Don't leave a voicemail, seriously.

And now for the other side of the Merlin flap. Unsurprisingly, poisontaster shows up in the comments there to voice my opinions for me in a far more rational way than I would go about it. I also agree w/ the comments there about all of the random characters either dying or going away (because it's a Monster of the Week show, folks!).

I think my deeper commentary about Merlin (I have some?) is that perhaps what people are reacting to negatively is a sort of amorphous, unnamed feeling of bitterness towards Arthurian legends because of a lifetime of reading feminist commentary about the subjugation of the feminine divine. There's a certain latent !!! that any representation of vaguely medieval female magic users foments. We've been propagandized in effect to see a woman using magic while donning pre-Raphaelite regalia and immediately turn a side-eye on it. Is The Man about to open a can of woman-hating on us? Knee-jerk response: SHE DIES, OH NO THEY DIDN'T! This sort of response it's necessarily bad, and 9 times out of 10, maybe it's even correct. The Man did actually excise or co-opt divine femininity. That's real and our reactions to it are needfully wrathful.

Now we come to the postmodern reality of the fact that as often as not people are mindless when it comes to robbing history and mythology for their own ends. Observe Supernatural if you will. There is an asston of ignorant usage of mythology going on over there. They go so far as to rewrite the Bible to their own ends. Where is the outcry? Perhaps it happens, but I haven't seen it in metafandom's delicious like I have this Merlin thing, so excuse me if I'm just ill educated about the sturm und drang of fandom mythology wars.

Someone in all of this maelstrom actually put out there that mythology is by its very nature elastic and available to all for a retelling. I think that's the thread I was trying to reach for when I first commented on Merlin myself. I couldn't QUITE touch why it was that I could just handwave all the insane touches (such as Gwen not being royalty), and I think the fact that mythology/legends don't belong to anyone is the reason the proprietary treatment of it by Merlin haters rubs me the wrong way. This is the same way I feel about Smallville in light of superheroes being a wing of mythology that belongs to everyone for me. Would I tell a Superman story like Smallville chooses to? hahahaha Fuck no! Do I think my own Superman stories in my head are as valid as Smallville. Absolutely. I suppose this is a strict constructionist vs intent argument as applied to say Mallory or Siegel&Shuster (sorry non-Americans, I'm making a very American analogy).

(As an aside, I am very committed to this idea of superheroes being a form of accessible mythology not any different from common parlance as the Olympians were in their time and if I wasn't so intellectually lazy now I would even write something about it.)

Maybe this will be my last commentary on this--maybe not!

eta: Tara links to tons of Arthurian resources. And in the comments here Julia and I go on a bit in a smarmy academic way!