Arthur Pendragon and Family: A Sloppy Love Story
A rebloggable version of this post for those who asked:
I feel like when you watch this show you have to do a lot of justifying when it comes to how, well, everything is written, but mostly the characters, because aside from Merlin (and even he's not spared from it sometimes), character traits and histories that were well established and beautifully done in the previous episode will be reset, forgotten, ignored, or shunted aside for the sake of making the plot work (!!JDHHJ!HJ!) in the next episode.
Since the writing can be so inconsistent, I think a lot of the best stuff comes out through how the four young'ins interpret and work with the material they're given. Honestly, anything I talk about here will pale in comparison to Bradley's opinions on Arthur--he's unsurprisingly quite defensive of him as well and is very eloquent about all of it (I'll try and dig some of those interviews up if I can).
On that note, Bradley is at his best, acting wise, when playing the broken little boy who never knew his mother and still has doubts about his father even loving him, this guy who he's looked up to his whole life as the paragon of everything he's been trained to be since birth, and...that's who he has. If we start at season 1, that's all he has. He has his father, and Morgana. He kind of has Gaius. He's too emotionally stunted to let anyone else in, and too wary to bother with anyone else except family (or anyone who's the equivalent of). Like, I have this theory that part of the betrayal Uther felt on Ygraine's death wasn't just directed at people who use magic, it was directed at people who weren't family--if you weren't bound by blood to trust someone, then they weren't worth trusting. Uther trusted Nimueh and he was "betrayed" by her (lol right, Uther), so that's that. And this must have been ingrained into Arthur from the start as well.
Related to this is Uther's complete failure (thank god) to turn Arthur into a man like him. Another instinct that he most definitely honed into Arthur was to suppress all that big emotional vulnerability and such like, but alas, all that suppression had the opposite effect. So instead of being cold, closed off, and without empathy, Arthur ended up...feeling too much (ew, I know right) and thinking he should hate himself for it, because that wasn't who he was supposed to be. This is why he and Merlin are so, god, perfect for each other, no matter how you interpret that, because Arthur grew up with a fearlessness in face of his enemies, with a fenced off but intensely beating, bleeding heart, while Merlin grew up with a fearlessness in the face of his friends--his heart isn't worn on his sleeve, it's practically ON HIS FACE, while the very thing that makes him dangerous, a fighter, a threat, and a force to be reckoned with, has to be hidden away for the sake of his survival. They balance each other out perfectly.
Anyhoodle, it is because all of this that I was unsurprised by how easily Arthur trusted his clearly skeevy Uncle A last season, as dumb a decision as it turned out to be. Growing up without a mother and an emotionally distant father would either (in extreme circumstances) cause a character to nurture the idea of "family" or dismiss it altogether, and it's because of the person Arthur is--i.e. too trusting and noble and shit--and because of that possibly being one of Uther's Life Lessons (which I want no part in, thank you), he obviously went for the former. His line in the season 4 finale "Why do they hate me?" wasn't just depression over Morgana and Agrivaine specifically hating him, it was confusion and anger at himself, because these people were family, and that means everything, and why isn't it all matching up? He refers to his knights as his brothers, he lingers less upon the idea of making Gwen his Queen than making her his wife, marrying her, making her family, and, honestly, as much subtext as that relationship has, I think he sees Merlin most of the time as that goofy little brother who likes to tag along on camping trips. I think he loves him stupidly (stupidly!!!), and would disembowel anyone who even looked at him funny (this has been sorta proven), but Arthur Pendragon just does that. He does that for family.
And their relationship has been (is still) maturing into a place where Arthur can seriously take his advice and place it above all others, but he has often put others before Merlin in terms of who he listens to, whom he takes orders from. He doesn't like it, but he has to do it, because his father said so, or his uncle said so, or etc. etc. etc. The Secret Sharer from last season is a pretty average episode but great in terms of seeing this conflict in Arthur, because it really does a number on him to put his trust in Agrivaine before his trust in Gaius and Merlin. People complained a lot about that. But, he doesn't like it. He doesn't like thinking that Gaius betrayed him, and he doesn't like seeing Merlin upset (I think we can safely put that in the top five of Arthur Pendragon's Least Favorite Things, Ever), but he has to listen to Agrivaine, because at this point, he's all the "real" family he has left. His father is dead, Morgana betrayed him ages ago, and Agrivaine is his blood, if he lets him go, he won't have anyone else left and ohhhh man Arthur honey
He's stepping out of that now, I think (I hope!), I think we've seen in the past couple of episodes this distancing from Uther's way of doing things that's so clearly been haunting him since he died, his regrets on the attack on the druid camp that he had done to prove something to his father, burning the bridges with Odin, making alliances with kingdoms that Uther would have simply destroyed. So, in regards to that post (lol finally), duh! Of course he wanted to bring back Uther because he didn't see him for the genocidal despot he really was, just like he couldn't see Morgana smirking at him behind his back for a full season, just like he didn't suspect anything from Agrivaine's strangely one toned (black) wardrobe. They were family. And that had to mean something, right?
