"Untitled" (Trophy)
Gen ● T+ ● WC: 100 ● Warning: Violence // Written for @merlinmicrofic 2024, for the prompt 'Tradition'.
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Mud underfoot—post-storm damp. Warm, not cold. Arthur’s boot lifts, slicked heel to toe with blood.
A boy, dead at his feet: pulled drowned from the well, with a cracked skull and sticky, congealing hair clumps. A Druidic medallion crosses his dislocated shoulder.
“Orders?” The knight’s sleeve: soaked to the elbow.
Arthur can’t feel his knees. Spare the children.
In one squashed eye, the boy’s pupil runs into iris, floating in a red socket. A spoon of jelly. Arthur—with a mouth of hot, pre-vomit bile—snaps the trinket off his white neck. A trophy for his father. It’s tradition.
okay @thefollow-spot you were probably joking but ahaha i am a Nerd and i love your drabble SO MUCH and i'm sorry but here is that essay 🫡
we see bbc merlin open straight into season one with the understanding that king uther historically carried out (and continues to carry out) a genocide of sorcerers. arthur's belief and participation in this genocide as prince - and his eventual perpetuation of it as king, no matter how non-explicitly - could easily be simplified as just a matter of his upbringing. fics like yours highlight exactly where it would have been so much more complicated than that. i know we can't project modern understandings of collective violence either backward in time or onto fictional narratives, but i like thinking about it from this perspective, because it really goes to show the complexity of arthur's developing sense of ethics as he comes into adulthood himself. so let's dive in:
before we get to your fic, some set-up. genocide is an extreme example of collective violence. uther initiated this violence after a specific stressor, which we know was the magic-involved death of his wife in childbirth. as the king of his kingdom, he had the power and influence to immediately write his violent ideology into law; and this mandate, which could not be disobeyed at risk of death, became equivalent not just to a call for violence but to the necessity of it for survival among the collective of camelot's people.
in lieu of individual stressors or escalatory factors of their own, knights and ordinary people alike were coerced into participation by virtue of living under the king's rule. humans are instinctually averse to committing acts of violence, though, so what follows as a process is the taking of immediate steps to justify participation, in order to make it less psychologically aversive. this would have included things like disconnecting from moral reasoning, becoming desensitized, and especially, revising shared definitions of violence. nobles in the show justify their low regard for the human lives of peasants through classism, dehumanizing an entire social group simply based on lesser social status; in a similar cognitive process, though obviously for very different reasons, the people of camelot both accepted and came to endorse violence against sorcerers - whether in the form of reporting upon their neighbors, coming to watch as the pyre burned, or participating directly - by collectively dehumanizing anyone with magic.
which brings us to arthur, who as knight and prince should be fully desensitized to violence against sorcerers at the start of the show, and who as uther's and ygraine's son has a variety of personally-motivated reasons to engage in it as well. and yet - almost immediately, we see him challenge a type of commonly accepted violence by repeatedly saving and choosing to value merlin's (a peasant's) life, against the orders of his father. with morgana's influence, we also see him eventually choose to illegally help to save the young druid mordred. no matter how often we hear arthur uphold his father's beliefs in conversation, we often don't see him explicitly target a user of magic with violence unless they have first attacked him or threatened to attack his friends, his father, or his people. we actually see him, despite all odds, trend toward softening his attitudes toward magic into season two, where merlin, of all people, is the one to discourage that.
arthur's beliefs and behaviors in canon fluctuate a lot over time, and generally the focus is far more on the direct influences of uther or merlin or morgana than on the mechanics and traumas of an individual breaking away from extremism-driven collective violence. i LOVED these moments in your drabble for how cleanly it let those be shown. here we go with a line-by-line look:
Mud underfoot—post-storm damp. Warm, not cold. Arthur’s boot lifts, slicked heel to toe with blood.
knowing what we know about canon, your opening is evocative of a battlefield right off the bat. warmth tells us the violence is still very recent, and already, the passive voice with 'arthur's boot lifts' puts some distance between arthur and his actions in this gruesome environment. the instances of assonance and consonance here, conveyed through a pacing of lines that feels very staccato, already have us feeling as much on edge as arthur might.
we don't know yet whether arthur is prince or king here, or whether or not we can assume his presence is one of privilege, power, or even victory at all - so we read on.
A boy, dead at his feet: pulled drowned from the well, with a cracked skull and sticky, congealing hair clumps. A Druidic medallion crosses his dislocated shoulder.
the scene sharpens quickly, and neither boys nor wells belong on battlefields - this is a village, or settlement of some sort. the consonance of the 'd,' 'l,' 'k'/hard 'c,' and 's' sounds, within lengthening sentences, help pull us straight in as the horror of a dead body unfolds.
our first clue: the boy is a Druid.
“Orders?” The knight’s sleeve: soaked to the elbow.
and here's our second clue, which begs the question: is that sleeve only soaked from having pulled the boy out of the well, or is this knight, under arthur's command, also the man who killed him?
more assonance and consonance link this line beautifully with the next one:
Arthur can’t feel his knees. Spare the children.
and this is our turning point. arthur is numb - maybe dissociating, as he doesn't issue a verbal answer. we have to question, to realize alongside arthur: have the knights just ignored direct orders, in order to murder a child? is arthur now experiencing the consequences of trying to violate a long-established status quo?
it seems here like for arthur - consistent with his canon role in the saving of young mordred - 'youth' is a qualifier that overrides 'potential sorcerer,' making the outcome of this present child's death, to him, very aversive; while for his knights, no such override exists. for the knights, noncompliance with the imperative to exterminate sorcerers would have been the most aversive outcome. this is the difficulty of trying to cycle-break when the collective has already undertaken the traumas of adapting to extremism: arthur as an individual can suddenly change neither the extremist behaviors nor the extremist ideology of his knights, who were made to learn/adopt them under uther and now willingly endorse them. during this event, he can only wrangle internally with his own changing understanding of the violence he endorses/perpetuates as the leader of these men.
In one squashed eye, the boy’s pupil runs into iris, floating in a red socket. A spoon of jelly. Arthur—with a mouth of hot, pre-vomit bile—snaps the trinket off his white neck.
the attention to detail here is so effectively jarring. we get a moment of arthur zeroing in on this one gory aspect of the boy's face, and then he leans down to take this trinket - to snap it off, which gives the impressions of quick action, of a desire to avoid lingering or touching the skin - as if he isn't thoroughly disgusted with what he's seeing and experiencing. as if he's maintaining the show of being calm and collected about all of this, either intentionally in this moment or by habit alone.
A trophy for his father. It’s tradition.
now this... this was the moment i became feral. this is arthur as prince; almost as boy himself. in the few sentences before these, he's standing in the aftermath of what we can assume was a massacre of druids, and he's disgusted not by his complicity with his father's genocide of magic users in general, but by how that genocide has caused the death of someone he believes should have been excluded from its reach.
by starting to assert that some potential magic users should be treated humanely, arthur is starting the work of cycle-breaking internally; but already his actions have been policed, and his orders 'corrected,' by one or more members of the collective who should have obeyed him. that 'orders?' from the knight could be read as a wakeup call: both an unspoken invitation back into compliance, and a warning. a reminder that his power comes from his father, and from people he does not yet control. he must either find a way to deal with this aversive outcome and forge ahead with questioning his worldview alone, or he will fall back into the trap of full participation with the group.
and immediately, we have our answer: though disgusted, the prince falls in line. he stays silent. he is the obedient son, and takes the trophy for his father. though he came so close, he does not break the cycle of violence today. he does not break with tradition. no matter what the internal cost.
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anyway i hope it was okay to go ahead and just special interest like this in your notes 😂 its just that, at every crucial moment in the show, it seemed like someone was always there to remind arthur of his place in upholding literal genocide, and all too often, that person was merlin himself. this was just such a striking moment to capture between arthur, one of his knights, and a victim of that genocide like - way to pack such a giant punch in 100 words. biggest of kudos!
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edit, i know this isn't academic but not properly citing was making my eye twitch lol. this was my source for some of the above and is a WONDERFUL article to start with if you're looking for more on this subject:
Littman, R. & Paluck, E.L. (2015). The Cycle of Violence: Understanding Individual Participation in Collective Violence. Advances in Political Psychology. 36:1. DOI: 10.1111/pops.12239
