I Have Been Working On A Project With Something Similar To That As The Premise For A While Now, Though

is this too niche

It was supposed to be Mordred as he’s described in my writing. A friend and I couldn’t find any art which matched our headcanon of his appearance, so I decided to try to draw him myself, but my attempts to make him stop looking like me just made him look like an elven version of my mother. There are several characters who this sort of looks like it could be depicting, especially if you ignore the pointy ear (not quite sure where it came from), but I don’t think it quite fits anyone in particular.

Ah, well. At least it’s clear to everyone that it’s not Lancelot. I think Mordred would hate people mistaking him for Lancelot and kill anyone who did or vastly abuse (and maybe destroy) his borrowed reputation.

okay sorry thinking about false guinevere again and I think I get it now. like if you were raised alongside your beautiful sister, the beautiful daughter of the king, and she gets everything and everyone loves her and she marries the guy who pulls the sword out of the stone and she’s the queen now and everyone’s looking to her and knights are dying for her and you look exactly like her and you have her same face, your father’s face, but the man who raised you isn’t him because no one can talk about what the king did to your mom and everyone pretends it’s normal but actually they all know you were born from violence and you were never supposed to be born and there she is, your sister, with your same name, your same face, the most desired woman alive, and she is everything you’re not. i might also do something evil tbh

I normally don't like Tennyson's narrative around the female characters due to his framing of them being the source of all the faults in Camelot.

But there's a part of this story that often catches my attention and its Guinevere's rejection of Arthur:

Like, I can't help but dig idea that Guinevere rejects Arthur because of his virtue. As if his holy character actively irritates her.

If I was writing, I would take it further and outright imply Guinevere is some kind of demonic being. If Tennyson can get away with turning Arthur into a mysterious, divine entity that Merlin found instead of being born of Uther's misdeeds, then I don't see why I can't apply that to Gwen.

Welsh Myth already provides the idea of Guinevere as a Fae/Giantess so I would just present her as a "Reverse Persephone" -

Guinevere is actually a mysterious girl who came up from the "Kingdom beneath the Earth", "a daughter of a Colossus of Old" and is reared as ward of one of Arthur's vassals. Arthur, being taken by her beauty, took her as his wife. "And so, the Worthiest and Most Righteous King on Earth married a she-devil, the fairest of all her race, and made her his Queen."

The reason she finds Arthur repulsive is because she's a "primal spirit" who was born deep underground and can't stand the presence of someone so "Heavenly", so divorced from "the touch of the Earth". Camelot falls into "sinfulness" because Guinevere is in fact a physical avatar of all Materialism and Worldly Values, both good and bad.

And instead of Guinevere repenting of her actions, I would just take a cue from E.A. Robinson and have Gwen reject Arthur to the very end:

And if Arthur and Guinevere ever meet again, Guinevere could go as far as threaten to eat Arthur - "as is the habit of my kind, says the Queen" - especially if Arthur starts posturing about his (Victorian) morals and being chaste for her.

If there was a way to present Guinevere as a proper Anti-heroine or compelling villainess without the usual sexism/misogyny, this is how I would do it.

She's not so much an actively evil force as she is simply incompatible with the "Blameless" Arthur and indeed, the marriage's eventual failure was inevitable.

But for a time, while the marriage endured, Camelot was the place where the Spiritual and Material meet as fellows and prosperity ensued.

@maniculum and @joemerl, it might take me a bit to make a list of all of the sources for the weird “canon” Arthurian info I mentioned, especially since I only have links for a few and my next week’s schedule is absolutely hectic, but I will work on one.

It was a musical, but...I am not beating the allegations.

I shall take this as an opportunity to ramble about Rómeó és Júlia, the subject of said allegations by @unstark, who may have created a monster (/j; thank you for doing so).

The first thing to know is that I haven't read Romeo and Juliet since middle school and liked it well enough then but wasn't really enthused because I liked the poetic elements but found the romance somewhat grating. However, I am a theater kid/opera nerd at heart, and looking at different versions of things and analyzing the connections, sometimes to an obsessive degree, is one of the things I live for (that's part of the lure of Arthuriana).

The second is that Rómeó és Júlia (ResJ) is fantastic, in large part because the cast is incredibly talented. I've seen all or a good portion of several different language versions of the musical, which originated in France as Roméo et Juliette (RetJ), and they all have good or decent but reasonably similar Juliets and mostly fine to mediocre Romeos. In addition to having a good Juliet, this Romeo, played by Dolhai Attila, was quite charming as an actor as well as a great singer so the rest have been mostly downhill. I am afraid, though, that like most of the people on ResJ/RetJ Tumblr, the characters I found most interesting were Mercutio and Tybalt, who both vary wildly from production to production. In ResJ, Mercutio (who fans call Zolicutio because he's played by Zoltán Bereczki) is a force of nature, and I did not properly appreciate that the first time I watched it. He sings, dances almost constantly, acts well, and raps in Magyar, and he never seems to stop or slack in energy until he dies. Tybalt, on the other hand, is a deeply tortured soul who's occasionally comedic in his melodrama (he does the Mr. Bean walk once) but has genuine pathos. I originally watched the first half without subtitles and did not realize the...ahem...concerning nature of his thoughts about Juliet, but that's in almost every version of the musical, and it is not as big a trigger warning as the obvious one, which is that Romeo and Juliet includes onstage suicide and murder, as well as references to sexual content. This is probably the first thing anyone learns about Romeo and Juliet, but I thought I should put that out there to be safe. Anyway, Szilveszter Szabó was vastly different than how I pictured Tybalt while reading the play, but he was excellent and brought a new perspective to the character. You love to see it. Also, ResJ Benvolio is a punk with the heart of a golden retriever, another far-from-the-play take which works in its context.

Now, the 2010 French version. I followed ResJ with the RetJ revival because John Eyzen's Mercutio is the second most popular Mercutio on Tumblr, after the inimitable Zolicutio, and I wanted to see what the hype was about. He is vastly, vastly different, both from how I imagined Mercutio and how Mercutio is in any other production. Eycutio alternates between stillness and over-the-top energy. He may or may not be bad mental illness rep. He may or may not be beholden to the madness-inducing entities of Chaos. Eyzen fully embraced the vibes of "La Follie" and the Queen Mab speech Mercutio has in Shakespeare to create a very unstable dude who revels in unpredictability and danger to a greater degree than Zolicutio and has probably won Best-Haired Veronese Man three years in a row. He has a love/hate relationship with Tybalt and flirts with him while fighting. (Zolicutio also flirts with Tybalt, but less in a I've-secretly-liked-you-since-we-were-twelve-but-also-hate-you-and-we-kissed-at-a-party-once-but-you-pretend-you-don't-remember-and-I'm-going-to-make-that-hard-for-you way than an I-bet-you're-into-me-and-also-that-you'll-hate-this-and-I-could-be-into-you-but-it's-not-clear-and-I-canonically-kissed-Romeo-but-didn't-seem-serious-about-it-and-I-rap-about-not-liking-romance-and-it-might-be-to-hide/drown/prevent-the-pain-or-I-might-be-aroallo-and-thriving way). Tim Ross's 2nd Tybalt looks and acts like the unlikely and maltreated test-tube child of George Michael and Cruella de Vil, and I'm going to leave it about that, because I have rambled too long without mentioning that Romeo's costume is exceptionally terrible in this one, that I really did not like Escalus, and that the Nurse was fantastic. All in all, what this one has to recommend it is the excellent Nurse, plus Tybalt and Mercutio's unevenly acted but ultimately interesting dynamic, which is the stuff of Fanlore pages.

I have not watched all of the 2001 French original, even though many people say Cécilia Cara is the best Juliet, because the other Juliets are also good and apparently a bald Mercutio is one thing I cannot take. (I could under certain conditions. If he were a young cancer patient, then that would add an urgency to his fervor for living life to the fullest, and a suspicion that he's going to die painfully soon whatever he does could influence his recklessness, but him being considerably older and more sophisticated than Romeo is weird). I might watch more of it, but it's low priority.

Apart from those, I've watched large parts of the Italian and Israeli ones, which I prefer to the French ones in acting but not in singing. The Italian one is a lot more dramatic than the Israeli one, which is maybe the least dramatic RetJ variant ever but pulls it off really well. The characters seem like normal people you would meet who try their best but get caught up in a tragedy bigger than they can understand. Of special note, as usual, is that ever-shifting scene, the duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, and this is the most original take on it I've seen. What sets it apart is that THEY DON'T EVEN DISLIKE EACH OTHER. You get the sense that they've had a lighthearted rivalry since they were kids but they're sort of friends and it's all a game to them. It's also the only version I've seen where those two actually have fencing swords, so the fight looks more realistic, emphasizing that they're playing with fire. When he realizes Mercutio is dying, Tybalt is visibly devastated and seems to lose the will to live. I don't usually cry at movies or shows, but that is the version which brought me the closest to crying.

I would like to watch the 2019 Toho version, since it comes highly recommended, but am not sure where to and might have to wait a while on that one. After I'm done with the Italian one, I intend to watch the Russian one, the German one, and the alternate cast recording of the Hungarian one. As for the English one...well, I've listened to a bit of it, and it was awful.

If you want to watch multiple versions at once or see which ones you might like, there is a great playlist on YouTube where someone edited together parts of the videos of different versions. If you want an incoherent-without-watching-the-full-thing but possibly still entertaining look into it, watch this compilation someone made, which is extremely funny if you've actually seen the full musical.

If you've read this entire semi-coherent ramble, you're a trooper. I hope it was vaguely interesting. Have a wonderful day!

it’s really easy to become obsessed with a shakespeare play you just have to watch one version of it and then read the play and then go mad trying to watch every possible version of it you can find and then study several centuries worth of performance history and controversy

The Grail Heroine leading Galahad to the ship, where Percival and Bors wait

Stained glass by Veronica Whall for King Arthur’s Great Halls at Tintagel

Six years ago

Me: Knights? Sounds boring. Greek mythology all the way.

Six weeks ago

One of my friends: Something-something-Dwayne Johnson-something…

Me: DID SOMEBODY SAY GAWAIN?!?!?

Victor Frankenstein used corpses. Merlin used blood and fingernails.

Merlin is Frankenstein on a budget and Frankenstein is budget Merlin.

Gargantua, artificial grandson of Lancelot and Guinevere.