Of course spoilers. So many many spoilers.
Well yes, hullo, it has been an actual long time since I wrote something about Merlin. I was going to make this into a Vlog (what a strange word) but my crippling unemployment and the fact that the sun goes down at three o clock here means that I grew bored of promising to do it everyday and just decided to write this stuff down instead.
The last time I wrote about Merlin on this blog, Gwen had just turned evil for no apparent reason, Elyan had just died in what I can only describe as the most pointless death ever and I was still clinging onto the hope that the makers of Merlin could turn this around and we would have a whole series of Magic!Merlin and Swordy!Arthur. Of course, I was wrong.
Several weeks on and with only two more episodes to go there still hasn’t been a magic reveal, and we have been told this is the last series. Ever. There go all my hopes of a perfect series, there go all my hopes of perfect character development and constantly interesting plot lines. Because, unfortunately these have all but disappeared.
So in the course of four episodes we went from Gwen being a wicked character, breaking stereotypes being a general badass MC, to being evil and totally destroying any good female role models in this series, to being all cool and nice again in the last five minutes* of the ninth episode.
There are of course several things that I struggle with this. Firstly it’s that we find out that Gwen was actually being magic-ed evil in the ninth episode. Before that there was a general ambiguity hanging over her evilness. Did she turn bad because of magic or because she was tortured or did she just generally hate Arthur. Of course for these last two things to work, there would have to be at least half an episode dedicated to a woman on the show. So the makers took the quick way out . MAGIC! MORGANA! EVIIIIILLLLLLL!
The only way that women on this show can get good coverage is if they are being evil. Women doing good things that do not involve being rescued in no way deserve to be watched. It’s like the makers of the show decided to give feminism a go in the first half, but then got really tired and just decided to fall back on cliches and lazy writing.
But actually, no, this is the thing that confuses most of all. The scenes in which evil!Gwen was friends with Morgana were actually really well written and (obviously) really well acted out. The characterisation of evil!Gwen was such that you believed she believed she was doing the right thing, without any of the manic head-in-the-sand ramblings that Uther had. She cared for Morgana. She cried when Sarrum described (with pleasure) the torture and imprisonment of Morgana, while Arthur, who was raised with Morgana as her brother, merely showed some distaste.
It’s like the writers of the show are really trying to promote a good healthy a complex female character to the young Merlin audience, but keep coming up with cliche responses to how women and men should act.
Feminism works both ways. By promoting the idea that women can be anything; girly, butch, evil, good, manic, organised etc. you are also promoting the idea that men can be this too. Arthur does frequently show his emotion and Merlin does cry (which breaks my heart honestly) but more and more in these episodes the characters are falling into the strict parameters as to how the genders are supposed to perform. And it’s becoming very tedious.
I mentioned also in my previous blog post about the series to cleavage ratio on Merlin. The higher up in the series it is, the more cleavage gets shown. This is a blog about looking to find positive female role models (and then, by extent feminism) in sci-fi. If you have a show that is falling to provide adequate coverage for women in their show, and then solely showing the women with their boobs all out, what kind of message does that send to all children?
The kind that means the number one search phrase for my blog is angel coulby boobs.
As ever, please comment and let me know what you think about this. Also Merry Christmas.
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* Seriously, the whole episodes pre amble, every evil thing that she done all over series, gauis being like GUISE SERIOUSLY DARK MAGIC! Merlin being like ITS SO DARK I DONT I HAVE THE ABILITY TO CAN. then poof all better.
Nancy and Dorritt 