LogFAQs > #956674518

wydrah posted...

So what Hollywood tries to do instead, often, is turn Arthur himself into an action hero. He's not, really. He's a king. He rules while his knights go out and fight for him.

Ehhhh...

The problem is, Arthur does kind of fight. For years. Not just as a "general" but as a warrior (because that's how combat was generally handled in that setting/era).

But most of the stories go "Here's Arthur's origin story, boom - sword, crown, table. He and his allies fought for years to unite the land, but we're going to skip over every one of those fights and timeskip forward to the point where he's uncontested king and his knights were going out and having adventures." So you're mostly skipping over the entirety of his "action hero" years.

Then you have the amorphous period of time where tons of adventures are being had, where they're mostly told as self-contained stories or anecdotes without any clear timeline - which is what happens when you're trying to assemble folklore and fairy tales after the fact and hammering them into a narrative framework (imagine if the Brothers Grimm collected all their various unrelated fairy tales, but then wrote a framing story to link them all and wrote in occasional crossovers between characters... you'd basically have something like medieval Kingdom Hearts). But because they're not really interconnected, most media either picks one or two and adapts the crap out of them, or they ignore them entirely in favor of skipping ahead to the ending.

And then the myth cycle sort of jams the whole "Oh, and then Arthur fucked his sister, Mordred's here now, Grail, oops Guinevere's cucked him, Lancelot's gone, Saxons, Battle of Badon Hill, Avalon" storyline in at the end to cap the whole thing off. So that's a ton of crazy crap happening all at once at the end.

And then you get Merlin and his related shenanigans woven into the overarching story to tie it to together.

So you've basically got a multi-part structure, but the tone of each part is very different from the others, and there's too much content in some of those parts to cram into a single movie, let alone cramming the entire story into a single movie. You wind up leaving waaay too much out.

If anyone ever did a Game of Thrones-esque TV series set in Arthurian lore, what you'd kind of need to do is maybe make the first couple episodes the really idealistic origin story, then the rest of the first season would be Arthur actively fighting for the throne, probably winning it for the season finale. Then season two skips ahead a bit, Arthur's settled in (and maybe already had or is just getting the round table), and then you have episodic (or two-part) stories where each knight gets his own stand-alone adventure, so Gawain and the Green Knight, Pellinore and the Questing Beast, etc. Jut build up how awesome each knight is, and get the audience to like them. Maybe cap off the season by having Galahad show up and sit in the Siege Perilous, because shit just got real.

Then have your third season be the Grail Quest as a season-long story, where most of the knights we learned to like in the previous season utterly fail, some die, and Camelot generally suffers for it, as the good knights are whittled away and the less than noble ones remain.

And then season four is when everything gets really bleak. Mordred shows up, the Cuckening gets outed, Lancelot kills Gawain's brothers and war breaks out, the Saxons show up, etc etc. Then the final scenes of the final episode are Arthur dying, Bedivere throwing the sword back into the lake, and Arthur getting carried off to Avalon.

And then if you get renewed for season five, you can have Arthur come back in the future and do a Camelot 3000 riff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelot_3000
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