“After having watched the entire series, I feel like S1 Arthur comes across as more of a noble and good guy than in later seasons? I can't put my finger on why, exactly. Perhaps the way he stands up to Uther with no hesitation. I don’t know.”
I like this. Could you please elaborate? Maybe it's because S1 Arthur had hope and a future ahead?
someone read my ramblings!!
Good question. As I said, I'm not sure I can put my finger on why. S1 Arthur is at times dick-ish and a bit of a spoiled brat, but it's also established pretty quickly that he's a good guy (because we've got to care for him, after all). He's the Jerk with a Heart of Gold. But I feel like later in the series Arthur was, sometimes, just a jerk. The way he treated Merlin was unnecessarily mean and dismissive at times.
I said it's maybe the way he stands up to Uther -- which I know he does at other points in the series. And he does still follow Uther's orders in S1 -- he's the one who has Gwen arrested for sorcery! -- so he's not entirely innocent, but it feels like he was also quicker to point out the faults in Uther's logic and to stand up for his own beliefs?
It might have something to do with the way Arthur changes after he becomes king (first in all but name, when Uther's loses his mind, and then officially). He seems to become more conservative, almost -- which I think is actually realistic. It's easy to stand up to authority when you don't have the responsibility of an entire kingdom on your shoulder. But once Arthur became king, he had to measure up with his father's legacy and to come to terms with own desire for Uther's approval (even after his death). And of course, the way Arthur lost his father also contributed to the souring of his attitude towards magic (the second major blow after his encounter with Morgause, actually).
But yeah, things happen to Arthur in later seasons that make him a bit more conservative and a bit more Uther-like. And perhaps that's why he feels like a "nicer" character in S1.
I don't know though, I'm not sure it's just because of this. It's just an impression I had but I'm afraid I can't explain it any better than this.
30 notes
·
View notes
Fishhook
Adjacent to this piece
CW: accidental hand injury, nausea and dizziness response (vasovagal syncope I suppose), wound tending, max + lo talk about pet whump universe and their relationship to each other in it
@distinctlywhumpthing -you requested some lines on this :))
The fishhook caught Carlo’s hand like a surgical tool and buried itself to its glinting base in no more than a second.
Adrenaline almost made him try to pull it out, but he hesitated. Instinct told him it was in too deep, the hook too curved. It took a moment of staring down at it to even believe what he’d just done. How had he allowed such a careless thing to happen? He wished to return to the previous minute and pay attention. That was Max’s oft repeated advice when they were out traipsing the woods: just pay attention. He glanced at his new keeper, fishing in the sunshine twenty yards away and oblivious to Carlo’s mistake.
It was the same hand he’d broken his finger on. It seemed like another lifetime he’d gone onto his master’s back porch cradling it, unsure what to do. Erik had helped him, hadn’t even faulted him for provoking Keith. He remembered sleeping for a long time in a pleasant medicated daze, his finger in a splint and throbbing mildly. Being unable to bring this new mistake to Erik for help wrung him breathless with homesickness. The adrenaline flagged from the first time since he’d realized what he’d done, and in its absence he finally felt the pain.
“Max?” he croaked, and coughed to clear his throat. He wished again he could just pull it out himself, but didn’t dare.
“Max!” he called, louder this time. Starlings sang in the autumn trees above their heads, and where their branches broke was a strip of blue sky like a mirror of the river. Upstream, Max turned to him.
“I…” it was too stupid to say out loud. His voice shook. After he trailed off, Max put it together by the way he was holding his injured hand, or the thin line of blood making its way slowly to his wrist. Either way, he set down his fishing rod. Even with his eyes dropped back to his hand, Carlo heard the urgency in Max’s approach from his boots on the rocky riverbed.
“It’s okay,” were the first words out of his mouth— spoken so surely, like a man who had seen a dozen fish hooks in hands just this week. He touched the sides of Carlo’s arms. “It’s okay. Can I see?”
He lifted his hand between them. Max hissed in sympathy. “Really got that in there, huh?”
As he took hold of his wrist to better inspect the accident, Carlo became aware of a rising dizziness that had gripped him some moments ago, only now becoming severe enough to warrant his attention. He took a deep inhale through his nose to try to gain control of it. His face felt impossibly hot. Max’s eyes lifted from his hand to meet his.
“Sit down.” He guided down him to the rocks. “Don’t look at it. Look at the opposite shore over there. Take another deep breath. You’re gonna be fine. How’s the pain?”
“Not bad. It’s just really… weird that there’s a hook in my hand.”
Max knelt down to his level and took his hand again to inspect. “I know. It’s enough to make anyone a little squeamish. Don’t look— that’ll make it worse. Keep looking over at the other side of the river. I’ve got you.”
“I’m so sorry. I wasn’t paying enough attention. It’s so stupid. I didn’t—”
“Shh,” Max hushed, busy cutting the still-attached fishing line with his knife without tugging on the hook. If he hadn’t already been lightheaded, Carlo thought the gentle shushing he’d just been given would’ve done it alone.
He was more than happy to keep quiet. Opening his mouth made him nauseated, if his new keeper wasn’t the type to ask how he could be so fucking stupid, he wasn’t going to address it either.
“It might be in the meat of your thumb here,” Max said. “That’s just the hook doing its job, unfortunately. Hey, don’t look at it. Look at me. You’re gonna be good, we just need to get this removed safely. Maybe take you to a doctor.”
Carlo recalled the opening lines of a poem from some dusty anthology in his old home with perfect clarity, clearer than the red trees or blue sky. What a thrill— My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone.
“Can you just do it? With your knife?”
Max blinked at him. The river was on their left, and for a moment Carlo thought maybe he hadn’t heard him over the sound of the water running over the rocks in the shallows.
“No,” he said after a strange beat of silence, looking back down at his task. He’d heard perfectly fine. “Hands are delicate, I don’t need to be digging around near tendons. You want to be able to use it after, right?”
That last was meant to be lighthearted, but Carlo caught the moment of disbelief on Max’s face when he’d asked him to do it himself. The request translated to an unmistakable display of trust.
Now that he knew Max had heard his plea for what it was, he was embarrassed for showing his cards like that. Like an animal bearing its neck.
“I don’t want to go to an emergency room,” he said quietly. A fact, not a request. He had plenty of practice in quietly exerting his own wishes without sounding demanding, spoiled, or insolent. Keith picked up on any of those attitudes immediately, and he always paid for it. Erik had more patience for it, on account of the affection he had for him. He might be annoyed by perceived insolence one day and mildly amused by it the next. Of course, Keith would’ve punished him for this kind of mistake by squeezing his hand with the hook in it, or letting the men yank him around with a line attached to it as a joke on their break.
“Mr Holstrom always had a doctor visit me at the house.”
Max was still studying the angle of the hook. He made as if to touch a part of it and hesitated. “Shit,” he muttered. “I have bait and god-knows-what all over my hands.”
“He always called a doctor to the house…” he continued, concerned that Max didn’t know about the lax protocols of pet treatment in US hospitals. “I can’t go to the regular ER.”
“Anyone can go to the ER,” Max replied, distracted. “I don’t have pet insurance, but they’ll just bill me.”
“No, it’s…” he felt tears of frustration prick the backs of his eyes.
Max lifted his head. “It’s what?” he asked, attentive now.
“It’s not a good place for me.”
He could tell Max was skeptical. Did he really not know the way of the world? Erik said most people don’t realize, or don’t want to. Many of us don’t like to dwell on problems we can’t fix in an hour, he said. It’s not our nature.
“Well, I think I can get this out for you anyway. But it has to stay clean. Don’t touch it. First aid kit is in the truck. Can you walk with me, or do you want me to go get it?”
He insisted he could walk. When they finally got back to the truck, Max insisted on lifting him up to the open tailgate and set his first aid kit beside him. On the side of the dirt access road, he put on a pair of latex gloves before gently probing the eye of the hook. Carlo winced and looked over his left shoulder at the line of birch and pine trees. Visualizing the hook moving under his skin made him feel lightheaded all over again.
“I know it’s going to hurt regardless, but tell me if it’s too much.”
“Okay,” he breathed, and took a deep breath through his nose to keep the dizziness at bay.
“It’s not as deep as I initially thought, it’s just a weird angle.”
He whimpered as Max slowly dragged the straight end of the metal out, along his skin, until the hooked part caught and Carlo flinched.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he said in that hushing tone Carlo was beginning to listen for like a key in the door.
One gloved finger held the base of the hook in place as he searched something on his cellphone with the other hand.
“Hang tight. There’s a trick for this, I just can’t remember exactly how it goes.”
Soon he was looping a piece of fishing line around the curve of the hook, right where it went into his skin, like threading a needle.
“I’m going to coax it out at an angle so I don’t cause any more damage. I’ll push on this side and pull the line at the same time, and it will come out the same angle it went in.”
The pain doubled when Max pulled the fishing line, and he could feel a warm trickle of blood oozing from the site. He bit the inside of his cheek, and in a moment felt the sudden, blissful absence of the hook.
Max applied pressure to the bleeding. “Move your thumb for me? Good. Just checking.”
Whatever he put on the wound when he lifted the gauze stung fiercely, but that sort of pain was far preferable to the nauseating feeling of metal moving under his skin.
“Need to keep a close eye on it for infection.”
Carlo watched him place a bandage and tape it down. He liked the sound of Max’s voice, and watching his hands as he worked. Usually this was on something other than him, and Max had rarely stood so close to him for any reason.
“I’m sorry,” Carlo said, just to cover his bases.
“Don’t be. It happens.”
“Thank you. For taking it out.”
Max began packing up the first aid box. “‘Course.”
“We can go back out now…” he offered, still cringing at the thought of derailing the weekend activities.
Max smiled knowingly as he latched the kit shut. “We can also go home.” He took his time choosing his next words, and Carlo’s anxiety doubled with every second that passed in silence. He deserved a reprimand, but it would still sting from someone he’d been trying so hard to please these last few weeks.
“You’re a little too good at being a pet, you know that? You’ve got experience at this. I don’t. You should take advantage of that. I’m like the substitute teacher you can convince there wasn’t any homework.”
Carlo looked away, down at the offending fish hook on the tailgate of the truck. It was wet with his blood.
“I’m teasing, Carlo. I’m sorry. I just mean… you don’t have to try so hard. I know this is all really strange for you, probably even more than it is for me, but you’re doing fine. I’m not gonna make you go sit by the river all day with a hurt hand when home is a half hour away. That’s not.. normal. I know it’s hard, but just… just roll with it, okay? I’ll never try to test you, or trick you. I mean what I say. If I need you to do something or behave a certain way… I’ll just tell you.”
He nodded, both chastised and relieved. “I’m trying,” he said, hoping it sounded more like willingness to collaborate than defensiveness.
“I know.” Max put a brief hand on his knee and Carlo resisted the urge to lean forward and put his forehead on his chest. “I’m just going for clarity between you and me. That’s all. Come on. Careful.” He offered his arm to help him jump down from the tailgate. “Let’s go home.”
28 notes
·
View notes
My theory is that Watson is a victim of his own success; he’s so good at Being A Narrator that people have trouble perceiving him as a Character.
Much of his personality and presence in his stories is tied to his narration—but since the stories aren’t presented as about him, it’s easy to process that presence/personality as part of the background, just neutral elements of the medium in which the stories take place. But this means that if you don’t pay attention to his narrative voice, Watson’s voice and personality are far less obvious than, say, Holmes’s. He’s Just Some Guy, right? He’s just the everyman there to tell the audience what Holmes is doing.
I think this kind of assumption leads to a lot of the weird Watson choices in adaptations. Because if you’re working in a medium where he’s not the narrator—TV and movies, obviously, but also written works that made a different perspective choice—then a lot of his narrative presence is stripped out by default. And if you only processed that narrative presence as part of the backdrop, you may not even notice it’s gone…you just look at Watson without his voice and go “Hm. Yeah, he’s kind of a blank slate.” And then you make stuff up to fill it in: “Stuff” ranging from Nigel Bruce’s “comic relief” to Martin Freeman’s “addicted to violence” to fairly-widespread fic tropes like “handles Holmes’s social missteps for him.” (Yes that last one is also Martin Freeman, but it predates BBC Sherlock.) Fans and adaptors “fill in the blanks” and find things for him to do.
The only problem is he’s NOT a blank.
And this is one of the things that makes Watson SO interesting, because he has PLENTY of personality but people still overlook it BECAUSE it meshes so well with his role I guess? People keep making up traits for him and he HAS traits already. They’re just not looking in the right places! His character permeates the narrative so well that people overlook its presence!
We know things about Watson. Listen.
We know that he unironically and uncritically thinks Holmes is the greatest, while seeing him clearly enough to give us a picture of his flaws and faults.
We know that he’s imaginative and keenly sensitive to atmosphere, and also good at reading people’s emotions even if he can’t deduce why they’re feeling something. (He is, in fact, very good at observation and not good at deduction.)
We know he’s brave, and always up for something interesting.
We know he’s intelligent and well-read.
We know he’s idealistic, chivalrous, impetuous, and kind of a hothead; we also know, however, that his temper is generally short-lived and he’s quickly ashamed of it if he thinks he was in the wrong.
We know his ego works the same way (and is often tied to his temper); it’s easily wounded, when he remembers it exists, but he doesn’t care enough about his pride to feel embarrassments for very long.
We know that he, generally speaking, feels everything deeply, but is also comfortable with that, and is apparently incapable of resentment that lasts for more than five minutes. (To a degree we may, personally, find insane, but it is still consistent within the text.)
We know all these things! They’re in the stories! But because the stories are so consistently in his voice, we are consistently encouraged by his voice to overlook his actual character. So well that even when people want Watson to have personality, they apparently don’t realize it’s already there.
150 notes
·
View notes