User blog comment:Adelina Le Morte March/Statements regarding Arthurian Legend in general I cannot take seriously/@comment-6684863-20130223053802

Some of those aren't that bad, although probably only by accident. And many of the changes, like Morgana being Uther's ward, don't really matter. There's no reason why they shouldn't mix things up. I didn't have a problem with it, as long as they maintained a sense of the spirit of the Arthurian myths.

Morgana usually wasn't a villain. She had it out for Guinevere, and she did have her villainous moments, but Morgana was one of the sorceresses who took Arthur to Avalon. She was a member of the court to the end.

As for Arthur dying, that IS a pretty stupid question when talking about the myths, but it's and extremely good question when referring to the show. This was supposed to be Merlin, the early years. There was no reason to end with Arthur's death, since he was still shy of 30 and hadn't accomplished anything at all yet. It should have ended with Arthur being crowned High King of Albion, with Merlin at his side.

Camelot did fall, but there was a golden age before that, and Arthur's court became the model for good government, and still is!

To me, the problem with S5 is that they took a light-hearted show, and suddenly went extremely dark, and unfortunately, that really left the bad writing exposed. And the S5 writing was the worst of the 5 in my opinion.

Example:  In Servant of Two Masters, it makes no sense whatsoever that Gaius & Gwen didn't just tell Arthur what was going on. What possible reason was there for hiding it? But we didn't care, because the episode was so much fun and so enjoyable.

But in the finale, Merlin's failure to call Kilgarrah right away was such a ridiculous plot hole that it was hard to enjoy the episode as much as I might have.

Gaius even says "Only a magic as ancient as the dragons themselves can save him." Oh, well, too bad we don't have an ancient dragon. And time is of the essence, so instead of, say, flying to the island on a dragon, Merlin dragged Arthur though the forest for a couple of days.

Or in the Disir, Mordred is left alive to punish Arthur for rejecting magic. So if he'd accepted magic, Mordred would have died, leaving Arthur feeling betrayed and turning him against magic. What kind of stupid plan was that?

In the Mithian episode... ugh. OK, let me ask you this. If you're Morgana, do you:

a) Convince a king to invade a neighboring kingdom and capture the king and holding him hostage to force his daughter to go to Camelot with Morgana disguised as an old woman tolure arthur away into an obvious trap in a ruined tomb, or

b) Just blast Arthur.

It just doesn't make any sense, and because it wasn't played for comedy, it was just tiresome.

That was a long digression. To get back the subject, your 1) is pretty funny, but it does underscore that in the myths, A&G weren't the great romance, it was Lancelot & G.  That's the absolutely central pivot of the entire mythos - it's their affair that leads to Arthur's downfall.  (And yes, I know that in the earlier myths, there was no Lancelot, but the version everyone learns does. Did you know that the original version of Little Red Riding Hood she dies horribly? It doesn't matter, because that's too obscure to have any resonance.)  To just pass over that for the Disney romance between G & A seems an insane abandonment of what could have been really great dramatic tension, not to mention giving Gwen's character something meaty to do.

At least they could have made G&A interesting! Poor Angel Coulby - what a waste of a really good actress. When she was given a good moment, she really shined.

3) is funny too, since there was no concept of "gay" in the Dark Ages, and Merlin if anything he's sort of sexless, or in some versions a dirty old man.

1)  Uhhh.  Okay.  He was supposed to marry his SISTER?!?!  AAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

Yeah, he did boink Morgause, but he didn't know what he was doing.

4)  Mmmm, I'll give whoever said this this one.  Non-Arthur's-son Mordred is only in really early versions, and in those Guinevere marries him while Arthur is away and they try to overthrow him (although G plays virtually no role in the story).  The later versions that we're all familiar with always have Mordred as Arthur's son.  And I'm not aware of him ever having been Morgana's son, except in the movie Excalibur, where they combined Morgana & Morgause.

But again, in a way it's kind of silly to be wound up about things in the series that aren't compatible with Arthurian myth. Who cares? The show had it's own story to tell, and it has to be judged on its own merits. I think you can judge a lot of it harshly, but in my opinion at least, not for refreshing the myths. Half the food shown didn't exist in Europe at the time, the armaments are from many centuries later, the castle is obviously a 19th c restoration, they use a lot of Americanisms, and Morgana was not Irish. And Guinevere was certainly not black! So what?

I once saw someone complaining that Mithian's palace was Renaissance and growled about that. WRONG! The interior used was Hagia Sophia, a huge cathedral in Istanbul, which was built in the 6th c, when the Arthurian myths took place. It's one of the only things that's in the right time period! In fact, it's the building a lot of later Renaissance structures were modeled after.