User blog:Adelina Le Morte March/The LEGENDS are repetive. It's not just a BBC thing!

It has come to my attention that amoung the many (in my opinon, rather nit-picky and, excuse me, but yes, stupid) complaints that the reason the show is "failing" (can I have some proof that the show is bombing that is not a bunch of hot air coming from unconfirmed sources? I'm starting to think someone's just making this nonsense up) is because it's become far too repetive.

Now, that IS a matter of opinon. Mine is that I feel the writers are building up to a kind of parallel so it's not just random. However, even if you feel the show is neednessly repetive, you can't just blame the writers. Sometimes we as viewers are impossible to please.

Look back for example to when the Lancelot/Gwen fans were whining that Arthur and Gwen working out was "against the legends". The writers were building up to something with Arthur/Gwen and, for the show to work, COULDN'T give the viewers Lancelot/Gwen, though they still managed to fit in the love triangle (I personally thought the way they did this was rather brillant, though I know not all my fellow fans would agree), so they gave us an episode of Merlin and the Lady of the Lake (Merlin/Freya, in season 2), a very "canon" pairing legend-wise. And people whined about THAT because they wanted him to "end up with Morgana". (Yeah, because that's JUST like the legend. Um, not.)

Now skip ahead a couple seasons and the writers are trying to stick with their own unique spin on the storyline but are at the same time adding more little 'touches' from the legends.

And we lovely fans are... what? Wait, for it... Complaining again.

That the show goes over things (plotlines, twists) repetively.

When was the last time we READ an Arthurian Legend? Or even a book retelling that attempts to put them in some order? They repeat. Characters come and go seemingly randomly. But in a beautiful way, it all fits, like pieces of an abstract puzzle. Things happen over and over again, but they're different while still being the same. Sometimes the story seems to be going in circles with the knights doing this or that. In the Howard Pyle version, if you mean to read it straight through you had BETTER be ready for a lot of random "thee" and "thou" conversations between the knights. But in the end, all the pieces, in their repeating Arthurian cycles, come together.

Why can't we look at Merlin the same way?

Isn't that what's great about the show? That it reminds us all why we loved stories of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere and the rest when we were maybe little kids and our parents told us about them or let us look at picture books or paintings of knights in a mall gallery? That it's not an exact match, but the spirit and FEEL are very like what we grew up loving so they feel close to our hearts? If we attempt to whine and dismiss the repetiveness as "annoying" we may in a sense be dissing the legends, the kind of storytelling we once loved.

Our generation no longer has the "bard spirit". We don't want to listen to circularly-told stories, we want everything to be Boom, this happens, boom that happens, boom it never happens again, move forward, boom, boom boom.

Darlings, LIFE is not like that. So why do we need stories to be?

Why do we need Merlin to be?

Think about it.