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panharmonium · 4 years

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okay, honest question about 5.11 -

are we seriously supposed to watch this episode and still come down on arthur’s side?

i’m not saying that’s what the show wants us to do. on the contrary, i think they actually do a pretty good job this episode of NOT hammering us in the face with “you’re supposed to root for camelot,” which i appreciate, because there have definitely been other times when they’ve approached the moral dilemma of magical oppression and have kind of punked out at the end - most noticeably in ‘the sorcerer’s shadow,’ when they finally force us to look merlin’s cognitive dissonance in the eye by putting him in the position of saving uther from a magical youth fighting for freedom, and then they back off from that uncomfortable question by having kilgharrah say “you, like i, must hold hope that arthur will bring about a new age, an age where the likes of you and i are respected once again.”

they don’t quite do that in this episode, which i really appreciate, because i just cannot see how they would have been able to pull it off without sounding ridiculously disingenuous.

arthur is WRONG.

(i’ll get to merlin later, he’s...he’s got a whole different issue going on, but let’s just deal with arthur first.)

that whole conversation where he interrogates kara in front of the court - just look at it:

were you part of a cohort of saxons who attacked an arms shipment bound for camelot?

yes.

and were you acting under the orders of morgana pendragon?

what i did, i did for myself. for my people, and for our right to be free.

i have no quarrel with the druids.

i have spent my life on the run because of my beliefs, and seen those i have loved killed.

once, maybe. but i’m not my father.

you don’t kill those with magic? it is not i, arthur pendragon, who needs to answer for my crimes. it is you. you and your father have brutally and mercilessly heaped misery on my kind. it is you who has turned a peaceful people to war, and it is you and camelot that will pay the price.

are we supposed to look at this girl and condemn her? nothing she says is wrong.

whenever we encounter these magical rebel types, the show always tries to play it like ‘well uhhhhhh they’re a little extreme......i mean......they kill people 0.0,’ as if camelot’s regime hasn’t been killing magical people all along. like - kara stabs that soldier when she’s escaping from the cells, and the show kind of plays mordred’s reaction as...‘omg she killed someone oh no what a baddie,’ but dude! the soldiers are about to kill her!!!!! she’s running for her life! killing a guard is nothing merlin and arthur haven’t done a hundred times, when escaping from captivity on their own adventures, but it’s never been framed as some sort of evil thing, for them. why is kara the only one branded as a sinner? a knight’s life isn’t more valuable than any of the children uther drowned. a knight’s murder isn’t more deserving of reprisal.

the girl’s murdered innocent men in cold blood. we are at war. i must be resolute.

we hear arthur say that and we kind of just want to shake him like - CAMELOT has murdered innocent people in cold blood! if arthur can use “we are at war” to justify killing someone who has magic, then the same justification should apply to magic-users attempting to kill him. camelot declared war on magic-users decades ago. these people are fighting for their lives.

arthur is showing his father’s reasoning here. his own rules don’t apply to him. his rationale, his justifications, they only go one way. there is so much to pick apart in his response to this situation - he tries to make it sound like ‘the problem isn’t magic, it’s that you murdered some guys,’ (he tells kara “you stand before the court not because of an act of sorcery or sedition, but because of an act of murder”) but literally in the previous episode he sends out a squadron to hunt down finna (and merlin, unknowingly) just because gaius said finna practiced the old religion.

finna had killed no one. she’d done absolutely nothing wrong. but arthur went after her and said she ‘must be found and brought to trial.”

brought to trial? for WHAT???? she hadn’t DONE anything. nothing except be a follower of the old religion.

and his hypocrisy! ‘it is [people like morgana] that have terrorized camelot and forced us to outlaw such practices’ - really, arthur? literally two episodes ago, you went the cauldron of arianrhod and used magic to save your wife from an enchantment. at the beginning of season 5, you used magic to summon your father’s ghost. at the beginning of season 4, you used magic to try to save uther’s life.

arthur has always been willing to use magic for his own purposes, when it suits him. all while continuing to restrict others from doing the same.

this show is big on pushing the narrative that “arthur’s different from uther” - and he is - but how different, really? seriously. in the end, how different are they?

i feel like because we are fond of him - because we’ve gotten to know him personally, in settings where we can temporarily forget the impact of his policies - we’re sometimes asked to sort of look past the real harm that is constantly being done in his name. like - ‘it’s okay for us to let it slide when arthur persecutes people with magic, because he has valid reasons to think magic is a threat.’ but what, then it’s not okay for someone like kara to want him taken out?

she has valid reasons to think ARTHUR is a threat. he IS a threat!!! to people like her! that’s the reality. these people have every justified reason to want arthur off the throne. they have every rightful reason to riot. they have EVERY RATIONAL REASON TO REBEL AND REMOVE HIM FROM HIS SEAT OF POWER.

if this were star wars, they’d be the rebellion. we’d be rooting for them! it is not wrong for an oppressed population to rise up against their oppressor!!!!!!!!!! we all know this!!!!!!!! just because we like arthur on a personal level doesn’t make it less true. we CANNOT fault these people for refusing to just sit back and wait for arthur to someday wake up and give them their rights. that never happens. that is never how people become free. we can’t fault these people for not choosing to be like merlin, for not choosing to hover in a morally questionable limbo for years and years and years and become complicit in their own oppression.

(and again, i’ll...i’ll deal with merlin later. he keeps fucking up and i hate to see it but i also have to remember that he is a victim of the same oppressive policies as kara and mordred so it’s like...his case is more complicated.)

but arthur. i honestly feel like the most telling moment is when he gives kara that opportunity to “repent,” which is supposed to be like ‘oh wow look how benevolent,’ only the thing is he’s completely missed the point. the point is not that she needs to apologize for her crimes. the point is that she hasn’t done anything wrong.

no.

it isn’t.

the way they cut to merlin at that particular line is devastating. it’s this...reminder of how far we have wandered, from who he used to be. he used to think this, too. he used to fight for himself, too; he used to come home to gaius angry and upset saying “i want to be seen; i want to be free.” and now he’s just...locked into this impossible place where he can either ignore the veritable chorus of dragons, seers, and literal gods who keep telling him he has an absolute responsibility to make sure arthur triumphs, or listen to their counsel and thus betray himself, and his own people along with him. and all this while still living under threat of execution himself - what is he supposed to do?

this episode calls back so strongly to ‘the sorcerer’s shadow,’ which is the first place where the show confronts this problem so directly, when merlin outs himself to gilli and gilli challenges him about his choices:

i know how it feels. i understand.

then you understand why i have to fight. if uther is killed, so what? how many of our kind have died at his hands? how many more will? it's time those with magic fought back.

gilli -

you can't tell me what to do!

you need to learn to use your magic for good. that is its true purpose; it's not meant for your own vanity.

i'm not going to apologise for who i am! you can be a servant and - and pretend you're less than them -

no, that is not what I do -

no?! you're defending the king! protecting a man that would have you dead!

i'm protecting you!

you've been pretending for so long now that you've actually forgotten who you are.

merlin gets so upset by this. he’s visibly shaken, and on the verge of tears, and he weakly protests, and then the next shot is of him lying awake in his bed, agonizedly stewing over it, because deep down he knows that gilli is right.

this conflict has never been resolved. i would add, as we move toward the spot where i am now in season 5, that it’s not so much that merlin has “forgotten” who he is, exactly, but that he’s been forced to abandon who he is, for the sake of his mission. and most of the time he tries not to think about that, because it’s the only way he can survive, but he feels deeply conflicted about it still.

watching 5.11, it is so easy for me to get frustrated at merlin, because i feel like he should do more, in this episode, and do the Right Thing, but honestly at this point the only way for him to do the right thing is to reveal himself. that’s it. there is no other option for him. we’ve exhausted all other avenues; there is no other step he can take. he is trapped, in his current situation, and his deception is not just hurting him, now, it’s...it’s an abdication of his responsibility to everyone like him.

i don’t like saying that. because in real life it’s never okay to just say like...’oh, you need to out yourself because you have a responsibility to the community.’ that’s never okay. a person’s primary responsibility is to their own safety, when they’re living as a marginalized, threatened person.

so in real life, i would never say that. but this is fiction, first of all, and it’s more complicated than that, for merlin, because he is already in a position of responsibility over these people, whether he wants to be or not. the decisions he makes are things that impact their lives.

and secondly - how threatened is he, really? he is supposedly the most powerful sorcerer who’s ever lived. do we really think arthur could successfully get merlin up on a platform and hang him? do we really think arthur could hold merlin in a cell? when merlin was newer to intentional magic and unstudied, absolutely, yes. but now?

the risk merlin faces now isn’t necessarily to his life. it’s to his lifestyle. he might have to leave camelot. he might lose all his friends. and these are valid fears and i UNDERSTAND, because merlin has never felt safe and he has so rarely felt loved and i UNDERSTAND how paralytically frightening it is for him to consider doing anything that would jeopardize even the tiniest bit of belonging that he has been able to scrape together for himself, but i do not see that he has another option - not one that doesn’t poison his soul, at least. he knows that what is happening to kara in this episode is wrong. he tells arthur “free them both.” he knows that’s what should have happened. but then arthur executes her, and merlin does nothing to stop it, and i hate to put one more burden on merlin’s young shoulders but the fact of the matter is that this cycle of violence will never end until merlin ends it himself. merlin cannot continue to stay trapped here between the dictates of destiny and his own sense of right and wrong. it is killing him, and now it’s killing other people, too.

it is not a crime to fight for the right to be who you are.

merlin desperately needs to remember that. he needs to remember it for his own sake, not just for the people around him. he is one of them. their struggle is his struggle. it is not the magical community’s fault that merlin has more information than they do - how are they supposed to know that arthur is supposed to be some kind of great saviour? without knowing that, why would they ever choose to bow to him? he has done nothing to earn their trust. they have no reason to approach this situation the way merlin has, with infinite patience and a willingness to suffer constant injustices.

merlin has to understand that. he has to know that. he can’t condemn them for fighting for their freedom. they haven’t done anything wrong. and i think he does know that, deep inside. but he is trapped, where he is now, and the only way out is for him to tell the truth.

the truth will set you free. it might upend your entire life, but it will set you free. and it is past time that merlin was free. from camelot’s oppression, and from the oppressive dictates of destiny, too - if destiny had shut up for two seconds about ‘don’t trust mordred,’ we wouldn’t necessarily be in this situation now.

i guess overall this episode leaves me feeling pretty grim. and sad, i guess, because honestly like - it’s hard to for me to even root for arthur, as we enter the finale. i can’t condemn mordred for running away to join the rebellion. i don’t think morgana’s ideals are exactly pure, obviously; we’ve already seen several seasons ago how her goals have slid from ‘liberation’ to ‘power’ - but mordred is only motivated by the fight against injustice. he’s in it for freedom. and i can’t fault him for that, because he isn’t wrong. i can’t fault him for giving up merlin’s identity, either, because merlin’s been treating him like crap from the very beginning (and again, yes, it’s more complicated than that - merlin is in an impossible position; he has reasons to trust all of the people who make prophecies at him - but still. that doesn’t make mordred less wronged.)

so it’s kind of like - i’m going into the finale feeling like i shouldn’t really be rooting for our heroes. which is kind of...depressing.

i mean. yeah.

he kind of does.

#the once and future slowburn #meta #merlin S5 #long post #this is such a...i don't know #it's just...a bummer #like i appreciate that the show is kind of allowing us to sit with the complexity #and for once not telling us that 'arthur's right no matter what'#they haven't quite gone the 'guess we were right not to trust mordred route!' yet #they had arthur say 'i shouldn't have trusted him' but i don't believe that's their endorsement of that position #and i'm glad #because that's just...demonstrably false; after this episode #but i also don't trust them not to take that tack later because they have a history of that sort of thing #so who knows?#right now i'm just in a place where i feel glum because i mean...how can i even root for the heroes?#like #mordred strides off to morgana's fortress and i was like 'good! you go! you march over there!'#he's been wronged! how can i justifiably ask him to just roll over and take it?#it's not fair to ask that of him #it's not fair to ask that of any of them #and that **includes** merlin #merlin should never have had to do all the things he's done for this regime #i know why he's done them; and he won't complain; but he's been wronged as well #he's made mistakes but he's also been victimized so it's just...it's a mess #i just can't envision a scenario where this turns out okay for anyone #even arthur and merlin 'winning' doesn't seem like a good ending to me #because like...why does camelot deserve to win right now?#i don't know #it's hard to explain #it's just...a disaster

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teamdoubleoh · 4 years

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Q’s nephew

(Vaguely) based on this post by @needacuppa and @midrashic ‘s dialogue prompt. (technically) featuring @caffeinatedflummadiddlebutmerlin ‘s non-binary Merlin bc I like to see myself represented.

wordcount: 2312

Beware: Q is Holmes and has a fourth sibling, like in all my other fics bc I love consistency and Merlin.

TL:TR James thinks Q is married, Q thinks sleep is overrated and Mordred is very not-amused that James thinks Q is straight.

Q woke up in at 03:08 am because there was someone in his flat.

Someone other than himself, Mordred, Turing and Hawking. Q silently prayed that whoever it was could be killed quietly, so the cats wouldn’t wake.

He kept his eyes closed and listened. He could tell the someone wasn't moving, even though the door to the living room was shut. He turned his head to the bedside table, where his phone and glasses were sitting. He reached out, carefully avoiding to make any noise, put on his glasses, unlocked the phone and and logged into his security feed.

Apparently the intruder had had the decency to enter the flat trough the front door, which was a feat in itself.

Q selected the camera the monitored the door and went through the timeline. The feed was monotonous until two minutes ago, when a figure had walked up to the camera and opened the door with a key. Before entering the figure looked around, exposing their face to Q’s camera.

It was Bond. Who else would manage to steal acquire a key to his flat and show up in the middle of the night.

Q sighed and slipped out from under his comforter. He then reached under the bedside table where one of his personal guns was located and slipped it into the waistband of his pyjamas. He knew the double ohs well enough to know that taking a gun would be the best course of action.

Now armed, he opened the bedroom door. "Bond. What are you doing in my living room."

Bond was sitting on the couch, illuminated by the light of a half-moon that shone through the window. "Q! how nice to see you, what a coincidence."

"You've gotten yourself injured and the best thing you can think of is to break into my flat. Hospitals exist, you know that right?"

"Oh Q, I missed you. How did you know I was injured?"

"Posture." Q sighed.

"Ok, thats fair. You don't happen to have a bandaid or twenty lying around, do you?"

Q sighed deeply and went to retrieve the MI6 issued medi-kit from under the bathroom sink. "Over here Bond. I don't want any stains on my couch."

Bond stood and even in the relative darkness of the room Q could tell that it was a painful endeavour. Not a grazing shot then. Q searched the medi-kit for needle and thread. Bond sat down on the tiled floor, already pulling up his shirt over his left hip, where the bullet had dug into the flesh but had luckily been stopped by the hip bone.

Apparently the shot had been long distance, which would make the surgery relatively easy. Bond groaned when Q poured disinfectant over the wound.

"Honestly, Q. There is an intruder in your flat and you’re not even armed. What do they even teach you in basic training anymore."

Instead of answering Q pressed down a cotton swab on the bullethole and pulled out his P99 from his waistband.

"...Touché"

"Now if you'd be so kind and refrain from talking. You’re not making this any easier for either of us and I swear to god, if your noise wakes the cats or Mordred I'll-"

"Too late for that." Came a sleepy voice from the living room.

Bond was already half on his feet, trying to shield Q with his body, before Q could stop him.

"Hi. I'm Mordred." The boy, he could’t be older than 17, waved sluggish.

Bond looked hesitant but slowly sat back down again.

Q pinched the bridge of his nose with his unbloodied hand.

Bond smirked. "Didn't know you were the 'married with kids' kind of person."

"You do realise I can kill you, 007."

Bond looked stunned at the mention of his designation. he looked from Q to the kid and back to the quartermaster. "Uh, Q..."

"What."Q snapped.

If the Quartermaster wanted to throw around his top secret designation so be it. Q knew what he was doing.

"...Nevermind."

"I don't think he wants me here. "the kid murmured turning away, obviously still half asleep. "I'll go back to bed."

Q sighed. "Now that’s is some good thinking. Bond, hold still." he picked the pair of tweezers. "This might hurt a tad."

Somehow James ended up in Q’s bed. With a very disgruntled Quartermaster in it. 007, being himself, couldn't resist commenting. "If you wanted to get me into bed, you should have just asked, Q. I mean I don't usually go for married people when off mission, but I'll make an exception for you."

"Shut up or I'll put you on the couch."

"Pray tell, if I’m annoying you so bad, why am I not already there? Should I inform the other agents that you're secretly concerned about our well being or do just like me?"

"That couch was my mothers, and she is ready to maim anyone who leaves stains on it."

"...Stains, huh? Got it. Thats the no-fun zone."

"You should know that I am also ready to maim anyone who keeps me from sleeping."

"Good night, Q"

Bond woke at 6:38 am precisely.

Someone was working in the kitchen, and since the bed was empty, save himself, it was probably Q. Or his son, apparently. Come to think of it, if Q was married and had a son, where was his wife?

The smell of toast and freshly brewed earl grey wavered into the bedroom and James decided that those were questions for another time.

The kitchen was, to Bonds surprise, well stocked and maintained.

He wouldn't have pegged Q for the cooking type but he hadn't pegged Q for the married-with-kids type either so that was that.

Q was just pouring a mug of tea when James limped in. The boy - Mordred, what a peculiar name - was sitting on a stool, nursing his own tea.

In the light of day his dark brown hair seemed to be a similar shade as Q's, while his pale blue eyes were a little unnerving, but that could be a side effect of him being a teenager. Everyone knew teenagers were dangerous creatures as they didn't need sleep and had fatal levels of cynicism, sarcasm and caffeine running through their veins.

Q handed James a mug of steaming tea, which tore him out of his staring.

"You should sit down." Q advised, pointing towards a kitchen table with three mismatched chairs. "And you should go to medical. I'm head of Q branch not a doctor." He hesitated for a second. "Well I am a doctor, just not of medicine. My point is: get that checked out, or I'll kill you."

"Aw don’t worry, I will, or it might kill me first."

"As if you wouldn't just come back from the dead to just to annoy me, hm 007?" Q smiled sweetly, something dangerous lacing his tone.

"I have before, I could do it again. Given a good enough reason." Bond eyed Q provocatively up and down.

Q just sighed and turned to take the slices of toast out of the toaster, placing them on a plate. "I assume you will join me on my way to work, seeing as your flat is on the way and you need to stop there for new clothes?"

Bond looked down at himself. He was wearing his boxer briefs and a tee shirt that definitely wasn't his. Since there was as science pun on it, he was pretty sure it was Q's.

“Yeah.... that might be a good idea.” James mused and went to find his slacks.

***

“So, what kind of a name is ‘Mordred’ anyway?” Bond asked the boy some months later.

He had broken in again and again and at some point Q had given in and made him his own key, which only made Bond come by more often.

Now he was sitting on the no-stains-allowed couch, enjoying a cup of perfectly brewed Rooibos tea he had gifted Q a few weeks prior. Mordred, currently located in the kitchen, was busy making dinner for himself and Q, who was still at Q-branch handling 009′s Washington mission.

Mordred, who rarely ever talked, much less with Bond, kept dicing onions and garlic. After half a minute of silence, just when James thought he might never get an answer, the boy opened his mouth. “It’s from the Arthurian legends. According to the popular legends Mordred was Arthur’s son.”

“You say ‘popular’ like you know better...”

“Well-” Mordred smiled ever so slightly. “-I know Arthur is my uncle.”

James grinned. “Is your mother a historian by any chance?”

Mordred shook his head and turned his attention back to the stove. “My mother is a PA. But her name is Morgause and her half sister is called Morgana - you know, like, from the Legends? -, so she thought it would be funny.”

James smiled and emptied his cup. Now that was something he could tease Q about.

Q chose that exact moment to stumble in through the door. He looked like he was dead on his feet. His tie was askew and his hair ruffled. He closed the door behind him, hung his parka on the mantle piece and placed his messenger bag on a nearby drawer, but his movements were that of someone who was kept awake only be caffeine and spite.

By the time he reached the living room his eyes where almost completely shut. He dropped down on the couch where James was still sitting, but Bond just steadied him as Q slumped against him.

“James?”

“Hello dear Quartermaster. You do know that sleep is essential for your personal health, right?”

Q only groaned and closed his eyes.

***

Four hours later Q woke to the smell of pasta and the clinking of cutlery being placed on a table. He sat up and opened his eyes, but everything was blurry. He groaned. Someone entered the living room.

“James?”

“No this is Patrick.” James answered deadpan. “Honestly Q, I thought you were supposed to be smart!”

“Firstly, You took my glasses. You should be glad I can distinguish you from Mordred right now. Secondly, why are you quoting Sponge bob at me?” Q asked in a tone that made it very clear that he was ready to murder someone or just fall asleep again at any moment.

“...Oh, yeah. I forgot about the glasses. You look adorable with out them, I have to say. Here you go--” James care fully placed Q’s glasses on his nose.

Q blinked twice and waited for his eyes to focus again. Right in front of him was James, smiling widely. Q shrunk back and tried to stand up in an effort to hide the slight blush on his cheeks.

“So. Why were you quoting sponge bob again?”

James took a step forward and held Q on his upper arms so he wouldn’t keel over. “I don’t know what Sponge bob is but that’s what Mordred sat to me when I ran into him in the city the other day.”

Q rubbed his forehead. “Ah yes, he does that. And here I was, thinking you knew what memes were.”

“Whats a meme?”

***

Mordred cooking, James decided, was divine.

“You should become a Chef.” James mused, after finishing his third plate of Aglio olio and fourth glass of wine.

“How about I finish school first.” Mordred aswered snarkily.

Q snorted. “Aren’t you planning on becoming a pharmacist or bodyguard?”

James shook his head in confusion. “How are those two even related.”

Mordred looked at him weirdly.” They're not.”

“Then why would you? ...nevermind.”

Q rolled his eyes. “Mordred is interning with my uncle Gaius whose a Apothecary. if He’s good enough when Gaius retires he could have a change at taking, over like I did.”

“last I checked you were running Q-branch...”

“-and before me uncle Boothroyd was Q.”

James turned to Q. “Boothroyd was your uncle? That explains... so much.”

Mordred sighed. “could you leave the flirting till I'm back in my room.”

Q sat up straight. “He wasn’t flirting.”

“I was.”

“Since when?”

“Since before I broke into your flat. But sadly you’re faithful and straight and all that crap.”

Mordred let his head fall into his hands. “Here we go...” he muttered under his breath.

“And who would I be faithful to, exactly?”

“Your wife?”

“My--?” Q sputtered.

“Mordred’s mother?”

“Wait, you thought I was

straight

?”

Mordred raised his hand. “You do know I’m not actually Q’s son, right?”

James turned to Mordred. “Wait, what?”

Q looked almost gleeful as he explained. “Mordred is my sibling’s... .” Q turned to Mordred. “What do they call you?”

“Mostly ‘a baby’”

“No, no there was something else...”

“Lovechild? Morgause-spawn? Heir to the throne?”

“They really call you that?”

“I don’t have a second name, so they had to improvise when they were angry.”

Q shrugged. “Well, point stands. Mordred isn’t my son. He lives with me because he’s kind of my siblings adopted son? But he can’t live with them and their husband and apparently I can’t take care of my self or something--” the last part was muttered. “--So he lives with me.”

Mordred was staring at James wide eyed. “Wait. You thought I was Q’s son? Honestly? Q? Your Gaydar is BLOODY SHITE. YURUSENAI!”

James flinched and faced Q, who was rolling his eyes at Mordred. “Translation please?”

Q smirked at him. “He says your ability to build context about inter person relations and read peoples attractions is rather bad and that he won’t forgive you for thinking he was blood related to me.” Q paused. “I would be rather offended by that last statement if it wasn’t for the blatant sarcasm.”

James smiled dreamily. “This is why I love you.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Mordred took a sip of his water. “He said he loved you.”

#007 fest 2020 #team00 #005.Vi #00q #pre relationship #idiots in love

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coinofstone · 4 years

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5x12 The Diamond of the Day pt 1

Final two episodes! Big finale! Why am I making myself cry in the middle of the afternoon! Both eps in this post.

I do love that they made Arthur a sore loser

Enter treacherous white woman #2. Srsly it was lazy writing when they did it for Mordred, it's worse now with Gwaine.

I do love the actual Round Table war room discussion but a) why isn't Merlin seated at the round table and b) why does Leon have so much goddamn faith in Camelot's walls? Like??? You literally said the same thing last year and yet Camelot *did* fall when Agravaine brought an army through the tunnels!

Poor Aithusa. Kid's had a rough life.

I do love Arthur responding to Merlin presenting him with all his supplies ready - which he prepared without his magic mind you - with suspicion 😂

But then he calls Merlin a coward and it's sad

Katie has such a great voice. That entire thing in the cave from her taunting to her laughter to the spell, it just just beautifully played.

Whole ass battle to prepare for and Arthur is just walking around moping cuz Merlin isn't there

So, Merlin's father-vision telling him he's magic itself and he just needs to believe in himself to get his magic going again, does this mean he *didn't* need to go to the cave to get it back? Cuz it seems like he needed to recharge in the cave itself, his injuries were healed when he woke up. That seems like magic cave stuff to me.

Also that "always have been and always will be" - I'm taking to mean 'always have been' in the sense that since he's 'magic itself' even before he was born, his magic existed in other, intangible forms, like we are all stardust etc. But now that he is, he will always be, aka he will not die.

Arthur waking up with his wife in his arms and Merlin's name on his lips, jumping out of bed to act on dream-info.

Balinor telling Merlin to trust in what will be.... like bitch that is literally not how this ends.

5x13 The Diamond of the day pt 2

You know that gif of the cat knocking everything off the table? That's literally Merlin shooting lightning at everyone from his perch on the ridge.

I have a lot of snarky things to say about Merlin coming out of the cave in full Dragoon gear and riding a horse instead of teleporting like the other witches but I'ma keep that to myself.

Mordred is a bitch and Aithusa has terrible aim. At least Aithusa's loyalty to Morgana makes sense.

Arthur said oh shit I'm magic - oh wait no it's that old man again

He also straight up "No! Bad dragon!"-ed Aithusa

Y'know, for all I've watched this episode and screamed about Arthur's death, I don't think I've ever focused on the exact moment he gets stabbed before.

Mordred catches him from behind and he meets it, no fault there. But as soon as he realizes his assailant is the knight who turned on him and joined Morgana, what does he do? HE LOWERS HIS FUCKING SWORD

He leaves himself wide fucking open and vulnerable and Mordred seizes the opportunity. I understand wanting the moment of recognition for Arthur, but on what planet is a trained warrior going to drop his sword mid-attack because he recognizes his attacker as a dude who only just recently decided to forsake him? It's soooooo dumb

There was a whole sequence a few episodes back where Mordred and Arthur are sparring, the point of it was to show that Mordred has become a skilled swordsman. So what exactly was the point in having Mordred run Arthur through as soon as Arthur idiotically lets his guard down? This should've been a meticulously choreographed sword fight, with Mordred getting the upper hand and sticking Arthur properly. Not this nonsense. Look at Arthur's FACE! Oh, Mordred... 👉👈 do you maybe wanna be friends again- STAB ... guess not

Uther's been rolling in his grave but he's taking an extra tumble watching Arthur forget all his skills and training in that moment.

I do appreciate Arthur getting Mordred back though. Like that moment of merciless anger followed by the hurt and regret playing on Arthur's face, warring with surety and responsibility. It was good.

I've rewatched the big confession scene about 16 times just now.

I don't quite understand why Merlin took Arthur to the woods to begin with. Instead of bringing him to the med tent in the battlefield or back to Camelot. What was the reason?

Merlin saying it feels strange (to use magic freely in front of Arthur) and him just going 'yeah' completely deadpan makes me laugh every time.

I really feel like Arthur's head should be elevated at a further incline if he's going to be fed.

Gaius refusing to outright expose Merlin as the sorcerer but nonetheless letting Gwen figure it out on her own warms my heart.

My God Arthur is sitting there dying, feeling betrayed about his best friend 'lying' to him, and still he can't stop himself from looking at Merlin's mouth.

Percival summoned MUSCLE POWER

Hey um random but why does Gwaine even know where Merlin and Arthur are headed? Why would Gaius tell him?

Arthur looks at Merlin so lovingly after he's killed Morgana 😭😭

And now he's literally grabbing at the man's hand 😭 "just hold me, please"

That's gotta be the gayest death scene in television history. If you can watch that without thinking Arthur puts his hand on the back of Merlin's head because some part of him wants to bring him down for a kiss, or that "just hold me, please" is in any way shape or form a 'bros' thing, and certainly not at all an intentional mirror/callback to Isolde dying in Tristan's arms, then I'm afraid you are what we professionals refer to as a dumb-as-nails fucknugget, more commonly phrased as 'willfully ignorant'.

"All that you have dreamt of building has come to pass" yeah except for the whole, y'know, magic still being illegal thing.

I've said this before, but, while I'm sure there was a determined intention to have Arthur die in his armor, probably in some kind of attempt to make sure the audience knows he's died a warrior's death, I *really* think it was kinda stupid that Merlin never removed it, despite Arthur being weak, despite the fact that there was something like five days between him getting stabbed and him actually dying, despite that for the duration of that time they were traveling or hiding out. Merlin managed to produce a cloak to put on Arthur, why did he need the full armor on that whole time? Like even if they left the chainmail on, those plates on his shoulder were just getting in the way, and it looked quite uncomfortable.

Also not for nothing but Lancelot got like, every flower in the forest surrounding lush verdant greens in his death boat, Arthur gets a bunch of sticks.

It suddenly occurs to me, watching this now, that the reason Leon/Percival is such a common side pairing in Merthur fics, is because these two motherfuckers are the only original Knights of the Round Table to survive the series. 🤦‍♀️ I dunno how I failed to notice that before now. My stupidity amazes me.

I'm *really* glad they decided to do this scene with Gwen wearing the Pendragon red dress instead of the black mourning dress. Yes she looks fabulous in it but it's more the symbolism than the 'reality' - with Gwen wearing her house's colors it represents a continuation rather than a finality. Camelot will go on, Gwen will undoubtedly end the war on magic and with Morgana dead (and frankly, I think by now she already brought about the death of all the angry incel type rulers in Albion) there stands to reason her reign will begin with a period of peace, possibly longer than Arthur's. We kind of have to assume that the 'time the poets speak of' is, inevitably, Gwen's reign - which only came about through Arthur's death. It's a little bit toooo subtle in my opinion, but at the same time, I understand the need for the focus on Merlin and Arthur - after all, this show was their journey - not leaving much time to focus on Gwen and Camelot in the aftermath of Arthur's death.

I will just say, the first time I watched this that fucking truck scared the ever living shit out of me. I also just immediately, viscerally hated that scene and declared it invalid - but I think it was because the truck made me jump out of my skin. It has since grown on me, particularly once I started reading 'Arthur Returns' fic.

Everything beyond this point is post-series spec and headcanon, so if that's not your jam you can exit safe in the knowledge that as usual, if there's anything worth commenting on in the S5 extras, I will create a separate post!

For those interested, my go-to post-series fic is We Begin Again by katherynefromphilly I fully headcanon this series as the continuation of the series.

I have a lot of thoughts about Gwen and Merlin post-Camlann.

For one, poor fucking Gwen. She's lost her father, her brother, and her husband, all by what, age 30? That's rough. And who knows what happened to her mom, that was pre-series and I don't think it was ever mentioned.

Merlin, dear god poor Merlin. First of all, I just wanna say straight off that my instinctive headcanon about Merlin was that he never returned to Camelot. I couldn't really say why exactly. I just don't think he could stand being there after Arthur's death. But practically speaking, Merlin's still got Aithusa to deal with, that dragon needs some godsdamned house training asap. He's still the last Dragonlord, it's reasonable to assume he'd immediately take that on considering Aithusa is partially responsible for Arthur's death (the sword Mordred killed Arthur with, only succeeded in killing Arthur because it had been forged in Aithusa's fire-breath) so he's either going to attempt to train the bad behaviors out of Aithusa, or...well...

The only thing is, I do not believe Merlin would abandon Gwen, or Gaius. So my hc is inherently flawed. I do think Merlin probably spend a couple months with his mum, and I do think he ultimately settled near lake Avalon waiting for Arthur's return.

But I do wonder, what must their relationship have been like? Gwen, surely, would've sought his guidance in establishing laws governing the use of magic. And surely, peace cannot last indefinitely, so Merlin absolutely would've defended Camelot and protected Gwen. There's just no way he could've completely turned his back on them, but I doubt he could bear living in Camelot. And Gwen is both strong and practical enough to get on without him there 24/7, even though I'm sure she'd miss him.

I also think she would've found love again. Whether with Leon, as many people hc, or someone else not in the series.

ANYWAY.

Thanks to everyone who came on this journey with me. I will post comments on the extras if I have anything worth saying - and I think I'll do a master post linking all these episode posts after I clean them up once I get time to sit at a computer and do so. Until then! 💙💚

(Gif source) (h/t @shut-up-merlin)

#bbc merlin #bbc merlin spoilers #merlin #merlin spoilers #merthur #onceandfuturerewatch #5x12 #5x13 #5x12 the diamond of the day pt 1 #5x13 the diamond of the day pt 2 #bbc merlin 5x12 #bbc merlin 5x13 #merlin 5x12 #merlin 5x13 #the diamond of the day #the diamond of the day pt1 #the diamond of the day pt2 #for the love of Camelot

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swanqueeneverafter · 4 years

Text

The Once & Future Queen Pt.35

Storybrooke. Swan-Mills House. (Henry and Ella stand over Maria's crib, who is sleeping contentedly.) Ella: "Kinda makes you think huh? (Henry looks to her:) About having one of our own?" Henry: (Smiles:) "Yes. Absolutely." (Henry drops his gaze back to his sister.) Ella: (Nudging him with her shoulder:) "I didn't mean right away." Henry: (Sighs:) "Oh thank god." (They both laugh and share a kiss as the doorbell rings. Giving Henry a playful swat on the butt when he goes to answer the door, Ella returns her attention to her slumbering sister-in-law.) Front Door. (Opening the door, Henry sees a man standing on the porch with his back turned.) Henry: "Hello, can I help you?" Mordred: "Actually, you can. (He turns around:) Is Maria home?" Henry: "You! Get out of here and stay the hell away from my sister!" Mordred: "I'm afraid I can't do that." Ella: (Joining Henry at the door:) "Well there's no way we're letting you anywhere near Maria." Mordred: (Spots the kitchen knife in her hand:) "I can see you’re serious. Perhaps I'll call back at another time." Henry: (Mordred turns to leave:) "You come anywhere near this house again and I'll-" (Mordred disappears in a cloud of smoke. Slamming the door closed, Henry winces, instantly regretting it.) Ella: "Henry, she's sleeping!" Henry: "I know. Wait. (He listens but hears nothing:) Oh no. (Running towards the crib:) Oh no, no, no." Ella: (Following:) "Henry, what-" Henry: (Reaching the crib to see that it's now empty:) "Maria. She's gone!"

Dun Broch. (Merida paces nervously while Anastasia watches from her reclined position on the window seat.) Anastasia: "Will you relax? I'm sure it won't be as bad as you think." Merida: "You don't understand, I've never brought anyone home before." Anastasia: "What, never?" Merida: (Sighs:) "Back when my father died and I became next in line, the clans didn't want to be governed by a woman. I refused proposals from Lord Macintosh, Dingwall and MacGuffin. They exiled my mother and it almost cost my brothers their lives as well." Anastasia: "But you won them over in the end, Merida. You became their Queen." Merida: "Yes, but now there's us and I just don't know how the clans will react." (The doors open and Elinor enters alongside Drizella.) Elinor: "If there's one thing I've learned during my time at your father's side, Merida, it's that searching for universal approval is a fool's errand. (Drizella joins her sister on the window seat, pushing her legs to the side to make room for herself. Elinor takes her daughter's hands and continues:) And as far as love is concerned, that should never come easy. It's messy. It means arguing and making up and laughing and crying and struggling. And sometimes, it doesn't seem worth it. But it is. And, in the end, when you're in love, no matter what happens, you have each other. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you.” Merida: “I won’t, I promise.” (Merida walks over and kneels in front of Anastasia. Noticing that Merida seems to be searching for the right words, Anastasia takes her hands in her own.) Anastasia: “I think I'm ready. If you are.” Merida: “For what?” Anastasia: “It’s finally time for me to leave Wonderland behind, and start a new adventure... with you?” Merida: (Smiles:) “I’d like that. Yeah, I’d bloody love it.” (Merida surges forward and kisses Anastasia passionately, bumping Drizella from the seat. Elinor helps her to her feet.) Drizella: (To Elinor:) “So... I guess the big question is, which room is mine?” (Elinor chuckles and they leave the room together, giving Merida and Anastasia their privacy.)

Storybrooke. Library. (Belle sits beside the unconscious body of her husband, when all eyes turn to see the cloud of smoke appear outside the library doors. Drawing his gun, Hook points it at the doorway until he sees Regina and Emma cross over the threshold.) Hook: (Holstering his weapon:) "Apologies, I thought you were Mordred coming back to finish the job." Henry: "Mom! (Henry and Ella cross the room to console each of them. Hugging Regina:) We're so sorry, it was Mordred he-" Regina: "We know. And it's not your fault, it's ours for leaving Maria unprotected." Ella: "I don't understand, how can you already know?" Morgana: (Walking into the library:) "I told them I had a feeling Mordred would want to go after the child again." Hook: (Draws his gun again:) "What the hell are you doing here?" Emma: "Relax, Hook, put it away. Morgana's with us now." Hook: "What are you talking about, Swan?" Emma: "She was cleansed at the Cauldron of Arianrhod." Hook: (Still pointing his gun at Morgana:) "Oh really? Well isn't that nice. (Raises his voice:) Does anyone here know what the bloody hell she's talking about or can we assume this one's got them under her spell?" (While Hook continues to glare at Morgana, Belle steps forward.) Belle: "I do. And if it's true then whatever darkness there was inside Morgana's heart has been purged." Emma: "It's true, Belle. Regina and I were there. Morgana came with us to try and talk sense to Mordred, but I see we're too late?" Belle: (Nods:) "He came here not long ago and ransacked the place. I sent Alice out for help and then Hook and Rumple turned up and all hell broke loose. Mordred used his magic to send Hook and Rumple flying. One of the bookshelves caught Rumple in the head and knocked him out. Hook managed to fire off a shot or two and Mordred fled."

(Regina kneels beside Rumplestiltskin, stroking his hair.) Regina: "Does anyone know what Mordred was after?" Belle: (Shakes her head:) "He left clutching a map of some kind, but I couldn't tell where-" Morgana: "I think I know where Mordred's headed." (Xena and Gabrielle enter the library and take in the carnage.) Xena: "Care to enlighten us?" Morgana: (Glares at Xena, then looks away:) "I believe he's headed to the Crystal Cave." Belle: (Gasps:) "It's the place where magic began." Morgana: (Nods:) "And it's where the Old Religion was founded." Gabrielle: "Why would Mordred be headed there?" Morgana: "He wants to take the child's power for himself. So that he can be invincible." Hook: "So that's it then. Mordred has Maria and the map and he could've magicked himself to the caves by now." Morgana: "The Crystal Cave is protected. You cannot gain entry through magical means. You have to walk there." Xena: "Yeah, well walking is something we're real good at, but we still don't have the map." Morgana: "We don't need one. I know where the caves are. I'm your map." Emma: "Then what the hell are we standing around for? Let's go." Zelena: (Entering:) "You're not going anywhere without me. (Emma turns to her:) I knew I should've killed that little bastard when I had the chance. Maybe it'll be third time lucky." Morgana: "No one is laying a hand on Mordred. I believe that he too can be saved." Emma: (At Zelena's questioning look:) "Turns out you were right. Morgana could be saved after all." Zelena: (Scoffs:) "All right. (To Morgana:) But if it comes down to saving Mordred or Maria, your little druid boy is done for." Morgana: (Stares at her for a long moment, then nods:) "Agreed."

Will & Tiana’s Apartment. (Tiana breaks an egg into a bowl and starts whisking when Will returns home.) Will: “There you are. Thought you'd be out celebrating. Morgana’s been ‘cleansed’ whatever that means and Anastasia was rescued and plans to stay in Dun Broch with Merida. So it appears Wonderland is solely yours once again, Your Majesty. People should be cooking beignets for you.” Tiana: “Cooking helps me clear my head. Or at least it used to.” Will: “All right, I can see something’s bothering you, so why don’t you put down the whisk and tell me what it is?” Tiana: (Puts down the bowl:) “I don't know who I am, Will. Part of me just wants to run the Rollin’ Bayou and have a life where all I have to worry about is the price of butter. But I realise that kind of simple life isn’t possible for me. When I first heard about what Anastasia was doing, I was pissed. That she could just pretend to still be the Queen of Wonderland for all that time and I didn’t even notice? It made me think that she was right, that maybe Wonderland is too big to manage by myself.” Will: “But you’re not by yourself, love.” Tiana: “I know, but look at Camelot and all the previously unknown forces coming out of the woodwork to take Guinevere’s throne. After taking some time to think about it, I’m not sure if someone were to make a play for Wonderland, that I’d give them much of a fight.” Will: “Tiana...” Tiana: “I mean it, Will. A real queen would be out there helping her people, and I'm hiding in here, stress baking.” Will: “Hey, hey, hey. Come on. (Wraps his arms around her:) Did you forget what happened during the Black Fairies curse? You were the leader of the rebellion that spanned across several realms. You provided a safe haven to all those who had lost their homes. The woman who saved those people, who saved me... That was a queen. It was my queen.” (Both chuckle.) Tiana: “You always did have a way with words, Will Scarlett.”

The Valley of The Fallen Kings. (The group of six walk along the valley between two large stone statues.) Gabrielle: "Is this place cursed?" Morgana: "No, but it is crawling with bandits. Which is why we must stay together. Without being able to use our powers, we won’t stand a chance.” Xena: (Scoffs:) “Speak for yourself.” Morgana: “I wouldn’t dare speak for you. My soul may have been cleansed back at the Cauldron, but the fact remains that you disfigured my sister.” Xena: “The same sister that locked you in a tower and twisted your mind against the world? Sounds like a little disfigurement was the least she had coming.” Gabrielle: “And I think you pretty much got even with Xena when you had her fight all of your soldiers for your entertainment. Let’s not lose focus as to why we’re here, all right?” (The group continues on, descending several stone steps.) Zelena: (Walking with Emma and Regina:) “No magic. What kind of ridiculous protection is that?” Emma: “I don’t like it very much either but if this is the only way of getting to this cave then we’re sure as hell going to do it.” Zelena: “If it’s even true, I mean we could be letting our guard down and walking into some trap concocted between Mordred and Morgana.” Regina: “Zelena, you were the one who told us that we should give Morgana another chance all along, remember?” Zelena: “Yes, but since when have you ever listened to me?” Regina: “Since we witnessed it with our own eyes. And like Emma said, what choice do we have?” (Up ahead, Xena hears a twig snap and bandits come running at them.) Xena: “Morgana, take cover!” (Unarmed, Morgana ducks down behind a nearby rock while Gabrielle draws her sais and turns to fight the men. Xena blocks the blow of one and pushes him to the ground. Gabrielle punches the other one and knocks him to the ground as the first one gets up. The first bandit goes after Morgana, who stumbles backwards onto the ground.) Morgana: “Help!” (Xena stabs him in the back, pulls the sword out.) Gabrielle: “Xena, behind you!” (Without looking, Xena flips her sword under her arm and stabs the other bandit about to attack her.)

(Spotting a whole group of bandits now running towards them, Gabrielle turns and shouts a warning to the others.) Gabrielle: “We’ve got company!” (Twirling her sword, Xena slashes two bandits when they run within reach. Gabrielle tosses her sai at another before launching herself at him. Emma draws her father’s sword while Regina raises her own.) Regina: “Take cover, Zelena. We can handle this.” (Also unarmed, Zelena has no choice but to obey. Sliding further into the ravine, Zelena finds herself standing with Morgana while the battle continues above them. Turning to watch the action, Morgana laments a missed opportunity.) Morgana: “If only I had my sword. It’s been years since I’ve had the chance to practice.” Zelena: (Rolling her eyes:) “What is it with you princesses and sword fighting? Do you get a group discount or did Daddy pay for a private tutor?” Morgana: “I’ve had the proper training since I was three years old.” Zelena: “Yeah, well hooray for you. (There is a yelp of pain and both women duck as a bandit rolls towards them. While he flies over and crashes to the forest floor, Morgana eyes his sword:) Don’t even think about it. I’m not going to be the only one out here who’s defenseless.” Morgana: (Smirks:) “I may not be armed, but that doesn’t make me defenseless.” (Morgana looks around and picks up a fist sized rock. Peering up at the ongoing fight, Morgana rears back and throws the rock into the air, hitting a bandit squarely between the shoulder blades, allowing Gabrielle to finish him off with ease.) Zelena: (Impressed:) “Not bad. But two can play that game.” Morgana: “Careful now, it’s not like throwing fireballs you know.” Zelena: “Like I said to your brother years ago, just watch and learn, Pendragon, all right?” (And so, with the fight raging on above them, Zelena and Morgana take turns throwing rocks at the bandits. The sounds of swords clashing echoing throughout the valley.)

#sq #swan queen #swanqueen

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rubyofhouserocks · 4 years

Text

sundays, starlight, and other small magics (4/?)

Fic Summary: At age two, Aelwyn learned how to say the incantation required to cast the Light cantrip. At two and a half, she learned how to say her little sister’s name. At seventeen, she’s still learning how to say she’s sorry.

part i is here || ao3 link here

part iv

It’s about a month into her stay at the manor, now, and Aelwyn makes a habit of disappearing into the background. She’s trying her damnedest to become just another spectre haunting the winding halls of the house, to be another ghost lingering imperceptibly near the dominion of the living. If she treads lightly enough, she hopes, then maybe she won’t kick up the light film of dust that’s starting to settle on her history.

Tracker doesn’t even look at her twice anymore, eyes settling on Aelwyn only long enough to register her presence and then sliding away, back to Kristen or Jawbone or someone else who actually deserves her attention. It helps Aelwyn breathe a little more easily, but she’s miles away from any kind of sense of belonging; she’s pretty sure her presence is an acceptable inconvenience at best. She knows that her feeling of displacement is only exacerbated by her inability (unwillingness) to connect with her housemates, her conversations with them largely limited to pleasant banalities. Rectifying that problem seems a herculean task, however, when Aelwyn knows how off-putting most people find her genuine personality. It’s safer, she thinks, if she sticks to discussing the weather over the dinner table.

Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t efforts to include her.

“We’re about to watch a movie,” Jawbone says, standing in her doorway. Aelwyn already knew this information—it’s Sunday, and movie night is a Sunday tradition in Mordred Manor. Everyone usually piles onto the couch at first, but slowly they devolve into a giggling, squirming pile of entangled limbs on the floor that somewhat resembles a gibbering mouther. Rarely does the movie actually get watched. Aelwyn never comes to movie night, but Jawbone always takes care to invite her, looking so sincere that Aelwyn feels a pang in her chest. “We’d really like it if you’d join us.”

She’s about to respond, her mouth open to tell him I’m okay, or I’m a little busy reading, but maybe next time, or please just stop trying, when Jawbone cuts her off.

“It would mean a lot to Adaine,” and, well, Aelwyn is barely treading water through her guilt as it is. She just swallows and nods mutely, silently following Jawbone down the winding hallways to the living room like a woman walking toward her own execution. It’s going to be miserable—she knows it is—but she owes it to Adaine to try to be the sister Adaine asked her to be.

When she actually reaches the living room, however, it’s so much worse than Aelwyn imagined. Her heart rockets up to her throat, panic tightening her chest in a way more characteristic of Adaine than herself, because she is looking at a minefield of volatile seating possibilities.

Adaine is already sandwiched between Riz and Ragh on the couch, because all of the Bad Kids and their assorted sidekicks are here. All of the Bad Kids who Aelwyn either tried to kill personally, or otherwise almost killed through her actions.

Fuck.

She’s weighing the merits of sitting next to Fabian (who doesn’t hate her, but. Well.) against the more appealing option of just bolting out of the room when Adaine nudges Fig, who is already sitting on the floor in front of her, with her foot. Fig scoots over, and there is suddenly space on the nest of blankets directly in front of Adaine’s spot on the couch.

“Sit here,” Adaine says, eyes hard and determined like she fully expects Aelwyn to say no. Like she hasn’t—not to be dramatic—just saved Aelwyn’s life by making the decision for her.

“Sure,” Aelwyn says, and folds her legs delicately under herself on the duvet. She rests her back against the couch and tries to take deep breaths without anyone else noticing, mouth barely open as she tries to gulp in air to calm herself down.

Jawbone, meanwhile, beams at the full house and curls up in the cozy armchair he’s sharing with Sandra Lynn (despite it being far too small for two people). He pulls up Fantasy Netflix and selects something, probably a movie that the group chose earlier that Aelwyn lost her opportunity to vote on. She resigns herself to two hours of being unable to pay attention to the movie. Really, she doubts she will be able to pay attention to anything other than her own body. She feels too big for the space she’s in, feels gangly and awkward when her elbow brushes against Fig’s, or when Adaine’s bouncing right leg brushes against her shoulder.

She’s wondering how long she has to wait until a bathroom break would be a believable excuse to escape for a minute, or how many times she can get up for a drink or a snack without arousing suspicion. Oh God, what if this is the kind of movie where she’s expected to make fun of it, and she’ll have nothing to say, and—

and Aelwyn feels hands in her hair. She jumps out of her skin at the contact, trying to pull away until she hears Adaine say, “calm down, dude, I’m just gonna braid it.”

The hands continue moving in her hair and Aelwyn forces herself to sit still, even though she’s sure Adaine can feel the way tension is knotting up her shoulders. It’s a nice gesture, after all. A sisterly gesture. Aelwyn owes it to Adaine to be patient and accept this for what it is, however ill at ease she may be.

Soon enough, though, Aelwyn feels herself relax at the sensation of blunt nails running over her scalp. It’s tender in a way she isn’t used to, and that alone makes her uncomfortable, but it’s also…nice, in a strange way. No one has ever done this for her before, and there’s something in the repetitive motion that feels like being cared for. Once Adaine reaches the ends of Aelwyn’s hair (which took a while, Aelwyn guesses, but it didn’t seem like it), she takes the hair tie that’s holding her own ponytail up and uses it to secure her work.

“Can you pause it?” Adaine asks to the group at large as she smooths her hands down the sides of Aelwyn’s head. “I have to use the bathroom.”

“Of course!” Jawbone says, grinning the way he always does, “I could use a snack break myself.”

When she comes back, Adaine says, “let’s switch places, and you can do my hair.”

Adaine moves to sit on the floor, and Aelwyn’s hands shake a little as she realizes that she’s only ever braided her own hair, that she isn’t quite sure how to replicate the motions on another person’s scalp. But she isn’t going to deny Adaine this moment, so she nestles herself on the couch between Riz and Ragh. She carefully angles her body so as to minimize any contact with them and tries her best to do to Adaine what she does to her own hair.

“Ouch!” Adaine yelps immediately, leaning forward out of Aelwyn’s reach. “Pull a little harder, why don’t you?”

“Sorry,” Aelwyn says, but she has to smother a snort at Adaine’s indignation. She must not do a great job, because Adaine slaps her leg lightly.

“Whatever, just make me beautiful without the sadism, please.” Aelwyn can’t see Adaine roll her eyes, but she knows it must be happening as Adaine relaxes back against the couch.

“Aye, aye, captain.”

It doesn’t go great, but she does, technically, braid Adaine’s hair. She’s much more careful with the force she uses, trying her best to be gentle with her sister’s head. It leads to a loose, messy final product, which isn’t particularly stylish and probably is not the look that Adaine was hoping for. In any case, though, she doesn’t complain about Aelwyn’s too-harsh hands a second time, and the room is dark enough that Aelwyn’s handiwork isn’t really visible to anyone but Aelwyn.

“All right, thank you,” Adaine says as Aelwyn takes a hair tie from her wrist to hold the braid. Then, she looks sternly up at Aelwyn. “Now gimme my spot back.”

“You think I’m going back to the hardwood? As if,” Aelwyn scoffs as she relaxes into the cushions. Something in her chest unwinds when she realizes that it came out the way it was supposed to, light and teasing and silly. She realizes, too, that at some point she stopped being so aware of her limbs in relation to the boys on either side of her, her knee now casually resting against Ragh’s thigh.

“Fine,” Adaine shrugs. “If that’s how you want to play it,” and she proceeds to lie down on top of Riz, Aelwyn, and Ragh. Riz squawks and almost fumbles the bowl of popcorn he’s holding; Ragh just laughs and starts petting Adaine’s head. Aelwyn goes silent with shock, initially, but at Ragh’s cue, she starts laughing too.

It’s not particularly comfortable, but Aelwyn finds herself enjoying the second half of the film. After the credits roll and the yawning teenagers stumble off to find places to sleep, she finds herself thinking, maybe I could do this again.

#fantasy high #dimension 20 #d20 #aelwyn abernant #fh #fhsy spoilers #fantasy high sophomore year #fantasy high sophomore year spoilers #adaine abernant

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writer-and-artist27 · 4 years

Text

Knight of Treachery and a Pianist

Note: The Fate/Apocrypha event in FGO has had me in metaphorical hell from how good the story is, and I’m frustrated that I haven’t been able to write more for my own stories. So, here’s another oneshot to tide over my frustrations. How I’d like to think a future interaction might go in Healing Over Time. Maybe. Still need to figure out the cogs in the machine that is Fate universe logic.

Oh, and by the way. Mordred is referred to as “they/them” by Tomo in narration since FGO and the original Apocrypha made it clear that referring to them as a woman is going to equal hell. But at the same time, male pronouns seem to be in the egg-shell area, so they/them. It works, I think.

I got the inspiration from this opening of Apocrypha when writing.

Another thing for you, @withanina. If you’re up for reading more Fate stuff. It’s unedited aside from my own usual routine, so just a fair warning, especially for others who click below the cut.

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The thoughtful look in those normally sharpened green eyes had me stop in my current errand of putting away dishes in the cupboard. Mo-san — well, Mordred — didn’t seem like the type to stop and observe, so to see them do that was a bit surprising. Even if all they were wearing was a red hoodie and blue shorts borrowed from Kei.

“What?” they snapped once they noticed my staring, a hand on their hip. Aaaaah, precursor to yelling. Aaaaah. “Is there something on my face or what?”

“I-It’s nothing,” I fibbed, when really, it wasn’t really nothing to see them quiet. I was still in an awkward place, so I pushed my braid back behind my ear before adding, “Did you need something, Mo-san?”

Their eyes narrowed at me. “What are you implying?”

Well, we’re getting somewhere, for one. I didn’t voice that thought, though.

Swallowing the anxiety in my throat, I instead turned on my feet to face them, instinctively grasping my Wayfinder necklace. It was both a good and bad thing that Art-san was out with Papa on a grocery shopping trip. This kind of talk wasn’t really something I could see myself having with Mordred when my first Saber was present. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you quiet, Mo-san, so I wanted to ask if there was anything I could do for you,” I elaborated, smiling weakly. “My ears are open.”

“It’s not really something I need.” Mordred puffed through their nose, turning their head away from me in some kind of defiance. If I didn’t know any better, they would have resembled a stubborn child faced with something new. Something they were unsure about. “I just—argh!” I jumped once they stomped their foot against the floor, aggressively ruffling their hair. “I don’t get you!”

What?

“You…don’t get me?” I echoed faintly. And here I thought everyone could read me like an open book. At least, the ninja all say that they can.

“Yeah! That!” Mo-san rounded on me as fast as they said the words, pointing a finger to my face. Eeep. “You’re not a Mage! You’re not even a warrior!”

“H-Hey…”

“You’re jumpy, you’re nervous, you talk in a squeaky voice when you get nervous—” They took a few steps forward into my space bubble, making me back up almost instinctively. “You’re not even a fighter! You play piano being nice and flowery and yet you’re a shitty Master! We haven’t even gotten a chance to fight!”

A nervous giggle left my lips because gosh, that was a burn. “I-I can’t deny that since there’s no other Servants…” On the other hand, I knew one more thing.

If anyone else were here, I feel like Mo-san would be asking for a fight… I thought. Thank god Kei and Team Minato were out too.

“So then, how—” Mordred exhaled, shaking their head while lurching back into their own space bubble, crossing their arms. “How…”

I allowed myself a tiny “Eh?” because Mordred never trailed off like this before. This was new territory and I didn’t know whether to be apprehensive or curious about what brought this on.

Even with my little noise, Mordred went quiet, ducking their head while aggressively tapping their foot against the kitchen tile floor. “…did you get the King to love you?”

I blinked. “Mo…san?”

Mordred kept tapping their foot, avoiding my gaze the entire time. The frequency of the tapping became louder with each passing second, almost irritable from the sound. “How did a person like you earn the King’s affections?” they reiterated finally, a minute crack in their voice. “Just…how?”

I opened my mouth, found no air, and gulped in a breath before letting my shoulders relax. This was definitely a moment, and I knew I was walking on eggshells. Anything mentioning Art-san already was a big enough sign. For Mordred to say it on their own…

“I…don’t have a straight answer for you, Mo-san,” I admitted finally, shaking my head. The urge to hug them was strong, but I held myself back. “But I could try helping you with that. With Art-san, I mean.”

The proposition was enough to make Mordred face me, and their green eyes narrowed at me again. “What are you getting at?”

I did my best to not fidget, keeping eye contact the entire time. “Art-san loves food like you, for one thing,” I offered, shrugging my shoulders. “And if you want, Mo-san, we can cook together. Make your favorites, and Art-san’s favorites. Maybe then, it could—”

“Cook?” Mordred seemed taken aback by my offer, shaking their head. “No way. There’s just no way Father is someone who loves food. When I knew him, back when we were knights, he would eat anything from sawdust rations to Gawain’s cooking with a straight face! And it was that big hotshot Gawain who couldn’t do a damn thing aside from boiling potatoes!” Ooookay, that was expected considering where Camelot was in terms of old world history from Vy’s memories, but there was a big but. Mordred was still shrinking into themselves. “Cooking won’t fix—”

“We don’t know that,” I said in the same quiet voice, taking a step forward towards them. I couldn’t shake off the sudden feeling that Mordred was someone who never experienced any affection in their past life. It felt so wrong. “And it’s an idea we can try. Only if you want to. We have time, Mo-san.”

Mordred met my gaze with a quirked eyebrow, a frown clearly on their lips. “…You’re too bright,” they said finally, shaking their head. “Father never acknowledged me back when we were alive. How would cooking change that—”

Okay, enough is enough.

I took another step forward to be in front of them and grabbed the hand that was not on their hip. “Because I know Art-san,” I said firmly. “And I know you, Mo-san. It sounds like you want to reconcile.”

“Reconcile?” The word came out as a mix of venom and incredulity as Mordred raised their head to look at me. Their green eyes went wide enough at our intertwined fingers so that the irises, even if narrow, still exposed my tiny reflection back to me. “How can you say that?”

“Because you’re not killing me even though I’m holding your hand without your permission,” I continued, doing my best to ignore how cold Mordred’s fingers felt in my grip. How long were they just sitting around in the house, unsure of what to do when Art-san was with me? Were they in spirit form before they started staring? Or were they sitting out on the house rooftop, watching the shinobi go around as they did? Just… “If you didn’t want to try, you could’ve struck me down right now.”

Mordred’s lips went into a straight line. “…Even if I’m known as the Knight of Treachery, Master, I’m not a complete monster.” They were already trying to slip out of my grip if not for me tightening my hold on their hand. “Wha— Oi.”

Yeah, no. No running here. “You’re not slipping away, Saber,” I said with a pout, shaking my head. “You’ve been alone for long enough. So let me help you!”

“The hell—” Mordred tugged at their arm. “Why aren’t you letting go!”

“Because I don’t want to!”

“You—” Once it became obvious I was digging my heels into the floor just to keep them around, Mordred tugged again, to no avail. Chakra was great at reinforcing limbs, by the way. But if I didn’t know any better, it felt like Mordred was putting less and less strength in each tug-of-war attempt. One tug, two tugs, three tugs. Pause. “Why are you—”

I shut my eyes, raised my head to stare at them, and blurted out the first thought in my head. “Because I’m not a warrior! It’s because we’re not fighting out on some battlefield that I can worry about you!”

My sudden yell was enough to stop whatever protest was on Mordred’s lips, their facial expression being summed up as, well, “surprised.” And stupefied. “Worry?” they echoed. It took a moment for me to realize their hand had relaxed in my grip too. From the shock or the weight of my words, I didn’t know. “Why worry? I’m a knight, not a baby, Master.”

“But you’re Saber,” I said in the same firm voice, shaking my head to get the beginnings of tears out of my eyes. “Baby or Knight, my intent is still the same. I don’t care what you call yourself. You’re a Servant that somehow got involved with me, and I can’t let you go now. Not when I can tell you’re unhappy.” I exhaled, putting my free hand to my heart. “I’m sorry that I’m not the best Master. I’m sorry that I can’t take you out on battles like you’d want. But if there’s anything that these Command Spells on me have reaffirmed, it’s that I want to help whoever comes my way as a Servant.”

“And, that…” Mordred was quiet too. I met their gaze. “That includes me?”

“Of course it includes you!” I stomped my foot against the floor for extra emphasis. Goddammit, what the hell was my luck in finding people who had shittier self-esteems than me. “Don’t put yourself out, you jerk! I found myself loving you even with all your flaws since you were summoned, so suck on that!”

Mordred’s eyes went wide again before they turned away. I didn’t resist once they finally slipped their hand out of my grip. “You… how do you get away with—” they aggressively ruffled their hair again. “That kind of line is something you’d use in seducing, not for an argument, Master!”

This probably would’ve been a moment where Hisako would scream, THE FUCK, in her usual sarcastic inflections. But she wasn’t here. It was just me again.

“Th—the heck you hear that from?!” I protested, feeling my cheeks flush an emotive red. “I’m horrid at seducing!”

“That could’ve been a line, anyways!” Mordred yelled back at me, and this time, I was surprised to feel myself raise my own hackles and not back down. “You’re not that horrible Lancelot!”

Woo, another name I vaguely recognized. Comparison not appreciated. “I’m Tomoko, Mo-san. To-Mo-Ko!” Without thinking, I reached over and flicked Mordred’s head. “Get that memorized!”

“Wha—” Mordred reeled back, nose wrinkling as they covered their forehead with both their hands. “Did you just hit me?”

“That was a flick, not even a hit!” I protested, feeling miffed. “So, are we going to cook or NOT?”

For the first time ever, Mordred stared at me for only a second before smirking. A proud, taunting smirk. I could see the fangs in their teeth. “…Is that a challenge?”

“Take it whatever way you want, you dork of a Knight.” I crossed my arms, already feeling my patience ebb away with this entire situation. “We still need to make lunch and no one else is around. So you’re helping me.”

“Oooooh,” Mordred’s smirk widened. “I’m so scared.”

“Don’t make me use a Command Spell on you.”

“…You’re bluffing.”

“Am I?” I raised my Wayfinder necklace to display the smallest chakra blade I could muster from my own stubbornness. “I was raised by assassins for friends, Saber. Once I decided to flick your head, I knew what I was getting into.”

Mordred’s smirk was shit-eating. “Never took you for having the courage of a bitch.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” I turned off my Wayfinder and flicked Mordred’s forehead again once they lowered their guard. “No cursing in the house, you dork.”

The shock was palpable on their face once I retracted my hand. “Why you—”

“Please get some eggs if you want a feast for lunch, Saber.” It did not stop me from adding an extra “Dork,” for good measure.

“Pah. You do have guts! Where was this when I was trying to kill Father earlier?!”

“You just haven’t seen it before! Now get those eggs!”

Somehow, even with all our bickering and the questioning looks Art-san later gave me at the kitchen table, I felt like we made progress somewhere. Mordred’s gaze on me for the rest of the day didn’t radiate what felt like killing intent for once.

Maybe Kei would be proud of me once she got home.

#writing #hoshino tomoko #healing over time #au oneshot #fate mordred #long post #fate stay night #crossover #oneshot #short story #2k words written in an hour and a half #new record!#oh also #first time someone cursed Tomo out #writing this bickering was *fun*#fate apocrypha #first time writing mordred #i hope it worked out #mordred

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hayleysstark · 5 years

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You don’t think Merlin is a good person? I have always thought he was fantastic. He has always done what is best for everyone which often causes great harm to himself. He has never been malicious or taken joy in any of the terrible things he’s has to do in the name of destiny. In the name of Arthur. I’m very curious as to why you think that. Could you possibly elaborate? I’m not saying your opinion is wrong, I’m just wondering.

Oh, no, I do not think Merlin is a good person!!! not at all!! and I do not think Merlin is a hero!!! don’t misunderstand me, because God knows you do make a truly wonderful point here, that Merlin has made many sacrifices, he has buried every last one of his own dreams, and all to protect his friends, and I would never, ever try and ignore or disregard that outright. I don’t think Merlin is a good person, but I certainly don’t think he’s selfish, either. He’s usually the first one to put himself last in every circumstance, and I would absolutely never say Merlin is a selfish man. For all his faults - and we all know he has a straight-up surplus of those - his friends are always his number-one priority, top of his list.

But it doesn’t really cancel out all the rest.

You say he feels badly for the terrible things he’s done. Good. He should feel badly. He should lose sleep over all the horrible choices he’s made. He should remember all the innocent people who lost their lives at his hand. He should know he is not a good person. If you do something wrong, and you feel bad about it, your guilt does not negate the wrong thing you did. Guilt is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s literally basic human decency to feel bad if you hurt people. So, yeah, Merlin should feel bad. It should hurt him, to do the things he does.

I’m not going to go into a super-long and detailed thesis about this, because A. I’m seriously not trying to rip up such a cherished and beloved character and B. i legitimately don’t think actual humans are going to read this when i’m done because, point A, i am, essentially, ripping up a cherished and beloved character.

And Merlin definitely has some flaws I’m not going to touch on - i.e. he’s impulsive, he’s melodramatic, he’s oversensitive, he’s childish, he’s whiny, he’s self-pitying - mainly because those flaws fade as he grows and matures and also, are largely played up for humor in the series anyways (can you honestly think of a single episode before S3 where Merlin didn’t take at least ten minutes out of his day to bitch to Gaius about how hard his not-very-hard life was??). But I’ll tackle as much of the serious stuff as I can before I inevitably just spiral into repeatedly calling him a Terrible Bastard Man lmao.

Merlin has shown, hundreds upon hundreds of times over the series, that he will stop at absolutely nothing to get what he wants, to get where he wants, and he takes full and often brutal advantage of everybody around him to further his own agenda. Remember in The Wicked Day how he straight-up refused to heal Uther until Arthur promised to bring magic back if he did?? yeah. same here. And we can’t forget the way he literally took away Arthur’s free will in The Sword in the Stone, can we? or when he deliberately sabotaged Arthur’s second chance at love and happiness in The Hunter’s Heart because Mithian had committed the cardinal sin of not being Gwen???

Even if you can overlook all that really blatant manipulation Merlin puts his friends through on a regular basis, he also tries to kill Mordred in The Witch’s Quickening ((okay, he actually just tries to make sure the attacking knights find Mordred, but same difference, really)). And do I even need to talk about how he tried to poison Morgana in The Fires of Idirsholas? no, i’m serious, do i even need to talk about that??? a billion other people have already discussed it, so you know what, fuck it, but the takeaway is, it was a terrible thing to do, even if Camelot did hang in the balance at the time. ((no, he does not get a pass for trying to save the kingdom. he’s a bastard. you can’t change my mind.))

oh, he also sets Kilgharrah free in The Fires of Idirsholas, too, which brings his Bastard Points up to a two for that episode--wait, no, it’s a three, he gets a Bastard Point just for existing i think. a n y w a y s

And he murders Agravaine in The Sword in The Stone. Doesn’t sound too horrific on its own, we all know the story, Agravaine is the traitor in the court, and Merlin does what he has to do to eliminate the threat, but, wait, he doesn’t. Does he? Merlin doesn’t have to kill Agravaine, because Agravaine literally presents no real threat to Merlin. God knows Merlin could keep him alive, God knows he could just truss the asshole up like a goddamned Christmas morning turkey if he wanted to, but that’s the thing - he doesn’t want to. Because what if Agravaine escaped, and made it back to Morgana? He knows about Merlin’s magic now, and Merlin can’t let him live with that knowledge.

Merlin does not strike back at Agravaine in self-defense.

Merlin murders Agravaine to save his own lying skin.

so. yeah!! Merlin is ruthless !!! Merlin will turn literally anyone he lays eyes on into a pawn in his game to fulfill destiny. everybody is just a piece he can move around the board, and it’s not good. it’s not okay. yes, Merlin values his friends, Merlin would do absolutely anything for friends, but he doesn’t hesitate to use them, either. Yes, most of the time, he truly believes he’s doing what’s best for them, but that is not his decision to make.

I’m not trying to say Merlin is unforgivable or irredeemable. I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t like Merlin ((obviously, I’m not trying to say that, I love one (1) Merlin Emrys with my whole-ass heart, he’s kind of the reason i didn’t off myself once upon a teenage depression, so)) and I’m not trying to say you should change your entire opinion on Merlin to fit mine!! if you still think Merlin is a good person, don’t let me stop you!!! now, if you need me, i’ll be showering a Tall, Dark and Bitchy Bastard in a little more love ~

#merlin #bbc merlin #ask #joyfuldonutsuitcasething

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elizabethsharmon · 5 years

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I was tagged by @peraltasass thank you Lari ❤️

Pick 5 shows, then answer the following questions, don’t cheat. Tag 10 (or however many) people.

orange is the new black

stranger things

la casa de papel

skam france

doctor who

1. Who is your favourite character in 2? oh god i don’t know. Dustin? I think? I hate choosing just one (1) character ugh

2. Who is your least favourite character in 1? ugh that blonde methead (I think her name was Leanne?) I absolutely couldn’t stand her

3. What is your favourite episode of 4? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CHOOSE and should I choose AN EPISODE or should I choose A CLIP??? HOW??? Okay so I guess this is the point where I’m just gonna say fuck you to the rules and choose a few soooo if episodes then I guess 3x07, 3x10 and 4x10?? and clips then jeudi 17h32 (AKA AXEL’S ACTING IN THIS ONE IS STILL KILLING ME ALL THOSE MICROEXPRESSIONS HOW), samedi with Lucille’s speech, samedi 9h17, vendredi 20h27 (both), all vendredis from 3x02 (at this point I feel like I’m ordering chinese or sth), vendredis from 3x07, mercredi in the canteen (aka 4 lines, lots of death afterwards), la violence clip (where there was no violence), now let’s move on to season 4 so sextape clip (where there was no sextape), eid clips, dimanche with the mattress, all the swing clips, all the bakhellal family clips aaaand I think I’m just gonna stop here cause I’m getting carried away

4. What is your favourite season of 5? I think that series 8? With series 9 and 5 being close second (ugh I really hate choosing, suddenly I’m Chidi Anagonye)

5. Who is your favourite couple in 3? well berlin and palermo aka bros being bros sans ambiguité (though they were both complete sexists and i hated them for that but well I guess I was so excited about the flashbacks that I ignored it in the end)

6. Who is your favourite couple in 2? idk? i don’t think i have a favourite couple? lol let’s go with hopper and joyce, why not

7. What is your favourite episode of 1? i honestly don’t remember all the episodes from previous seasons so well so I’m just gonna go with 7x12 cause it was amazing even though it left me emotionally drained and depressed

8. What is your favourite episode of 5? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CHOOSE JUST ONE??? ugh “Vincent and the Doctor” because of reasons

9. What is your favourite season of 2? I think season 3 because music was amazing and the colouring of all the scenes (especially the last fight) was a real cinematography porn

10. How long have you watched 1? I bingewatched first 5 seasons last year, right before season 6 started

11. How did you become interested in 3? I heard it was cool and it turned out to be cool

12. Who is your favourite actor in 4? Axel Auriant (finally a question I didn’t have to think about too much)

13. Which do you prefer, 1, 2, or 5? I’d go with doctor who but just for the sake of my old whovian days

14. Which show have you seen more episodes of, 1 or 3? well 1 because it has more episodes

15. If you could be anyone from 4, who would you be? probably Lucas? cause even though our situation is not the same when I was watching s3 I just saw myself in him with all his anger and sadness and wow it’s starting to get a little bit depressing but no, I just think we have similar characters so probably him?

16. Would a crossover between 3 and 4 work? OH MY GOD YES THAT’S WHAT @evnisak AND I WERE TALKING ABOUT ALL THE TIME LA CASA DE PAPEL SKAMFR AU CAUSE RIO LOOKS LIKE BASILE ASJKDJKSASKL and then we’d have Lucas as Denver and Eliott as Monica and Lucille as Arturito, Mika as Moscow, Alexia queen as Nairobi queen, Yann as el profesor and Imane as Raquel but with platonic relationship ajksjkdajk someone should write that fic

17. Pair two characters in 1 who would make an unlikely but strangely okay couple? Nicky and Janae (idk i’m just making this up)

18. Overall, which show has the better storyline, 3 or 5? aaaah I loved la casa de papel storyline? but then again doctor who can have and has every single storyline you want so I’ll go with that

19. Which has the better theme music, 2 or 4? well skam france doesn’t have a theme so I have to go with stranger things

okay this was cool to do so i’m gonna actually tag some people this time ajksjkajskla (obviously no pressure, feel free to ignore it) @evnisak, @livia-sz, @isak-valterssen, @jebentnietalleen, @demauryy, @srodvlv, @martinskiseyes, @lallemntswift, @look-out-lovers, @bakhellals, @bakkoush, @mordred, @maryiofengland, @softeliot, @lightwooodbanes, @yossiacar (jak tam skaza btw exposing you on main hehe) and idk if anyone else wants to do this then consider yourself tagged i guess

#I was tagged #is it time to admit that i cheated with numbers 3 and 4 cause i wanted those shows to be there so i could expose iza's and mine crossover au #ajsksk #i'm such a rebel i guess

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lokikingofasgardslover713 · 6 years

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Sparkling Topaz & Mead: 5

Masterlist

One Two Three Four

Loki Laufeyson x Plus!Size Reader

Words: +1,800

Warnings: Pissed Loki, cussing, SMUT, TRIGGER WARNINGS SUCH AS POSSIBLE NON-CON. I'm making sure the story doesn’t start till under the cut.

SO, I’m not ready to end this just yet, at least 2 more chapters ;p

“Please don’t let them take me to med bay,” a weak voice spoke up form Loki’ chest when he stood, the god looking down at Y/N.

If he hadn’t been able to see eye lashes flutter Loki would swear that Y/N was speaking in her sleep, the movement of her head to hide her eyes told him she was awake along with the utter of a weak please that barely reached his ears.

“Ok,” was all he spoke, holding Y/N close.

Patiently the god watched & waited while Mordred was violently kicked off the ramp by none other than Thor, even having to school his features the moment the worthless creature went sliding into the doors that led into the compound. Smirking when the entire team turned focus to Thor, yelling at him, talking him down as the pissed off god of thunder started for Mordred a string of obscenities in his wake. Loki realizing it was a distraction & quickly disappearing with Y/N in his arms.

Y/N shifted nervously in Loki’ arms, not sure why, he wasn’t hurting her, far from it actually, but it left her begging him to sit her to her feet & leave her alone.

“You should let me stay, you shouldn’t be alone,” Loki began, watching Y/N closely, going through motions, gathering clothes to take a shower it was pitiful really & it made Loki’ heart shatter that she was truly this broken.

“I'm fine,” Y/N deadpanned, stepping into the bathroom & shutting the door without another word.

It worried Loki, he could understand needing space, yet something telling him someone needed to stay close, but he didn’t want to lose her, & push her away by being to clingy. Deciding to leave a note telling Y/N that he would be back to check on her & bring her something to eat. Begrudgingly leaving the room to see if they where done with Mordred & witness the team try to stop Thor or him from killing the bastard.

Y/N stood under the cold water, ignoring the sting of her shoulder, staring into noting while looking at the ceiling, Mordred’ voice on constant loop from things the demon had said before this day. Calling out to F.R.I.D.A.Y to play music, tuning into the beat of Linkin Park’, Castle of Glass. Mind falling to the dark grimoire hidden in a small safe under the bed, in the form of a sparkling ruby pendant.

Remembering what is was like when the darkness consumed her, it helped Y/N to forget, grow numb to the hell that had been her life from the age of 14 to 22. So, Y/N was now 36 & that means it had been 14 years since last seeing Mordred, since last forced to obey him. For 10 of those 14 letting darkness take her soul to do what she truly felt & feeling no remorse.

The answer was the dark grimoire, no matter how Y/N looked at it, thought about it, that was the path. Darkness, didn’t really matter anyway it was where it always ended, either due to another, or because she made the choice. Figuring it was better she make the choice this time. Y/N’ mother, the first Morrigan was darkness, until she met her father, he pulled her out. Mordred had killed Y/N’ father, to get to her mother & herself. No, the grimoire was it.

Cutting the water off, hoping that Loki was gone & had listened for once. Peaking out to see the coast was clear to head straight to the bed to retrieve the box, opening it when her hands where on it, & smiling darkly at the pendant that sparkled with it's own light. Y/N had been wearing it when the Avengers found her, they where the reason she took it off, only wearing it at the time in case it was needed. It didn’t hold her soul, no not even before did it hold her soul for fear of not getting it back. Now, who cared, letting it's silver chain glide over her fingers, the ruby 2inches tall an inch wide and heavy as it laid on her chest.

“Hello old friend,” Y/N spoke darkly to the pendant this time gentle when it took her, breathing in when the tension released, the dread, the foreboding, a wicked grin pulling at her lips.

“Show me,” she spoke out to nothing holding her hand out, a small leather-bound book appeared in it & holding the other out for a trinket Y/N knew belonged to Loki could rest in it, sinister smile taking up residence on her features.

“Oh, I have missed you Ruby, what have you to tell me,” Y/N spoke to the book that opened to a page on it's on, the ancient Gaelic making her smile widen to show sharp teeth, Y/E/C irises turning to burning red glowing brighter than Mordred’.

“My beautiful darkness, you haven’t a clue what you have unlocked,” Y/N smirked to the book, & had it been a person it would have shivered.

“Your pet, where is she now,” Mordred spoke though bloody lips, eyes beginning to loose the red glow that they once had, turning to muddy brown.

The demon, sorcerer, monster, coward, whatever the two gods where choosing to call him now was chained to the steel floor, sprawled out from the last ass beating he had received. This time it came from Loki while Thor took a seat & let his brother work.

“Forget about her,” Thor snapped, making Loki break the gaze he had fixed on the creature, mind automatically going to what he meant by the question he had choked out & why his eyes were fading.

“You should be worrying about yourself monster,” Thor began darkly, getting out of the chair stalking towards Mordred.

“No, I believe you should worry about her because Y/N just drew every last bit of my power,” Mordred began stoically, pushing to his feet to look up at the fuming god.

“What,” Loki spoke striding forward, taking the sorcerers collar in his fist, almost choking him out, Loki forgetting his own strength.

“The eyes,” Mordred choked out hinting to his own, “you not wonder why their fading? I wouldn’t have noticed either had I not seen my reflection in your own. She’s a strong one Y/N, stronger than her mother, stronger than me, if anyone can harness the dark ruby it's her.”

“Dark ruby,” Loki breathed, immediately remembering the ruby Y/N had around her neck when they found her.

“Yes, & you best hurry,” Mordred laughed/choked before Loki flung him to the floor, Thor grabbing his brother’ shoulder to make him pause.

“I have to,” was all Loki needed to say as Thor nodded in agreement & allowed him to leave before turning back to Mordred.

“It seems to me,” Thor spoke, jerking Mordred back to his feet smirking while lighting began to coarse over his body, ignoring the beating on the door.

“We are done here,” Thor’ voice darkened, hand going to the struggling sorcerers throat, tightening his grip and watching him squirm.

Darkness, silence, & the acrid taste of dread hung thick in Y/N room. Had it not been for the odd talking, as if to a person, Loki would swear that there was no possible way anyone or anything could be in the room.

“Show me Ruby, I need something worse,” Y/N hushed voice echoed through the blackness, it was her room, but it wasn’t, having taken on a dank underground feel.

“Y/N, this is enough,” Y/N heard Loki call to her through the darkness, looking up to spot him instantly, watching as he tried to pear through the inky black, good he wouldn’t know what hit him.

“It's never enough lover, you should know that,” Y/N voice echoed around him seductively, but the tone of the seduction sent shivers of dread to his very core, it wasn’t Y/N speaking.

“Are you not the one who sought to take over New York, Asgard? And, Oh! What about Sakaar? Yes lover, heard, or actually read that from your thoughts myself,” Y/N voice echoed all around him once more.

Light caresses along his forearm alerted him to that fact Y/N walked circles around him, looking to where he believed she stood, to find nothing & the sensation to begin anew on the opposite side. Turing attention to something that wasn’t there again.

“Loki, god of mischief, tell me what you would like for me to do to you, or would you prefer to show me in that brilliant mind of yours,” Y/N continued in the same dark seductive tone, this time Loki clearly heard her at his back, turning cautiously to look down into dazzling red eyes, & had Loki not known better would swear they belonged to a frost giant the red having swallowed the sclera whole.

Dressed in something that could only be described as a deep green satin & lace baby doll that fit her well, a piece of clothing that Y/N defiantly would ever worn around Loki, at least not yet. Hands snaking around his neck to loop around the back playing with the collar of his disheveled shirt. Placing hot hands on the nape of it to tug Loki down close to her, lips so close they ghosted his when Y/N began to speak once more.

“What’s the matter, pet, did I still your silver tongue,” she smirked, eyes dancing with fire while holding Loki’ gaze filling him breath in her breath, his own eyes twinkling with an odd light, with her seidr.

“You need to stop this Y/N this isn’t the way & you know it,” Loki began looping arms around her plump hips resting his hands there, Y/N’ lips crushing into his, but not returning it, earning a sharp bite of fangs that brought blood & caused him to pull back in surprise.

“See lover, I have tricks of my own, though it appears you don’t care for them,” Y/N spoke with a dark chuckle that seemed to lower the temperature of the room.

“This is not mere tricks Y/N, this is dangerous, this is your soul,” Loki spoke quietly, soothing over his bitten lip flinching when he realized it wasn’t healing, looking closely at Y/N, reaching for the pendant & noting she didn’t pull away allowing it in his hand.

Norns the over bearing darkness Loki could fill coursing through it, how could Y/N contain it without it swallowing her whole? Though he felt fear, not from Y/N but from the ruby itself, it feared Y/N, IT feared she was to strong, & was upsetting the balance of nature.

“Come now Y/N, let’s take this off & talk,” Loki bargained, allowing the pendant back to her breast & meeting her gaze.

“Mmmm, lets,” she smirked darkly showing bloody fangs before pushing Loki back, expecting to hit the floor but instead bounced onto the bed.

Y/N quickly straddled the god, sure to grind into him while pulling down for a kiss, jerking at Loki’ shirt to pop the buttons, the cold pendant hitting his chest. Deepening the kiss when he finally allowed her tongue to tangle with his, both battling for dominance & tasting blood when fangs cut lips.

I tagged who I thought would be interested, if you would like to me removed or put on my list let me know!

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#loki laufeyson #loki fanfic #loki smut #loki x ofc #loki x plus size reader #loki x you #loki x reader

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dexcidium · 7 years

Text

So I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now… my review so far of Fate/Apocrypha. Keep in mind that I’ve read all the way up to the translated LNs, which is only up to the end of volume four, as well as this being written prior to the ending of the anime. As of now, it’s only up to episode 23. Let me preface this by saying that I love Fate. The lore and that distinct writing style ever so present within the series. The (mostly) well represented servants within the series. The character interactions, the relationship between servant and master, and everything else in between. That being said… I’ll keep this part short because I am prooooobably gonna go on and on forever on my thoughts later on.

TLDR: The concept was interesting, hype and it had some really great hooks. However, it felt flat on so many of its percieved promises and then… he happened. Sieg is a black hole that made Apoc so much worse than it actually is. Everything is fucking weak overall aaaaaand once again, FUCK YOU SIEG. YOU WASTE OF SPACE AND TIME.

I promise it’s not too long.

Not at all.

Right, let’s get this out of the way. I think Higashide can be a good writer. There were some good characterisation throughout Apoc, as well as some genuinely well written moments. However, there were many failures on his end as a writer. And it only became more evident in the anime. I’ll get to that later. First of all, let’s start with what I liked about it.

Jeanne(Light Novel): Those of you that know me know how much I adore Jeanne. And since FGO was a waifu game, I initially only liked her for her looks. No hiding that fact. But as I read more and more, getting sucked in to the hell that is the Type Moon wiki, I started to like her more and more based on personality. Again, those that know me know that I find these vanilla heroines extremely boring and bland. (SorryArturiaIjustreallydidn'tlikeyouoryourstoryarcinFSN). But of course, since this is TM, there was bound to be more than meets the eye. Like goddamn, she’s a literal saint. Probably the most well known in the world even. I expected her to be a goody-two-shoes and nothing more. But BOY was I wrong. Jeanne: *prays for hours everyday*. Also Jeanne: *exorcises 1000000 unborn children, suggests to crash a plane into the gardens without even blinking*. Her constant struggle of being called a saint and rejecting that very premise was frankly quite shocking because of the established facts about how much she loved God. There was divide in her character. And suddenly she wasn’t this benevolent, all-loving saint anymore. She was Jeanne. A religious girl who fought for her beliefs, and died fighting for them. The world imposed to her a title that she didn’t necessarily want. But her characterisation ends there… at least the actual interesting parts. Oh don’t worry, I’ll get to *that* later.

The Red Faction: Boy these guys were fun! The Red Servants felt much more organic and light hearted compared to the other faction. Granted that part made sense since Darnic is a literal Nazi. Anyway… these guys were just so much more fun. From Karna’s literal and metaphorical roasts, to Shakespeare’s loud and outspoken cravings for tragedy, to Achilles’ constant and flirtatious admiration towards Atalanta (AKA the woman who beat up his dad), to the crazy, fucked up and manipulative asshole that is Shirou (not Emiya) Kotomine. They were just fun to watch. I could go on about the tinier details but that’d make this shit even longer… MOVING ON!

Kairi and Mordred: Oh boy these two are just… perfect. A father son combo like no other. And an absolute joy to watch. They filled a void sorely lacking in each other’s existence. And you can clearly tell that by their interactions. Kairi was edgy and cool but unlike someone like Kiritsugu, he was easy going and didn’t take everything so seriously. A cool dad. And Mordred… god I love this little scamp of a knight. Mordred is adorable in her own little way while being cool and badass like her master/dad. They were just a fun duo to watch in the series where master and servant interaction was rather lacking of interesting dynamics. These two just worked. And they worked well.

The premise: basically any other HGW times two. Goddamn was the set up cool. That’s all, really.

Right, so this is the section where I shit on Apoc from both a viewer’s stand point, as well as from a narrative and structural stand point. To stop myself from going on an even further tangent, I’ll be talking about Sieg last. Other than this part. Let me just say that he is pretty much directly linked for like… 70% of this show’s major flaws. But again… that comes last. Lets start off with the stupid points in Apocrypha and the disastrous end of the first volume. I’ll also be comparing it to the anime, which was a hot mess. Not quite garbage. That came later.

So… the characters. Way too many of them. It was evident that Higashide could not handle such a large cast. It was basically what a normal grail war was times by a factor of two and then add a little bit more. So what did he do? Take out half of the masters by having Amakusa straight up manipulating the entire thing. A good move I’d say… but there was still too many for him to handle. It was all over the place. But frankly, he handled the earlier parts quite well in the LN. There was, however, a gigantic lack of characterisation for many of the earlier characters. Of course those were the same characters that pretty much needlessly died off for shock effect. For example, Siegfried (henceforth shall now be known as Siegfriend) had me going “this makes no sense" rather than “YOU KILLED SIEGFRIED. YOU MONSTERS". And as a writer, if you can’t make your audience feel the emotion that you intended them to – then you’ve failed. And the series is plagued with these rather stupid deaths. A lot of them felt pointless and held no significant impact on the overarching narrative. They just died. And I didn’t feel anything. The delivery felt weak and half-assed, played for fake emotion.

And speaking of deaths, Darnic and Vlad’s… no that, that was fucking stupid on top of a pile of stupid. Well, this felt like actual lost potential. Unlike a certain other character… Darnic was being built up to be the main antagonist… and he felt like he would have been a good one. If not for the structure being a battle royale-ish. And it is one because people pretty much did their own thing pretty early on in the story. Getting back on track, Darnic and Vlad had a relationship akin to Tokiomi and Gilgamesh from Fate Zero. And that is the servant being more of a master than the actual master. This was good as we were seeing a variety if servant/master dynamics. Darnic, however, was no pushover. This man had been established to do whatever it fucking takes to get what he wants. And he had been succeeding too. Just what grand scheme was he about to pull off- aaaaaaand he’s dead. Dude talked a lot of shit… nothing happened. Not even a lasting impact. He just became one with Vlad and that was it. What the fuck was that? There wasn’t any sort of intelligence or cunningness that he had displayed before. Oh and poor Vlad. Man, he was the real victim here. This part I actually felt for. Because he became what he didn’t want the most. The Legend of Dracula. A vampire. And not one of Nasu’s myriad of vampire OCs. The OG, Count Dracula. It was meant to be an actual tragedy… yet… it left no impact. So when Darnic’s BRILLAINT plan of fusing his and Vlad’s soul together, while activating his Legend of Dracula NP, he was made out to be this near unstoppable being that needed all these powerful heroic spirits boosted by a command seal to be stopped. But really… he wasn’t. Fuck, he didn’t even kill anyone important. And no one at all in the LN. I was expecting him to pull some Hellsing Ultimate bullshit and turn the entirety of Trifas into a ghoul-infested city. But nope. Nothing came out of it.

He ends up getting fucked over by the ACTUAL main Antagonist, Amakusa Shirou Tokisada via baptism rites. This was meant to make him look powerful or whatever. Except the entire fight scene is really dumb because if you know anything about vampires, they have very specific weaknesses. Two of those are the sun and holiness. And not just any weakness. Deathly weakness. AND WHO DO WE HAPPEN TO HAVE!? The most famous saint in the world and the son of a sun god who literally has sunlight woven into his skin. This whole thing was made even more stupid but the fact that the initial plan in the LN was to wait until dawn for the sun to come out. Also in the LN, Jeanne was poking away at Vlad using her holy spear which she did not do in the anime. By the way, Jeanne can do the exact same thing as fuckboi Shirou. Only even better because she’s an actual saint and a Ruler. Plus she used Baptism Rites to exorcise Jack as well. Seriously, Karna could have hugged Darnicula to death. This whole scene is stupid, man.

Continuing the stupid death trend, Avicebron and Adam… god that was stupid. Roche you say? Who? Kid was barely a character. He was made to be killed. He had no build up. No actual back story. And barely a personality. In short he didn’t matter at all. But dear god, this fight was meant to be the Cthullu fight equivalent. Yet again, this was somehow even more anti-climactic and even more boring than the Darnicula fight. Again, nobody important died. They’re killing for the sake of killing. And it was just fucking weak man. I barely felt anything. Other than the seething hatred and boredom of course. And again, it was meant to make somebody else look good. Our “protagonist". Anyway, this fight was dumb and boring. Some good animation in the anime though. I will give it that much.

And this was the point in the series that everything pretty much got thrown out the window and it was evident that it wasn’t going to get any better. Jeanne lost her neutrality, literally 2/3rds of the Ygdmillenia family didn’t even really matter in the end, the Red faction’s fucked off to cross the border or something, Sieg is a super special servant/master hybrid rolled into one with super special BLACK command seals because he’s the super special protagonist aaaaand Jack’s fucked off back to Reika. Who at this point also barely has a personality and back story. But still way less than most people that have already died. And that’s just sad man. I, as part of the audience, couldn’t give less of a shit about any characters except a set few. If I didn’t know most of them through Grand Order already, I would have dropped this shit ages ago. And dear god, Jeanne still doesn’t have an established personality besides existing for SHIGGU-KUN in the anime. The LN does a far better job with characterisation. Even if it is still a heaping dumpster fire. And then they do pretty much nothing except side quest to kill Jack and exorcise 10,000 babies. Which, despite feeling like a loose end that they had to tie up despite being in a rush to go after the Red faction, was actually my favourite scene in the LN due to the fact that it completely changes the reader’s perception of Jeanne. Of course the anime version sucked ass.

Right, continuing on… this scene. It did not work for the anime. And I’ll have to start by explaining that Jeanne’s characterisation does not exist beyond Sieg in the anime. A lot of her characterisation outside of that was cut. Which is a damn shame because she became what I hated the most in an anime character. Bland, generic, no real motivation, no established personality yet somehow still being out of character whenever that shithead Steve-kun is around. Not only was Jeanne no longer the Jeanne I knew, she was replaced by bumbling tsundere who blushes for a wet sock. It was cheap and boring. And this fucking harem Romanian romance BS that was happening was so fucking out of place. It was evident that Jeanne had barely become a character anymore. She was just waifu bait like Astolfo now. Putting that aside, even in the LN, Jeanne still becomes a mess. While I have not personally read the last volume since it has not been translated, I have read summaries. And my god is everything stupid. I’ll return to this part once I cover the long awaited shitfest…

WARNING. As this is my personal review, it is very opinionated. And as you can probably tell… this is very personal.

Sieg. Oh you waste of space, you don’t fucking deserve that name. Like every both of his being, it’s half assed. I mentioned that Sieg was a blackhole in the beginning. And that’s because he sucks up any bit of good in this series whenever he’s in a scene. Good characterisation from well established characters? NAH LETS BEND OVER AND LET SHIGGU KUN WIN AND HE WILL BE LOVED FOREVER AND EVER BECAUSE HE’S SO GOOD AND PURE AND INNOCCENT YOU GUYS. Right, now that that’s out of the way. It’s time to dive into exactly why this dude is such a demerit to the series overall.

First and foremost, he disrupts the entirety of the story structure. While it could have certainly worked, it most definitely did not here. Sieg’s role in terms of plot devices was to centralise the story as a whole. However, Higashide went too far and just… ended up giving Sieg far too big a role. This, in turn took away a lot from the rest of the cast. Not only their screen time but their whole character. Yet despite all this “development" he was getting, he still barely had a character. Some may say that was the point. Sieg is indeed a blank slate that was meant to learn as he grew. But the thing is – he never did. Instead, there was this identity crisis that was never really addressed in the actual narrative. However, as it stands… the whole fiasco was extremely pointless. Sieg remains a flat character and his entire goal was immediately solved the episode after he decided to do it. Worst of all, there was no sense of struggle. Not even a spec of it. He just sorta did it. And my god was it so boring to watch. Even after when he’s trying to get his morals straight, it basically boils down to him asking people if killing was bad. And it just kept dragging on and on and on and on! And in the end… nothing came out of it. By the time they were about to go and attack the Hanging Gardens, barely anything changed. Basically, it was a giant waste of time.

And of course, we have to address Siegfried. While certainly, yes, you could argue that tragedy is the very essence of Siegfried’s story. Even in his own legend we were only told of his story through a series of flashbacks. In Apocrypha, Siegfried’s suffering continues. He has a shit master, he can’t even fucking talk, his brotp moment gets cucked by the fetus, and he never actually gets anything that he wanted. And as a result; he was sorely undeveloped. Then he fucking dies. It was meant to come off as a heroic sacrifice but… there was nothing there to latch on emotionally, as well as making no sense. For one, at this point everything about Sieg was just to make the audience feel sorry for him. That’s it. Nothing else. Secondly, the homunculus and Siegfried had no real emotional connection. They literally just met. Hence, making the sacrifice feel… well, emotionless. They try to reason it off with some BS about Siegfried doing something selfish… but it was still a selfless action. So I never bought it as a proper reason. Now keep in mind, that I personally was trying to keep an open mind about Sieg when I began reading Apoc. I had heard bad things and the stuff that people were saying pretty much embodied everything I hated in a protagonist. Except… it was a lot worse. Sieg is a lot worse. At this point in time, I didn’t even hate Sieg yet. He just had little to no presence or relevance, nor even a semblance of a personality that I did not give a Rin’s ass. Then… Siegfried tore his fucking heart out – his own heart out, literally and made Sieg…. eat it? It was… really stupid. Because A: Servants’ spiritual cores are their hearts and they wouldn’t be able to even move without it the moment it gets torn out. And of course before he dies out Siegfried gets his only redeeming moment… chock one up to poor pacing…. yay. So just when I starting to give a shit about Siegfried, he’s out of the picture. For this… thing. And as someone who’s aware about the consequences of having a servant’s body part attached to another human being (AKA Heaven’s Feel), I was expecting some consequences. Horrible, horrible consequences. But…

Nothing.

But I’ll be generous and gloss that one over since it wasn’t established in the plot here.

Now I may be going on and on about expectations and shit but that’s because literally everything in Apoc was trying to outdo Zero/FSN. Let me go on a tangent for a bit and explain. Twice the masters, twice the servants, a more exciting and dynamic premise. But in actuallity, every bit of delivery was extremely weak. A lot of it was just below par. I was promised something great but even as I continue to lower the bar, Apoc continued to limbo under it.

Anyway, back to that useless sack of shit. The anime didn’t really have this but my god… the following moments is what made me hate Apoc right then and there. So in the Light Novel, Jeanne senses a new disturbance due to Sieg’s unique (*rolls eyes*) existence. So as she investigates, she goes and talks to the black faction (they fucking skipped the theological debate between Jeanne and Vlad in the anime btw), until she finds Sieg.

Then she collapses because of Laeticia needing food still cuz host body and all that. So far I was buying it. Then Sieg carries her. O..kay? Then blushing… Uhhhhhhh…. and when they finally reach a village and was allowed a room for the both of them… it devolved into a generic light novel plot.

They had to share a bed.

Girl blushes.

Dense protag is dense.

UHHHHH

WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? You’d think I was kidding but this id exactly what happens. And it was this precise moment that my expectations drastically dropped to near zero. It came out of fucking nowhere. I don’t get why they’d not-so-subtly force this shitty romance between characters who just met in a primarily action-focused novel. It wasn’t even good. I could open SAO and whatever other clone and they’d do it just as badly. And it was at this moment that Sieg became the worst thing about Apoc for me. But ohohoho… just as you think it’s hit rock bottom, it somehow goes BELOW that.

GO BELOW AND BEYOND. MINUS ULTRAAAAA!

Okay, so skipping a couple of events, Jeanne fucks back off to the main battle where the Red Faction actually gets their shit together. She does nothing but run around for the entire volume. Like. Literally does nothing except save wet sock’s ass. Anyway, while everyone else is having rather personal battles with Chiron fighting his former pupil, Achilles, the two Lancers/Aces of them having one hell of a fight and arguing their religious beliefs, Fran confronts fuccboi Shirou and gets screwed over by Shakespeare’s NP (and we get to see her real struggles as well as a bit more on how Caules is as a master), Astolfo being a loser as always, Atalanta being… whatever she was doing, she doesn’t really get interesting until after, and Mordred being the shitty driver she is, giving Kairi a heart attack. Right so before this gigantic fight happens, Sieg finally decides that he wanted to save his homunculus buddies. Which is a fine motivation. …that got immediately solved because everyone else was too busy actually fighting. Zero tension or risk here. Anyway after one of his major character motivations gets solved so stupidly easily, he decides to pull a Shirou Emiya (only a lot worse and he doesn’t make sense) and fight the servants. In which Mordred immediately kills his ass but is the only one that does damage for some reason (gotta make him seem useful and interesting), despite Fran doing next to no damage. The servant. Doing no damage. But this guy did. O… okay. So he gets killed, I rejoice like Kirei when he hears an Emiya is participating in a HGW on Christmas day, the evil is defeated, the world is a better pla- and he’s alive. Once again. Not even an episode later. Absolutely no tension. Do you see what my problem is with wet sock as a character? There’s almost no stakes for him. No proper emotional connections to a lot of characters. Characters die for him to live. Said characters who have never even had a conversation with him prior. So tell me how am I supposed to feel? Certainly not satisfied or even happy. In fact I’m frustrated that a far more interesting character died so that this bland fucko could live. And it doesn’t even make sense! He gets a fucking power up too for whatever fucking reason. So Fran accidentally zaps him back to life when she sacrifices himself to kill Mordred. Now he has command spells that are black (because HE’S SO SUPER SPECIAL YOU GUYS). And he can now turn into Siegfried.

What kind of stupid writing is this? It makes no sense. Progression is fucking stupid. No explanation. No proper emotional connection. No proper stakes. No risks. And above all else… there’s no entertainment. I’m so goddamn bored. And I’m already sick of our main protagonist. And he takes up a lot of the time. I can’t connect to this character. Even if I can’t relate to his struggle, I should be able to at least feel for him. But I didn’t. Because I know that somehow, someway, he’ll BS his way through it with fake struggle that has no tension. Wet sock is lacking in every single area. And him being the protagonist highlights his shittiness as a character. Honestly, he could have worked if they didn’t have a forced romance or if he was the main character. He could have provided the view of the homunculus. Instead Toole, who barely appears, does a better fucking job of that more than the guy that takes up half the screen time. And at this point, I’d rather have him gone completely rather than try and make him even remotely interesting. Even his introduction was sketchy to me. It was just a whole lot of “FEEL SORRY FOR ME. ARE YOU FEELING IT NOW MISTER KRABS? ARE YOU REALLY FEELING IT??????”. But I didn’t. I didn’t know shit about this fucko. Why should I care? There was nothing to latch on to, no emotional hook. Not even an interesting characteristic. And he never develops one. Instead, I feel like he just steals shit. Just like him receiving Siegfried’s heart and taking half his name, his entire character is half-assed. Not quite a self insert because there isn’t a power fantasy to be fulfilled. That sort of fantasy is immediately ruined because he literally turns into someone else. Can’t really project yourself onto someone who turns into someone else. A terrible MC due to him bullshitting everything and surviving everything with no real consequence to him. He just makes the story terrible by his sheer existence.

Right, so going back to one of my earlier points. That scene with Jeanne, Atalanta, and Jack. A very pivotal moment for Jeanne and Atalanta. Jeanne, who was a revered saint decides to confront Jack the Ripper, who is the embodiments of one part of the legends where he killed pregnant ladies or something. I don’t exactly remember all the details with Jack. Anyway, the important part is that Jack is made up of a bunch of unborn souls. Children. And Atalanta, whose wish is for the happiness of all the children in the world, sees all this. The horror of the tormented children, not even a chance given to live. She’s hit right at the core of her being because she was abandoned by her own parents on a mountain for not being a male in her legend. So Jeanne’s decided that she can’t save these children. They’re already long gone. Of course Atalanta was forcing her own beliefs towards this revered saint. It seemed that to Atalanta, saints were miracle workers, they could do crazy things. And historically, yes, that was exactly who they were. And as Jeanne rejects the very notion of being pronounced as saint, saying that she was nothing more than a village girl who answered god’s calling, she demolishes Atalanta’s view. The Archer’s entire world. And with the baptism rites going, Atalanta screaming for her to stop, and Jeanne following her own set of beliefs… it was a very personal moment for all of them. In the anime, Sieg was there for some reason. He literally just took up screen time. He feels like he was just there. Added absolutely nothing and just wasted time. And this annoyed me because this was a very personal moment for two other characters. Yet this wet sock is just… there. Intrusive. Like he needs to be included in everything. It was an absolutely well done scene in the LN where Jeanne’s beliefs are far more established and she actually has personality outside of Steve-kun. Where he wasn’t there.

Basically what I’m saying is Apoc is really good when he’s not around. Seriously, it’s so much better. Achilles’s fight with Chiron was very personal, so was Achilles’ fight with Atalnta. When it’s personal, it’s good. Sieg has no personality or history with others. No emotion. No relations. Nothing. Just stale bread that’s winning against people who have nothing to do with him. And I can’t help but get frustrated at this goddamn show for that.

OKAY: Lightning round of shitty wet sock things:

Spends a fuck tonne of time asking people “are humans bad hurr durr” and comes out with the solution that he basically wants to be hero of justice and protect humanity or whatever. It’s never stated in the anime but this is what Siegfried wanted. So he’s stealing personal character motivations too. Waste of episodes that could have been used developing far more interesting characters.

Jeanne (in the anime ESPECIALLY) only exists to be his love interest. She isn’t allowed to be anything more. And her big character revelation is that she loves Sieg(big surprise). She acts against her neutrality a lot of the time because of him. When she strongly declines picking sides at the very beginning. The reasong for this is that he has nothing to do with the war. BUT GUESS WHAT? HE DOES BECAUSE HE DECIDES TO GET INVOLVED IN IT. So there is no reason to protect him. She acts against her own beliefs so that she could be waifu bait for this fucko. They say it’s all Laeticia or whatever but to NO ONE’S surprise, it was Jeanne all along (yaaaaay….).

He becomes more Siegfried than Siegfried. Well in life, Siegfried could spam Balmung as fast as he could swing it. But he can’t do that as a servant of the Saber class because it’s a big Noble Phantasm. But guess whaaaaaat? Sieg can do that because he apparently also has galvanism from Fran for some fucking reason, and to pour more salt on the wound, he can upgrade Balmung to EX Rank using a command seal. Which, mind you has never been done before nor foreshadowed. Karna’s Vasavi Shakti was still more powerful thought because this dude don’t play around for some ho. And ya’ll know how much of an asspull this was.

Speaking of that fight, from what I’ve heard in the LN, he actually had a clear shot of Siegfriend’s back but for some reason didn’t decide to take it. I can’t 100% confirm this but if that was the case, that’s another thing of making characters act OOC. Karna would never let someone win a fight. And this is him with a time limit while wet sock has a shroud from Jeanne that auto heals him, a bunch of help from a bunch of other people. Yadda, yadda, yadda, ass pulls. He wins the fight. Fuck off wet sock-kun.

Jeanne, for some ungodly reason is unaffected by really personal things like her mother talking to her and reasoning that she shouldn’t have gone off to war, seeing her fellow Frenchmen die in the hundred years war, and even seeing the room where her best friend murdered a bunch of kids after her own death. Yes, she knows it’s all fake. But when Shakespeare shows her images of Sieg burning at the stake instead of her and his decapitated head… she freaks the fuck out. Why? She knows it’s fake. She’s known this dude for like a week. You could argue that she feels personally responsible for involving him in the war. But once again. This doesn’t make sense. Sieg chose to involve himself. He chose to fight. He chose to fight a riskless war because he’s the main character. Of course in the shittiest reveal ever, she realises that she wuuuuuuuvs him. Fuck right off. AND DON’T GIVE THAT ‘LOVE WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS’ SHIT.

SPEAKING OF THIS BULLSHIT. There was this utterly stupid scene in the Light Novel where Sieg and jeanne see a couple or whatever. There was a baby or something. And Sieg asks Jeanne if servants could get pregnant. Of course, since she looooooooves him so much, her immediate thoughts were “DOES STEVE-KUN WANT TO IMPREGNATE ME!!??!?!?!?”. I wanted to hack out blood when i heard that was a thing. Thank god that it wasn’t in the anime.

He cucks Jeanne out of killing Shiroumine, the big bad antagonist of the series. The anime and promotional material is making them out to be rivals when they have zero ideological battles, have never even spoken to each other before, nor an allusion to some sort of rivalry at all. It just happens. At this point Sieg doesn’t even have any command spells and he pulls Blasted Tree(Fran’s NP, yeah he stole that too) out of his ass. Kill stealing bitch. Reported. Blocked. Emailed Harada. Email Jeff Kaplan. Perma-ban pls. Basically, Shiroumine was a shit villain because his plans weren’t really clear. Salvation of humanity was too broad in a sense on how the actual fuck he was gonna pull it off, and it wasn’t explained all too well. And with Sieg being the contender for the shittest protagonist I have ever had the displeasure of laying my eyes on, the main villain just became… fucking boring. I say villain but he was an antagonist. A direct result of bad character writing.

The so called romantic ending is an even shittier version of one of the endings in the Fate route in FSN. Like it’s a straight up copy. Imagery and everything.

Oh yeah, he turns into a dragon for whatever reason. Comes out of nowhere. Like zero build up. Then he fights monsters for the rest of his existence on the other side of the world or something. It’s really stupid. It’s meant to feel heroic but I don’t feel that at all. When a heroic sacrifice that’s meant to make me feel all sorts of emotions, makes me laugh instead, you’ve done a shit job at writing.

There’s probably more that I can’t remember at the top of my head. But there’s only so much that I can complain about. Oh who am I kidding, there’s a chat in one of my discord servers that we spend all our time at least a couple times a week on how shit this fuckhead is. He’s that bad, honestly.

To conclude, Apocrypha could have been great. It had a lot of promise. But it failed on nearly every end. The grandiose battles fall flat because nobody actually cares about a lot of the characters since more a lot of them are severely underdeveloped. And despite the narrative spending the most time with him, Steve-kun was a massive failure of a main character. He was a shounen protagonist in the wrong genre. Actually, he’s a generic light novel protagonist in Fate. And it didn’t work. Because fate is so much more deeper. So much lore. And I love that crazy, well thought out world. Wet sock-kun doesn’t have a place in it. Not in a narrative like this. Not in a world where depth can go seemingly forever. And especially not against characters who have actual strong personality and rich histories. And so, he fails. Sieg fails. The actual self-inserts of a character like Hakuno and Guda do a better job at fulfilling their role than an established character. And that’s fucking pathetic. I had more fun reading through Hakuno’s nurse fetish and Guda’s snarky attitude. Honestly, it is tiring. I was constantly frustrated at Apoc. I still am. The anime will be ending soon. And I’ll probably just laugh at how bad it is.

I won’t rate it or whatever. I’ll just say to not bother. But if you love fate, then go for it. There may be characters you saw in Grand Order that you want to know more about. And the servants are absolutely great. But honestly, just go read their source material. You’ll have more fun with that. But if you’re like me and are a salty piece of shit… the welcome to the club. There’s a lot to gnaw on.

Right so before I get massive flack for an opinion piece that I decided to write, and before anyone says that 'If you’re not going to say anything nice then don’t say anything at all'… I’ll just say to fuck off because it is my very right to speak about a creative piece. I’m not critiquing a person. I’m critiquing their writing in my own little colourful language. Critiquing a professional work, mind you. I wouldn’t do this to a fan work. And again, it’s an opinion. You don’t have to agree with it. If you liked wet sock then more power to you. I just personally thing that he’s the worst thing in the Fate franchise. Though people do say that Manaka is worse. I doubt you can limbo under something that’s like negative bajillion on any scale. Sieg just managed to offend me so hard when almost nothing does these days. And honestly, that’s an achievement on its own. Golf clap.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun writing this. But hey, maybe I’m just a petty little shit who got his waifu cucked by a fetus, amirite?

#[...ooc]#i had a lot of fun writing this #i'm probably gonna get alot of shit later on for this but fuck it #come at me bro #ok to reblog

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panharmonium · 4 years

Text

no man can know his destiny...

...because if we told him what it was, he might decide to tell destiny to bugger off!

all right, folks. i am obviously eight years late to this party (party? maybe not party; that’s...maybe not the best word), and i am aware that everybody who was ever in this fandom has probably already consumed all the finale reaction posts that they ever needed to read. i am putting this S5 finale round-up together for my own purposes anyway, because now that i’m no longer avoiding spoilers, i want to make sure i get all of my own thoughts down on paper before i accidentally run into anyone else’s.

fair warning before anyone decides to invest their time: this post is sixteen single-spaced pages long. i am putting it under a cut here, so feel free to scroll on by.

with that said, off we go!

in a land of myth and a time of magic (i fell in love with a ten-year-old tv show):

so, to preface this, i think it’s pretty fair to say that i very rarely complain about merlin.

i watched the first episode of merlin on a complete whim - i was by myself, on a trip to atlanta, and despite the fact that i usually never sit down and just decide to watch random tv, i was scrolling around on netflix before bed and saw merlin and thought “oh hey, that’s always been on my list as something i thought i might like.” i clicked it. i watched it. i thought it was going to be a silly, fun, low-investment show i could use to fill the spare time on my trip.

it was silly. and it was fun. it was not low-investment. i fell in LOVE.

and i know this comes through in the way i write about it, like - the vast majority of the blogging i have done about merlin has come from a place of THIS THING IS GREAT AND I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT’S GREAT. sometimes the story will go places that stress me out or make me sad, but usually that hasn’t impacted my enjoyment, because generally, when i evaluate stories, i react more to my perception of the story’s integrity, as opposed to whether or not i personally ‘liked’ the ending. so i might personally prefer stories that don’t end in tragedy, but if the story has earned its ending, with integrity, then i won’t feel any desire to criticize it. i will talk about how sad i am or how low it made me feel, but if the story has earned its ending then i can’t - i just can’t argue with it. i have to respect it.

and i think i’ve demonstrated that well enough in all the other blogging i’ve done about merlin. with 5.10 and 5.11 particularly; i felt those episodes were impossibly tragic and dark and SO unhappy, but i respected the storytelling, despite this. i wasn’t hopping on here to make posts like ‘ugh this is getting so dark this episode sucks!!!’ i was writing about the story they were crafting - which, yes, WAS getting dark, certainly - and about how impactful it was (even when that impact was just “OUCH”). i was still deeply engaged, at that time.

so - i think i have earned the right to say honestly that the following analysis does not come from a place of ‘this was SAD and that makes it automatically CRAPPY!!!’ that’s not how i assess things. 5.10 and 5.11 were devastating, but i respect them. i loved watching them. i would watch them again. i thought that the show had the potential to pull off something masterful, after those two episodes.

but the one thing this series has always struggled with a little bit is follow-through. bbc merlin is at its finest when they aren’t afraid to go barreling after the moral ambiguity and complexities that their show inherently contains (‘to kill the king,’ ‘the sorcerer’s shadow,’ ‘the disir,’ ‘the kindness of strangers,’ ‘the drawing of the dark,’ to name just a few), and they achieve real greatness in those moments. but they sometimes pull back from the difficult questions they pose. and i can’t tell if it’s that they’re deliberately chickening out, or if it’s just some variation of carelessness or ineptitude that makes them fumble the ball, but the end result is that they hit these amazing highs of “wow, i can’t believe we’re finally going there; we’re addressing the central conflict” and then all the complicated questions they asked just get dropped.

it happens in ‘the sorcerer’s shadow’ (which is an amazing episode otherwise), when kilgharrah kind of...word-of-god handwaves away merlin’s conflict, saying ‘we just gotta wait for arthur to be king, that’s the right way to go about this.’ and they double down on this by having merlin say that it was gilli, not merlin, who had betrayed their kind - which is just not - that is not what that episode had been saying, up until that point! the entire point of that episode was that yeah, merlin has in fact gotten himself into a position where he’s made a morally questionable decision to serve a regime that oppresses him and others like him. they show us how conflicted he feels when he’s confronted by this reality. they show us that he knows it’s true. it was brilliantly done - and then they pulled WAY back.

but even then i don’t think it was like...unforgivable, at that point. it doesn’t break the story’s integrity; i can definitely believe that merlin would take that tack - i’m not sure he’s quite ready to confront/accept the reality of his situation at that point. so i get it. it wouldn’t be a big deal - if the show had eventually addressed/followed through on this conflict in the end.

and i think the same is true of the episodes leading up to the finale. they were dark and complicated and tragic, but they were telling an important story; and none of the terrible things we saw happening to the characters were dead-ends, story-wise. there was a place for that story to go. there was room for morgana to have her arc resolve in a meaningful way. there was room for mordred’s arc to do the same. the place in which we found ourselves at the end of 5.11 was as dark and complicated as merlin had ever been, and it was still bursting with potential.

and then you watch the finale and it’s just - empty. i described it as a paper castle in some other post, and that’s what it felt like. no substance. it was like they stuffed us on a bullet train and whizzed us past material that should have taken an entire season to handle, and you didn’t see any of it or feel anything because the trip took ten seconds and the scenery was a blur.

it honestly felt like they thought they had another season coming and then someone popped in and told them “actually you have to wrap this up in two episodes.” i can’t think of another way to reasonably explain how dramatically the quality of the storytelling downshifts between 5.11 and 5.12. i wasn’t watching the show then, so i don’t know, but it’s - at least if that had been the case, i would UNDERSTAND what had happened. it’s just insanity, otherwise.

so anyway, with all that said, here are my own reasons for why i think the last two episodes were objectively bad writing, as opposed to just writing i don’t personally like. nobody is obligated to agree with me on any of these points, but i’m also not putting them up here to debate them, really - i truly believe that almost everything i watched in the last two episodes was poorly-conceived.

(there’s an entirely different discussion to be had, of course, about the relative merits of ending your, uh, hopeful fantasy story on a bummer of a death knell, and i might touch on that later, but that’s a little bit more subject to personal preference, and honestly, it’s not the point i’m trying to make here, because to be frank, these episodes are bad without even getting into who lives and who dies.)

i. plot contrivances: EVERYWHERE.

i don’t mean plot devices. plot devices are important, in a story. a plot device is something like how merlin throws excalibur into the lake in 1.09, and then is able to retrieve it in 3.13 because of a choice he made to show someone compassion in 2.09, and thus he is able to save the day and defeat the undead. excalibur is a plot device, in that scenario - the ability to use it in 3.13 unfolds organically.

a plot contrivance, on the other hand, is artificial. it’s unnaturally convenient. it doesn’t feel convincing. it’s what you reach for when you can’t think of a way to make something happen, but a writer is supposed to look at these things when they edit and think ‘hey. if i can’t make this happen without it being contrived, maybe it shouldn’t happen. maybe i need to look at this again.’

so like, from the very beginning of 5.12, we have:

the face-sucker slug. never seen one before. never heard of it before. never given any indication that any such creature ever existed. never given any indication that “stealing” magic was something that could even happen. no idea where morgana found it. created for and introduced in this very episode, just to give merlin a reason to go to the crystal cave; removed from the episode ten minutes after it’s introduced, forgotten.

gwaine’s sudden girlfriend. NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE. NEVER HEARD OF HER BEFORE. NEVER GIVEN ANY INDICATION THAT ANY SUCH CREATURE EVER EXISTED. where does she come from? why do we care? (surprise: we don’t.) created for and introduced in this very episode for the sole purpose of explaining how morgana could get the information she needed to interfere with everyone’s plans, which was a contrived idea in and of itself, because it relied completely on making gwaine act like the kind of dope who tells a civilian military secrets.

you just. you can’t. if your plot point can’t function without a) introducing a brand new character in the penultimate episode of your show and b) forcing a long-standing character to do something they just wouldn’t do, you can’t use it. you just can’t. you have to figure out something else.

this lady’s very existence is nonsense. absolutely, utterly contrived. to waste that much time on a character we’ve never seen before and don’t care about, in the last two hours of your five-season show...incredible.

morgana’s army. they outnumber camelot’s forces “five to one.” where did they come from? how did she amass such a force? in season 4 she was losing all her allies - the episode with annis and caerleon was specifically designed to show us how people were turning from her methods and aligning with arthur. and then she spent two years in a pit. how did she amass such a force in such a short period of time? what could she offer them? why do they fight for her? there is no explanation of who the “saxons” are or what they want - the show just needed an army for camlann.

aithusa. aithusa was, apparently, just a vehicle to enable mordred to obtain a blade forged in the dragon’s breath. beyond that, he served no purpose. he literally just vanishes, along with that entire storyline - the future of the dragons, everything - just dropped, forgotten, never mentioned again.

morgana in the crystal cave. “gee, i finally caught merlin, the guy who’s supposed to be my doom. i think i’ll just...trap him behind some rocks. wouldn’t want to kill him, while i have him completely powerless and at my mercy. how then would he escape from this super powerful magical cave and ensure that the next step in this impossibly weak plot unfolds?”

the crystal cave itself. what is the entire point of this detour? killing time while arthur and merlin are separated? i mean, the whole “merlin loses his magic for all of five minutes” thing was a contrivance itself, just to ensure that merlin and arthur had a reason to be separated during the battle. but even putting that aside, once merlin is in there, and balinor says ‘you have to go into the light to discover who you truly are, you have power of which you cannot conceive’ - what purpose did that serve? all we see merlin do once he gets to camlann is call down some lightning. he’s done that before. he...he did that in season one.

the entire detour in the crystal cave changed nothing. it was a contrivance to mark time so merlin didn’t arrive at camlann at the same time as everybody else.

arthur at camlann. the idea that we are supposed to believe that arthur somehow finds himself all alone on that battlefield, long enough for mordred to sneak up on him and stab him and for him not be found by a single other human being until merlin shows up. he is the KING. there is no conceivable circumstance where his army lets him go wandering around by himself after the battle has been mostly won. it doesn’t make sense. it isn’t believable. it’s a contrivance to make sure mordred has an opportunity to get him.

“only the sidhe possess such magic.” the SIDHE????? you guys. the last time we saw the sidhe was in that gooftastically wonderful filler episode where a pixie wanted to bone gaius. you can’t - you just - you can’t center your entire ‘this is how we save arthur’ plan on a race of beings that we haven’t heard of since early season 3 and which we never knew anything more about than that they once possessed a farting princess.

“not without the horses.” are you telling me. that the reason they don’t make it to this fabulous isle in time. is because. their horses. were conveniently scared away. that’s what killed the glorious once and future king. the horses ran off.

and the horses conveniently ran off because they were conveniently scared away by morgana, who conveniently happened to show up because she was conveniently put in a position to extract information from someone who conveniently knew where arthur was going - all of this, of course, predicated on the impossible-to-believe assumption that a) gwen would ever tell anybody where arthur was going, when the stakes were this high, when nobody needed to know and camelot had already fallen prey to spies multiple times, and b) that gwaine and percival would, if they did for some reason know where arthur was headed, be so foolish as to literally serve themselves up to morgana on a plate, when they know that the whole point of this scheme is that they WANT morgana to hang out in brineved wasting her time in order to allow arthur to reach the isle safely.

I SAY AGAIN: if your plot point cannot function without making characters do things we just do not believe they would do, you can’t use it. you can’t. you have to revisit what you’re doing. you can’t just make anything happen that you want to in order to drive the story to the place you want it to go. it has to make sense.

kilgharrah. is called just in time to deliver a pat explanation of the ending, but not in time to shuttle arthur over to the isle? merlin could have called for a ride ages ago. merlin and arthur weren’t traveling fast, or far. it’s not like kilgharrah was having that much trouble getting around. we see that he handles carrying the two of them just fine. we see that he flies away, zoop, no problem. there is no reason for him not to have been called even a single hour sooner, other than that the plot demanded that he could not be, because the plot demanded that arthur not get there in time.

it breaks the boundaries of disbelief. it takes you right out of the story. it reminds you, inappropriately, that all of this is a thing someone planned (poorly). all of it is contrived.

ii. dropped plotlines

i can’t believe i actually have to say this.

i’ve seen tv shows tank before, but usually, when tv shows tank, it’s just that the quality of their writing has declined, and they’ve resorted to resolving their plotlines in ill-conceived ways.

i have never, in my life, seen a tv show DROP all of its major plotlines before it ends. i have never seen a tv show just. FORGET. to address their premise. never. i still can’t believe it actually happened. i’m sitting here trying to remember if the merlin finale was actually some kind of anxiety-induced fever dream i had while i was gearing myself up to watch the last few episodes.

merlin bbc had, at its outset, two major plotlines. these would be supplemented later by other throughlines (many of which were also dropped), but the two major ones always stayed the same, one for arthur and one for merlin:

for arthur, the question of him one day becoming the greatest king in history and uniting the land of albion

for merlin, the question of him one day liberating the magical community from oppression and being able to live free from fear

those were the two constant throughlines in this show, from episode one. the struggle to unite the land of albion, and the struggle to make the land a free and just one for ALL of its people, not just those without magic.

this show, somehow, ended without actually addressing either of these things.

it’s amazing. i don’t even know how they managed it. somehow, this show ended without actually ending.

to elaborate on this (and other dropped plots):

a) the once and future king: we never see a united albion. the show is driving at it, in seasons 4 and 5, when arthur makes peace with annis in S4, and then gets annis’s permission to travel through her lands in 5.01, and then helps Mithian’s father in S5, and makes peace with odin in 5.04, and then tries to make peace with the sarrum in 5.08, and it’s all making sense, and you expect that plotline to continue until we see its eventual fulfillment at the end of the show. you would expect, if this were supposed to be such an important thing, that the big struggle at the end of the series would have been all the peoples of albion united together against a threat.

but we never see any of these kingdoms again. we never hear a peep out of them. no one ever mentions them. it’s like they all just vanished into the wind. as far as we’re aware, camelot fights morgana’s army on their own - it’s like annis and odin and godwyn and rodor and those five kings that came together to sign the treaty in 2.10 never existed.

the dragon says at the end, “all you have dreamt of building has come to pass,” but we’re just like - WHERE? we literally didn’t see it! it was never shown to happen! you can’t just say that the most important outcome of your five-season series happened when it never did! it demonstrably NEVER DID! you can’t…..oh my god, you can’t...try to end your show offscreen, lol; i don’t know what else to say!

look - this is something i wrote before i knew how the series ended, when i was considering the possibility of arthur dying:

i wrote that before i even knew what happened. that’s not the result of, you know, retroactive complaining because they killed a character and i didn’t like it. i was doubting the idea that they would even be able to kill arthur, because i legitimately didn’t believe the show had shown us the uniting of albion yet (and they hadn’t, lol).

it just...it truly doesn’t make sense. something got tangled as they approached these last episodes. in 5.10, finna tells merlin, “without you, emrys, arthur cannot build the new world we all long for,” indicating that it hasn’t been built yet. but that scene takes place just a few weeks before the finale - you’re saying “the new world” hadn’t yet been accomplished at that point, but now, a few week later, it has? arthur didn’t DO ANYTHING in that interval! we saw camelot fight off a bunch of invaders (alone) like they’ve done a billion times before. there was nothing to hint that now albion is united.

and if finna was referring to the “new world” meaning a magical world, i mean - arthur didn’t do anything to build that, either. he died.

something happened. some wire got crossed. i don’t know what it was, but it meant that the show ended without actually closing out Main Plotline #1.

b) one day, we will be free: this show also somehow managed to end without addressing the plight of the magical community, which was THE central conflict of the show for all five seasons. more than that, it was the show’s premise - it was how they crafted their entire idea; it was one of two defining features of their pitch to BBC: that they would “wind back the clock” to when the characters were young, and that magic in this universe would be outlawed.

they literally abandoned the show’s premise. the episode directly preceding the finale was entirely about camelot’s wrongdoing and the right of magic-users to stand up and fight for their rights. it is not a crime to fight for the right to be who you are. and then we literally never heard a word about this struggle again. it was dropped like a hot sack of bricks.

IMPOSSIBLE.

and yet

it’s just left, twisting in the wind. we have no idea what happened. the one and only glimpse of camelot that we get at the end of this show has nothing to do with magic; it’s grim and somber people chanting ‘long live the queen’ in the throne room. and then we’re gone from that place, forever, never to return. it’s like they don’t even remember that ‘freedom for magical folk!’ was the driving source of conflict for the entire show. you would never have known that “magical oppression” was ever a feature in this show, if you just watched the end. camelot’s wrongs are never addressed, never referred to, never amended. the fate of the magical community is never hinted at. we don’t have any inkling of what happened to those people. we literally do not even have any indication of whether the magic ban was lifted.

it’s like none of that ever existed. it’s like the show just FORGOT its entire premise.

this truly might be the most unbelievable thing about the finale, for me. i’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it. in a roomful of writers and editors and producers, not a single person pointed out “hey uhhhh...we haven’t actually resolved either of our plots?”

i was exposed to enough vague reactions from fans to expect the finale to be disappointing. i assumed that the show would resolve its major plotlines in ways that i either didn’t approve of or found unsatisfying.

i did NOT expect them not to resolve their major plotlines at all.

i have never seen a tv show literally forget to end. never. never seen that happen before in my life.

c.) i am the last of my kind: the reveal of merlin as a dragonlord ushered in a third important plotline - his responsibility to the dragons, his duty to protect them and help them thrive. and the question was always ‘all right, so as a dragonlord, how is merlin going to ensure the survival of the dragons as a species, since they’ve been almost exterminated - .’ and that was also dropped. like a hot potato. like it never was. we never get clarity on what the heck was going on with aithusa, and then at camlann, aithusa just vanishes. gone. literally never to be seen, mentioned, or wondered about again.

d) i am old, merlin: this is a smaller thing, but in 5.10 the show starts this subplot about kilgharrah being unwell and merlin suddenly confronting the idea that kilgharrah is not, in fact, immortal. and it was actually very poignant and made me emotional despite how kilgharrah kind of drives us insane. they set us up for the idea that we are going to lose him. they set us up to expect that we will eventually see merlin arrive at a place where he doesn’t have that voice in his ear anymore, kind of like when luke goes to cloud city and obi-wan can’t help him.

but then, in the finale, kilgharrah just shows up like he always does, and there’s no mention of anything that came before. he’s fine.

it’s - it’s inconsistent, it’s not appropriate; there’s no emotional throughline. the exchange they have in 5.10 is such a beautiful moment, when a wavering merlin asks “what will i do without you?”

and kilgharrah says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, “you will remember me.”

that’s such a powerful thing. for someone like merlin, for someone who has lost so many people who mattered to him - you can feel that line expand to cover miles and miles of ground. it’s about more than just kilgharrah.

but having kilgharrah then show up at the end of the finale to deliver his neat little explanatory summary the same way he always does dilutes that previous moment down to almost non-meaning. there’s no emotional consistency. they emotionally prep us for this figure’s departure, and instead he shows up, the same as always, with no reference to the fact that a few episodes ago we were getting ready to watch him leave us.

it’s not good writing. it just isn’t good writing.

iii. i want you to always earn your ending

i think it’s hard to come to grips with the idea that bbc merlin was specifically a show whose kind of...big premise was being a deliciously torturous slow burn up to some massive and long-awaited reveal, and then it fizzled just before it gave the audience what it had been leading up to for five seasons. it’s really just...wow. i’ve seen shows fizzle before, obviously, but the fact that this one was specifically built on the idea that you were waiting for something momentous (and inevitable!) to happen - which then doesn’t happen? that’s just...hoo boy.

the long-awaited, promised “payoff” doesn’t happen in any way that is convincing or satisfying or remotely plausible. it’s a little walk in the woods, and it ultimately doesn’t matter, because as soon as it’s over, so is the show, and everybody except merlin is long dead.

not with a bang, but with a whimper, indeed.

for a show that had its audience waiting on tenterhooks for five seasons for merlin’s secret to be stripped away, the fact that the show’s biggest “payoff” ended up carrying so little weight and feeling so unconvincing is truly a shame. there was no way for the show to give this concept the weight it deserved by flying through it in thirty minutes. the audience knows that there’s no way this could have been resolved so quickly, so everything that happens between the “reveal” (such as it was) and the end feels...false. it doesn’t seem real. it’s not believable. it feels (again, to use the word that truly sums up the entire spirit of this finale) contrived. rushed and squished together to be neatly tied up in the time they had available.

and that’s poor craftsmanship. stories shouldn’t feel like ‘well, i needed to reach x destination no matter what, so i made this that and the other thing happen to ensure that we got there.’ a reader/viewer shouldn’t be able to sense the presence of the author. they shouldn’t be able to feel the hand of god reaching in and arranging pieces to force a conclusion or extract an emotion that hasn’t been earned.

stories, if they are crafted appropriately, should feel like they have no author at all. like they just are. like everything that happens is the natural next step to whatever came before, as if events could not possibly have unfolded any other way. and i don’t feel like the “reveal” and arthur’s reaction to it met those criteria. all the supposedly super sad and emotional moments they were having at the end made me feel absolutely nothing, because the things arthur says don’t feel real. they haven’t been earned in-story. i felt like i was watching that sequence from a hundred miles away...just like...clinical. removed. like i was taken completely out of the story. like i was in the lighting booth of a theater watching some scripted scene play out below me.

(and this might be the time to mention that this has NOTHING to do with the actors. the entire cast was killing it. they were AMAZING. their performance threatened to wring emotion out of me even despite me being completely unconvinced by the idea of what was happening.)

but that aside - how can you stay immersed in something when you can feel the creator’s hand coming down and forcing a resolution that doesn’t make sense, that hasn’t been earned? it snaps you right out of the suspension of disbelief that all stories require you to maintain in order for you to engage with them. the writers needed arthur to say these things sometime before the end of the show, and so he says them, regardless of whether or not it would ever actually happen like that. but i didn’t believe it, because it wouldn’t have happened like that, and so the emotional impact was zero.

here’s the truth: you can’t use lines like “i want you to always be you” and expect me to get weepy about it when you haven’t earned that kind of resolution. it’s a false tearjerker. the writers are relying on our previous emotional attachment to these characters and our burning desire to see merlin validated in order to slip a contrived resolution past us without actually doing the work to make it plausible. they’re playing on our affections in order to cover up the structural shortcomings of the story they cobbled together.

i don’t like when a story tries to manipulate me like that. i’m not going to play that game.

iv. you are destined to be albion’s greatest king (*thor face* are you, though?)

i think there are probably some people out there for whom arthur’s death would have been a dealbreaker no matter what the rest of the story looked like. i respect that.

i’m in the camp where i could have accepted the ‘legend-compliant’ ending, if only it had been earned. as it is, arthur is never allowed to fully realize himself before he dies. the show keeps saying, and i quote, “one day you will be the greatest king this land has ever known,” but arthur skips off to avalon after having reigned for a whopping total of three years, during which time he is not shown to accomplish the only goal that was prophesied for him (uniting the land of albion) and during which time he also becomes further entrenched in his father’s anti-magic views (along with the hypocrisy of using magic for his own purposes), as opposed to ever seeing the error of his ways. he doesn’t right his father’s wrongs. he doesn’t usher in justice and freedom for all camelot’s people. he doesn’t change the status quo in camelot much at all, to be honest - and then he dies. and they try to tell us “there will never be another like [him].”

how? how can that not fall completely flat? he hasn’t accomplished his goal yet! he hasn’t become what they’ve kept telling us he will become.

so i can understand the ultimate plan of arthur shuffling off this mortal coil and being prophesied to return, and i could even accept that as an appropriate ending, but not when it hasn’t been earned. the way it actually unfolded, watching this moment feels like we skipped a season somewhere. it feels like a sham.

we’re being asked to give arthur credit for something he did not actually achieve, and it makes the whole thing feel like a farce.

v. gratuitousness and inconsistency

i had no emotional reaction when i realized they had actually killed gwaine.

that is insane, because you know how much i love him. but his death was so ridiculous that I actually started laughing in disbelief. and that in and of itself should be a sign that something wasn’t working. when your emotional beats are landing this wrong - falling this flat - something has slid fundamentally sideways with your storytelling.

i laughed when they killed my favorite knight! but what other reaction was i supposed to have? it was laughably silly! the premise itself was already foolish - that gwaine and percival would even come out here and endanger arthur in that way - and then gwaine dies because morgana used a nathair to extract information from him? we’ve seen morgana use the nathair twice before! she tortured elyan with it. she used it on alator. neither of them died. it’s never been indicated that being tortured with this creature will kill you. which isn’t to say that it can’t be the case, but from a writing perspective, if you’re going to use a sudden inconsistency to kill a major character, it’s noticeable! it’s jarring! and it makes us feel, once again, that the writers just grasped at any little thing they could think of to make what they wanted to happen happen.

and then there’s the whole question of why they wanted gwaine to die in the first place. what purpose did it serve? gwaine didn’t have to die in order for morgana to get the information the writers wanted her to have. and you’d assume that if they still killed him after that, that there would be a reason for it, or that it would at least...matter, somehow, but - WE LITERALLY NEVER HEAR ABOUT HIM AGAIN LOL. i wasn’t even sure he was dead at first. that’s how insignificant it felt. i felt like zuko in the ember island players.

that’s it. we never see him or percival again after that scene. there’s this weird moment where percival examines a footprint and the implication is that he’s going to follow morgana or something, but then it never happens. it’s like the showrunners ran out of time and were like ‘ok well, we just won’t be able to get back to that dangling thread.’ they gratuitously axed their most developed knight and then forgot they did it.

that’s why i laughed. it was so unbelievably bad - there was literally nothing else for me to do.

vi. let the bodies hit the floor (but like, anticlimactically)

i don’t feel like i need to examine mordred and morgana’s fates too closely, because i suspect the subject of “they deserved better” has already been done to death, and that’s kind of a different conversation than what i’m dealing with here. i’m not here right now to argue that they should have lived (though of course, yeah, i have my opinions on what would have made a better story), i’m just here to deal with how ineffectively the story we did get was executed.

one thing that amazes me is that when i watched the S5 deleted scenes, i realized that the showrunners did in fact originally have the right ideas about making morgana and mordred’s arcs deeper/more nuanced, but somehow these ideas never made it into the final cut. there are two deleted scenes that change so much about what could have been - one where arthur and merlin are talking about morgana and arthur is expressing regret and confusion about what happened to her, and merlin says it’s not arthur’s fault, that “there were others better placed to help morgana,” indicating his own guilty feelings.

and the other one was after mordred defected to morgana, where he has a whole conversation with her about how he thinks there is still GOOD in arthur!!!! he’s uncertain about what he’s doing! I JUST

i can’t believe

they had the seeds

of this better story

and they consciously decided not to pursue them. it’s not like they didn’t have the idea. it’s not like they just never thought of it. they thought of it, filmed it, and deliberately removed it. unfathomable.

it’s also pretty remarkable that the big baddie they’ve been touting for the last three seasons just pegs out from a stab wound in about 5 seconds as we’re being hustled on to something else. there is no space devoted to morgana’s death scene (such as it was…). it’s a parenthesis. it feels like, ‘oh we gotta get this out of the way quick hurry up let’s move on.’

and the thing is, i am not wholly opposed to the idea of morgana ultimately destroying herself - it’s not necessarily my first choice, but there are ways they could have gone that route and still told a meaningful story - but if they wanted to go that way, her death would have to matter. it would have to be treated like the terrible failure it represents. it would have to be given the weight of tragedy.

but structurally, the way this scene is set up, there is no way for this to happen. the viewers are already hyper-strung out on tension, when she appears, because they’re suddenly starting to get this horrible realization that one of the show’s two central characters might actually be about to die, but nobody wants to stop clinging to hope despite their bad feelings so there’s just this desperate, screamingly loud ticking clock running in the background, and when morgana shows up in the middle of that clenching fear, there’s absolutely no way her death can receive the attention she deserves. the audience doesn’t have room for something like that. they don’t have room to feel anything on top of what they’re already feeling. they’re already about to explode. they’re already maxed out on investment. they can’t focus on her; they want her to disappear because something more urgent is going on.

and so the show hustles us past her, and her death is just this blip. it barely registers. if you sneezed, you would miss it.

(and then mordred, for his part, doesn’t even have the benefit of a structural problem to explain the anticlimax of his death. he just gets taken out like the trash. for a character that they just spent all this time developing and making sympathetic - boy.)

i think...the thing, ultimately, is this: if this show truly felt that what they had to do was take their previously hopeful premise and stun their audience with the death of the hero, then they should have understood that trying to stack other things on top of that is too much. trying to squash morgana’s death right up against arthur’s is foolish. it’s ridiculous to expect your audience to be able to process morgana’s death and arthur’s in-progress dying at the same time. these two things happen within two minutes of each other. the audience has been following these characters for five years. it’s unreasonable to expect your audience to hold so much emotion at once.

vii. you’ll just have to trust me

the last thing i want to say is a more general thing.

the rest of this analysis focused on the ways in which the finale is poorly-crafted, rather than on my personal feelings about who they did dirty. it’s not really about my own personal thoughts re: the merits of killing gwaine and morgana and mordred and arthur or stranding merlin across the centuries; it’s about if these things (and all the other things in these episodes) were done effectively, and the answer, sadly, is no. the show could have killed all these people and still written something i would have respected (even though it would have been devastating), but that’s not what happened.

but here, at the end, i think i can make room for a little sentiment.

so what i want to reflect on here is this: ultimately, i don’t end up rejecting stories just because they do things i don’t like. the pre-finale episodes were filled with things i didn’t like. i hated how merlin turned mordred and kara in instead of letting them run. i hated how he let the execution proceed. i hated how arthur refused to see the injustice of his own actions. i hated how merlin was getting so wrapped up in ‘make sure arthur doesn’t die’ that everything else was fading away, that he was doing things he could never have done in good conscience before. but i was still deeply wrapped up in these stories, because i believed they were plausible and true. i accepted them. it made sense to me, that these things would be happening, dark and unpleasant as they were.

i don’t start rejecting stories just because they go places i don’t want them to go. i start rejecting stories when i feel they’ve betrayed my trust.

writers and readers/viewers can only ever move together if they trust each other. i allow stories to take me places i don’t want to go because i trust the authors to keep me safe while we travel. i know that they may take me somewhere i don’t want to be, but i trust that they will never take me somewhere i don’t need to be. i trust that they are taking me somewhere intentionally, with the story’s integrity in mind. a creator i trust can take their story anywhere, because i know they will take care. a creator i trust can end their story tragically, because they remember that i am experiencing it alongside them. they don’t surprise-punt me off the edge of the cliff so i can crash, alone, into the painful conclusion. they carry me the whole way, and by the time we get to the end of the line, we can both look back and see that the road that led us here was straight and true. i don’t fault them for taking me here. it was the right place to go.

the end of merlin didn’t feel like that to me. putting aside the fact that it was all so contrived that it didn’t even feel real (illustrated clearly enough in the ten pages above) - the truth is that even if it had displayed the highest quality writing in the world, the way this show ended felt like the audience had been abandoned. the bond of trust between the creator and the consumer was severed. the show forgot to take care.

i’m a ‘galaxy far far away’ girl first and foremost, so i’ll borrow an excerpt from the world according to star wars in order to make my point:

kasdan: i think you should kill luke and have leia take over.

lucas: you don’t want to kill luke.

kasdan: okay, then kill yoda.

lucas: i don’t want to kill yoda. you don’t have to kill people. you’re a product of the 1980’s. you don’t go around killing people. it’s not nice.

kasdan: no, i’m not. i’m trying to give the story some kind of edge to it…

lucas: by killing somebody, i think you alienate the audience. (x)

i think merlin forgot this.

i’m not saying that merlin shouldn’t have killed anybody at the end of their show. i’m not even saying that they shouldn’t have killed arthur. i’m saying that they forgot to take care.

merlin bbc betrayed their audience. you cannot take a show whose underlying theme has consistently been the promise of better things and then turn around and end it like that without taking special care of the people who are watching. you cannot just take an audience who has spent five years listening to someone bright and full of unflinching hope say - without any indication that anyone should doubt the certainty of this statement - “one day things will be better” and expect them to walk into this kind of ending safely.

by killing someone, i think you alienate the audience. and this doesn’t mean that nobody can ever die. but it does mean that if you’re going to kill someone, you have to understand that there is going to be an automatic pain reaction from your viewers/readers/etc, and if you want to maintain their trust, you have to take so much care. you have to be sure that you know exactly what you’re doing. you have to be sure that it’s the right thing. the only thing. you have to make sure that it doesn’t betray the fundamental promises you’ve made whilst crafting the rest of your story.

the end of merlin is truly stunning in a) its utter reversal/unfulfillment of every major promise that comprised its premise and b) the casualness with which it throws its characters away in the last episode. it’s not just “killing someone.” it’s a slaughter. we have to watch almost half the cast die onscreen, and then at the very end literally everybody is dead except merlin himself.

and this is merlin! not game of thrones! merlin is a “family show;” that’s what the writers/directors/producers keep calling it when you listen to the episode commentaries and they talk about how they can’t show certain things or make it too bloody. they wanted to follow in the tradition of “big, kind of epic family-entertaining shows, that—across generations—work on lots of different levels.” but i cannot imagine a young person who has watched this show for five years coming into the finale to see mordred and gwaine and morgana and arthur violently executed, and to see gwen in mourning, and merlin anguished and then more alone than he ever was even when he was hiding his secret, and then, whoop, there’s the credits, that’s all folks. aren’t you glad you got on this ride?

the show ends without fulfilling any of the promises it made repeatedly for years. the liberation of magic, the uniting of albion, and, for merlin, especially, the long-predicted day when he would be known and recognized for who he was - all forgotten. all abandoned. the finale finishes without giving the audience any of the things that they have spent five years being told to expect. the show rewards five years of emotional investment with death and desolation. it breaks all of its promises. it doesn’t take care.

i was lucky enough to have been so disconnected by how shockingly bad these episodes were that i mostly sat there shock-laughing at them in disbelief, the first time i watched. but going through them again to put this write-up together was just like - that’s when a deep sadness kicked in, for me. not at the ending itself, exactly, because, as i’ve said before, it was so poorly put-together that i can’t even see it as real. but just - at the idea that i still had to see it, period. that i had to witness this thing that i loved so much descend into this misery, for all that i didn’t recognize it as something plausible or true. that i still had to watch merlin drag arthur all over creation, still trying, still scrabbling for that sliver of hope, only to have arthur bite the dust like ten feet from their destination. that all merlin ever wanted in his life was to be accepted and loved for who he is, and that he put all of this on hold so he could (supposedly) bring about a world where it would be possible, and then he never gets it. that a life of hiding himself and believing that everybody around him hated who he was inside - that was as good as it was ever going to get, for him.

the writers just - piled it on. ‘you can watch mordred die, even though we just went to all this effort to make you root for him! and now you can watch gwaine die (why????? we don’t know!!! it doesn’t change the story, but why don’t you watch it happen anyway!). and now you can watch morgana die! but don’t look too long, because arthur is dying! and now you can see camelot cold and in mourning - but only for one second, because now you can see merlin, who we never showed meeting any of his friends ever again, wandering around as a solitary old man thousands of years after everybody else is dead and the universe we spent the last five seasons living in no longer exists!!!!!!’

unbelievable.

it doesn’t upset me in the sense of “it’s so terrible that the story ended that way” because i know it didn’t, really. it was contrived and false enough that i laughed through most of the episode. i know it isn’t the way things would have gone, and i won’t have any trouble forgetting it; whereas if it had been well-done, i wouldn’t have been able to dismiss it so easily. but i still had to watch it, regardless. you’re forced to watch it, because you care, and the creators know you care enough not to look away, and they use that trust to keep you glued there while they gut-punch you over and over and over again and then peace out without concluding any of their plotlines, saying, “isn’t it clever??? we really fooled you, didn’t we? technically, we fulfilled the prophecies - nobody ever said any of the characters would get to enjoy the new world they would build! i bet you’re so surprised!”

it leaves you stunned.

it’s so...mean.

it’s so careless.

i don’t have any desire to subject myself to that a second time. after i’m done with this post, i know i’m never going to watch those episodes again. they weren’t good, first of all; and if you need more clarification on that, please see the first ten pages of this document. but more importantly, i don’t feel the need to subject myself once again to the callous disregard for the trust i gave this show’s creators.

if i’m supposed to trust a creator to carry me over rough terrain, i’m trusting them to carry me all the way to the end. they can’t violently dump me to the ground two feet before the finish line, run me over with an ATV, and then expect me to willingly climb back into their arms.

viii: if you want something done right

in conclusion, i guess the one nice thing about this is that we can crawl the last two feet ourselves.

for me, sadly, i think canon!merlin is always going to end at 5.11. the last two episodes don’t feel believable to me. i couldn’t watch them and be convinced that i was watching something plausible; i felt like i was watching two hours of scripted theater. which is, of course, what we’re always doing - but if the story had been crafted appropriately, we shouldn’t have realized it. we shouldn’t have been able to feel the writer’s hand reaching in and making improbable things happen. we shouldn’t have been laughing in disbelief as supposedly “sad” things were happening in front of us, and we definitely shouldn’t have been almost falling off the couch because the last scene was so jarring we thought it was an advertisement. (the TRUCK, people. blaring across the screen and bulldozering through medieval fantasy-adventure show merlin bbc. nothing on earth or in high heaven could have prepared me for that moment.)

but the one good thing about a piece of media that ended so unsatisfactorily is that it lights a fire under people’s butts to go ahead and sort of...row the boat themselves. i was afraid, before i watched this, that seeing it would make me never want to go back to merlin again. i put off finishing season 5 for an entire year because i was in the middle of writing a fic and i thought that if the end of the show upset me, i would never want to write another word. but now that i’m finished, i’m relieved to be able to say that the finale, while it will always be a bitterly disappointing sore spot, was also SO laughably bad that i don’t feel the slightest compunction about just...letting it lie unrecognized. if it were well-crafted and i was just ignoring it because it made me sad, i’d feel guilty for being petty. but it was Just Actually That Bad, so my conscience is clear.

and so is the path to more fun things, i hope, because that is the point of fandom, in the end, to have fun with something you love in the company of other people who love it the same way.

i hope i haven’t written the last merlin thing i’ll ever write. i hope there’s more inside me that i want to say. i hope i haven’t come in too late to make connections. i hope i’ll enjoy rewatching (most of) this show someday. i couldn’t imagine that any of these things would be true, when i knew the end was going to be a let-down, but now that i’ve finished, i feel like there’s infinite room to play, and that, at least, makes me smile.

i’ve said before that this was a hell of a ride. it ended in a trainwreck, sure, but i’m not sorry i got on.

#the once and future slowburn #merlin S5 #meta

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