eleanor

oswinsdolma on ao3!! your local classicist and fandom analyst, follows are from dustyxoverture 🇬🇧🏳️‍🌈

[saltedume]

[winnie-the-monster]

“How can I love someone who betrayed me?”

[oswinsdolma]

i have nowhere else to say this but i am experiencing such an insane full circle moment. because fifteen year old me posting their silly essays analysing bbc merlin on Tumblr dot com would not BELIEVE that they are attending an academic panel with one of the creators of the show at their university. actually what is my life.

[oswinsdolma]

okay some notes from the panel that are both a) acceptable to share on social media, and b) things i think tumblr would appreciate:

The idea for young Merlin and Arthur came directly from one of the writers watching Smallville

The show actually had a big budget "for the BBC".

The original pilot was a lot less "sincere and earnest". it took an intervention from Russell T Davies (yes, actually!!!!) and a year of rewrites to get to the pilot that was actually produced.

It was always going to end in camlann. the only question was how they would get there.

There were talks for spinoffs, more seasons and A MOVIE, but due to a variety of issues with ownership rights, actor availability, and other shenanigans, it just wasn't possible.

In response to being asked about the "large cult following in the queer community": "yeah, we are aware of that"

Im all seriousness, the queer coding of Merlin and Arthur, and of magic as a queer allegory, this was unintentional, but as the show went on, both the prod team and actors were aware of it. The actors were given permission to play into it as they wanted, but merthur was never an endgame in the writers room.

The reason merthur never happened was partially for the same reasons that lancelot/guinevere was never fully explored: introducing love triangle and explicitly sexual themes went against the core ethos of the show, and the characterisation that had been established.

On a similar note, Merlin was definitely "a story about love, but never about sex"

Canonically, the only sex ever confirmed to have taken place was uther and the troll. this is not a drill. the only canon sex in bbc merlin is troll sex.

Regarding merthur and fan reception: "it's their [the fans'] couple, not ours [the writers']."

Throughout the process, they were conscious of not relying on the existing arthurian canon which is "built on quicksand". They wanted to take the core bits of the story ("Excalibur, Camlann, and Mordred") and build around it with fragments of the canon and innovations, not trying to scientifically reconstruct Arthurian legend.

When asked why they didn't look in too much detail at arthurian canon: "you just get scared ... and when you get scared, you get conservative. And you start looking for safe nets..."

The discussion ended on a really nice discussion of history and narrative: "as a species, we need stories ... we can't live without stories. [...] and without them, I think we feel very lost."

Writing the last episode was devastating for them. "it was very upsetting". But they wanted to make it "as satisfying as possible" while still leaving it open for more stories to be told. whether or not that was by them, or by other people, by fans.

"if I envy historians, it is that your stories are never finished. Whereas ours are finite..." (I am about to be So Annoying about this.)

genuinely i think this panel was one of the best and most surreal experiences of my life. in the pub afterwards, i confessed to the hundreds of thousands words of fanfiction and meta-analysis i had written on the showz and the impact that Merlin had on me as a queer teenager and he gave me a high five and a hug. i am going to a different university in october and i am so glad that one of my last experiences at this one was a panel with one of the reasons i am in academia in the first place. also confirmed uther fucked that troll

[oswinsdolma]

i have nowhere else to say this but i am experiencing such an insane full circle moment. because fifteen year old me posting their silly essays analysing bbc merlin on Tumblr dot com would not BELIEVE that they are attending an academic panel with one of the creators of the show at their university. actually what is my life.

[thebookluvrr1816]

The love that dare not speak its name is a phrase from the last line of the poem "Two Loves" by Lord Alfred Douglas, written in September 1892 and published in the Oxford magazine The Chameleon in December 1894. It is usually interpreted as a  euphemism for  homosexuality. This phrase gained fame during the trial of Oscar Wilde, Douglas's lover, where it was used to describe their relationship.

bbc merlin writers, you were not subtle :)

[writing-prompt-s]

The defeated and bloodied king was chained to kneel in front of his enemy and he says weakly: "Is my wife still alive?" His enemy nodded. "You fools," he said smirking, and the king starts laughing as the sounds of explosions getting closer shake the room.

[emmikay]

HOLY SHIT

[jessiesjaded]

Ship dynamics are always like Sunshine and Sunshine protector~ Cinnamon roll and their grumpy one 🤗 Well what about 2 cunts. They're both cunts and that's the dynamic. cunt4cunt.

[dollopheadedmerlin]

I enjoy when fan artists exaggerate Merlin's little peasant haircut

Like yes please give this man the most poor medieval bowl cut know to history, this is as it should be

[penny-anna]

aw she's crying

[penny-anna]

this wasn't the highest level last time so keep em coming there's still time

[penny-anna]

you made her cry again!!!! keep going

[oswinsdolma]

i was rewatching with a friend the other day and like. the thing that really gets me about the sorcerer's shadow isn't just the obvious queer subtext and the weight of all those secrets never told. but it's the fact that gilli is what merlin could have been in another life, another time, and vice versa. all the anger, all the desperation, the loneliness, could have so easily lent themselves to another story entirely, yet they didn't. and the narrative conspires to make us believe that this is a good thing: that the person merlin became is the way things were meant to be, and the best thing that couldn't happened. but the glaring truth that lurks just beyond this is that no matter how much better it may seem that merlin became the person he was, his story is still a tragedy just as much as (or perhaps more so than) gilli's. he still has to hide his magic, he is still treated like a fool. he uses his magic for good rather than for evil, but he still has to use his magic for something beyond who he is, justifying his existence with a so called greater good rather than just being allowed to exist as a neutral fact of this world. the story of bbc merlin is inarguably a tragedy, i'm hardly the first person to say this (and this is hardly my first rant on the subject) but part of what makes it so is its vehement refusal to accept that fact, even to the bitter end. it is a story, and a psyche, obsessed with the idea of meaning something, perhaps so much so that he loses the ability to exist as something beyond that, wearing himself ineffably down to a fragile and insubstantial bone, held aloft by the denial of its own dreams. in this sense, gilli and merlin are not just alike through their magic and their youthful hope for a world in which they are no longer forced to hide, but by their unconscious rejection of the very ideals that they wish to embody, their sisyphean self-sabotage that eats away at the fundamentals of who they are, or at least the potential of who they could have been. in the end, the message we get from the end of the sorcerer's shadow isn't the one that the characters think: that it is better to use your magic for good than it is for bad, but that it is a privilege to be able to think this way. but that any world in which magic is must be "used" to have any meaning is a dystopia, and no matter their intentionality, both merlin and gilli are long since lost to the only reality in which either of them could have ever been free. a loss so intense and so inevitable that even the narrative structure itself seems unable to acknowledge it.

[weedle-testaburger]

this will always be the greatest moment in the history of doctor who documentaries tbh

[nitronine]

[thebeatleshermajestydotmp3]

Is that timothee chalamet?

[nitronine]

???? That is the seventh doctor from Doctor Who, portrayed by Sylvester McCoy

[oswinsdolma]

thinking again about the metatextuality of merlin as 2010s queerbait. because the phenomenon of queerbaiting itself parallels so interestingly with the text itself: the story of merlin and arthur survives by being suspended in legend, never quite reality, but always more than just a story. and queerbaiting lies within that same genre of subtext: the idea of a love story depicted like shadows on the walls of a cave, undeniably conscious but not yet corporeal. and the reason for both of these — for the survival of a legend and the strange censorship of a story half told — is the ineffable and unquenchable power and desparation of queer love.

[ispaintingcalmly]

[yourlocaladhder]

I saw this meme going around on twitter and I think it'll be perfect for this account.

List 5 topics you can talk on for an hour without preparing any material.

[demiboy-dean-winchester-deactiv]

thanks for the tag @louthingg ! (removing the reblogs because its a Long Post)

supernatural. i know this because ive done it lmao. i infodumped to my friend for like an hour and managed to convince them to watch it even tho thats not what i was trying to do

doctor who! i can explain the plot of pretty much any episode from series 1-5 In Detail

star trek tos, and specifically spirk. im insane about those funky lil space husbands

animals! i know So Many Animal Facts from watching nature documentaries obsessively as a kid.

queen. i know a lot about the band and the band members and the songs and. yea. i can talk about them for a Long Time lol

no pressure tags: @aggressiveguitarnoises @spirking-and-smirking @shatnerihardlyknowher @my-chemical-cas @mrsmafiaau

[mrsmafiaau]

Thanks for the tag, Mike! @demiboy-dean-winchester

I know its been almost a month since you tagged me in this, I don't really have an explanation lol

Okay so,

1. How cinema isn't cinema anymore, it's content.

2. The Merlin fandom. How it's unique from other fandoms, and, of course, how it refuses to die. Also, don't forget to ask me about the things I would change if I was the one who made the show and could do whatever I wanted with it, I could yap for hours about how I would fix all the plot holes lol

3. It's proven that humans now are just as smart as humans were "back then" tm. I could talk about how this very simple fact changed my perception of human history, science, the arts, and religion forever.

4. Art history. I actually really love art and art history, and it's my dream to one day pursue a formal education for it.

5. I'm not sure what to list for #5. Honestly, let's just watch a movie together, I could and WOULD probably talk you through the whole hour and a half of one of those 😅

no pressure tags: @nutmeg-cider @estrelio @vaguely-screaming @ubi-goes-uwu @maleyah-givemetomorrow @nogoodninny @forecast0ctopus @oswinsdolma @lorewhoresam @hell0mega @tamaha @alivedean @pomidorfriend @vampirebandmate @lazrusrising

[oswinsdolma]

1. the tragedy of bbc merlin as something caught in the paradox of its own inevitably, and the avoidability of its fate.

2. doctor who as a queer/feminist commentary.

3. how doctor who reflects classical iconography and mythology.

4. supernatural. anything and everything. give me a whiteboard and i'm sat.

5. the impact of ancient greek literature on modern global culture

@ anyone who wants to!!

[merlinoutofcontext]

you're the voice try and understand it btw. if you even care.

[oswinsdolma]

lads we're trending again now fess up who had a homosexual breakdown on main again?