Board Thread:What If?/@comment-5674726-20130929195208/@comment-5102537-20130930105409

ReganX wrote: That moment in The Crystal Cave where Morgana wants Uther to acknowledge her and he doesn't seems like a potential turning point to me but, as MMV on that count, I'd like to take it through the possibilities either way.

My opinion is that, had Uther acknowledged her, it would have opened the door to a reconciliation between her and Uther. She is clearly hurt and angry when he decides against telling her that he is her father and this drives her to begin a campaign to secure the throne of Camelot, something she had shown no interest in before that point. Had Uther told her that he was her father, I think that this, combined with the fact that he had allowed magic to be used to save her life, would have undermined her belief that he hated magic more than he cared for her. I could see her drawing back from her campaign with Morgause and maybe trying to influence Uther to change without wanting him dead.

As you know, I'm convinced that Morgana didn't care about Uther's confession at a human level but only wanted him to confess in order to damage his reputation and to give Morgana an advantage over him.

Everything pointed into the direction that she was simply looking for more opportunities to hurt him best she could, and by confessing that he was her father she would have had the possibility to undermine his authority in public and to cause great damage to his reputation, his credibility and his politics with other nobles and kingdoms.

Since she didn't care for his love at all and not even for him using magic in order to save her life, she had no reason to care about him being her father for the benefit of her soul. All positive feelings for Uther and her friends had died already. As a matter of fact, the way she talked to Morgause later when she told her half-sister about the secret, she behaved like a pouting but also very furious child who was insulted and felt disadvantaged or underpriviliged rather than hurt because she supposedly loved him.

In my opinion, it was a mixture of hurt pride and anger about the failed plan to make him confess.

In case that the show wanted to make the viewers believe that she was hurt because she felt some kind of daughterly love for him and that she was actually right in being angry, Morgana was described as being more ignorant than she deserved. She was too intelligent and has lived for too long in the royal household to ignore that acknowledging an illegitimate child would be sociatal suicide, especially for a king.

She was too intelligent to ignore the fact that acknowledging her as the king's illegitimate daughter would have caused great damage to her mother, too. Also to Gorlois as the cuckold, to Arthur, to Igraine, to Uther and to herself. As a person who uses her brain, Morgana should have known the very good reasons why Uther kept this all a secret instead of being furious at him. By not acknowledging Morgana as his daughter, Uther didn't only save face but also protected every other person involved, including Morgana, her mother and her beloved step-father Gorlois.

He couldn't risk such a scandal that would hurt many people for the sake of personal peace in the family. His job was to protect the kingdom and the social stability, not to damage the reputation of his family and his friends by being stupidly honest.

Moreover, adultery was punishable by death. So according to the law, Uther should have been sentenced to death once the secret was revealed. Since he surely can't sentence himself to death, society would lose faith for their king and Uther's credibility would be gone. I don't know every detail of the laws in Camelot here on "Merlin" but in case that there was an authority that had the right to sentence even the king, maybe Uther would have been kicked off the throne and indeed sentenced to death.

Either way, it would have been stupid and dangerous to acknowledge Morgana as his daughter. And this most likely was the reason why Morgana wanted him to confess since she obviously didn't even care for the reputation of her mother and Gorlois anymore.

Had Uther told her much sooner, maybe by making clear to her that it must be kept as a secret, things might have been different. But I honestly doubt it since Morgana rejected every single sign of Uther's fatherly love for her, so she surely would have hated him the same way if he had told her sooner. She was immune towards love and family ties after the year with Morgause.

In case she had known as a child already, she might have used this knowledge to blackmail him or to damage him later when she fought him in regard to the ban of magic and even more so when she returned after the year she went missing. It's hard to tell. I'm not sure if they had grown closer had she known the secret. Maybe yes, maybe no. The problem is that we don't know what happened to her during the year with Morgause, and what caused her inhuman hatred, so it might have changed things in the previous years but probably not later when Morgause took her with her.