stop the Antichrist from ending the world. They eventually follow his tracks to a school in Scotland, where he was groomed to be the Antichrist and where he has just killed a host of people in a castle that is said to have once been able to move. The entire thing is a giant subtweet to Harry Potter for being unoriginal and, y'know, I'm not really going to defend that? I don't engage in criticism of Harry Potter's unoriginality myself, because it doesn't bother me too much and I genuinely feel that it takes away from the many more serious issues with the series, but it's still a fair cop and lord knows I love to point out the ripoffs whenever some TERFy piece of shit tries to insist that Rowling is some visionary writer that single-handedly invented the concept of female authors. If all Century was saying was that Harry Potter kind of sucks, I'd honestly probably add it on to things like Pratchett and Le Guin pointing out the flaws way before most people caught on. But there's one issue I take, and it's this:

The point Moore seems to be making, at least from what I can tell and what the common critical consensus is, is that Century is a three-issue rant about the commodification of magic and occult mystery, something the self-professed worshiper of an ancient snake god seems to take umbrage with. Harry Potter doesn't just suck because it's unoriginal, it and all British Wizard Children Fantasy of the incredibly nebulous time of basically everything post-1950s suck because they took away the magic and mystery from... well, magic.

And, y'know, I may not believe in actual magic myself, but I'm not going to say Moore is wrong to believe that. The message itself is fine. The problem is... well, 1. Alan Moore has not read every story in the world and consequently 2. He inevitably ends up drawing from what he's familiar with, and the things he hasn't read get used as props. And, my friends, he has not read The Dark Is Rising, which still remains one of my favorite books ever written. This is not a combination that results in a happy David.

Like, if Alan Moore is angry about the lack of mystery and intrigue in 'modern' fantasy? Here's a scene from the chapter of The Dark Is Rising where Will learns everything he needs to know as an ageless Old One:

He might read no more than one line — I have journeyed as an eagle — and he was soaring suddenly aloft as if winged, learning through feeling, feeling the way of resting on the wind and tilting round the rising columns of air, of sweeping and soaring, of looking down at patchwork-green hills capped with dark trees, and a winding, glinting river between. And he knew as he flew that the eagle was one of the only five birds who could see the Dark, and instantly he knew the other four, and in turn he was each of them. . . .

He read: . . . you come to the place where is the oldest creature that is in this world, and he that has fared furthest afield, the Eagle of Gwernabwy . . . and Will was up on a bare crag of rock above the world, resting without fear on a grey-black glittering shelf of granite, and his right side leaned against a soft, gold-feathered leg and a folded wing, and his hand rested beside a cruel steel-hard hooked claw, while in his ear a harsh voice whispered the words that would control wind and storm, sky and air, cloud and rain, and snow and hail — and everything in the sky save the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars.

How's that for mystery, Al? How's that for not trivializing magic? Maybe, if you hadn't very clearly picked Will's name out of a list of children's fantasy from the 1950s onwards, which is what I have to assume you did because the amount of references at Not-Hogwarts is so broad that you can't purely be criticizing Harry Potter and it's derivatives, Dark Is Rising came out in 1973 for god's sake, you wouldn't end up saying that a series that states outright in the fifth book that a key factor of magic is accepting that there are some things you will never know is less mystical and magical than Mary Fucking Poppins, no offense to Mary.

Now, is this petty fanboy complaining about a character from a series I like not being treated 100% how I want him? ...Yeah, pretty much, because if Moore hadn't included Will I wouldn't be as annoyed at his treatment of him. But that's another problem with League: Alan Moore uses the world of League to make broad sweeping statements: "Fiction from the 1800s was better", "Children's Fantasy trivializes magic", "Superheroes all suck unless they're obscure enough that I know them and no-one else", statements that cannot possibly hold up to scrutiny because he's not read everything in the world, and hell he's not even read most of the things he complains about because he's convinced himself he knows it all already. It's the problem with everything he uses, he warps it to fit his own worldview and leaves the people who love those stories, who read League entirely because it features those characters, in the lurch. He's reinvented the Event Comic, and it may be a parody but I'm not sure it is, and that's depressing.

*This, incidentally, is why I think Kim Newman's attempts at this concept work better than League - for most of his stories that I've read, Newman is pulling from genres specific enough to be conceivable but expansive enough to fill a supporting cast - e.g. vampire and associated Gothic literature of the 1800s for Anno Dracula or femme fatales throughout the 1800s for Angels of Music.

[wonderwafles]

One thing I’d like to see from a modern Arthuriana adaptation is utopia, treated in the same way that utopian science fiction does; what makes a utopia? How should people be governed well? How can society be improved through the use of (advanced technology/magic), and how do we need to be organized politically before those material benefits can be put to good use?

Obviously it would be very different from utopian science fiction, because it takes place in a medieval fantasy setting rather than an advanced future, but that’s the fun part :D

[vikingsong]

WIP Wednesday (8/31/22)

Arthur climbed the worn stone steps up to the top of the cliff face overlooking the gray, windswept sea. He took a deep breath—tasting the salt tang in the air—as he approached the statue.

Gallos. From the Cornish word for power.

It was fitting, Arthur decided; the imposing figure was even more massive than it had appeared in pictures. Bands of tattered bronze draped from the shoulders to outline a cloak. The edges curved and rippled in a frozen mimicry of the way the clifftop gusts buffeted his peacoat. The intentional gaps in the design rendered the figure half-present: a mythic shadow of the past or perhaps a superhuman frame waiting to be filled in the present. As Arthur stood in its fragmented shadow and looked up at the face half-hidden beneath the crown and cloak, he was grateful he hadn’t come here sooner. He would have felt the hundreds of kilograms of bronze weighing on his all-too-human shoulders. He looked away from the face he didn’t recognize and gazed out towards the sea through the gaps in the legend’s silhouette.

As Gwen stepped up beside him and quietly intertwined their fingers, the weight he’d carried since the day of his first birth slipped from his shoulders like shedding a cloak. His was not a legacy of gallos, of rigid silhouettes of metal bolted to cold, unfeeling cliffs. His was a legacy of tenacious ivy that thrived on weathered stones, of flesh and blood standing shoulder to shoulder, of dreams of what could be and the audacity to try.

Merlin approached from the other side and paused beside Arthur. Gazing up at the statue, he tipped his head to the side and raised a scrutinizing eyebrow. “Hmm.”

Arthur cast him a questioning glance.

Merlin bumped his shoulder against Arthur’s. “Well, for starters, they got the chin all wrong,” he declared.

“Oh, definitely,” Gwen agreed with a straight face even as her eyes danced with mirth. “Frankly, I’m offended by the cloak. We didn’t have nearly that many moths in Camelot.”

Arthur nodded gravely, fighting a smile. “You’re quite right. I’ll file a complaint immediately”—he glanced at Merlin—“or maybe I’ll just send the sculptor to the stocks.”

Gwen and Merlin’s serious façades cracked. As they snickered helplessly beside him, Arthur couldn’t help but join their laughter. It felt like freedom.

As he caught his breath, he squeezed Gwen’s hand and added, “Better yet, I think it’s time for a new policy: no more royal statues.”

(Image source article: https://www.cornwalls.co.uk/tintagel/king-arthur-sculpture.htm )

[lionofchaeronea]

"I am Sir Launcelot du Lake, King Ban's son of Benwick, and knight of the Round Table." Illustration by N.C. Wyeth from p. 38 of The Boys' King Arthur, published by Scribner in 1922.

[illustratus]

Yniol shows Prince Geraint his Ruined Castle by Gustave Doré

[antifainternational]

September 10, London - Justice 4 Chris Kaba!

[awinterrosesstuff]

Celtic mythology/Arthurian legend : King Arthur - Arthur is the legendary king of Britain, he reigns in Camelot and counts on many knights of the Round Table such as Lancelot, Yvain, Perceval as his vassals. His wife is the Queen Guinevere, daughter of Leodagan. He's the wielder of the magical sword Excalibur.

[weepingwonderlandharmony]

𝖄𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖌 𝕸𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖓 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝕹𝖎𝖒𝖚𝖊 (𝐌𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐧, 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟖)

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Have to say, of all the God-tier (hah) gags to come out of the Scion community, 'What if the reason it's so hard to get to Dun Scaith is because Scáthach actually really hates teaching, but is under a geas to teach anyone who asks her, so she keeps trying to kill them off before they reach her?' still remains one of the best.

[autumnfangirler]

ill be the first to admit that i dont interact with the gaa fandom as much as i should, so id be very glad to be wrong about this, but from my (admittedly very limited) observations in the fandom susatos talked about mostly in the context of a) other male characters(naruhodo, kazuma, mikotoba, holmes) or b) shipping. which is fine, it makes sense! shes not very attention grabbing in the game, and while she does have her goofy moments, shes not nearly as silly as the rest of the cast. shes more of a straightman than anything else. but shes such a good character and i really want to see more people talk about her so fuck it, were making the overdue susato rant ourselves gdi

major spoilers for great ace attorney under the cut and in the tags!

i think a lot of people see susato as a #girlboss, which is true and undisputed, but ive never seen people dig into why. personally what sticks out to me is how determined she is. its overshadowed by kazuma, but she Clearly learned a few things. she was willing to travel halfway across the world to work as a judicial assistant, and in kazumas death she helped naruhodo become a lawyer in his stead. she broke the law to help naruhodo win ginas case, a decision that tore her up so much she nearly resolved to quit. and of course she won a fucking courtcase at the age of 16 while succesfully pretending to be a man. when she has a goal in mind, shes seeing it through. shes consistently pulled naruhodo out of (rightful) uncertainty and hesitation with this mindset. she followed kazuma, and then naruhodo, to the ends of the earth because she truly believed it was the right thing to do. shes competent in her work, and shes firm without being unkind.

thats another thing about susato. shes one of the most emotionally mature characters in the games (games filled with adults– iris is probably one of the few characters who rival her in that respect). shes emotional about the things shes passionate about, but shes never overwhelmed by it. the only scene i can think of where emotions really did overtake her was at the end of the first game, where she nearly threw her judicial book into the sea. which is,,, still relatively reasonable? she broke the law and had to leave britain to go back to japan. she couldnt practice as a judicial assistant anymore, and nobody back home had a need for her skills as a judicial assistant. why would she need it anymore? in every other instance, shes polite, calm, and most importantly, the heart of the whole cast.

because while shes a great character on her own, her main role in the story is always in servitude to others– whether that be as holmes number one fan, iris' big sister, or naruhodos ever-reliable judicial assistant. we never get the sense as to why until the 4th chapter of the last game, where her backstory is finally revealed. with it, a lot of who she is is recontextualized. she never had a mother and her father left her before she could have any real memories of him. shes headstrong and driven because there was no direction for her. shes compassionate and polite because her only role model for her formative years was her grandmother. shes emotionally mature because she learned what loss was at a young age and how to live with it alone. and all of that translates to a young girl with a fire to help others in whatever way she can.

shes just,,,, shes such a good character man. i love her.

[the-light-of-stars]

Apparently the British. government is changing the laws around refugee politics and the justice system to be able to just exile refugees to Rwanda.

Which is messed up for many reasons already, but what gets me about it is that german media is calling it "hollowing out the constitutional democracy/rule of law" or "pure populism" and talks about how this is a betrayal of principles (which is all true it very much is)

...when a few months ago they were all fine with the German government introducing the exact same plan and referred to it as "progress" , a "viable solution to the refugee question" , a (positively connotated) "change of the times"

Apparently racism is only bad when other people do it according to german government and media.

[lionofchaeronea]

Piety: The Knights of the Round Table about to Depart in Quest of the Holy Grail, William Dyce, 1849

[illustratus]

Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat by Sophie Gengembre Anderson

[nappingpaperclip]

I worked with some amazing folk to do polling shifts yesterday for Super Tuesday and people said some really fucked up shit to some of my people! stuff like “they don’t need a ceasefire they need to be beaten to death” meanwhile the person we were campaigning for is Jewish…

its honestly fucked how many people mindlessly support Israel’s genocide, not because they care at all about the Jewish diaspora, but because they just hate Arabs and/or Muslims and want to see them wiped out. It’s fucking bizarre to see so many conservatives who parroted antisemitic conspiracy suddenly flip the script and start caring a whole lot about fighting ‘antisemitism’ at universities/in the workplace when they really mean anti-war protests. They are not just incredibly racist and Islamophobic, but antisemitic too because they would rather Israel wipe out Palestinians completely so that the US can have a stronghold ally in the Middle East and because they see it as a place to ship Jewish people off to

[siwer]

just watched King Arthur (2004) and while the movie has a meh plot, it has an incredible aesthetic and makes me want to write on the Matter or Britain so bad

here's the reason that got me to watch it : siwe