#merlin my beloved weird wizard I could have written waaaay more about this but I figured one single-spaced page was more than enough

[werewolf-transgenderism]

i must know any and all merlin opinions please

ok this is LONG sorry I have many thoughts about this!!!!

Robert de Boron’s Merlin gives us a more in-depth look at Merlin’s odd childhood: he’s the child of a demon and a mortal woman, and the resulting magical powers that he possesses make for a childhood where he is simply out of time and out of place. He engages in a sort of “crip time” where everything collapses backwards and forwards simultaneously as he performs the tasks he needs to perform in order to fulfill his fated role, marking him as an other and not allowing him to fit neatly into the spaces he occupies in the present due to his looking toward the past and future.

Merlin as a child kind of freaks out the people around him, because he’s got all of these timelines converging in his mind and he’s got this skill for precocious speech that one wouldn’t expect from, like, a little kid. Jes Battis, reading these scenes in de Boron’s Merlin, argues, “a lot of hyper-verbal kids on the spectrum will get this portrayal of a kid who tends to unnerve adults with non-traditional language. Non-verbal kids on the spectrum run into similar problems as a result of their silence, which is never actually silence, but rather non-verbal interaction” (Thinking Queerly 35). Merlin, in de Boron’s text, is unable to connect with other kids his age due to his very apparent difference, and also finds himself often needing to withdraw from society into isolation to regulate himself, which Battis suggests we might read “as the strategy of someone who is easily overwhelmed—someone who flees to the woods in order to escape the sensory overload of court” (34).

From its medieval origins into modern medievalist adaptations, Merlins across the Arthurian tradition also experience an inherent neuroqueerness coming from the prophetic position they occupy. Merlin simply does not interact with the world in the same way that other people do—he can’t, when he’s got the anxieties of the past and the future weighing on him at all times, lifetimes of knowledge condensed into one person who is necessarily both within and outside of himself. He’s unpredictable, a bit unhinged, and often, as a result of his prophetic and magical powers, he’s seen by others as cold, unfeeling, and uncaring, but that couldn’t be further from the truth—he’s bursting with lifetimes of feeling that he simply cannot express in ways that are easy for those around him to interpret. (And here is where I go on my personal tangent about the inherent feeling of being out of time/out of place as an autistic person interacting with a neurotypical world that is simply not made to accommodate the ways we differ from the norm. I’ve been told I’m unfeeling and emotionless and that I speak weirdly and think in ways that don’t make sense to allistic people and I just!! have to scream!! I am SO full of feelings and emotions and love, etc., I just don’t express myself in the same ways as allistic people do!)

Merlin, across traditions, displays a neurodivergence where he’s always out of place, engaging in the kinds of neuroqueer rhetoric that M. Remi Yergeau describes as coming into being “through movement and the residues of movement, through creeping, sidling, ticcing, twitching, stimming, and stuttering” (Authoring Autism 76). Think of Sword in the Stone Merlin! He’s always stuttering, always having difficulty expressing his ideas verbally, always running into communication failures because he’s got so much knowledge from so many times and places bouncing around in his head that he simply interacts with the world in different ways from others who don’t share these experiences. Or even Merlin Merlin, with all his gumby awkward weirdness that he’s always getting into trouble with because of his magic and his destiny! Merlin’s a weird little guy, variously mad, always misunderstood, always living through a world that’s not made to accommodate his ways of thinking and being—which echoes, for me, the experience of being autistic SO clearly.

#sorry this is very long but you did ask lmao #I don't know how to put text in a readmore sooooooo #merlin my beloved weird wizard I could have written waaaay more about this but I figured one single-spaced page was more than enough #long post