It's actually kind of weird to me that the Merlin writers never explicitly stated that Mordred was Morgause's son. Personally I feel that it was kind of implied by Morgana's there's a bond between us line in s01e08, and by the fact that being the son of a high priestess would explain a lot of things about Mordred that are otherwise unexplained, such as how he's able to recognize Emrys on sight (something most druids are not able to do, unless they are especially powerful or high-ranking) and why he has such powerful instinctive magic even as a child (something we don't see in anyone else other than Merlin).
I was going to say that maybe they never addressed it because they wanted to stay 3027361038391 miles away from the Arthurian incest plotline, except that doesn't really track because in the first place, Arthur is not his father on the show, and in the second place, Arthur and Morgause are not related on the show. And in the third place, they clearly aren't all that afraid of incest considering that they spent most of s1 sort of implying that Arthur and Morgana are meant to have an arranged marriage eventually, before totally backtracking on that idea. What was up with that, anyway?
the knight's gambit (at the cauldron of arianrhod)
G - 100 words - gen
***
“My lord,” says Mordred, “where’s Merlin?”
Even Emrys, a practiced liar, can’t help his momentary look of alarm. And yes, all right, perhaps that’s just a bit why Mordred said it. The wretched disguise, the ridiculous flirting was the last straw; he can’t bear seeing a figure of prophecy reduced to this. Surely Emrys will understand: Mordred is doing this for him.
Yes, and for himself too. It’s too risky for Mordred, but His Majesty will forgive sorcery, if it’s Emrys. Well. If it’s Merlin.
But Mordred’s play doesn’t work. Emrys lies, and the King believes him. Just as always.
Something's off. Morgana knows it, can feel it sparking in the air between them, almost like— but no, it couldn't be, there's magic all over this island, that's all it is, and it's not until after she's taken a sip of her wine that she realizes.
Morgause bares her teeth.
“How dare you.” It's all Morgana can do to keep the shaking out of her voice as she glares across the table through the candlelight, the flickering candlelight casting flickering shadows across her sister's face. “How dare you. Do you still not trust me, after everything? After I nearly died for you and— and your scheme?”
Apparently unmoved, Morgause simply stares her down. “Do I trust you? You tell me. Are you loyal to me?”
“Yes,” Morgana spits out. “Though I can't fathom why, when you're behaving like such a cunt.”
In a flash Morgana is on her feet, nearly tripping over her skirts in her haste, knocking over her goblet; the tainted wine splashes across the table, soaking the nice white tablecloth she had laundered just that morning. By magic, of course, but she had picked the lavender by hand, scattering it into the wash water with their linens, thinking of Morgause who was due back from Ascetir that evening. “You're unbelievable. I really don't believe you.”
Morgause pulls a frown and rises to her feet as well, trailing her fingers over the deep red stain on the tablecloth. “Dear me,” she murmurs. “So upset.” She's drawn closer, coming around the side of the table, and turns Morgana's face to her with just the graze of a finger on her cheek. Morgana can feel the humid warmth of her breath on her own lips, but she won’t be distracted. Not now. She employs her own distraction: a feather-light fingertip brushes along Morgause’s collarbone, drags down, lower and lower, between her breasts.
“You drink it,” she breathes against Morgause’s jaw. “Prove to me that I can trust you too.”
She’s not sure whether or not she’s surprised that Morgause does: pulls back from the touch to stare at Morgana with such intensity that Morgana shivers, tips just a drop of potion onto her finger and brings it to her own lips, darting out just the very tip of her tongue to taste it, never taking her eyes off Morgana’s— they flash red for the briefest moment before melting back to brown.
Morgana wants to ask about strategy, really she does: something about armies, routes and maps, or the cup of life; but what comes out of her mouth instead, painfully low and earnest, is, “Are you fucking Cenred?”
For a moment, Morgause looks almost hurt. Then it’s gone, swallowed back up by her inscrutable mask.
“Yes.”
It’s not as if the response is unexpected. Still, the admission wrenches a sound out of Morgana, a strangled sob, wild. Would that she could leash the feral thing and drag it back inside her. Clamp it fast inside her mouth, so it can never bite anyone again, least of all Morgause, least of all Morgana.
“You knew this.” The look on Morgause’s face is almost like pity. “He’s nothing. It means nothing. You know this.”
“Well, of course not,” snipes Morgana. She knows it’s childish, but can’t bring herself to care just now. She’s entitled to it, she thinks. “Obviously. I don’t know why I would have expected otherwise. You’re not the type for a summer wedding and, and, and… babies. Or whatever,” she finishes lamely, waving a hand in a dismissive gesture. As though she can so easily dismiss the lump in her throat, the one that tastes of lavender buds.
But the air shifts, a shade cooler, suddenly, and a shadow passes over Morgause’s eyes. No, not a shadow, Morgana realizes with a start, but a flash of red. Morgause grimaces, presses her lips together. Grinds out her next words: “I did. Have one. Once.”
“What?!” Morgana splutters.
“Relax,” says Morgause, although it’s through her teeth, and she’s clearly struggling to keep her own composure. “It was a long time ago.” After a pause, she grits out, “You shouldn’t have given me a truth potion if you didn’t want the truth.”
The lump in Morgana’s throat is gone, completely dissolved by her boiling rage. “How— You! I do want the truth! And it was your bloody truth potion!” A jolt startles her; it’s her own hand, smacking the table. “Were you just never going to tell me that I’ve a— a—”
“A nephew,” Morgause supplies, apparently having regained her own calm. “It was, oh, fourteen or fifteen years ago, now. His father was a druid, since you seem so keen to know. I’m not sure who, exactly. I was sent to give a blessing at the Lughnasadh festival, you know how it is. Things got a bit,” she smirks, “heated.” Her face turns thoughtful, and she adds after a moment, “Nimueh was furious with me.”
Morgana sags back to sitting. The lump is back, too. “What happened?” she whispers, wondering if she ought to reach for Morgause’s hand. “Did he— oh gods, was it Uther—?”
But Morgause looks only faintly annoyed. “What? No, of course not. He's alive. I left him with the druids, obviously. I wasn't about to let Nimueh deliver me of a child. She didn't do very well the last time.” She makes a face, half wolfish smile, half grimace. “I went to a druid camp, a different one. It was Beltane, and even their healer was falling over with drink by the end of the night. I left before morning.”
Morgana picks at fraying lace, the edge of the ruined tablecloth. “What’s his name?”
“I don't know,” says Morgause in a hard, slow voice, “what they named him.” Her chin lifts. The shadows play dangerously across her face. “What? Did you think I was going to call him after Gorlois?”
“I don’t know what I thought,” says Morgana, honestly— she can’t be otherwise, can she? She can’t seem to help her next question, either. She tells herself that she’s not being cruel on purpose, that it’s just the potion, loosening her tongue. “How do you know he’s alive, then? For all you know, he could be dead.”
“I know.” Morgause looks away. “There’s— a bond between us. I would feel it. If he died.”
Morgana snuffs out the candles. Above her, Morgause’s skin is faintly grey, just barely luminous under the half-moon. She rises to her feet to stand behind Morgause, settles her hands on her waist, hooks her chin over one shoulder, and her eyes fall upon the stained tablecloth, the dark wine cooling and setting in. There’s an idea floating just at the edge of her thoughts: a bond between us. The impression of a blue cloak, a blue gaze, too intense for one so young.
“Promise me—” The words catch in Morgana’s throat. “Promise you won’t— with Cenred. I don’t want you to.”
Morgause takes Morgana’s arms to wrap them around her own waist, and Morgana feels that she’s being posed, like a doll.
“Ask me tomorrow,” she whispers. “I’ll promise you then.”
oh my god I JUST realized that the inspiration for Uther's purge of magic comes from King Arthur's scheme to get rid of Mordred via shipwrecking all the babies born on May Day in Le Morte
people will really be out here like "people aren't writing enough of XYZ in fanfic" and it will be a person who doesn't even write fanfic lmao. like ok? you're not writing it either though?
*gets out a big megaphone* sanitizing female characters by removing all moral ambiguity and their ability to make complex choices is not any more feminist than demonizing them. you have to learn to appreciate female characters without finding some way to simplify their personhood into either "evil bitch" or "perfect pure girlboss." it is still dehumanizing to view women as virtuous morally pure angels of light who can do no wrong. thats just bog standard benevolent misogyny.
for @merthurmicrofic prompt "rat" and @merlinmicrofic prompt "starvation"
***
“In my defence,” Merlin grumbled, bending down to wrench his arrow out of a log, “that log looked very much like a rabbit.”
Arthur whacked him on the shoulder. “Have you ever managed to kill anything edible? Anything at all?” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Anything other than a rat.” Merlin, having just opened his mouth to speak, shut it again.
“Hilarious,” Arthur groused. “I’m sure you had a right laugh at me.”
Merlin chuckled. “Yeah, a bit. But that’s not why I did it.”
“Well, why did you, then?” Arthur snapped.
“Because,” said Merlin, “I couldn’t let you starve, could I?”
Something had changed in Merlin’s tone. Arthur paused, turning round, and where there had been the brilliant smile, now there was the other look: the wide, solemn eyes, the heart-wrenching sincerity. A long moment passed before Arthur could speak. “No,” he said at last, softly. “No, I suppose not.”
Arthur flexed his fingers. The smile was back, just a small one; a small, private thing, just for him. He gripped Merlin’s upper arm and gave his own small smile in return.
“Come on, then,” he said, in the same soft voice. “Let’s catch something better for dinner.”
Modern AU Merlin would not be an academic. Sure he's intelligent and capable, but fundamentally he is completely lacking in ambition. Academia is soul-crushingly competitive. It's a magnet for THE most ambitious people in the world, people who are willing to work long hours for years and years and sacrifice everything else in order to make it. Canon Merlin does all that, but he's doing it because he believes it's his duty to Arthur and Camelot. He's not doing it for the love of the game. This man doesn't have an ambitious bone in his body. He failed upward into the medieval equivalent of middle management and then stayed there for 10 years and was kind of awful at it the whole time. You just know if the magic reveal had happened sooner and Arthur promoted him to some kind of advisor/sorcerer position he would complain about it SO hard. He'd probably be pleased eventually, but that's not the reason he's doing all that.
Also, he's a bit lazy. He's certainly capable of working hard, and often does, either because Arthur requires it of him or because there's a magical problem that only he can solve; but he's also constantly trying to bunk off work whenever he can get away with it, and doing a half-assed job otherwise. It's well established that he's really bad at his job and the only reason he never gets (permanently) fired is because Arthur likes having him around.
I kind of think modern Merlin would be more along the lines of "certifiable math genius who's otherwise a bit of a dumbass; works a regular-ass IT job." Canon Merlin with his instinctive magic is sort of the sorcerer equivalent of the gifted kid (TM) who never really had to study hard. I think he'd be more or less that person in our world too. Maybe he would get a PhD; you can get that far without much work ethic or ambition, if you're intelligent enough. But I really don't think he'd go any further in academia. He just doesn't care enough.
I'm irritated about how the Merlin writers handled Gwen and Lancelot's affair. Partially because they were way too afraid of making Gwen seem less than perfect so instead they just took away her agency by putting her under the spell of an enchanted bracelet rather than having her make her own decision. And also partially because they completely divorced the infidelity storyline from everything that made it important in the source material.
Le Morte d'Arthur is not the one and only source of Arthurian mythology, but it is the best-established version of the story of the Guinevere/Lancelot affair and the schism between Mordred and Arthur, and it's clearly what the writers of Merlin were basing the general outline of their story upon. One of the most noteworthy things about Le Morte d'Arthur as a piece of literature is the way it uses sexual transgressions to mirror the broader moral themes of the story. There are several examples of this:
The rape of Igraine by Uther resulting in the conception of Arthur is the sexual manifestation of force, violence-without-a-cause, which is the reason for the disintegration of the Round Table once the golden age of Camelot is achieved and the knights have no cause toward which to channel their aggression.
The incest between Arthur and Morgause resulting in the conception of Mordred is the sexual manifestation of vice and impiety, which is the reason that the attempt to redirect this aggression toward spiritual pursuits (the quest for the Holy Grail) is a failure.
The adultery of Guinevere and Lancelot is the sexual manifestation of treachery, which is the reason that Mordred takes advantage of the rupture in the court to initiate the civil war that leads to the titular Death of Arthur and the downfall of Camelot.
The writers of Merlin went in a very different direction plot-wise, which is fine and could have been done well, but I think they kind of lost the plot somewhere and wound up with a story that was really thematically muddled. It was thematically muddled in a lot of ways but I think the way they handled Gwen and Lancelot's affair is one of the most egregious examples. The thing is, they abandoned the idea of "sexual wrongs as a mirror for more general wrongs" in two out of three cases, and what they replaced those with actually worked pretty well. Instead of the rape of Igraine, we have the atrocities carried out by Uther in the name of Igraine's memory. And instead of the incestuous conception of Mordred, we have the tragic backstory of Mordred as a victim of those atrocities. That all works.
But in the case of the adultery storyline we have... a cheap trick orchestrated by the established antagonist. It doesn't have any symbolic significance to the narrative, and it's a fairly minor transgression (because it's a one-off, and occurs before Gwen and Arthur are even married (!) as opposed to how in the source material the affair goes on for decades) that's eventually forgiven and plays no role in the ultimate outcome. It really felt to me like the writers kind of said "well we gotta have the affair in there because it's canonical," i.e., it's a big plot point in Le Morte d'Arthur, but then they watered it down as much as possible and shoehorned it back into the story with no literary finesse whatsoever.
To be clear, I don't necessarily think that the adultery plotline needed to play a huge symbolic role in Merlin like it did in the source material. But, if they were going to bother to include it-- which really was not a foregone conclusion given how much other stuff they changed-- they should have given it more relevance to the story arc or at least played it as something more than Morgana's villainous plot of the week. And they most certainly should have let Gwen's decisions drive that subplot instead of treating her as a pawn in her own storyline.
sorry unpopular opinion alert but sir lancelot was the most boring character. he was actually more interesting to me as a shade than as a living breathing human person which i think sums it up pretty succinctly
Gwen is a fast runner, but not fast enough. Morgana's icy voice through the trees cuts her to the bone. “Why won't you just go away? Why can't I ever be rid of you?”
Morgana's eyes glow gold, and now Gwen’s ears are growing, back bending, fur sprouting, fingers shrinking and fusing together. But worse still is the sudden, terrible mental clarity, the dumb wisdom of the prey animal against the predator. RUN, it shrieks, echoing off the walls of her empty mind. RUN, it screams.
Her ear twitches: human shouts, hoofbeats, crossbows nocked.
#“talk about the monster. magician/maniac.” morgana’s glowing eyes under those words
ooh im glad you liked that part because the other thing I want to say about this is that the "talk about the monster" quote is from The Rule.
which is to say that "talking about the monster" is THE prototypical example of a conversation that passes the test. yeah, that test, you know the one. and also that the monster in question is the xenomorph from Alien, about which there are many parallels to be found with morgana if someone were inclined to wax poetic on that topic.
(anyway sorry for going off about this, it's all part of my sinister agenda to encourage people who have never heard of Dykes to Watch Out For to learn about the actual context behind the bechdel test)
G - 6348 words - hunith & gaius - major character death
for @merlintarotfest
***
Dear Gaius,
The day has come upon me at last, the day that brings to every mother equal parts joy and sorrow. It is time for my little bird to fly the nest.
Well, perhaps such a day does not come to every mother. When I first came to Ealdor many years ago, I imagined my life going very differently. I imagined a doting husband and a whole gaggle of little children, children who would grow up and leave my house, yes, but would settle down right around the corner, with doting husbands and wives of their own. I imagined sweet daughters-in-law, and grandchildren.
Don’t misunderstand me— I wouldn’t trade Merlin for any of that. He is the delight of my heart. But it’s now become clear what I’ve put off accepting for a while now. It is not his lot in life to stay here in the village and comfort me in my old age. He is meant for different things. Greater things, perhaps.
You have always been so good to me, Gaius, and I must ask something of you now. It is too much to ask, but I do it for Merlin’s sake, not mine, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t ask, or do, for my boy. Would you take him in? It makes my heart so uneasy to send him to Camelot, but he just doesn’t belong here in Ealdor. For all the dangers, I do think he will fare better there. And I think he will benefit from staying with you. No, I’m not just saying that to flatter you! He has no father, and you have no son. The two of you could be good for each other.
Still, I cannot make light of the risks; you know them better than I do. I’m sure you know what I mean. It’s been many years since you last saw my son, but I’ve written to you often enough about him. Please believe me when I say I have never exaggerated what I’ve told you about him. If anything, I’ve understated his unique qualities. I always wanted to believe that he was not so different from other children, that he could have the normal, simple life I tried to choose for myself. I don’t believe that anymore, and that’s why I must send him away.
Forgive me for mincing my words. If Merlin is to stay with you in Camelot, it seems the smart thing to do. I trust that you understand, and gather my meaning regardless. Would you do me a favor and destroy our prior correspondence as well? It seems best not to keep any written record of sensitive topics.
Please write back soon. I’ll have Merlin depart after Yule, if you agree.
i love gaius as a character, in the first place because he's hilarious, but in the second place because he's a relatively rare example of a character in a fantasy setting who behaves more or less the way regular people behave in real life. in fiction and especially in genre fiction, there's sometimes a tendency to write every character, even the minor ones, with big Main Character Traits like being willing to die for a cause or to save the lives of strangers. (cough cough: will.) it makes sense for main characters to behave that way because in order to have a big epic fantasy story you need to have someone around who's willing to risk it all when the stakes are high. but if every character is like that, even the joe schmoes, then it starts to strain plausibility because that's just not how most regular people operate.
so I actually love that we've got a character like gaius who wants to do the right thing but isn't always brave enough, who's prepared to die for his own loved ones but otherwise tends to act out of self-preservation, and who tries to be a source of good advice and sometimes gets it wrong because he doesn't have all the answers. it makes him a fascinating character and also a very realistic character.
the other thing i want to say about gaius is that i do think he genuinely believed not telling morgana about magic was the best of the available options, all of which were bad. people will say things like "gaius was gaslighting morgana" which is just not accurate. gaslighting is not the same as lying. gaslighting is lying with the intent to make the victim doubt their own sanity and with the underlying motivation of controlling the victim. none of that is what gaius was doing. it would be much more accurate to say that he lied to morgana in a paternalistic attempt to protect her. and also that gaius and morgana are both victims in this situation. either of them could be executed on any given day based on nothing but uther's whim; morgana is vulnerable because she is young and sheltered and a woman, and gaius is vulnerable because he is common, and they are both vulnerable because they are sorcerers.
and it is is the truth that all of the available options were bad. it's tempting as the audience to think that "if gaius had given morgana some spellbooks and encouraged her to practice magic with merlin, she would have learned to control her nightmares and she never would have ended up going down a dark path and committing atrocities" but the thing is we actually have no way of knowing whether any of that is true. gaius had extensive knowledge of magic and still had no idea how to do anything about morgana's nightmares. the only thing that ever helped with that was a specific, powerful artifact that gaius did not have in his possession or even know existed. morgana might have turned to morgause anyway. she might have revealed merlin's secret to uther. she might have gotten caught by uther herself. don't forget: merlin did pretty much tell morgana she was a sorceress, and it ended poorly, because she ran off to the druids and then immediately got dragged back by uther in the most traumatizing way possible. so it wasn't even incorrect for gaius to fear that giving morgana that information would put her in worse danger from uther! he was, factually speaking, 100% right about that. it was still morally wrong of him to withhold information from her, because it was paternalistic, but I understand why he did it, man. i get it.
