User blog comment:MerlinUSA/Merlin -- The Big Picture/@comment-5102537-20130120143649/@comment-5102537-20130122115013

@MerlinUSA, Kilgharrah referred to love as the greatest force of all in regard to Gwen. The spell could only be broken by Arthurs true love (by a kiss from the one he truly loves), and this was Gwen. So I don't see your reference to Merlin at all.

I understand pretty well that you don't want to believe only hearsay. However, the show runners and others involved have lied or stretched the truth  many times. They often told the audience things that simply didn't happen on the show, not to mention that attracting people by making specific promises in order to gain their attention is part of the business. Most Merlin fans will confirm to you that it was indeed said that Arthur will become king towards the end of the show and that the actual legends then begin (off-screen). A while ago I had a long and pretty pointless debate on another forum with someone who constantly demanded proof from me about this subject, even though she was very well aware of the fact that I was right. No matter what I delivered, she constantly denied it and twisted everything upside down, even after finally a Merlin crewmember directly confirmed what I said. This show has a tendency to push people into denial and a lot of viewers only believe what they want to believe, depending on who their favourite characters are.

If you want to know about the plan of making Arthur king towards the end of the final season and not in the beginning of season four, please search articles or Youtube videos, because I can't even remember if I read it in magazines, on the internet or if it was said in Youtube videos about Merlin conventions. I surely will find the link again in which Anthony Head said that once Arthur is king, the show will be over. For the rest, please ask other fans and/or search the internet/magazines.

When they say that they've always known how the show will end, then they either lied in the beginning (which I doubt) or they had at least two alternative ends and chose the one we saw indeed. Everything they recently said and what happened in the last season contradicted the things they said in the past.

Anyway, about the homosexual or homoerotical relationship, as the Lurker already mentioned, the show runners definitely denied that there was more than just a bromance going on. Alexander Vlahos emphazised in his latest interview about the finale that it was only about a platonic love between Merlin and Arthur, and when the producers were asked about the fans who think that Merlin and Arthur are actually gay, they said that they were aware of this but played with it to keep those fans in line because it's totally alright to pretend they are gay even when they're not.

No, of course I haven't got a problem with homoerotic or homosexual relationships, neither on TV nor in real life. One of my closest friends was gay (he died several years ago) and I really don't care who has sex with whom or who is in love with whom. However, the show was never about a gay relationship/love, and if it had been about it, I wouldn't have bothered watching it for long simply because I get bored very quickly by love stories (whether between heterosexuals or homosexuals). As a matter of fact, the most boring thing on "Merlin" was the banter and bromance of Merlin and Arthur. What was the main reason for many others was the most uninteresting thing for me. In my opinion, they had no chemistry with each other whatsoever. But that's okay, it's only a matter of taste. To pick my interest, a love story has to be carried by really charismatic characters and it has to be different from the usual "we would like to be together but we can't because of artificial drama and the will to suffer even though it could be all so easy". This up and down - they have each other, they leave each other, they are together again, leave each other again - is so boring and irritating. It's all this Romeo & Julia style and it repeats itself in most tragic love stories. It's often very immature and most of the time the protagonists lack of strong personalities. Instead they are young, looking beautiful/handsome and behave like teens. A good example for this is the love story between prince harming and Snowhwite on "Once Upon a Time". The show is great, much more clever and logical than Merlin was in season four and five, yet the story about those two is really, really boring to me, whereas the romance and love between Mr.Gold/Rumpelstilstkin and Bell is very interesting.

What you wrote here:

"In the bedchamber at Annis's,  Arthur throws his boots off while talking,  then sprawls out on the bed an splays his arms and legs. There was no reason to show those last few seconds except for the tease. If you're gay, those few seconds are astonishingly bold. Every gay male knows what that splay means. "

I actually don't get why in stories about gays everything has always to do with sex. If a woman lies down on the bed because she's tired or wants to relax and splays her legs, it certainly doesn't mean that she wants to have sex with wohever is with her in the room, whether another woman or a man. Arthur simply didnt cross his legs because he wanted to relax and men usually don't feel the need to press their legs together, like women do when they are wearing dresses or skirts. My husband lies this way on the bed all the time and it never indicates that he wants more than just relax or sleep when he does.

Same goes for pushing Merlin on his knees. Remember the scene when Gwen was accused of having used magic in order to make Arthur falling in love with him. She kneels so close before Uther that she almost had her head in his lap. Well, Uther/Gwen shippers surely would think that actually Uther wanted something from Gwen which I don't want to mention here on this site and that he was actually jelous of Arthur because he wanted Gwen for himself and whatnot. But it's simply not true. The reason why she was put so close to him was that the script said that Uther will slap Gwen. If she had kneeled a few metres away from him, he couldn't have reached her and he would have stood up and bow down to her to slap her, which would have taken away the surprise of slapping and which surely would have looked a bit funny.

And we could also say that for the deep friendship between Gwen and Morgana. They even hugged and Morgana was willing to do anything for Gwen before she became an evil monster. But never on this show was there any other thing intended than simply a deep friendship and not a lesbian relationship.

As for the plotholes, there is a difference between leaving some things to the viewers imagination or creating plotholes because things are being overlooked or ignored. There are tons of plotholes throughout the entire show and it would be too much to mention them all here in this comment. Fact is that the direction of the show had changed with the beginning of season four, thus created huge plotholes that couldn't be repaired anymore. It changed from a family show with balanced drama and also clever adult stories in which every character was involved with an overall happy-ending-promise into a disaster of pain, misery, death and dark nonsense about the Arthurian legend.

It's totally alright if the imagination of a gay relationship is stimulated. There are also a lot of fans who would have loved to see Merlin and Morgana falling in love, or Uther and Morgana (urgh...), Gwen and Morgana, Arthur and Lancelot, Gwaine and Merlin, Uther and Merlin... and so on. That's fine, why not? But the show wasn't about that and it most certainly hadn't intended any gay relationship from the beginning, neither was it about the platomic love between Merlin and Arthur only until season five. The show runners later saw that a lot of fans were enthusiatic about the bromance and/or a gay relationship between Arthur and Merlin and then focused on it. Shame, because they didn't manage to develop other characters well enough when simply suddenly dropping plotlines that the show used to be about.