I guess I'm just the scribe here

[scarfman]

The other day, one of Arthur, King of Time and Space's readers noticed on the message board that Guenevere had struck Arthur twice in the space of a week. My initial reaction was: whoa, she's a hero(ine) and a role model, mustn't let her beat her spouse. But then I thought twice.

Maybe my views are colored by having read The Once and Future King first - White reportedly having been something of a misogynist - but if you go back to the Morte, Guenevere is abusive. She screams at Lancelot a lot. She refuses to believe his story of his betrayals by Elaine, which drives him into a two year madness or at least is the last straw. Even when she mellows with age she's always sending him away (so that she can get in trouble and he can show up to rescue her in the nick of time). I try to portray Guenevere as a free spirit and not as a stereotypical hysterical female, but really in the sources that's someone she is.

White tried to explain the contradictions in her by saying "it's difficult to write about a real person", which I used to think was a cop-out, but if he was a misogynist that might have been the best he could do. Guenevere has always been the character out of the three of them who differs the most from treatment to treatment - compare Parke Godwin to Marion Zimmer Bradley, or Camelot to King Arthur. I never really got the handle on her I have now until I started globally replacing the characters in my Star Trek fanfiction with these characters and she got McCoy. That's who she is to me, the bleeding-heart sensualist cynic, the personification of the hero's heart in the conflicts between his heart and his mind. But to me she's also who she is in White, and White always claimed his characters were Malory's.

Maybe I need not to stop her thumping Arthur (and eventually Lancelot) every once in awhile, because that's who she is.

theferrett has been blogging this week about making sure all the characters in Home on the Strange are flawed. So I wondered what Arthur's and Lancelot's flaws are in AKOTAS. Yeah, they're supposed to be archetypes, but if I want the reader sticking around for twenty-five years they've gotta be interesting people too.

So I reprinted the message board comment on AKOTAS's website, and asked for reader feedback. So far one reader's noted that Arthur is too willing to accomodate people in order to avoid conflict. I've noticed that too, and have been regarding it as a flaw in my writing rather than in his character, but - on, again, second thought - the characterization is consistent with my sources. Every fanfiction writer knows working with found characters is more like working with collaborators.

More on this later if it develops further.

Comments

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Lancelot's main flaw is obvious: he's not empathic. He's really not conscious of the feelings of others and how his actions might impact on others. He's so secure in the knowledge that everything he does is right, everything he believes is right, that he's quite honestly surprised when he makes a blunder like, for instance, throwing up on Heracles.

This isn't necessarily a religion-based flaw. Granted, Lancelot is portrayed as holy and favored of God (until he gets involved with Guenivere). The flaw is not that Lancelot is insufferably Christian, though. The problem is that Lancelot doesn't understand that there is any other way to be than the way he is. Divergent viewpoints bother him; opposing viewpoints leave him baffled and uncomfortable.

This doesn't mean Lancelot doesn't care what other people think. He does. He just doesn't comprehend it when what they think doesn't line up with his own thoughts.

As for Arthur, his main flaw isn't conflict avoidance, it's lack of foresight. He tends to act and react without considering consequences. Unlike Lancelot, who overcomes his flaw in part over the legends, Arthur's flaw haunts him throughout his life, arguably leading directly to his death.