Board Thread:What If?/@comment-5674726-20130929195208/@comment-5674726-20130930215216

Fimber wrote:

However, due to the statements of both Morgana and Uther it's not clear what the social rules in those times on the show were. Uther said it was for Arthur's sake, Morgana said that Uther simply wanted to play the perfect king.

So which one is true?

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On the contrary, the fact that she learnt of who her true father was should have convinced her that Uther would have never harmed her, given that he not only wanted to sacrifice himself for Arthur but also asked for magical help to heal her. Since it didn't open her eyes and didn't touch her on an emotional level in regard to family love, she only was hurt in her pride and also needed another reason to hate Uther, in my opinion.

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As for your question if things had been different if she had known about it all as a child,  wish I could provide a believable idea. Alas, I have no idea whatsoever because I have very mixed feelings about her character even in season one and two. She has always been a very determined and dominating character, so anything could have been possible if she had known the truth as a child already.

I'd say that the key is in the word "perfect".

Acknowledging an illegitimate child wouldn't be a big deal by the standards of the time but I could see her thinking that Uther would rather disown her than admit that (a) Ygraine wasn't the only woman he was ever with, and (b) that he had cuckolded Gorlois, his closest friend and most loyal noble. Morgana, Uther and Arthur were the only ones alive to be affected by a revelation and, from where she was standing, Uther was disowning her to protect his reputation from very minor damage and for Arthur's sake.

As to the question of whether she would have thought that she was safe once she learned that she was Uther's daughter, I'd say that, had he acknowledged her as such, she would have felt more secure but that she may have felt that, if he didn't care enough about her to tell her that he was her father, he wouldn't care enough to not kill her if he learned of her magic. She was looking at the world through a negative prism in Season Three, believing that only her sister cared about her - something else that leads me to believe that her viewpoint was manipulated by magic and/or brainwashing. It would have taken something huge to shake this belief and, while Uther was well on the way to convincing her, or at least giving her some food for thought, after allowing magic to be used to save her life and revealing that he was her father, he unwittingly undid his good work when he didn't acknowledge her.

The idea of Uther acknowledging Morgana as a child struck me as something that could be used for a time travel fic, with Uther as the time traveller. If he went back to Morgana's childhood, I can't see him being willing to kill her before she could do any harm so he could think that the best course of action would be to cement her loyalty to him and her brother.