rose

ok I endured it. now what!!!!!!!!!

I usually try to be tolerant of anachronisms in books, particularly ye olde medieval generic swords and sorcery type books, but I think I broke the sound barrier with how quickly I just shot out of my immersion in this book when ye olde ancient archivist in the ye olde fantasy-england castle's library tells the protag where to find a certain book by giving him its dewey decimal number.

Today in an arthurian retelling set in pre-saxon britain I encountered a character who said he was going to quit drinking "cold turkey," which I think puts him roughly a thousand years prior to European awareness of the existence of turkeys, and the dissonance had barely registered in my mind before I remembered the medieval lending library run on the dewey decimal system and decided a chronologically misplaced poultry idiom wasn't worth noticing in comparison.

official library post

i never feel particularly fond of arthur as a character but like holy shit he kind of just has the worst life ever. made king at sixteen and basically disowned by your adopted father when it happens, now there’s weird tension with your brother because he tried to be king first and like obviously, that’s just how he is, but he’s probably always going to be resentful deep down that his little brother is king and he’s not. you didn’t even want to be king but you have to unite this giant geographical land mass and every kingdom in it obviously rebels against you and everyone wants to kill you. in the meantime you have to do all of this bureaucratic work and these tests to prove you really did pull the sword out of the stone because no one believes this kind of shy sixteen year old commoner is the son of the late king and you have no idea what’s going on with your parentage. some people are calling you a bastard. what would you even know about this. what would you even know about what happened to your mother. you keep having to fight these battles with people who want specifically you dead. why does everything always have to be solved in blood? you marry this pretty girl and your advisor tells you she’ll cheat on you. you don’t know if you can trust anything he says. you hope you can’t. he tells you also your son will murder you. what are you even supposed to do. kings are supposed to have an heir. but also you had a son with some random woman that you don’t even remember and now that kid is going to kill you. you try to kill him. what else can you do. it’s heinous. you order the killing of infants. why does everything have to be solved in blood. who knows if you even solved that problem. your knights are feuding constantly. the ones you are related to are kind of feuding the most. you remember your wife is supposed to cheat on you with one of these knights. your advisor disappears because of some woman he’s in love with. guess you can’t trust the people you love. guess you have to keep dealing in blood. you didn’t even want to be king but you thought you could at least make things better. you were supposed to make things better. why do the knights keep bringing back corpses. is your son still alive? who are tristan and iseult? you thought iseult was married to a king. your wife is supposed to cheat on you. maybe the grail quest will make it better. maybe your best knight lancelot will do the grail quest and make it better. maybe your sister’s sons can help you.

not an apologizer but a contextualizer. yes the character did that but please understand the Circumstance. yes they had other options but they had to make this choice in a sea of available bad choices. and also it made the narrative more interesting. won't anybody think about the narrative!!!!!

I do often think about how the origin of “he would not fucking say that” was in reference to a post which depicted Cartman SouthPark responding politely when asked for his pronouns

op is there any particular reason the librarians would feel safer not invoking you by name