Board Thread:What If?/@comment-5674726-20130906200850/@comment-5674726-20130928105508

I think that they'd have been better off dispensing with the family tie - or, if they must have it, making Agravaine a fairly distant cousin of Uther's - and had him as a nobleman who wasn't happy with Arthur's rule.

It was stupid that they had the nobility's objections to things like knighting commoners and the Prince/King marrying a servant girl as soon as it suited them to have Arthur do things that were previously unthinkable.

Agravaine could be the leader of a faction of nobles that were appalled by Arthur's decision to knight commoners and may have voiced their objections to his breach of the First Code but go nowhere, which made them angry. In Season Four, only one of the knights in Arthur's inner circle is of noble blood (technically two but I seriously doubt that Gwaine ever revealed that his father was a knight) and Sir Leon is outnumbered by four, later three commoners. If you're a nobleman whose son is a knight, I can't imagine that it is going to please you to see that commoners are held in higher esteem by the King. The prospect of a servant girl Queen, and her half-commoner kid as the next ruler, would be too much for them to stomach.

Agravaine could seek an alliance with Morgana thinking that they can be of use to one another. He has no beef with magic and, if he and his allies help her regain the throne, she'll put an end to this business of letting commoners think that they could ever be worthy of joining the ranks of the nobility, let alone marrying into the royal family. It wouldn't be every noble but there could be a few who think that even Morgana is preferable to Arthur's radical changes.

Mind you, the plot line would work better if they hadn't made Morgana irredeemably evil, and better still if she remained a fixture in the castle as Arthur's half-sister and heiress presumptive, loyal to Camelot and wishing no harm on its citizens but disagreeing with the laws against magic.