Off Topic Discussion Megathread

[Midareyukki]

I am genuinely enjoying looking through old, old threads on this forum.

Also reading Arthurian Legend. Man, The Sword in the Stone sure as heck romanticized the ever lovin' heck outta this.

We got Arthur having a bastard son with his sister that grows up to kill him.

We got Guinevere "breaking her vows" with Lancealot and that same bastard son.

We got Merlin being half demon, spawned from a woman after she had a visit from an incubus.

We got Merlin getting sealed inside of a tree by a hot water chick named Ninian.

We got Excalibur having some weird ass Welsh names.

We got Lancelot getting raised by a fairy godmother.

We got some accounts denying Arthur's death.

Phew.

Excalibur always had weird names. From its original welsh "Caledfwlch" to the Latinized version of that, "Caliburnus". Excalibur seems to have been popularized by the way the French said it. To their credit, writing or even pronouncing Welsh is an epic of its own.

Pretty sure Mordred didn't even exist originally. Whenever anyone mentioned Arthur having sons, they died really early into their infancy. Which then begs the question: where the hell did the Battle of Camlann even come from??

Lancelot also only existed since Late Medieval Romance, so 1400's, and he's very much written like it. He exists as a foil to Arthur with a "Chivalrous Romance" dynamic with Guinivere. He's not an original canon guy, and the whole infidelity arc was really just to push Romance's views on relationships and knightlyhood. So if he feels weird or off, or at all unrelated to the rest of the myth's message and epicness, you have the French to blame. It's an agenda they pushed.

Merlin got all that because apparently having a cool wizard dude was "too much" for the Christians. So they had to convert him into an antichrist figure born from an Incubus (some sources say the Devil himself), but who chose to defy his evil ancestry and become a badass good guy xD
The mental trips they took just to justify a good guy using magic. And that's before them giving Arthur's main quest being somehow finding the Holy Grail... a magical artifact associated with Jesus Christ who died at Jerusalem... somehow ends up in Britain. Someone had to retake Geography.

Honestly though, the Sword in the Stone might have had some weird influences in how we view King Arthur nowadays, but Japan's currently doing worse. Fate Grand Order's taking it up to eleven. "Camelot" is already pretty weird, but "Avalon le Fae" is an LSD field trip with a good soundtrack xD
The TV show Merlin was good, tho.