Discover Top Posts Tagged with #toafk

Fingon and Maedhros on the way to Doriath from The Once and Future King by @batsintheshadows

This took. So long. I think Maedhros technically took more work. I have a process for drawing gold and cabochons, still figuring out facets on gemstones. But its done! And it has an actual background! Yay!

#toafk #silmarillion #fingon #maedhros

“White’s stalwart page in The Once and Future King is named Thomas for Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, the primary medieval text that inspired White’s novel. It’s believed Malory wrote his epic while in prison. Like Arthur, he may have found himself grappling then with the lessons of his life and its inheritances. The closing passage of Le Morte is often quoted, rife as it is with its compelling allusions to the once and future king. Yet what’s not as often referenced is Malory’s own denial of that eventual resurrection. He writes: “…and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll not say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde say: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff.”

Here in this world he changed his life. Arthur’s promised resurrection pales in the face of his existence. The king may not come again, but his dream will never die, not while there are those who keep the candle burning. As White turned to Malory in the wake of World War II, as Mirrlees imagined a mirror of London in the aftermath of World War I, I've turned to their work, and to the work of Le Guin and Clarke as the United States continues its descent into right-wing authoritarianism. Each novel reckons in a different way with what a “love of country” unbounded by borders and grounded in a recognition of nonhuman agency could look like.

[…]

It would be easy to read each novel as fatalistic and the defeats and tragedies the characters suffer throughout as confirmation of the futility of their cause. Instead, that perpetual incompleteness functions as evidence of a long and living tradition, as a call to action that makes the reader an active participant in the story, an inheritor of its life past the end of the page. Arthur’s call to keep the candle burning, Stephen’s promise that Lost-Hope will be “in time set right,” even Estraven’s heir’s request to Genly to hear “…about the other worlds out among the stars— the other kinds of men, the other lives?" all gesture toward the fact that the work is never finished, the grail never reached. The story goes on, and therein lies the hope. In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which Ackroyd also quotes in his Albion (another link in that ever-growing chain) a different version of Merlin tells Arthur:

For an ye heard a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,

And therefore built for ever

A better world is not fated or promised. Although I love the places that have made me, I often fear that Le Guin’s skepticism of even this more localized love of place is correct, as it too can be weaponized and subverted into serving the project of nation-making. But in the intuitional, border-dissolving language of fantasy, in work spanning centuries and oceans, I’ve found again and again as counterpoint to and shield against that nationalist threat a turn towards a living natural world and a collective tradition that stretches forward into the future.

Almost daily now, I read in the news that the U.S. government has bombed another country or provided the weapons to do so; that they’ve gassed people in the streets, at home and abroad, that they’ve kidnapped, beaten, and shot those who would oppose them. And still, professors link arms and form a wall around student protestors as riot cops advance; faith leaders and public servants walk side by side with immigrants into court, placing their bodies in the line of fire; neighbors blow whistles and block streets as hooded ICE agents kidnap children to fill their camps. Although many individuals still languish in ICE detention, others have been freed through the tireless efforts of lawyers, activists, and local officials. In 2025, Australia’s humpback whales, which were hunted to a near extinction population of 150, returned in numbers higher than the pre-whaling population, thanks to a decision to ban commercial whaling of the species in 1963. And this past July, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized that “ecosystems—such as forests and rivers—have the right to exist, regenerate, and maintain their life cycles.” This landmark decision would not have been possible without the earlier work of Māori rights of nature activists and Indigenous water protectors in Ecuador, among many others. These gains were not given but fought for.

Tennyson’s Merlin, naturally, saw it coming: We have not built the city; we probably never will. And we are building still.”

A Candle Burning: Nation and The Agency of Nature in Fantasy, Caroline Shea

#my writing #peter ackroyd #t.h. white #toafk #the once and future king #ursula k. le guin #susanna clarke #ecofiction #rights of nature #robert macfarlane #Tennyson

hello! im nightcereusss

you might know me as the author of a time travel fic The Once and Future King.

this one lol

if you've read it, tysm! im proud of that work.

it's forever on a wip status because i might have blown my head on writing and plotting for that fic. but i still have the outline for it. if anyone's interested, here it is:

#merlin #bbc merlin #merlin bbc #merlin fandom #arthur pendragon #TOAFK #merlin fic #doomsday

Wailing and gnashing my teeth at the thought that there will never be a Studio Ghibli five-movie adaptation of The Once and Future King

#i need it #i NEED it.#please mr miyasaki please #the once and future king #t h white #studio ghibli #hayao miyazaki #toafk #the sword in the stone #arthuriana #unmitigated bleat

Elements of circular storytelling in 'The Once and Future King' by T.H. White

#this has been in my drafts too long everybody look #toafk #the once and future king #arthuriana #arthurian literature #th white

My best friend and I are doing a book club of The Once and Future King, just the two of us. Well, today we finished The Sword in the Stone, and I, like always, cried like a baby alongside the Wart when Ector and Kay knelt down before him.

#toafk #sword in the stone #arthur pendragon #king arthur #oh to be 8 and stupid again and read it for the first time and literally not know it's about King Arthur until the last word #that was a gut-punch #I still cry every time but it will never be Like That again.#The Wart is my Son and Boy #and I hate that he now has to face his “glorious doom”

I've been hand-wringing over the decision to up the rating of my current WIP and adding Spicier Content to it now that the slow burn's finally come to a conclusion. I think it would work tonally for the piece, but I worry that the people reading it would hate it - some people really enjoy reading less mature works and seek that content out. Would it be a bad thing to switch things up?

Then I remembered that like, ten people tops read this story so y'know. Fuck it, we ball.

#and I appreciate all ten of you <3 #TOAFK

in my post-toafk depression i’ve decided that 1) the green knight arthur and guinevere are so chill and gentle and sweet that they could handle a trio with their favourite knight, 2) since morgause is out of the picture, there’s no impending doom, and 3) the seat that arthur offers to gawain in the beginning belongs to lancelot, who’s run off on another long quest and therefore must be welcomed back with no effort spared

#bear with me im very sad #arthur x lancelot #arlance #king arthur #arthur pendragon #lancelot du lac #the once and future king #toafk #arthurian #fanart #my art #the green knight #tgk