Thoughts on the Northman

 I finished Pacific Rim: The Black this week? And it felt very abrupt? Like, they hadn’t originally planned it to last two seasons, but they had to wrap it up because they were canceled. It’s better than Uprising, but that’s kind of a low bar to clear.

Just so you guys know, I was this close to changing my Saturday Note topic at the last minute, with a couple of paragraphs already written, because of the book I read the past couple of days. It bothers me that much. It’s not even a bad book, it’s just… ugh. Maybe it was a bad book. I’m still deciding.

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Thoughts on The Northman

I’ve talked about the problems I have with pop culture stories about Vikings is how they try to romanticize a culture that is actually pretty garbage. Less bothersome aspects like mass slavery and human sacrifice are downplayed or removed entirely. The best example is Assassin’s Cred: Valhalla, which more or less removes slavery entirely from the picture (except as something the villainous Norsemen do sometimes), makes no mention of human sacrifice, and has the player character be against the harming of civilians while burning houses and raiding monasteries–monasteries which are populated with soldiers now so that you don’t get bored.

There is not, by the way, a reason given why Eivor doesn’t hurt or enslave civilians. She/he just doesn’t. A Viking who doesn’t hurt civilians. For Reasons.

These stories also tend to play up the conflict between Norse paganism and medieval Christianity. And obviously this conflict would exist! And mostly this seems to be an excuse for the writer to hash out his or her issues with Christianity, and again, in the case of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, the Christians are depicted as intolerant bigots for… not wanting the Vikings to conquer/raid them. Really, this and The Thunder God and Odinn’s Child really try to make you feel just fine with a group of people who go around colonizing, slaughtering, and raiding, because yeah, those are bad, but those hypocritical Christians man, am I right?

And so recently I watched The Northman which… does not do any of that. At all.

The first scene the audience sees with Amleth as an adult is him on a boat going down the river in the Rus, and the ship passes two fisherman. One of the Vikings shoots them and laughs. No one on board objects. They go on a raid on a village, slaughter the fighters, enslave the survivors, and have the children gathered into a house and then burn that house down. Again, not the protagonist nor anyone on his side object to this.

You’re not supposed to approve of this. I’m pretty sure that you’re supposed to be uncomfortable with this.

This is not a movie that glorifies medieval Norse culture. It’s not one of those that goes, “WeLl, ACKSHUALLY, Norse society was egalitarian and free and cool!” It’s not a documentary, of course, and I don’t think you should look at the movie and say, “Welp, now I know what it was like back then!” No, it’s a movie. But it does include things from the historical record that is often left out in an attempt to try to make it more palatable to modern audiences. And I appreciate that. It’s long bothered me that Norse society is, for whatever reason, a society of slave-holding white colonizers that for some reason, it’s cool to still romanticize, and act as if they were all great people by modern standards, and seeing a movie that didn’t do this was encouraging. I’m of the opinion that we should look at the Norse raiders the same way that we look at the Confederacy. There’s this backlash on the depiction of the Spartans in the movie 300, and how it makes them out to be the coolest people in history when in reality they were pretty garbage (they hunted slaves for sport), yet Vikings? Nah, it’s cool.

I get why many of the less-savory aspects are often wiped out–after all, it would be hard to find a protagonist likable if he’s taking part in terrible things. But while I think toning it down, and admitting in an author’s note or something that you did so, would be fine, I don’t think taking it out completely and acting like it’s okay is fine. I’m reminded of Obsidian & Blood by Aliette de Bodard, which is set in the Aztec Triple Alliance. And the main character doesn’t partake in human sacrifices, something the author admits she fudged because it would make him less likable. But she doesn’t remove human sacrifice from the setting at all–and Acatl is A-okay with it. He doesn’t object to the idea of human sacrifice, because he’s a Mexica priest when this would have been normal. If Viking stories in pop culture did an approach like this, I would be more accepting.

And The Northman doesn’t bother to try to tell you that this guy’s a good guy by today’s standards. Heck, by the end of the movie, I don’t think you’re even necessarily supposed to like Amleth, as he does quite a lot of horrible things on the way to revenge, and you wonder that he hasn’t become worse than his fratricidal uncle. The point of the movie isn’t “Look at this cool guy who everyone should be like!” It’s, “Here’s a story from way back when–take it or leave it as it is.” That doesn’t make it always easy to watch, but it makes a difference in how I judge the story despite the actions of the characters.

[Side note! There’s also not a ‘conflict of religions’ that many of these stories try to do. There are two Christian characters, slaves alongside Amleth in Fjolnir’s settlement, and they don’t have much role in the Plot. At one point after Amleth kills some men and nails their remains to the side of a house (yeah, it’s that kind of movie), Fjolnir’s son blames the Christian by virtue of “Well they worship a deity nailed to a tree, it might be them,” before his father points out that they had no way of doing this and dismissing the idea as ridiculous. Olga is some sort of Slavic pagan, but there’s not a conflict there.]

When representing past cultures, especially ones with values far removed from our own like that, I don’t think that fiction should whitewash the flaws away. I don’t mind as much if they’re downplayed, as long as the writers admit that’s what they’re doing. But they should definitely be referenced in the work in some way or another.

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You Should Buy Physical Media

 I… may have killed my PS4. It’s not starting and asking that I reinstall the system software. Which isn’t great, but it’s not the big disaster one might think–I only just started Ghost of Tsushima and the Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed should be saved in the cloud. Still! Not good!

Anyhow I’m hoping to have finished 60 books for 2022 by the time the month ends.

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You Should Buy Physical Media

So I had thought about this topic before, but with a bajillion different articles and video essays being produced about the “The Fall of Netflix” because of their scramble to react to loss of subscribers–and by the way, they’re handling this very badly. They slashed their animation department, including canceling their Bone adaptation, and holding up their Boss Baby show (which they don’t produce, just distribute) as the model for how they want their animated shows to go. They are considering having a cheaper version with ads. And of course, they’re trying to crack down on password sharing, because they’re convinced that if they demand you pay extra for it when one of your family members who happens to live in a different location uses the same account, they’ll win more money.

I don’t want to say go back to pirating everything, but it’s tempting.

But thinking about streaming again is making me think about how streaming is overrated. It’s not bad, in general, but it’s become the de facto way to watch movies. And that’s… not actually good. And it’s part of a trend we see with media that’s kind of bothersome. Mainly, we don’t own a lot of the media that we consume, and it’s actually kind of messed up.

Because you don’t own it. If your Internet craps out, your library of movies is gone. And that’s also true if your power does too, but I feel as if websites and online databases are a lot more fragile than the power grid, in general. Furthermore, you don’t have to pay to watch movies that you personally own. You buy them, and they’re yours–you just have to keep paying the power bill. Which you are also paying with streaming.

Streaming services also don’t always keep the same libraries. Movies regularly go in and out of services like Netflix and Hulu. Roku has a handy feature that lets you search what streaming services have different movies, but it’s immensely frustrating to decide to watch a movie on Netflix, only to find out that it’s no longer on Netflix, or any other streaming service you own. And in theory those services won’t remove their own original content, you don’t actually know that for a fact. They might decide a piece of media is too controversial for whatever reason and remove it without notice.

And then there was this weird thing that happened recently, with the upload of the Netflix Defenders serieses to Disney+, where it edited out the gore from certain episodes of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, presumably for the child-friendly version of Disney+, and it got added to all accounts? And recently episodes of DuckTales and Agent Carter just disappeared off of the platform? This doesn’t happen if you own DVDs or Blu-Ray versions of these serieses.

There was a time a few years ago that one of the ads you’d see on movies released on video before the menu popped up was for the preservation of old movies. Because there are tons of movies, especially silent movies, that have been lost because no one bothered to update the way they’re stored. And now we’re seeing a point in which most of us don’t even own our favorite movies and television shows that are coming out–we just stream them. And a lot of big releases aren’t released on physical media, in part as an effort to try to convince you to buy into streaming services.

The crackdown on password sharing, acting as if it’s somehow criminal: it’s stupid! Because when you own a movie, it’s not insane to hand it to someone and let them borrow it for a while. You can do this with library books and rented movies too, as long as they’re returned on time. It’s blatant greed, because these streaming services are convinced that they need to monetize everything, and are convinced they need to keep growing at all costs, even if it’s unsustainable.

What’s infuriating is that this isn’t just happening with streaming. Video games for instance. So many games are bought online and downloaded directly to the console, and it turns out that you can’t play those games if you’re not connected online. And do you remember when the Xbox One was announced, they pitched it so that your game discs would only be installed to YOUR console, and you could only share it with five other people registered as friends on your profile? Meaning you can’t share with anyone, and you definitely can’t resell it to a used game store if you don’t want the game anymore.

Music? Yes, it’s great that records made a comeback, but you notice that people often use Spotify and they don’t own the music? That’s a bit weird!

And books! Luckily buying books is still in fashion, but you don’t technically own Kindle books, you know. I’m told that it doesn’t hold up in court, but in the terms and conditions, Amazon can actually just yoink a book from your Kindle if they feel like for any reason at all. It used to be that you could look at the files on your Kindle if you plug it to a computer, and if you wanted to move digital books to your Kindle (and if you have the right program you can reformat it!), but in the more recent Kindle that I noticed that the books I’ve bought don’t show up in the files when it’s hooked up.

I’m not saying there’s an overarching conspiracy to take ownership away from consumers. I don’t think there was a massive decision by the black suits in charge of the entertainment industry or something like that. But it is a trend, and it’s annoying and dumb, because it’s more and more pushing for people to rely on their paid for constant services like streaming rather than just turning on a device and playing the media that belongs to them.

And if something happens to online collections, then you’re up a creek! Because if you can’t get on Netflix or Disney+ accidentally deletes your favorite show, you’re better off if you can just put in your own disc to your Blu-Ray player and watch it. Or if the Kindle app is fritzing out, to be able to load up the same book on another device, without the app, and reading a book like a normal person. Or being able to lend a cool game to your friend who doesn’t want to spend the money because he or she is unsure about it.

Just buy physical media again. I’m not saying don’t stream stuff, or don’t buy digital games, but also keep in mind the limitations and definitely buy physical media.

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On Belief Shaping Reality

 I don’t feel fantastic this week, which is a shame because it’s Easter tomorrow and it’s supposed to be a feel-good day. It’s not too bad, and I suspect by next week I’ll be fine. But I would rather not deal with this right.

Also! I started watching The Chosen. I had meant to put it off a bit, but then I thought it’d be very nice to at least start it during Lent. And I like it so far!

Anyhow it took me quite a while to come up with what I would write about before settling on this. I talked a bit about this in my sporking of Iron Druid Chronicles, but I figured why not make a Saturday Note for it! So here we are.

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On Belief Shaping Reality

So small only vaguely-related tangent before we begin:

I somehow came to this because Easter’s coming, and I thought about (for some reason) that one episode of American Gods with Ostara, Eostre? Which suggests that the Christian feast of Easter is entirely cribbed from the Germanic goddess Eostre. This wouldn’t be so bad, because it’s fiction, and for the novel Neil admitted that he fudged some facts to make the story work better (a third Zorya, for instance), but I remember picking up a behind-the-scenes book about the show in Barnes & Noble, and it straight-up tells you that Christians copied and pasted Eostre.

And yes, the English word ‘Easter’ is most probably taken from ‘Eostre’, but I think the assertion that the most holy day of the year for a religion started in the Middle East and really took off in the Greek and Roman world, whose words for the day aren’t remotely related to ‘Eostre’... to put it lightly, it strikes me as a bit silly.

Anyway, the actual point of the Note.

There’s a fairly common idea that is persistent in fantasy that wants to incorporate mythology, especially real-life mythology, go with this idea: gods, or mythological figures, exist because people believe in them. The more people believe in them, the stronger they are, and if people don’t believe in them then they don’t have as much power. So ancient gods are weaker in modern day, and ones who are unknown are dead or faded. And in some versions of this take, you see that reality itself is shaped by the beliefs of people.

I’m going to be real with you: I don’t much like this trope.

I don’t think that this concept was invented by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, by they’re the ones who popularized it in their books. The Sandman, Discworld, and American Gods run on this idea. And those stories all work! They work very well! But the difference between those and how a bunch of other stories deal with it is that they’re using this trope to make a point. Discworld uses the idea of belief being an actual force to talk about human nature and how it shapes how people act and the way they construct the world around them. American Gods is using gods and belief to talk about the fickleness of American culture. And The Sandman has a title character who is explicitly the anthropomorphic personification of creativity and imagination; of course, there’s going to be a lot about the nature of what people create through the things they believe. That’s just how that story would go.

A lot of stories in modern fantasy just relabel this idea though without the thematic reasoning behind it. Not all of them do, mind you, and they still manage to be creative. In Dresden Files powerful beings like gods aren’t kept alive by belief, but they do get power from active worship, and being known about helps them keep an anchor in the mortal world. We’re shown that there’s a group dedicated to kicking beings out of the mortal world by destroying records and eliminating all memory of them.

Also Fables? It’s a comic series about fairy tale characters in modern day. Plenty of characters run on the assumption that fairy tale characters’ strengths are tied to how popular their stories are, and one of them, Jack, goes so far as to work his way into Hollywood to make movies about himself, all in an attempt to become functionally immortal. Except the smarter characters (and the author himself) have suggested that no, that’s not how it works, and the characters are using a flawed theory to try to make sense of the world they live in.

There’s also a thing in Gunnerkrigg Court in which Coyote tells Antimony that the world works this way in that setting, but other characters express their own doubts. He’s got evidence to back it up, but it’s unconfirmed, and one of the mythological characters explicitly hates it because he doesn’t love the notion that he exists because humans made him up.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians also has the gods not tied to belief (at least, not entirely), but to Western Civilization itself, and so the villains taking down the gods is equated with destroying Western Civilization. And to be clear, both of these (the Olympian gods and Western Civilization) are called out as being flawed constructs prone to abuses, although this isn’t gotten too deeply into because it’s a kids series. Gods can seemingly choose to fade away and die if they’re forgotten, but that seems to be something of a choice, and also tied to their domains. Pan dies not because he himself is forgotten (he’s certainly not), but because humans don’t respect his domain at all–the wild places, which are rapidly dwindling.

But a lot of mythology-based stories use the gods-need-belief idea uncritically. I just talked about PJO and how it played with this, but the sequel serieses all play the trope completely straight, suggesting that the gods need humanity’s belief and are terrified of losing it, despite often featuring little-known mythological figures that barely anyone knows, all the while pointedly not depicting any major religions that dominate the spheres today. The obvious explanation is that Riordan wanted to have crossover cosmology–Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Norse myths are all real in this setting, and Aztec, Celtic, and Yoruba myths are suggested to be real–without stirring too much controversy from having figures from Judeo-Christian or Islamic mythology appearing. And to be clear, there are Muslim and Jewish characters in the series, their religious beliefs are just kind of handwaved.

Iron Druid Chronicles also takes the cake as the worst offender here because the gods exist because people believe in them, but it’s only there for crossover cosmology and nothing else. And when the protagonist explains this to a practicing Catholic, that her deity exists because He’s made up, this is meant to be taken as a heartwarming affirmation of how we’re all right, in our own way.

I suppose Nightside ALSO has the same system, but it’s rarely the focus of the story, and that story runs on Rule of Cool. Look, one of the protagonist’s friends is Razor Eddie, Punk God of the Straight Razor. Simon Green isn’t even trying to be clever, he’s just throwing stuff he thinks sounds cool into the books, which… is kind of fun, actually?

Which leads to my second problem with this trope: it doesn’t actually do much with actual believers in the story. Look, people who believe in a religion believe it is true. Christians and Muslims believe that God made the world, for instance. So for someone to come up to a religious character in one of these settings and say, “Actually, no, the world just exists and God does because we made Him up”: this should be earth-shattering. It should be a revelation that the character’s religion, all religions, are in fact made up fabrications with only pockets of truth. It shouldn’t be “Oh, okay, we’re all right?” for a religious character. It should be “Oh snap! We’re all wrong, then aren’t we?” In most belief systems, if your deity is discovered to explicitly be made up, then he or she or they or it isn’t real!

Thirdly, when we get to the idea of beliefs making things real, well, a lot of people believe in weird or stupid things. The weirdest this usually gets is things like aliens or Bigfoot. But you know how many wild conspiracy theories there are out there? So if people believe in that vaccines contain mind control chips, in a world where belief makes things real, do those exist now? Do some people really live on a Flat Earth? Is there really a lizardman cabal ruling the world?

And that’s some of the less offensive stuff.

Also! If the world is shaped by what people believe… well how does anything get discovered? How does anyone learn anything contrary to popular opinion? Columbus was looking for Asia because Europeans didn’t know there was another continent in the way. How would they have not reached Asia if the world is shaped by belief? How did spontaneous generation get disproved? How did geocentrism? This doesn’t make any sense!

You can’t just throw in an idea about how reality is shaped and then not think through the implications of it! And this is a big idea! Reality is a big idea! And so copying and pasting a thematic concept from better books doesn’t work if you don’t also do the work to make it fit into your own story.

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Convenience Retcons

 After reading 1635: A Parcel Full of Rogues, I sincerely considered making a Saturday Note about Cromwell and how much he sucks, but I think a large chunk of that will go into the Book Diary entry for that book. This Note was kind of inspired by a book though.

Tonight I’m planning to go see the play Something Rotten! So I hope that goes well. It’s been a while since I saw a play, I think.

Also! I have a public service announcement coming to ImpishIdea. So watch out for that.

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The Convenience Retcon

A lot of times when we talk about ‘retcons’, or ‘retroactive continuity,’ we generally mean worldbuilding details or character backstories. It’s when something is changed that contradicts what we already knew. Like, if your immortal character is established to have been born in the Scottish highlands and have no clear explanation for his powers, but then a new story declares that it’s actually because of he was born 500 years ago on the planet Zeist and is in exile for being an alien rebel, well, yeah, you clearly changed the backstory, that’s a retcon. And a very bad one at that.

We’re not here to talk about that kind of retcon though. Basically on Friday while thinking of this Note, I considered what I call “the convenience retcon.” Basically, it’s when you change the established rules of how the fictional world works for the sake of convenience. See, [old man voice] back in my day, Internet writing guides for fantasy worlds always drilled into people’s heads that they needed to have the rules for their magic systems precisely explained or drawn out, so that both you and the reader knew the rules.

Now I don’t think that’s a hard and fast rule–if the magic doesn’t have set rules, it can work. I don’t know how the magic works in Hellboy, and that’s never really bothered me that much. It’s magic. Who cares. It’s not supposed to make sense in that setting. ButI think that you shouldn’t contradict the rules you set up, or change things for the sake of convenience even though it doesn’t fit with what’s already established.

The reason I started thinking about this is because I reread Eragon and there’s a certain kind of spell called scrying, in which you can view something or someone far away. It’s specifically stated in this book that scrying can only let you see someone, not hear or talk to him or her. And if that person is somewhere you haven’t been before, you can’t see his or her environment. Communicating over this way is explicitly impossible, we’re told by characters who are experts at magic.

In the third book of the series, Brisingr, Eragon casually casts a spell to essentially do a magic Skype call, with the narration telling us that this was a spell he learned off-page that lets you talk to people over great distances. He and his boss have set up a system for him to do this.

And I get it, okay? That you needed characters to communicate with each other across long distances, so you had to do something. I suppose it’s better than what we have in Wheel of Time, in which plenty of characters are running across the map and have no idea what the others are doing, and missing out on important information because of it for books on end. But that doesn’t change that the author is now changing something that was before a hardbound rule. Yes, we can handwave it as a spell being rediscovered by an ancient master or something, but it’s pretty egregiously breaking the rules. Could he not think of some other way to communicate information over long distances?

Another example: in Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, when a group of characters starts out their time travel journey, they’re told that time travel has to be balanced. A trip to the past has to have a balance of a trip to the future of relatively equal value. So when our heroes want to go to the deep past, they first have to shoot into the deep future. Except when they finally get to the deep past after fighting through a dystopian future, they find they need to go back even further. When asked if they need to do a balancing trip first, Rose answers that she thinks that specific rule of time travel is bunk and so they can just keep going back. Which they do. With no negative consequences.

Hurm.

[I thought about adding the time travel rules from the CW The Flash here, but they don’t have any consistency with the rules there so I didn’t see the point.]

I’m also thinking of Heroes of Olympus examples, which aren’t breaking hardbound rules, as such, but they are changing things to make it convenient. Jason starts the series with a magic coin that he flips and it turns into an Imperial Gold weapon: one side makes a sword, the other a spear. He flips it again to change it back. It breaks at the end of The Lost Hero and he gets a new sword. It’s later decided that actually, all Imperial Gold weapons work like that, and you can just will them to change on the fly, as both Jason and Reyna shift their weapons between spear and sword in combat.

Likewise, we get a few other weird bits. Percy’s sword, Riptide, is magically disguised as a pen until he uncaps it. This is specifically something special, and we rarely see other items like it–and they’re all explicitly magic. Percy’s watch turns into a shield. Thalia’s wristband turns into a shield. Her spray can turns into a spear. Bianca finds a hairpin that turns into a bow. Except there’s a scene in one of the later Heroes of Olympus books in which the narration is like, ‘By the way, when he puts it over his shoulder, Frank’s bow turns into a backpack! Anyway moving on.’

This is also silly, because the setting has the Mist, which obscures what normal people see. The other items change for easy carrying, whereas Frank’s transforms to blend in–when it should already blend it because magic sight BS.

All of these are examples where the retcon happens because it makes it easier for the characters. Not necessarily easier for the Plot–though they sometimes are. But they make things easier or more comfortable for the hero by breaking the rules of what we already know, very often with casual disregard to what’s already been put down. There are times when it’s okay to break the rules you’ve already set up, but when it’s done for the sake of making things easier for the heroes, to sweep away any struggles they might have had, it’s frustrating. If you come up with a limitation, it’s YOUR job as the author to figure out a way around it. That’s the ‘creative’ part of ‘creative writing.’ If you make a rule in the story, don’t throw it away to make the protagonist more comfortable. You don’t always have to put characters through the ringer, but you shouldn’t cut corners to make things too easy either.

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Things I Want to See More in Arthurian Fiction

 It’s going to be another busy weekend but I thought I’d at least try to get a Saturday Note to you guys. Also! I’ve updated the sporking on ImpishIdea. If anyone follows that. I’m hoping that being off of Tumblr and Playstation for Lent is boosting my productivity a little bit in some areas.

I will probably not be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this month, for the record. 

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Things I Want to See More in Arthurian Fiction

I thought about more things to say about certain characters, but then I realized that I had written Notes about Galahad and Mordred, and this was an idea for a Note that I had more than once. Maybe I have written this Note, but I haven’t found it on the current Notes website, so we’re doing it now! 

I want to put a disclaimer that I’m not saying that I want all of these elements within the same work–I suspect some of them probably wouldn’t fit together very well if you put them in the same book. I also imagine it as given that I want more stories that excise the Love Triangle from Hell.

Celtic Christianity

There is a tendency, which I suspect was started by Marion Zimmer Bradley–she certainly codified it, if it didn’t start with her–to depict the Arthurian story as around the time that Christianity’s being introduced into Britain, and focus heavily on the conflict between Christianity and paganism. Because there is a habit of people romanticizing Celtic paganism and assuming that Christianity at the time was a cross between Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, and Westboro Baptist (it wasn’t), Arthur is often depicted as one of the last holdouts of paganism against incoming Christian hordes.

Uh… no.

Okay not all authors do this–Sword of the Rightful King has Arthur and his court as new Christians, struggling to work out what aspects of their lifestyle and culture does and doesn’t fit with their new beliefs. And obviously you have Stephen Lawhead, a Christian author who makes it a key part of the characters (Merlin is basically a prophet in the Pendragon Cycle). Still, while he does have interest in Celtic Christianity, I don’t think that 

Saint David, Saint Derfel, and Saint Iltud are all saints around the time who have folklore about being related to or knowing King Arthur. For whatever reason, other than Saint Derfel being the protagonist of Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, this is usually not referenced. I believe that Zimmer Bradley puts Saint Patrick in Arthur’s court (and of course makes him a jerk), which is a bit odd because as far as I know he spent most of his career as a bishop in Ireland.

We’ll get to the Irish/Welsh division later on.

I would like to see more inclusion of the Celtic Christian tradition in King Arthur stories. More inclusion of saints as characters (and not just in a ‘Ta-ha! Actually they’re jerks!’ kind of way, though feel free to play with their personalities), more Christian characters (as it’d be more accurate to the period), and more crazy stories involving miracles out of the hagiographies.

Welsh Mythology

You know on the flip side, if you do decide to make Celtic paganism or myth, can you actually do some research? Many times people want to add Irish mythology into Arthurian stories, and while that’s not entirely off, as they’re related, the old Arthurian stories are part of Welsh folklore, and related to Welsh mythology and legends. They are, after all, Britons. I blame the New Age movement.

There are less sources on Welsh mythology than something like Greco-Roman myth (which is also tied to Arthurian legend sometimes, like in the Imaginarium Geographica books), but it’s more true to the stories to have it included. The oldest King Arthur stories involve talking to mythological figures and fighting giants. Heck, there’s a family tree in which Arthur is a descendant of both Bran and Lyr!

Many King Arthur type of stories try to basically rewrite Arthurian Britain into a fantasy world. Very few of them do that with anything looking like Welsh myth. It should look something like Chronicles of Prydain in the way the world is set up. Probably more fantastical, really–there would be more giants, more monsters, more explicitly divine beings walking around. And obviously, include the Tylwyth Teg, the Welsh fairies.

Other things from Welsh folklore that should show up more: Arthur’s sons (yes, he has more than one), the treasures of Britain, and a bunch of other lesser kings who will compete for power and prestige. And some druids, I suppose! There were definitely druids in Britain before the Romans did their best to stamp them out, and if you emphasize the Welsh paganism those should be there. 

Mordred and Galahad Interactions

Have I written on this before? I don’t know. There’s a scene in one of the Gerald Morris Squire’s Tales in which the protagonist comes upon a campsite with Galahad and Mordred, and that’s a fun interaction. And I want to see that crop up in fiction much more often. Galahad is meant to be the perfect knight, the best of the best, and paragon of virtue. And Mordred is… not that. 

I’m not against redeemable Mordred, but I also think he’s most entertaining in stories when he’s The Worst. Just terrible. A garbage man. An evil little poop. Very often he’s able to present himself as being a good guy, but anyone who looks deeper sees how terrible he is (and then very often Mordred stabs that person in the back).

The paragon of chivalry and the absolute avatar of depravity. I want to see how those two interact with each other. Maybe even fight? Maybe not. That’d be a cool fight, though I can’t picture Mordred actually putting himself in that kind of situation. But I want to see how the two of them talk–Mordred trying to come off as a good guy, and Galahad either seeing right through it, or being utterly baffled, because Mordred’s talk is just that–talk. There’s a line in Kingdom of Summer in which the protagonist realizes that while he’s seen Mordred be nice, he’s never seen him do it when it’s not to his own advantage. Galahad seeing Mordred in action and realizing that would be interesting. Maybe he doesn’t know that Mordred’s full on ax-crazy, but he sees that something is up.

Especially because, in a lot of fiction, Galahad doesn’t get along with the other knights because he’s so Lawful Good. So you have Mordred, who is able to get people on his side because he’s a smooth talker, and his word is against the guy who we know is telling the truth about Mordred, but barely anyone believes him.

Or maybe have them fight, that’d be cool.

War in Europe

You know in the Arthurian romances, a lot of times Arthur goes to war in Europe and conquers it? We know that didn’t happen in real life, even aside from the war with Lancelot. The version I’m familiar with is that the Roman emperor sent a message to Arthur demanding tribute, and Arthur didn’t want to pay tribute so he just… went to war with the Roman Empire. And won. And took all his land. Which is utterly ridiculous, so I understand why that’s not in most adaptations, but I think it should at least come up?

I’m not saying I want more adaptations in which Arthur conquers Europe. That’s silly. But going to war with Rome? Going to war in the European mainland? Fighting different kinds of armies? These are interesting ideas. Especially since many adaptations are based off of the romances, in which many of Arthur’s knights come from around the world. Palamedes is Middle Eastern (and Muslim), and Sagrimore is the son of the King of Hungary.

Arthur is so associated with Britain and the British Isles. Stories like Excalibur make it so that his life is tied to the land in a mystical way. What happens when he leaves it? Is he still as strong? What does that mean for the kingdom? Who runs things while he’s gone? Traditionally he puts Mordred in charge and that’s when things start going wrong, but if you want to give Guinevere something to do, the story could have her running it while her husband is out.

Morgause

Most of the time Morgause’s characterization is folded into Morgan le Fay for simplicity’s sake. I get it. But look here–Morgause is the Queen of Air and Darkness in many of the stories. She’s a completely horrible human being who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and I am a bit tired of Morgan stealing her thunder. I would absolutely love to see Morgause get more spotlight.

[I suppose the recent Green Knight movie is ambiguous enough that you could argue that Gawain’s mother in the film is Morgause, as it is in the stories, but she’s never named on-screen and guide video released before the movie came out calls her Morgan le Fay.]

I don’t have much else to add here, just that.

Complexity in Morgan le Fay

BBC Merlin had a good setup for this, and then threw it out the window to make her a full-on evil villain. Which I’m sure Katie McGrath had fun playing, but is still frustrating. In the older stories, Morgan le Fay isn’t the incarnation of evil. She is a wicked witch, yes, and she does try to kill him in some stories–but other times does seemingly love her brother and there are instances of her doing things to help him. I’m not saying I want her to be a good character–I don’t think I do–but someone with more complexity than trying to destroy everything Arthur’s built.

Traditionally, when Arthur is dying, he’s taken to Avalon (to be healed or to be buried) by a group of queens, one of whom is his sister Morgan. Think about it: she’s there to bury or to heal him. Why would she do that if she had no redeemable qualities whatsoever? I should think that that’s a question more pop culture writers would want to answer, but weirdly none of them seem to think about it at all.

[The Tales of Arcadia writers did, which was a bit of a surprise for me.]

And that ‘le Fay’ thing? Is Morgan a fairy? Usually she’s Arthur’s half-sister so being a full-blooded fairy is a bit weird. According to the Gargoyles universe she’s a changeling put into Arthur’s family. Or is she someone who has spent so much time with fairies that she identifies more with them than with her human family–like John Carter of Mars, but with fairies? Either way, her identification with fairies may go some ways to explain her wayward nature.

She’s also often placed as Merlin’s student, though usually as a role that’s because she’s being combined with Nimue (although I suppose they can BOTH be students of Merlin in a retelling). What was that like? What did Merlin see in her that was worth teaching? In some stories he’s part fairy too, so maybe he saw something kindred in someone else who identifies with the fairies.

West Wing Shenanigans

My sister and I had this idea that since so much of the appeal of Camelot in many stories is how it tries to reform the way things are done in medieval England. So we’re thinking it could easily be made into a drama or comedy in which Arthur and his court are wandering around Camelot trying to make new laws pass or get certain changes made.

Or, alternatively, all of that is happening in the background, and we have our characters, the staff members like squires, ministers, advisors and such, running around trying to make things run smoothly while the figurative and literal battles are being fought.

We want The West Wing, but in Camelot. Basically.

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What things would YOU like to see in Arthurian fiction?