that you think it's bad if girls see the Arthurian mythos as centered on the women.
Not bad so much as radically unbalanced. The female characters are interesting and I wouldn't want their stories to be excluded, but as part of the entire Arthurian mythos, not the whole. Arthur should at least get to be important, and he failed to be so in the post which triggered my rantlet. I feel the same way about Lancelot, Galahad and the subordinate male characters. They are subordinate. Galahad gets his own stories, Morgan Le Fay gets hers, and that's fine. But this movie is titled King Arthur, so presumably, it's Arthur-centric. Complaining that Morgan has been left out in favor of Arthur's screentime (which we know nothing about and cannot judge based on a handful of unauthorized photos, but that's a separate rant) seems to be missing the point. In this version, it doesn't appear that the women are central characters, and if it's telling the story of Arthur as warrior king like it sounds like it is, that's not a surprise. That would necessarily be a masculine-focused version, and a legitimate one. If the filmmakers had taken a different approach, perhaps a feminine-oriented stance like MoA's would be the requisite, but since they seem to be making a war/action movie, I won't be terribly surprised if the women characters are marginalized. Indeed, I'm pleased to see that Guinevere might be as proactive as she seems to be. And I'm not sure why anyone would want to make her meek and pious and fairly conniving again, like MoA Gwen, to diminish her in favor of a character who isn't even in this movie (I saw many complaints over the loss of Morgaine, which is fine except that she's absent from many, many versions of the legend and almost never is she as important as she is in MoA. And when she is, it's as a negative force). Yeah, she doesn't look like the mild, ladylike Gwen some of these girls were expecting (and considering that mild, ladylike Gwen is traditionally one of the most villainized or ineffectual women in legend, I don't see why that's bad). But we've only seen two out-of-context snips, and in one she's being a warrior! I just don't see how they can justify saying that "Guinevere is ruined" when we don't know yet. So far, to me, she looks like she might be able hold her own, even in a movie where women are marginalized because Arthur is the main character.
I was being ageist, I admit. And I did it without thinking, not unlike snarking about the squealing Legolas fangirls who post reams of giddiness in netspeak that I can't even translate. So I feel bad about that. And I'm glad that the women characters have been given a voice in the corpus of Arthurian and fantasy texts, thanks in no small part to MoA. But when anything that varies from that single revisionist text is decried as "wrong" and "a betrayal," I reserve the right to be annoyed.
no subject
Not bad so much as radically unbalanced. The female characters are interesting and I wouldn't want their stories to be excluded, but as part of the entire Arthurian mythos, not the whole. Arthur should at least get to be important, and he failed to be so in the post which triggered my rantlet. I feel the same way about Lancelot, Galahad and the subordinate male characters. They are subordinate. Galahad gets his own stories, Morgan Le Fay gets hers, and that's fine. But this movie is titled King Arthur, so presumably, it's Arthur-centric. Complaining that Morgan has been left out in favor of Arthur's screentime (which we know nothing about and cannot judge based on a handful of unauthorized photos, but that's a separate rant) seems to be missing the point. In this version, it doesn't appear that the women are central characters, and if it's telling the story of Arthur as warrior king like it sounds like it is, that's not a surprise. That would necessarily be a masculine-focused version, and a legitimate one. If the filmmakers had taken a different approach, perhaps a feminine-oriented stance like MoA's would be the requisite, but since they seem to be making a war/action movie, I won't be terribly surprised if the women characters are marginalized. Indeed, I'm pleased to see that Guinevere might be as proactive as she seems to be. And I'm not sure why anyone would want to make her meek and pious and fairly conniving again, like MoA Gwen, to diminish her in favor of a character who isn't even in this movie (I saw many complaints over the loss of Morgaine, which is fine except that she's absent from many, many versions of the legend and almost never is she as important as she is in MoA. And when she is, it's as a negative force). Yeah, she doesn't look like the mild, ladylike Gwen some of these girls were expecting (and considering that mild, ladylike Gwen is traditionally one of the most villainized or ineffectual women in legend, I don't see why that's bad). But we've only seen two out-of-context snips, and in one she's being a warrior! I just don't see how they can justify saying that "Guinevere is ruined" when we don't know yet. So far, to me, she looks like she might be able hold her own, even in a movie where women are marginalized because Arthur is the main character.
I was being ageist, I admit. And I did it without thinking, not unlike snarking about the squealing Legolas fangirls who post reams of giddiness in netspeak that I can't even translate. So I feel bad about that. And I'm glad that the women characters have been given a voice in the corpus of Arthurian and fantasy texts, thanks in no small part to MoA. But when anything that varies from that single revisionist text is decried as "wrong" and "a betrayal," I reserve the right to be annoyed.