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Speaking about the project, Gajdusek said the goal is to strip away the fantasy surrounding Homer’s epic and reveal the human story beneath.

Homer wrote what ancient Greeks before him orally have said about the epics that were passed on through generations. The myths are linked to Hellenic paganism = religion, so a myth tied to a religion cant separate the beings they worshipped because religion helps you shape your world around you based on what a society believes.

King Menelaus and Queen Helen of Sparta

I am a stranger in this life, haunted by yesterday's desires (Mordred)

before and afters below the cut (16+hrs)

Bury My Heart (Galehaut Laid to Rest)

"HERE LIES GALEHAUT THE SON OF THE GIANTESS, THE LORD OF THE DISTANT ISLES, WHO DIED FOR THE LOVE OF LANCELOT" "And Lancelot himself lay his companion to rest inside the tomb. After he had laid Galehaut down, he kissed him three times on the mouth in such agony that his heart nearly leapt out of his chest. " - Lancelot Part IV (Lancelot-Grail /Vulgate Cycle)

I haven't completed a traditional drawing in pencil in years after switching almost completely to digital. There was a few times I almost gave up in the sketch phase, so I'm proud of myself for seeing it through.

Its been genuinely healing to work on this and pour my heart for these two.

Spin the wheel. This Greek mythological figure is trying to kill you

Spin the wheel again. This Greek mythological figure is trying to protect you

I am also a godless socialist anarchist who believes Britain shouldn't have a monarchy.

How could I possibly therefore be into a body of literature which tells the legend of a Good King™? And why on earth would I bother writing a retelling of said legend, if I hate the monarchy so much?

Except...Arthur might be a Good King, but he is never a perfect one, not in the original Welsh literature, not in any medieval literature that I know of. He is never an Unambiguously Good King™. And even if he were, that doesn't necessarily mean that the institution of the monarchy is itself good.

And that's the key word here: Institution.

For instance, when we say All Cops Are Bastards, we're not just talking about individual cops. We're talking about the institution of policing and what it represents: a carceral system, state-sanctioned violence, and in the case of my country, the iron thumb of white supremacy and class hierarchy pressing itself down on ethnic minorities and the working classes, and those are the examples from off the top of my head. Your cousin Pete may be a Good Cop, but he's still acting in the service of a rotten institution that perpetuates violence on behalf of the state.

So when I say the monarchy is bad, I'm not just talking about individual monarchs, good or bad, but about an institution that asserts that an individual has the right to rule over you by virtue of what family they're born in, "by their blood", or by virtue of Because-God-said-so.

And in the context of Arthuriana, there's another thing to consider:

Arthur may be a Good King, Camelot may be a Great Kingdom, but it is one that was founded on violence, and I'm not talking about Arthur's wars with the Saxons: I am talking about Uther Pendragon's rape of Igraine that was brought about so that Arthur could be born, so that this Great Kingdom could come about.

Do the ends justify the means? Is a Kingdom, no matter how good, that was founded on such violence, that saw one woman and her family as expendable in order for it to exist, worth saving?

I believe Arthuriana has plenty of space to explore such ideas. I think there is room for an interpretation that is questioning of the systems of violence that the characters knowingly or unknowingly perpetuate, including the institution of the monarchy.

I noticed in the tags of a reblog you mentioned "there is no such thing as a feminist retelling." Could you say more on that? I'm relatively new to Arthuriana and have heard that term used to refer to Mists of Avalon - which has put it in the queue behind my current reading, frankly. I'm curious if it's a failure of language or something else.

Hello!

Feminism is the belief in gender equality and a movement with a goal toward women's rights. In my opinion, a piece of fictional media cannot be feminist in and of itself; it's not alive and cannot act on its own. Media can communicate feminist ideals, it can be a tool of a feminist to illustrate her advocacy for women through storytelling, but I think over time people have come to mistake media consumption for activism and labeling books (or any other media or merchandise) feminist only exacerbates that issue. So long as reading a feminist fairytale is considered feminist action, the movement grinds to a halt and ends at consumerism. The term has now become a marketing label used by fiction authors/publishers to make money. We've been sold the false idea that reading "feminist" fantasy is akin to aiding the political movement. It isn't.

I also believe that people should be striving to write feminist works automatically. One can write a story which upholds the author's feminist theory without a woman at the forefront, even. If there are plentiful women with narrative impact and importance and the subtext humanizes and respects them, even if they live in a patriarchal society and the pov character is not a woman, that can still be a story which aligns with feminist values. For example, I just read The Story of Silence by Alex Myers, in which the point of view characters are an unnamed bard (a cis perisex man), Cador (Earl of Cornwall, another cis perisex man) and his child Silence (born female but raised male and identifies as such for most of the book) and Myers went out of his way to respectfully depict women that the original Medieval poem demonized. I would consider this to be feminist-aligned, particularly bc the story itself ruminates on gender inequality! Nowadays, especially since Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, marketing teams simply label any Arthurian retellings starring a woman "feminist" when half the time they're still misogynistic (or racist, or transphobic, which is incongruous with intersectional feminism and voids any supposedly feminist intentions)!

And on that note... I encourage you to research Marion Zimmer Bradley's history before you decide whether or not you want to read her work. Zimmer Bradley was lauded as revolutionary in the Arthurian genre and a feminist in her time, but since her passing, her daughter, Moira Greyland, has written her own book, The Last Closet of Avalon, which details her life long sexual abuse at the hands of both her mother, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and father, convicted pedophile Walter Breen. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back at The Mists of Avalon, there are undoubtedly some disturbing aspects which hint at the warped mindset held by and acted upon by Zimmer Bradley and led to the violence against her children.