i was rewatching with a friend the other day and like. the thing that really gets me about the sorcerer's shadow isn't just the obvious queer subtext and the weight of all those secrets never told. but it's the fact that gilli is what merlin could have been in another life, another time, and vice versa. all the anger, all the desperation, the loneliness, could have so easily lent themselves to another story entirely, yet they didn't. and the narrative conspires to make us believe that this is a good thing: that the person merlin became is the way things were meant to be, and the best thing that couldn't happened. but the glaring truth that lurks just beyond this is that no matter how much better it may seem that merlin became the person he was, his story is still a tragedy just as much as (or perhaps more so than) gilli's. he still has to hide his magic, he is still treated like a fool. he uses his magic for good rather than for evil, but he still has to use his magic for something beyond who he is, justifying his existence with a so called greater good rather than just being allowed to exist as a neutral fact of this world. the story of bbc merlin is inarguably a tragedy, i'm hardly the first person to say this (and this is hardly my first rant on the subject) but part of what makes it so is its vehement refusal to accept that fact, even to the bitter end. it is a story, and a psyche, obsessed with the idea of meaning something, perhaps so much so that he loses the ability to exist as something beyond that, wearing himself ineffably down to a fragile and insubstantial bone, held aloft by the denial of its own dreams. in this sense, gilli and merlin are not just alike through their magic and their youthful hope for a world in which they are no longer forced to hide, but by their unconscious rejection of the very ideals that they wish to embody, their sisyphean self-sabotage that eats away at the fundamentals of who they are, or at least the potential of who they could have been. in the end, the message we get from the end of the sorcerer's shadow isn't the one that the characters think: that it is better to use your magic for good than it is for bad, but that it is a privilege to be able to think this way. but that any world in which magic is must be "used" to have any meaning is a dystopia, and no matter their intentionality, both merlin and gilli are long since lost to the only reality in which either of them could have ever been free. a loss so intense and so inevitable that even the narrative structure itself seems unable to acknowledge it.
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