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teecupangel · 4 days

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The assassin's including haytham and Shay as witches or warlocks?

Considering how I wrote about Desmond as his ancestors’ patron god a while back, I like the idea of making Altaïr, Ezio and Ratonhnhaké:ton warlocks under an unknown patron god.

This is doubly funny for Altaïr who actually believes that what people consider as gods are simply beings more powerful than them that can be surpassed once their full capability is studied.

So Altaïr would actually be more a wizard, using knowledge to further his magical research, with a healthy dose of alchemy at the side. (He would also be the one to further advance the development of magical forgery but his way is intricately connected to alchemy since magical forgery regularly need materials created via alchemy, making it easier to augment magical properties into the materials itself that will remain during the forging process).

Then he got the Apple and learned that he now has a Patron God.

He is absolutely not happy about this, especially as his Patron God is only known as “The Reader”. He grows fond of his patron though because his patron never demanded anything but kept giving him whatever he needed to further his research.

The Reader becomes well known as Altaïr’s patron god but no one knows his real identity.

The only time the Reader demanded something from Altaïr was when an eagle made of gold and white light (his patron’s preferred way to send him things) left him a rolled up piece of paper that could fit in his palm.

‘Investigate Abbas Sofian and deliver judgment.’

Ezio, on the other hand, never thought of becoming a warlock or a witch. The Auditores weren’t magic users. They weren’t even combatants. The most they had was the required swordsmanship for their own safety and defense.

And then…

They tried to arrest his family and…

He heard it.

A sound he could not describe. A sound he had never heard before.

An eagle made of light appeared before him and delivered him a box.

A change of clothes that was more durable than his current outfit. A sword with wings for a crossguard and an eagle head for a pommel. Some kind of gauntlet with a blade hidden on its underside.

And a letter.

From his patron.

The Reader.

It was thanks to his patron that he was able to save his family and that they were able to leave Firenze without being ambushed, the light of the eagle becoming their guide.

The Reader was known as Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad’s patron. An unknown god who was as capricious as Altaïr himself, only appearing at whim and acting more like a distant supporter than an actual deity demanding loyalty and worship.

But it was during Ezio Auditore’s time that the Reader became a patron god of the Brotherhood. The unknown god did not bless everyone. Only Ezio. But that was enough. Because Ezio worship him as both his god and his family’s savior. As Ezio became more legendary as time passes by, so too did his patron god.

The Reader.

The Patron God of Freewill and Choice.

The Kenways were complicated (as usual).

Edward Kenway was a swashbuckling rogue, there was no denying that.

He had always been a rogue and, as far as he knows, he will always be a rogue.

Even when he started getting in the middle of this Brotherhood versus Order mess, he was still a rogue.

And then…

When he died, he saw the golden eagle.

Just watching.

It was always watching.

And all Edward could think about was how he needed to save Jenny and make sure Haytham and Tessa were safe.

Haytham still becomes a Templar. He studies witchcraft and developed his skills to combat the stealthiness of the Assassins and any and every magical devices and spells they may have.

His witchcraft is one focused on canceling other magic. His main weapon is still the sword and the hidden blade he took off from one of the people he killed.

Ratonhnhaké:ton is born to be a warrior. His grandmother taught him a few spells and rituals here and there. A few concoction to strengthen and heal his body.

One day, he saw an eagle made of light and followed it.

His village burned that day.

But he was able to save his mother.

But his mother was captured by the men who burned his village and he tried to follow them until his legs gave out.

The eagle appeared before him once more and guide him.

To Achilles Davenport.

Ratonhnhaké:ton’s patron was the Reader. His eagle appeared with gifts and short letters of suggestions. Achilles calls him bless.

Ratonhnhaké:ton thinks of the Reader as someone with an agenda of his own.

Every time Ratonhnhaké:ton feels the desire to go out in the world to find his mother, the Reader would send him a letter that always says the same thing. It’s not yet time. You must grow stronger still. Patience.

And Ratonhnhaké:ton realized why when he first met Haytham Kenway and his many magical devices and potions to keep Assassins away.

The only thing that can combat him and take down Haytham’s Order was…

The blessings that his patron god had given him that he had nurtured all these years.

Shay was trained to be an Assassin. It was only when he studied under Haytham Kenway that he learned witchcraft. Shay had never really been interested in it. When he was still an Assassins, Hope had been the one to always push him into trying out witchcraft. Even giving him potions to heal him or to invigorate him. Which was funny because Hope was ‘hopeless’ in the arts of being a witch. Liam was the best witch in the Brotherhood and Hope’s potions had been made by Liam.

Liam had fun telling Shay about that.

When Shay became a Templar, he learned witchcraft because it was the best way to counter the Brotherhood.

Then he got his familiar.

It was a wolfhound with light gray fur.

Liam had a wolfhound familiar as well.

It looked exactly like Liam’s familiar. But that was impossible. Shay had been the one to throw the potion that burned Liam’s familiar to ashes.

Arno only knew a bit of witchcraft. Ones that Élise taught him. It’s only when he started training to be an Assassin that he learned he was taught the very same witchcraft that Haytham Kenway developed and modified to combat the Brotherhood. That Élise was teaching him the ways of the Templars. He makes it his own though and used what he knows to combat the Templars’ own witchcraft.

By this point, the Brotherhood makes use of both witchcraft and spells. Traditionalists focus on spells that are said to have been used by those blessed by the patron god. They’re not warlocks though since they were not graced by the patronage of their god. They’re more akin to wizards.

Arno, himself, combines both and learns a bit of alchemy to make his own tools which is a requirement to all Assassins since they would never always have the money or be safe enough to buy more tools out in the field.

Jacob and Evie are… complicated. Jacob was trained to be an Assassin so he’s like Evie, knowing both witchcraft and a few spells. He also doesn’t use them, pretending to be just a rogue as a way to get back to their dead father. People actually assume he’s like an Arcane Trickster or something similar. Evie, on the other hand, is a master of both. She prefers spells though. The pressed flowers she gives Jayadeep in canon? She used them to create potions for him instead that will help him. He never uses them though because he sees them as too precious to be used.

Ah, Desmond.

So…

Desmond knows a lot about witchcraft and spells but he has no patron of his own.

They actually thought he would be blessed by the same patron as Altaïr and Ezio but that god never even looked at him.

But he has access to the spells only a warlock has.

People believe it’s because of the Bleeding Effect.

But Desmond knows that’s not true.

The patron god of his ancestors never looked at him but his Bleeds were too… real. There was something divine about them.

Something that tells him that he has made a pact with them that goes beyond life and death.

Bayek and Aya have been warlocks before they founded the Brotherhood but their patron god had not been Amun at first. They both renounced their god after Kemu’s death and Amun took them in. Amun, however, is not the patron god of the Hidden Ones. The Hidden Ones though would sometimes have patrons because, during that time, the gods were much more fascinated by humans (or have plans). This would continue on until the Hidden Ones become the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood (especially the one under Al Mualim) would rather be Rogues than be spellcasters.

Basim knows a bit of witchcraft because of Nehal but he only started actually training for witchcraft and spells when he got to Alamut. It’s there that he shows he actually has access to the spells granted to him by a patron god but it’s not one of the gods that usually bless the Brotherhood. He only realizes it later on when he receives Loki’s memories but the spells he can use are the very same spells that his wife, Sigyn, uses. He never acknowledged it though and his patron never contacts him.

When he reunites with Aletheia though, his patron god gives her very first order.

“Destroy what remains of the woman you love”

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lullabyes22-blog · 5 months

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Mal de Mer - Swoony Swashbucklers

Mel's girlhood reading choices are sus...

Mal de Mer on AO3

She's about to backtrack, when Silco says, "In time."

"In time?"

"When the moment's right." He tucks her curls, damp and dripping, over her shoulder. "When you're less inclined to envision my younger self as vermin scuttling from a pile of refuse."

"That's not—"

"No? How, then, would you picture me?" A wryness creeps into his voice. "Be honest."

"Well," Mel hedges, "I know you were a smuggler. You ran the Black Lanes, with Vander. The two of you were a bit of a legend belowground. I've seen photographs of you in archived newsprints. Mugshots, too." A tiny grin flickers. "You looked quite the chancer. All hooded eyes and sharp cheekbones. But also a bit... boyish. It was the hair." Idly, she tugs a damp, dark strand. "Quite long."

"Like a drowned rat."

"Like a merman. Or a pirate." She bites her lip. "I've always been fond of pirates."

"Have you, now?"

"Oh, you should've seen me as a girl. I had an entire shelf devoted to piratical romances. The swoonier, the better." A soft laugh, and a shake of her head. "My favorite was called 'The Devil and the Sea Witch'. It was a series of swashbuckling adventures. I'd smuggle each volume out from under the Grand Matron's nose. Read it under my bed, with a lantern, until my toes went numb."

"What was it about?"

"A roguish sea captain. A smuggler, like you. Lean as a knife, and as deadly. He had a wicked right hook, a price on his head, and a penchant for seducing noblewomen. But the twist was, he was no scoundrel. Not really. He was a castaway, and the victim of a great, unspeakable tragedy. The only thing he had left was his ship, and the seas."

"And the women?"

"An escape, from the solitude." Mel's grin turns a bit rueful. "Then, of course, he meets his match."

"Melusine, the sea queen?"

"Not a queen. Just a girl who'd lost her whole family to a terrible storm. She'd washed up on the shore, the sole survivor of the shipwreck. The magistrate, a lustful beast, falsely accused her of witchcraft. He sentenced her to hang unless she yielded to his advances. She fled the gallows, and stowed aboard the Devil's ship." The grin deepens. "Naturally, they hate each other. But the more they fight, the more the attraction flares. The Captain tries his hardest to resist. He is an inveterate rogue. Master of the high seas. He has no business with a soft little chit from the gentry. But, alas, he succumbs to her charms."

"Her perky arse?" Silco guesses.

"Her spirit. Her fire. She challenges him at every turn. Never gives him a moment's rest." Mel's sigh is a playful flutter. "They are so much alike, the pair of them. Two kindred spirits, bound by circumstance. And the sea."

"So, of course, he falls in love."

"He does."

"With her perky arse."

"With everything." Her lips, curving, find his shoulder. "The story ends with a grand battle. The crew of the Devil's ship, outgunned and outmanned, is besieged by an armada from the merchant navy. But our heroine saves the day, with a potion in a bottle. Proof, that there is a bit of a witch to her, after all. The Devil declares his undying love, and they sail off to a new horizon. The rest, well... I won't spoil the ending."

"I don't need it spoiled. It's all written on your face."

"Is it?"

"Happily Ever After."

"I wouldn't know." Her lightness fades. "When Mother found my books, she ordered them burnt. It was her way. No frivolity; only cold pragmatism. I watched as, one by one, the stories went up in smoke. I stood, and I said nothing. I was twelve years old. But I'd no tears left." Mel's throat works. "The rest of my years were spent in service to her ideals. Treatises on war. Texts on governance. Blood, and coin, and conquest on every page. I read, and I learned, and I grew up."

"Grew up. Or gave in?"

"I couldn't give in. If I did, she'd win. And if she won, it meant the life she'd forged for me was all there was. So I learned to keep the rest—the things that brought me joy—locked up tight." She twists to meet his eyes. "Until, one day, I met a real Devil. And he opened a door. Then, another. And another. Each one, leading somewhere strange. Somewhere... I'd been before. Or maybe only dreamed about."

His good eye, on hers, is a steady blue horizon. "So the story, in the end, was rewritten."

"Only if I write it for myself." She lifts a quivering hand up to thread through his wet hair. "Only if I get to choose."

#arcane #arcane league of legends #arcane silco #silco #forward but never forget/xoxo #forward (never forget)/xoxo #arcane mel #mel medarda #mal de mer #melco #silco x mel

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myxineye · 11 months

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i havent drawn my pirate101 ocs in a while so i'm just slowly working my way through all 10+ of them... anyways here's my witchdoctor's squad!

Quincy is a witchdoctor who does musketeer stuff because of their love to tinker with things -- recently, they've been on a roll experimenting with clockworks and technomancy. They never stay in one place for long and travel frequently, but the experiences they pick up from meeting so many people and dealing with many different situations (along with the crew they often travel with) has made Quincy a force to be reckoned with. They fight with a mix of witchcraft and guns and any contraptions they make.

Huo Tian is a swashbuckler who was the former princess of a ruined village in Mooshu. After the raid that destroyed her village, and with nothing left, she decided to embark on a quest for vengeance. After taking care of those directly responsible, she turned her sights to the one who hired them -- General Tso. However, Huo Tian landed herself in some trouble with the Armada and only managed to slip away because of Quincy's interference. Now with nothing to do outside of revenge, she wanders the worlds together with Quincy in hopes of finding a purpose in life. Huo Tian fights with a jian and an enchanted fan that can manipulate fire.

Knight is a privateer and Quincy's creation, a centaur created by scavenged battle angels and clockwork steeds. Though Knight often acts like a standard battle angel with the objective to protect Quincy and co., they've recently begun to have emotions of their own and expresses a curiosity of the world around them. Quincy is very proud of them :) They fight with a modified lance that can also shoot a burst of sparks when needed.

#pirate101 #pitty #pitty fandom #p101 #oc #pirate101 oc #p101 quincy #p101 knight #p101 huo tian #i got one player oc and 1-2 companion ocs for each so this is gonna take a while orz #sorry knight i wouldve wanted to draw more of u but ur design takes forever </333 #wizard101 #i do plan on putting them in wizard somehow... crossover with my wizzy ocs qhenever i get around to them ^_^

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glauconaryue · 2 months

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I have been on this hellsite for years and only now do I learn that writeblr introductions are, apparently, a thing. So here goes my

Writeblr Introduction

Glauconar Yue (they/them, xe/xir)

Nonbinary trans femme lesbian

I write horror, weird fantasy and poetry.

I also do drag and theatre sometimes.

I grew up with Spanish and German, I write in both and also in English or mixing it all up.

I love to meet people on tumblr dot com so please send asks and dms if you see common interests.

My novels

El Empalador (Spanish)

Gothic horror, historical fantasy

A retelling of the life of Vlad Tepes Dracula, blending myth and history through the paranoia of a doomed antihero.

Las crónicas del templo negro (Spanish)

High fantasy, metafiction

Immortals form a community to share their knowledge, but their individual personalities and strange abilities make coexistence no easy task. The book includes many notes on alternative translations of the cryptic source texts.

Das Herz des Zahnradmädchens (German)

Steampunk, romance

An inventor finds a mysterious female automaton whose body contains mechanical and magical secrets. To confront industrial and supernatural threats, they must first figure out their own feelings.

Many shorter texts have been published in magazines and collections, see a longer list here.

My WIPs

Graustadt: Kopfgeldjäger und Mythen

Urban fantasy, crime thriller

A couple of bounty hunters trying to make a living in a run down city. They hunt for magical artefacts and literally for the heads of luckless outlaws, while trying to not get caught up in the rising gang wars.

Status: Volume 1/3 completed, figuring out how to best publish it.

Princess on the Run

Quest fantasy, queer fairy tale, road story

After her castle is burned down, a princess roams across the land, stealing cars, fighting ghosts and con-men, questioning both her gender and nobility.

Status: Scattered fragments in various languages.

Discurso de Transmutación Alquímica

Queer poetry, witchcraft

A queer reading of alchemical mysticism, celebrating gender transition as a spiritual process. The poetical essay with embedded sonnets mixes Spanish and English, historical language and neopronouns.

Status: Revising and expanding on it.

Voyage of the Lieutenant Nun: Transition of Public Spaces

Experimental theatre

My second take on the historical queer figure of an infamous swashbuckler and sinner nun that terrorized South America in the 17th Century. Likely to contain Catholic drag and mixed language gibberish.

Status: Funding approved, probably showing in Cologne this summer. Writing in process, dates tba.

These are the book-sized ones, many small texts are constantly in the works or just happening.

Thanks for reading, I'd be happy to hear from you!

#fantasy #gothic #horror #theatre #writeblr intro #glauconaryue #my writing #weird fiction #queer poetry #author

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save-the-spiral · 8 months

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Question: what pirate class do people think suits Nolan Stormgate best. Because my current thought process is he does have magic cards and his wand, but without a Lot of ambient magic or a properly made magical array, like the battle arrays we fight on in wizard101, his magic will backfire if he casts a spell with a card. He would get initially imprisoned by the armada for 'witchcraft' due to this.

So either, he keeps trying and figuring out ways to use magic and becomes a 'witchdoctor' (general term they use to cover all magic users & such), or he picks up a weapon.

Currently I'm a fan of musketeer Nolan, because Giving Him A Gun. However, guns aren't exclusive to that class. Privateer may also be interesting but considering how that relies on more team cohesion and support, he wouldn't be suited at All.

While swashbuckler and buccaneer are aesthetically appealing, I don't think he could shut up for long enough to be sneaky. And he will be going into this all with noodle arms and would probably pull a muscle trying to pick up a battle-axe or what have you.

I was going to make a poll but writing this all out, musketeer is the only one that really makes sense. It lets him have a backseat in it all and organize a battle from the back lines or above, which he would be more used to as a myth student controlling constructs. And the trapping aspect of the class would be something he enjoys if only to taunt whoever fell into them, because he's an asshole (affectionate).

And the distance would help him adjust to the sensory input of battle as he gets used to pirate life. AND also. Guns!

#wizard101 #pirate101 #nolan stormgate #yeah this was gonna be discussion but instead you are subjected to my thought processes #anywya im gonna go bacj to my ethoslab video and go bedddy bye

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curserat · 1 year

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@electricea requested the swashbuckler

❝ Really hope you weren't expecting me to follow any of this. ❞ David said sheepishly, squinting eyes towards Ryuji.

❝ If you need me to point and shoot, I can do that. ❞ —Of course, this was an arcade cabinet, so Ryuji wasn't expecting David to pull out his musket in a public space.

Staring at the screen of the video game console like it was a reflective crystal ball of mystery, David found his hands on the joystick, names 3 characters long displayed on the 16-bit software displaying Ryuji's high score along with everyone else's.

David took a breath, stomaching the witchcraft laid in front of his face as best he could while Simultaneously not wanting to seem like a killjoy, as Ryuji was having a lot of fun here.

#electricea #Local man from 1777 trying to understand video games. More at 11.

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catphistopheles · 3 years

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Spicy water, spicy water

In—a—ditch:

How many times can you kiss this Lich?

#nature #witchcraft #shitpost #lich #fantasy #horror #dungeons and dragons #this is my tabaxi swashbuckler mocking a lich #he used to be a bard but his wee brain runs a little slow for that sort of occupation #but every now and then he gets a good un

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palatteflags · 4 years

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Pirate and Witchcraft based Bi moodboard with the name Fausta! ^^ For an anon~ Hope you like!!

Want one? Send an ask~ -mod Jay

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qqueenofhades · 3 years

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The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

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wassup people ! i’m harls (also known as harl, demon child, or whatever nickname mac wtw has come up with),, i write sci-fi, fantasy, and spy fiction ! i absolutely love writing thrilling action and problematic chaotic characters... also i probably have too many wips that i put in the backseat after a few weeks :3 it’s been a while since i’ve been here but exams are over, i have time, and i want nicole to validate me so here’s my masterlist and my mobile nav ! this is my official “im back bitches” post,, i’ve included a simple synopsis and mini intros of my stuff under the cut !

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a duology of witchcraft, politics, war, betrayal, and love ! the tss series is full of scandalous reveals, unexpected plot twists, character deaths *wink*, mind games, and loads and loads of magic. with poc characters and touching on subjects like discrimination and politics, tss is a fantasy wip not for the faint hearted that creeps and hopefully thrills :D ( started: 26 feb 2020 )