M. ([info]m_supercomputer) wrote,
@ 2009-06-27 16:31:00
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Have decamped to Panera Bread to the day, as both bathrooms at my house are being worked on now and the noise is hideous. *Will* at least one of the showers be usable?? No one can say.

Oh, also, I have a new fandom, kinda - Merlin! It's pseudo set in the middle ages, has bad CGI magic, and is crazy-slashy, so naturally I love it. Even if it's not what one would call, you know, "good." Seriously, though, there's a dragon that tells our incompetent wizard hero that his DESTINY is to be with Arthur, so. And Gwen and Morgana are pretty great too, and the ruthless king is played by Giles from Buffy. For fun recaps of the first two episodes, go here and here.

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[info]magnetmind
2009-06-28 01:21 am UTC (link)
I was half-watching Merlin last week and I don't understand why they even bothered to use the names of characters from Arthurian legend and literature. If they'd made exactly the same series and used a bunch of pseudo-Medieval/fantasy names, or even made it about Young Merlin's adventures many years before all the famous Arthurian stories occurred, I probably would have found the show fairly entertaining. Instead I just kept going "What the hell?"

Seriously, PRINCE Arthur? Way to miss the point. I'm struggling to come up with a good comparison here, but it's kind of like making a Batman series where Bruce Wayne had an idyllic childhood with his totally not-murdered parents.

That said, I may very well wind up half-watching the later of the two episodes on tomorrow because there's not much else on in that time slot.

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[info]daniidebrabant
2009-06-28 02:29 am UTC (link)
I like to call it Arthurian Smallville, m'self. It's terrible AU fanfiction on the silver screen.

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[info]m_supercomputer
2009-06-28 02:23 pm UTC (link)
I know, I can't figure out why they decided to make Arthur a prince, unless they just really wanted to give him massive daddy issues. But, well, I have a weakness for good-naturedly goofy, slashtastic badly pseudo-historical shows (for example, Hercules and Xena).

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[info]magnetmind
2009-06-28 05:19 pm UTC (link)
In fairness to Hercules and Xena, although the setting was about as unlike Ancient Greece as one could get, the writers did seem to know their mythology pretty well. Probably the biggest deviation is in portraying Hercules himself as a kind, good-tempered, and reasonably intelligent man rather than the frat boy-esque figure he is in Greek myth. But at least they kept his basic backstory intact.

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[info]m_supercomputer
2009-06-29 02:39 pm UTC (link)
Pretty close, true, but they did change that Hera caused his wife and kid's death directly instead of her making Hercules do it (to keep him sympathetic, I guess), and made Iolaus his childhood friend instead of some random relative.

My tolerance for bizarrely wrong mythology was most helped along by watching Smallville for four years. *g*

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[info]magnetmind
2009-06-30 01:10 am UTC (link)
Huh, for some reason I remembered it as being that Herc did kill the wife and kids on the show. But I wasn't watching when it was first on, so I guess it's just that nothing in later episodes directly contradicted my knowledge of the original backstory.

I wound up watching Mystery! on PBS last night, which presented a very faithful adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. :) But if I ever do feel like watching Merlin again, maybe I'll just pretend that the whole thing really is the adventures of young Merlin well before the legendary King Arthur was born. Other characters just coincidentally have the same names as more familiar figures from Arthurian legend. Heck, even in the Medieval texts there was some duplication of names, with at least three Elaines (Lancelot's mother, the mother of Lancelot's child Galahad, and Arthur's half-sister who was basically "Lady Not Appearing in this Legend") and some sources have two different Guineveres.

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[info]daniidebrabant
2009-06-28 02:31 am UTC (link)
I was kind of wondering when you'd find the terrible terrible crack. Because it's crack. And it only gets more cracked. In all the best ways. I heart that show, even though I have to pretend I didn't spend most of my childhood exploring Arthurian myths to keep from headdesking myself to death.

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[info]m_supercomputer
2009-06-28 02:21 pm UTC (link)
The Smallville comparison is totally what I was thinking too. *g* Crack-ish, but in a good-natured way and doesn't take itself too seriously. Hopefully it'll never get to the level of badness of Smallville s4, which is when I had to give up on it.

And yay for crack! It's always fun to have a fandom that I don't feel the need to take even the tiniest bit seriously.

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[info]daniidebrabant
2009-06-29 01:34 pm UTC (link)
...have you gotten to the episode with the poison and the porniest magical scene ever?

Causer seriously. "Higher, faster, Arthur. *pant pant* Faster". I Am Not Making This Up.

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[info]m_supercomputer
2009-06-29 02:50 pm UTC (link)
Hahaha, I just saw that last night - NBC's airing the series on Sundays through the end of the summer. That was...Willow and Tara levels of gay spellcasting.

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