Ten Things I Love About Merlin:

[gnimaerd]

Despite it's occasional Epic Fail (see: the treatment of Morgana this series and various other things), I do still love Merlin. It is still absolutely one of my favourite things ever, alongside pepperoni pizza, the smell of Christmas trees, warm sunny days in May and sleeping babies. And I thought I would make a post celebrating that fact, to remind myself not to get too bogged down by its failings and to enjoy what it also does so, so well. So, without further ado...

1. Colin Morgan:

There is something absolutely magnetic about Mr Morgan - there's no doubt that he's an incredibly talented actor, but he also brings such heart, vulnerability and believability to Merlin's character that even when I'm annoyed with the pernicious little sorcerer I can't dislike him. Colin gives Merlin a layer of complexity I doubt that many other young actors could, given that the script he has to work with doesn't allow much development on that front anyway. Without him the show wouldn't be anywhere near as watchable - he's what makes the weaker episodes bearable and the good episodes stellar. I'm so glad he's had a chance to flex a bit of acting muscle in a visible way on this show and I hope he does a lot more TV work once Merlin is over, if only because I'm gonna miss his cheeky chappy grin and big ears.

2. Katie McGrath:

 

Okay so I have a huge freaking crush on  Katie McGrath. As long as she's on this show, I'm going to keep watching; and if she left, I can't guarantee that it would hold my interest. I'd probably still watch to see what would happen to the other characters, but I doubt I would be into the fandom anymore. Morgana is the character I connect with the most on the show and Katie helps that along enormously by being so ridiculously gorgeous. On top of that, she is always sweet to her fans, and adorably dorky in backstage videos and interviews. And besides being ridiculously attractive, she strikes me as a genuinely intriguing person anyway. She's covered in piercings, she has a tattoo, she dresses like a rock chick and loves Guns N Roses. She used to have bright pink hair, she was overweight as a teenager, she clearly floundered around quite a bit before stumbling onto an acting career and she named her hot water bottle Hugo. Frankly I'd quite like to hang around this girl in a bar and have a drink with her - she sounds really interesting.

3. The whole gorram cast:

I could give every one of the cast their own bullet point but that's going to take up too much space - the point is, Colin, Bradley, Angel and Katie, alongside ASH and Richard Wilson, absolutely make this show. They're funny, they're adorable, they have great on-screen chemistry, they play practical jokes on each other, they do odd things like break off half way through an interview to wrestle and film each other catching and releasing spiders from their bathtubs. This show is worth sticking with just for the footage of the cast running round being lunatics between takes on the DVD extras. ^_^

4. The Female Characters:

 

Despite serious amounts of gender!fail on this series, the fact is that for its genre, Merlin does amazingly well in how it deals with its female leads (which of course is one of the reasons that the continued gender!fail is so frustrating - they're SO close to getting it right *sigh*). Doctor Who hasn't had more than one female lead per series since the new series started, Robin Hood barely acknowledged the existence of its second female lead and certainly never allowed them to interact with each other in a meaningful way and Demons fell back into the horrible trope of having the two female leads constantly bitch and snark at each other over men. On Merlin, we have two strong, contrasting and complimentary female leads, and, whilst by no means do they get treated with equal importance to the male leads by the writers, they still get given major overarching plot lines of their own, significant screen time in at least a few of the episodes and a close bond that doesn't revolve around either of the two main male characters. On top of that, two mothers (albeit those of the male leads) have also been given significant plot points in their own rights, even if they are mostly implied rather than actually shown - mothers are generally invisible on shows like this and so the fact that two have appeared AT ALL is noteworthy. Morgana's sister, Morgause, though considered to be a 'villain' is also the only magical character that Morgana has interacted with so far who has neither been actively manipulating nor deceiving her - and all those other magical characters have been male. She is complex, particularly for a villain, and her relationship with Morgana has clearly been treated with some thought by the show's producers. It's interesting that the character who is clearly being brought in as Morgana's most powerful protector - someone who is essentially going to be her liberator - is a woman, rather than another man.

The fact is that for all the criticism I have and will continue to direct at this show for the way it treats Gwen and Morgana, I only do it because it's so much closer to getting it right than everything else in this genre of TV show is at the moment. There has been SOME effort made at producing a pair of satisfying, capable female leads and the fact is that both Morgana and Gwen ARE  likeable, interesting, complex characters in their own rights - they aren't purely extensions of the male leads, despite how often they are used to further Arthur and Merlin's character development rather than being developed in their own rights. For that, I do love Merlin. It's far from perfect, but it's doing a lot better than its contemporaries often do and the fact that they do seem to be trying, even if they're horribly clumsy about it, means something.

5. The Gwen/Arthur Angle:

I came to this pairing as a complete sceptic. What had been in series one had NOT convinced me in any way shape or form that I was going to like this couple - I was prepared to accept it 'cause it was clearly inevitable but I didn't think I was going to be even remotely interested in their relationship and I was vaguely irritated at how clear it was becoming that Arthur and Morgana's relationship was going to be dropped just like Gwen and Merlin's had been in early series one. But... somehow it works. It shouldn't - it has all the hallmarks of an incredibly cheesy, predictable, underdeveloped, overly-forced romance - they even managed to get the old 'true love's kiss' trope in there, for god's sake - but somehow it DOES. I think I have to thank Angel and Bradley's excellent chemistry for a large part of that, and their individual skills as actors, since they both manage to make Gwen and Arthur respectively interesting in their own rights enough that putting them together isn't clichéd so much as it is new and intriguing. Gwen and Arthur are somehow, miraculously, adorable and interesting and weirdly feasible as a couple, despite having had little to no interaction throughout the vast majority of the first series. They are proof that this show CAN pull the impossible out of its ass from time to time and continue to give me a certain amount of tenuous faith in the capabilities of the producers and writers at dealing well with plot developments that have so much potential to go disastrously wrong.

6. The Homoerotic Subtext

So I don't particularly ship  Arthur/Merlin. It just doesn't interest me (see: the distinct lack of cleavage) enough for me to think about it enough that I'm going to find a way to make it plausible in my head that they might ACTUALLY be up to something off-camera. At the same time, though, I don't think it NEEDS to convince me that they're up to something off camera for me to find it enjoyable. I love Arthur and Merlin's subtext because without it 80% of the fandom wouldn't exist, and besides that - it's both adorable and hilarious. I like that the writers have clearly been playing with it this series and I also quite like how much Merlin loves Arthur, even if that aspect of the show doesn't hold my attention. On top of that, the subtext doesn't stop with the boys because Gwen and Morgana have a heck of a lot of it too, even though, because their relationship has about the lowest priority for development of any of the relationships on this show, we don't get to see nearly enough of it. But I enjoy all the slashy elements of Merlin - it's a huge part of the show and it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining without it.

7. The Humour:

 

Merlin is funny. If anything, I reckon humour is the thing that it does best - whether by sprinkling well timed moments of hilarity around otherwise dark episodes to lighten the mood (as with dragging Uther around during 2x12) or by doing an outright funny episode like 2x10; the jokes on this show are a huge part of what makes it so entertaining. The cast all have impeccable comic timing (particularly Angel Coulby and Bradley James, although I certainly wouldn't knock Antony's, Richard's, Katie's or Colin's, either) and they're all great at getting the most out of a laugh without letting a situation become too slapstick or farcical (most of the time, anyway :P). Merlin would not be Merlin without the jokes - there's nothing quite like implying that Merlin cross-dresses or smacking Anthony Head around a flagstone floor whilst he's apparently unconscious to make an episode worth watching.

8. Merlin and Morgana's Chemistry:

Merlin and Morgana's relationship has intrigued me from the very beginning of the series. They're sort of a reversed Gwen/Arthur but a helluvalot more complicated because of the whole super!sekrit magic issue. They didn't get that much interaction during series one but what they DID  get was always compelling, and they've had a good deal more in series two. Even if I don't particularly like the way the writers have handled it, there's something about the way these two relate to each other that makes it very hard not to be drawn in. Merlin was most definitely attracted to Morgana both physically (in the first episode) and later emotionally (from about 1x08 onwards) from quite an early stage; Morgana seems to have found him intriguing from the moment he brought Mordred to her onwards. Katie and Colin have great on-screen chemistry (maybe cause they're both Irish - idk XP) and both actors (according to the 1x08 commentary on the DVDs) seemed aware of the potential for the relationship to become romantic - or at the very least quite heavily involved - enough that they've given how they relate to each other a good deal of thought.

Now that we all know what Merlin ends up doing to Morgana I'm torn between being supremely annoyed that any potential for them to truly become allies has been quashed (unless they mind!wipe Morgana of the entire incident which frankly would annoy me even more), and really wanting to see how the pair are going to be interacting now. Presumably Morgana still doesn't know that Merlin has magic, since Morgause clearly didn't know either - yet at the same time we have to assume that the writers will find some way of sticking Morgana back into Camelot as quickly as possible in series 3, because continuing to develop her will be difficult if the episodes have to keep flashing away from the other characters to wherever she currently is with Morgause, and also they need a reason for Gwen to be in the castle on a regular basis. Whatever happens I'm going to be very interested in how this gets handled - whether we see any more of Merlin's guilt over the incident and how Morgana decides to interact with him in future.

9. The Fanservice:

I find it supremely reassuring that the cast and the producers are aware of the fandom and at least seem to be trying to take how they will react to certain things into account when they create new story arcs. I'm not saying they always get it right or that the fandom has any real influence over where certain plot lines are going, but at least they acknowledge our existence and try to bare us in mind. I say this as someone who came out of Robin Hood fandom - where the show's creators had NO interest in (or even belief in the existence of) the online fanbase, couldn't care less what we thought of how they were handling things and subsequently kicked their core audience in the teeth, repeatedly. Merlin's producers are conscientious about what they're doing and they DO care about trying to keep the fandom happy - they wouldn't do the Expos or the various other public appearances/events that they do if they didn't want to engage us on some level. Bradley's video diary type stuff seems to be increasingly aimed at the fandom, and I can't believe that things like the almost!hug between Merlin and Arthur, and Arthur's propensity to appear shirtless at least once every couple of episodes, and the running joke about Merlin cross dressing, would be in there if the writers weren't thinking about the fandom. For that I really do appreciate the show - I MUCH prefer the effort they are making here, however clumsy it can be or however completely and utterly wrong they sometimes get it, to the completely bone-headed view that the producers of Robin Hood had of its fans. It's just nice of them, you know?  It gives the show a good vibe.

10. The Fandom:

Merlin has a good fandom. I don't think that we can really claim the 'nicest fandom on the interwebs' title anymore - the fact is that a fandom can only stay small and friendly enough to be completely wank-free for a certain amount of time and that window is long past. But we have created a relatively decent, humane environment here, where wank tends to happen in small, self-contained bubbles that occasionally send ripples but don't generally spread too far and where most people, even if they disagree, manage  to exist along side each other harmoniously. I've also made a number of extremely close friends through this fandom - people who my relationship with will probably outlast our respective interests in Merlin (I certainly hope so, anyway). At the end of the day I suspect that that will be this show's lasting legacy to us all - the people we have met and the experiences we have had as a result of our involvement with the fandom, and that has to count for something. The fact is that some of the happiest points of 2009 for me have been related to the Merlin fandom - the Expo in May, the BAFTA event, the Expo in October - attending those and being surrounded by fandom people, was still the most accepted and content that I have ever felt in a crowd of semi-strangers in my life. Being part of that group dynamic is really awesome and when fandom comes together in person like that it's just such a nice thing to be a part of. I hope 2010 brings even more of them!

So what about you guys, f-listies?  What do you love about Merlin?

Comments

[eviinsanemonkey.livejournal.com]

I want to thank you profusely, Gni, because you just made me slightly less angry at Season 2...

*hugs you*
*hugs Merlin*
*wanders off to go outline some "fix it" fics*

[heather11483.livejournal.com]

Aw, I love this post! Thanks for making it, it made me smile. ♥ I've been wanting to do my own wrap-up post for the season as well.

I haven't been pleased with everything and have ranted accordingly but overall I've really enjoyed series 2, as I've been unsurprised by and compartmentalizing the genderfail just like I did with the first series. Plus more Gwen never fails to make me happy. It's still my cracky funtime show with an awesome fandom.

[entangled-now.livejournal.com]

Point 8! Merlin and Morgana's chemistry even though they've played with it a little I thought it was an absolute goldmine and I really wish they'd gone somewhere or done something interesting with it.

[tigger-01.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU. The minute my gripes about a show overpower my love for it and my enjoyment when watching it is when I stop watching (smallville, i'm looking at you!), and though I have nagging concerns about Merlin, I still love the show and I sometimes forget that :)

I'm growing to love Katie more and more, actually - at the beginning I felt like she was probably the weakest actor there, but she's grown a lot and learnt a lot, and though she didn't have a lot of amazing material to work with, she did a fine job. I miss Merlin and Morgana's chemistry too - I can see the parallels to Gwen and Arthur, but the important thing about them is that they are on the same page and willing to trust each other... but Merlin's fears about Morgana would never have allowed it to work, I think.
BUT THEY LOOKED SO CUTE TOGETHER, ARGH.

I love the show because of it's simple innocence/ Above all it's a show for children and families, so it can just be funny and sweet and silly and innocent at times (like 2x10, perhaps) and it just warms my heart.
I also love it because it's so... EPIC. It's hard to describe, but I love shows where it's set in the past and about heroism and friendship and beautiful dresses and long red cloaks and shiny armour (speaking of which - the costuming/hair and makeup/scenery department is AMAZING too. even eps I hate are visually stunning.) and epic quests. It's very escapist to me, and I adore it.

[shantirosa.livejournal.com]

In response to 10 - UNF WE ARE SUCH AN AMAZINGLY HOT FANDOM. :P

[gnimaerd.livejournal.com]

OH YEAH WE ARE! XP

[solochan.livejournal.com]

*COUGH* YAYYYYYYYY <3 WE ARE TEH AWESOME!

[solochan.livejournal.com]

Is feel honoured you used my picture ,3

[nikkidarling.livejournal.com]

OH GOD LOOK THAT'S ME. ARGH.

I like this post. It is happy and hopeful and loooooooovely.

[brightly--wound.livejournal.com]

Well, some of these things have made me less irritated about Merlin lol, but not enough to get me to watch the last two episodes. I just don't want to get let down by a show that once made me so happy to watch, you know? I tend to live vicariously through my favorite television, so when they screw things up it just guts me.

I love the costumes of Merlin, particularly the female costumes this season. Morgause's red dress is fantastic, I loved Igraine's gorgeous creamy/white little number, and Morgana's gowns are just made of epic win. (Leave it to me to be all materialistic :P) Also, I really love Morgana. I also really loved Arthur last season...and Bradley James is extremely easy on the eyes :D Yay Merlin!

[brightly--wound.livejournal.com]

You know what else? The music of Merlin is really quite enjoyable as well.

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed this post. It not only reminded me of things I enjoy about the show, but gave me insight into how very different your connection to the show is from mine, and that gave me many pleasant thinky thoughts.

Do you mind being made into a meme?

[gnimaerd.livejournal.com]

Nope! Meme away - that would be awesome! ^_^

[viorica8957.livejournal.com]

Er. Hi *waves* I came stumbling in here through your Djaq/Marian fic (which was excellent) and I have to say YES to all your points (except for Arthur/Gwen- I just cannot get into that pairing. It's too emblematic of everything they did wrong in S2) Especially the fandom- true we're too big to avoid wank entirely, but we're so nice, and by and large, we get along with the PTB. Coming, as you say, from the RH fandom, it's a huge relief.

Also, point #4 made me realize again how much I miss Hunith this season. Come back!

[indes-elfwine.livejournal.com]

I love that Morgause, while falling back on the villainous woman sterotype, is by far the most reasonable villain so far. Putting the whole castle to sleep so she could take out the only one she had a grudge against? Others might have slaughtered everyone in sight.

I love Morgana's wardobe.

I love Angel Coulby's smile for it is human sunshine.

And I love the Oscar-worthy emoting skills of Richard Wilson's eyebrows.

[mai-shiranui.livejournal.com]

Took me ages to reply to this, but I basically agree with everything that you've mentioned.

I say this as someone who came out of Robin Hood fandom - where the show's creators had NO interest in (or even belief in the existence of) the online fanbase, couldn't care less what we thought of how they were handling things and subsequently kicked their core audience in the teeth, repeatedly.

You know what the stupidest thing about RH is...they actually sort of cared about the fandom, because a former f-listie of mine wrote a letter to Foz Allen (I think that that's his name anyway) and raised some issues with him. He replied and some stuff actually got in S3 oddly enough, like the fact that the guards were suddenly in it more. Some other stuff also got in, but she bitched about that afterwards...but whatever.

Merlin is way cooler anyway.

[vermontypython.livejournal.com]

This is so weird, I was looking up Katie McGrath interviews and came..here. OH HI THERE.
You're google-famous now, omg.

Where did she say she had been overweight as a teenager? Like- is there a particular link? I'm intrigued, now, and I think that'd make like 95% of preteen girls feel better, haha.

[gnimaerd.livejournal.com]

It's here: http://community.livejournal.com/katiem_fans/14337.html#cutid1

WOOHOO! GOOGLE!FAMOUS. ^_^

Katie doesn't say it but the author of the piece mentions it so I'm presuming it came up in the course of the interview even if it isn't a direct quote.