Gwen is a blacksmith’s daughter. It’s not one of the first things we learn about her, but it gradually grows more important as the series goes on. As she drops the refrain “Morgana’s maidservant” and trades it in for something more meaningful to her person.
Over the course of season two, Gwen lessens her time at home, and subsequently the forge, to spend more time at Morgana’s side, night and day. Primarily because of Morgana needing her presence to tame her nightmares, but also in the wake of her father’s death, which invited so many grief-stricken emotions to the surface. The forge reminds her of him, plain and simple. Morgana had also played a role in Tom’s murder and is again, if subconsciously, pulling Gwen away from the setting that reminds her of her own family. In a similar way, Morgana’s power over her own magic emerges in destructive flames, seeming to symbolize the physicality of Gwen is losing ground of an art her family had been mastering for decades.
But season three changes the game. Gwen is given more space in the larger narrative, and her family returns to the center stage. Elyan is brought back into the fold in The Castle of Fyrien, and with his presence, the forge is up and running again for the first time in years. This is also the episode where Morgana’s ploy to further break Gwen’s surviving family apart fails spectacularly, because the love she wields to save her brother subverts that hatred instead, “It’s what you do when you love someone.” This follows a pattern over the rest of the season, and we see the significance of Gwen being the blacksmith’s daughter again in Queen of Hearts, where Tom’s death is finally given space, even if the only one advocating for the sum of her father’s memory is Gwen; defying Uther openly in the face of his ugly condemnation. Gwen is the one who’d “kneel on a stone-cold floor morning after morning” for her father, and it’s that fire Morgana once admired that leads to Gwen defeating her, once and for all.
And at the end of the season that very phrase comes to a fitting climax, as Gwen uses her skills and experience to outwit a Morgana who’s forgotten she was ever a blacksmith’s daughter in the first place, “I... forgot you too had suffered.” She returns to her forge, a place of terrible pain and the hope of new invention, and reclaims her own fire by making something of it, fittingly a key to escape. Something her father had lived and died in the hope of, something Morgana had given secret ambitions to, and ultimately worsened him for. Something his daughter would use years later as an instrument of escape, because it was her hands that melt it into shape, and it was her inheritance to ultimately wield it for good.
In a season about choices, Gwen makes a very deliberate one as an answer to the question, “Why else would Arthur fall in love with someone like you?”
Not just a commoner, but someone like Gwen, who’s heritage is the forge of a man falsely condemned for magic, and brutally excecuted for the same. Uther’s question is pointed at the very heart of the insecurity Morgana has sought to exploit, a place of deep fear from long-lasting repercussions. Why do you still dare to call yourself the blacksmith’s daughter? And Gwen, who’s found a new hearth amongst friends, and having used her wit and honesty to survive his regime thus far, openly embraces her father as the good and honest man he was, when she replies “I don't expect someone like you to understand that.” Fin.
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