I am, as I start this essay, re-reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White and I find… that I don’t actually like it all that much? I don’t like how a good chunk of the novel is laser-focused on the love triangle, and I don’t like how it tries to portray Lancelot and Guinevere’s actions as sympathetic when they’re kind of terrible. Having now read adaptations that brutally deconstruct or satirize the Lancelot/Guinevere relationship, seeing it played straight and the central part of the story feels…
I just kind of hate it. Not the book, overall, just this plot element. But the book doesn’t endear itself to me.
Anyhow this is something I’ve been thinking about since I started my Wheel of Time re-read last year.
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He’s So Good, He’s Bad
Something that bothered me in Wheel of Time during my re-read is the way Galad is depicted. Galad is one of the members of the royal family of Andor, and the brother of one of the main characters Elayne. Both Elayne and her brother Gawyn (yes, there are a lot of Arthurian-themed names in this series, go with it) don’t really get along with Galad because Galad’s a bit of a goody-two shoes, always turning them in if they do something wrong and being a stickler for the rules. This is framed as Galad being “too good.” He’s not a good person, he’s too good of a person. And this leads him to joining an extremist group called the Children of the Light, or the Whitecloaks, who are more or less what you’d get if you crossed the Inquisition with the Teutonic Knights on steroids, without any sort of Church or government that they owed allegiance to. In theory they stand against the Dark One, but they tend to label anyone they don’t like as Darkfriends and are so hypocritical that they hardly notice when their own ranks are infiltrated by Darkfriends, as they’re too busy pursuing the heroes.
And to be entirely fair to Robert Jordan, this statement of him being “too good that he’s bad” come from Elayne and Gawyn, who are his siblings. They hardly have an objective opinion on the matter. And Gawyn turns out to be even worse; by the end of the fourth book he’s a murderer who betrays his allegiances because he’s mad the good guys are keeping secrets from him, more or less. But Galad’s characterization bothered me a bit, because it seemed to imply that if someone was too concerned with doing the right thing, he or she will turn out evil. And that bothered me, because it was like a condemnation of the Lawful Good character type.
I don’t know; maybe I’m reading too much into it. I haven’t finished this series yet either, so I don’t know where Galad’s character arc will go.
But then this past week I’m re-reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and I had some of these thoughts again because White… is actually incredibly cynical. He helpfully informs us that if Lancelot hadn’t been brought up to care about chivalry or morality or trying to do the right thing, he could have just run off with Guinever and the whole tragedy could have been avoided. White sees the knights who obtain the Holy Grail in a way that makes it seem like he doesn’t like them very much: Galahad is too perfect, that no one can really relate to him, Bors is explicitly a misogynist (a trait White keeps telling us but giving very little proof of other than that he’s a bit rude to Guinever), and Percivale is almost childish in how innocent he is. Percivale comes across the best, in White’s eyes, but it’s still kind of condescending that he equates this level of innocence with being childish.
To be a saintly person, White seems to say, you must be completely detached from reality in some way or another. And this… bothers me.
Again, being fair, Lancelot does come to the defense of his son Galahad by pointing out that Galahad is apparently someone born without sin; or at least, without the capability of committing mortal sin. You wouldn’t expect an archangel to act like a normal person, would you? And Arthur accepts this explanation, pointing out that the knights who Galahad bothers are the most worldly of them all.
It’s not made any easier because very little of these characters is ever shown to us; Percivale is entirely off-page through the entire story. Their exploits are usually relayed to us by different knights, reporting back on what’s going on during the Grail Quest. So all we have to go on are these reports from others saying, “These guys? They’re just too perfect that they’re a pain in the butt to even be around.”
Like, imagine if there was a Marvel story that portrayed Captain America as a massive douchebag, not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because he’s too Lawful Good. That he’s so out of touch from the world and so neither the author nor the characters in the story care about him.
Oh wait, that did happen during the Civil War arc in the comics. A reporter accused Steve Rogers of being a hypocrite because he didn’t know what Myspace was. Rogers was flummoxed and stunned into shamed silence. And it was as stupid as it sounds.
I’m not suggesting you can’t play around with Lawful Good characters, nor am I suggesting that cynical takes on them can’t happen. I’m not saying that all the heroes need to be Moral Paragons! I don’t want that and you don’t want that. But I’m not thrilled with this idea of saying, ‘Oh this character is a paragon of what is Good and Righteous? Then he or she must actually be a colossal dick, or a social reject, or else I must find some other way to take a dump on this character and on the idea of morality.’
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