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brolinskeep

#(goes w/o saying: this one is older than ai)

adhd-merlin

I love how they made gaslighting one of Gaius's main character traits

adhd-merlin

@dollopheadsandclotpoles I hope this is real because it's hilarious

unfortunatelymerlin

#if you look at gauis' entire everything for more .5 seconds you're like 'wow shakespearen levels of moral complexity here' #but merlin is constrained by being a genre of show that can only be described as 'Hijinks' and so it's like #ah yes that's our ensemble cast's designated Funny Old Man. look at him he's raising an eyebrow in disapproval! #and like he is a damn funny old man icon! legend! beleaguered mentor dad to wizard jesus and babysitter to the magic hypochondriac king #except by rights its like hang on dude shouldn't you be like fundamentally broken inside. #stood by and facilitated the genocide of your own people and destroyed a way of life you had dedicated yourself to preserving #tried to save as many people as you could but had to essentially be choosy about how many you saved to be able to help more but also #to keep your own head. oh and also the guy who ordered the genocide is one the only friends you have left and you genuinely care about him #even though he's patently nuts and is directly responsible for the deaths of half your other friends. and he's your BOSS. #you end up looking out for young vulnerable terrified extremely powerful magic users in the heart of camelot #one of them you (tho this is hardly only half gauis fault tbf) inculcate into your own paranoia and loyalty to the monarch that #he becomes a shell of himself dedicated to protecting the king more than any of the ideals he came to the kingdom with #and the other just about goes mad after years of terror that the man she loves as a father would burn her a death for being who she is #and was so desperate for community she went looking for it in ways that went very Wrong when community was in fact there the whole time #but was lying to her face about it out of (genuine but misplaced) paternalistic care #literally gauis what the hell. i want to study you like a bug #sorry this was a funny post and look what ive gone and done to it dhejd

@princessithaca

girlinstembuck

My favourite character of all time probably

#yeah I never properly thought about it really #but this

grammarpedant

Murderbot and family are traveling through a massive federated hypercapitalist space featuring deserts, jungle, mountain enclaves, and suburbs, using a combination of ground transport (cars) while bitching about the lack of transit pipes (trains) cross-country. every time they cross state lines I mean corporate zones, their pursuers have to fall back and contract cops I mean security in the next jurisdiction over to keep pursuit up. Just now, in my read, they're having to take a detour because there's some kind of massive sports event full of sports-obsessed humans fucking up local traffic.

Murderbot and its Mensahs are road tripping across the spacefuture United States of America and Barish-Estranza is one of those states (my unfounded guess is Utah)

grammarpedant

and I didn't even mention that they're on this road trip at all because the brown family is trying to escape from an immigrant detainment center/forced labor camp that they were thrown into on a bullshit bureaucratic pretext while traveling legally.

not to be depressing, but now you really see the similarities, eh? there's your thinly veiled commentary on our current day US!

agrippina-siderea

I'm fairly confident the planet they're around is Earth, too.

grammarpedant

Now that's a notion that would require strongly compelling evidence to convince me. What's your argument?

agrippina-siderea

To be honest it's kind of vibes-based, but there's a few things.

Parts of the infrastructure are called out as being OLD old, like early spaceflight tech, and having been replaced (like the ventilation on the apartment building). Some parts of the ring seem to be ancient. All that lines up with it being one of the first large space construction projects, like the station from The City of a Thousand Planets, as opposed to something that came after FTL was a mature tech.

There's also the fact that it's apparently a major hub of corporation rim activity. That seems consistent with it being very old. And its fragmented governance sounds like the result of countless corporations and states trying to stake their claims on portions of it. It feels like the geopolitics of Earth just moved to orbit.

The sections of the ring that seem like little biome museums or memorials felt Earth-specific, like they were commemorating the biomes that once existed below.

The description of the planet, devoid of life, scarred by strip mining to the point that it's visibly no longer round from space. It sounded more like MB was describing a world full of life that had been killed, rather than one they'd tried to terraform.

Furthermore, the reaction of the humans to the sight. Like they knew, but getting a look up close was still a shock. It felt like this planet in particular had meaning to them, not just as a general example of corporate greed.

The way MB brings up human evolution, which it had never shown any interest in before.

Do I have hard evidence? No. But if I was writing a science fiction story and wanted to hint that the lifeless planet the characters were orbiting was actually Earth after having been murdered by corporate greed without actually saying so outright, I think it would look a lot like this.

grammarpedant

I don't necessarily agree that it would look a lot like this—or rather, that is, if I were a science fiction writer gesturing broadly at the Corporation Rim's extractive, exploitative evil, it would also basically look like what you've described. "Old" in an era of planned obsolescence is often not very old- parts of the Adamantine colony are described with a similar sense of age and history, despite clearly post-dating many corporate spacefuture practices by a significant margin. The Preservation humans reacting in horror to the sight of a strip-mined planet more readily speaks to their values ("not one living thing left behind to die," valuing the planet they live on, etc) than to any particular veneration of Old Earth (which has never been gestured at in the series, even as a concept).

But more to the point, I don't see what the planet being the mythical origin point of humanity would add to the story in any way, on a thematic level. It is evil and excessive that corporates strip-mined a planet to a scarred ruin and then built a dumb torus around its corpse in the style of Las Vegas or Rainforest Cafe. It is petty and myopic that corporates run their installations, whether this torus or TranRollinHyfa or Port RaviHyral, in this fragmentary, feudal way that makes coherent security or public transport impossible. Corps are fundamentally motivated to commit extractive colonialism, and so that's what they do on every planet, whether it's B-E on the Adamantine colony planet or whichever assholes strip-mined the torus planet to extinction. It being a special planet that this happened to honestly, in my mind, distracts from and obscures the real issue at hand, which is that this is an evil thing to do to any planet but it's an inevitable outcome of the system of capitalism.

If Ms Wells decides to come back to this planet in a later book and call this one the origin of humanity, I'll trust her to do so in a way that advances the themes of the series or at least makes for an interesting action-adventure plot. You may hold whatever headcanons you choose, of course, but until that time I don't find this theory compelling enough to subscribe to.

castielstiel

shalltheperish

i love landscape in merlin <3

fan-a-tink

no notes. just... this merthur moment.

Merlin | 3.13 The Coming of Arthur - Part 2

captain-lonagan

no like season 1 merlin rocks up to camelot and every magic user he meets is burnt out, bitter, or both. in season 5 mordred rocks up to camelot and the senior magic user that’s burned out and bitter is merlin. it’s merlin that’s perpetuating the cycle of hurt now and that’s crazy and they never get into it!

lovebotomy

in s3 when gilli (I think?) comes to camelot and wants to use magic enhancing ring to defend himself and kill their oppressor and merlin tells him it's not what magic is for, it's for good (that he can't do because magic is outlawed) and he tells merlin that he has pretended for so long he forgot who he really is. it has been a theme since the beginning

gehalge

#merlin goes through perfect indoctrination I think they actually nailed his character perfectly #you can see the shifts #he's hopeful in s1 #in s2 he believes it's necessary that he suffers at arthur's hand because it just has to be. doesn't trust morgana and poisons her #in s3 he's full of guilt over releasing kilgarrah and poisoning morgana. seems to fully believe arthur will never know about his magic #in s4 lancelots death and evil resurrection breaks him. his relationships with other people are detoriating. he is becoming emrys #s5 bitter obsessed merlin is obvious #just amazing progression (via @lovebotomy)

#the thing about BBC Merlin is that while there is a lot of clumsy things due to it being a TV show in the real world with all the messiness #that interferes with telling a completely ~perfect~ version of any story that creators are trying to do #they definitely WERE trying to tell a story specifically and I don't just mean King Arthur because it departs significantly from other #versions in new and interesting ways but A story definitely #and they got the idea from Smallville which is relevant only in that the KIND of tension they wanted to explore #from the beginning is absolutely central to how they dealt with Arthuria #and that tension works SO fantastically withthe world and characters they created #like do I personally wish Morgana's arc was handled slightly differently even as a villain? yes #but even as is it works fantastically with Merlin and Mordred and Morgana #and their trajectories and reasoning a d the cyclical nature of it #and the best part is that despite being a family show the one thing they kept extremely faithful to the most known versions of Arthuria is #that it's a fucking TRAGEDY and it was full of the deep moral questions that lead to that tragedy in a way where #you don't even always know how the characters realistically could have done better #should Merlin have lead Mordred be killed as a child? no #that would have been immoral and we see that Mordred didn't even grow up to be a villain #so like the whole thing is messy and real and SAD and that comes through even #when executed imperfectly #even when I'm not 100% they'd totally decided where they were going at the very start know that what they #wanted was that tension between a a broken cruel system justified by pain and loss #and the reality that people are good actually

khmelisuneliart

Merlin season 6 is looking good

aemelia

I was thinking about how much BBC Merlin fic has been published since I joined the fandom, and felt inspired to take a leaf out of data queen @frogmerthur's book and make some graphs about it.

As of 28 January 2026, there are currently 70,125 published works in the BBC Merlin tag on AO3. We are never moving on. 🙂‍↕️

historicallygay

I’m so proud of us🥹

katherynefromphilly

Fun fact: The spike/dip in published BBC Merlin fic during/after pandemic looks EXACTLY like the spike/dip that occurred in academic publishing.

Turns out that if humans have more free time and Things They Want To Write (especially to escape into their brains) creativity flourishes and grows.

skavod29

The power couple they would have been…

jasperrwrites

“are they lovers?” worse. they were supposed to be and never got the chance to

ilovefrogs24

Merlin saying "I'm happy to be your servant, until the day I die" kills me because what do you mean he's immortal??

What do you mean Merlin will never die but the object of his devotion did??

What do you mean Merlin is still waiting for the moment he can stand next to his King??

Someone play "Would you fall in love with me Again" and leave me to weep

They make me sick

nymika-arts

once and future 👑

psychic-angels

actually don't think i'll ever stop thinking about the fact that not a single character in merlin gets a happy ending ??? like not a single one ??? half of them end up dead by the last episode, everyone else stuck with the losses of the others and nothing that they truly wanted ??? alone ?? five seasons of growing attached to them and loving them and watching them want and work for what they want and try SO HARD all for...not one single happy ending....i'm siiiiickkkk....

#and broader as well: the whole fucking time it promised The Gilden Age of Arthur and of course #which happens yet doesn't #when Arthur is king Magic is still illegal #it is an improvement for everyone else because Arthur is a Good King #but there is no Golden Age for the magic users under him #the series plays in our expectation there too because even though this version of Arthuria breaks all kinds of rules #you still THINK it's going to go the way it's supposed to and Arthur was supposed to be such a great king that it's unthinkable #that thete would be no ultimate decriminalization if magic in his reign #because that's the central injustice the show has built in #I personally interpret the ending that Arthur's Golden Age actually happens under Gwen #that he paved the way for her #but that's me slapping a win on it #Arthuria is a tragedy and they changed the rules on nearly everything else #but they built a more perfect *loss* with it #so haunting how they reinvented the ending #it's not a happy story and they didn't make it one

fan-a-tink

merlin & arthur by the fireside. that's the real magic right there.

Merlin & Arthur | 4.12 "The Sword in the Stone - Part 1"

moniquill

goodoldfashionedengineer

Can't believe it's canon that Merlin said the words "No, I am that stupid and if you don't believe me, watch"

That's some incorrect quotes shit

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