At one point a guy is like “huh have you ever noticed that women are like slaves, sold to the highest bidder as a wife, expected to be excited and grateful while at his mercy and subject to his whims with no power of their own?”

And Merlin’s like “well I GUESS. Anyway I sure didn’t teach the king’s oldest bastard magic even though she’s already a gifted healer & I know first hand how precarious bastardy can be. This SURELY is the best move. Girls, am I right lol?”

And his eventual student, and lover, and successor, is a woman young enough to be his daughter who was consigned to isolated religious service against her will and had to pretend to be a boy to learn how to use the magic in her bones & gain power.

He saw FIRST HAND how his mother was treated, how her dad attempted to marry her off to someone against her wishes, how he refused to permit her to join a convent, how she stifled and killed her magic. He saw his grand dad’s bastards and uncles’ bastards running around, no sin attached to them, while his mother was tortured in an attempt to discover the father of her child. He saw it but didn’t think it was important.

This is his greatest failing. This is his downfall.

Morgause as an adult is almost cartoonishly villainous (although not quite as abusive toward her children as she is in “the once and future king,” if I remember rightly). She’s bad because she is very aware of her lack of power and wants to be in control of her life; she has & enjoys sex; she’s a shitty mom; she’s vain. She’s a bad woman, a creature of incest, and of poisons (a woman’s tool). She’s petty.

What would have happened if Merlin had met her as a child and instead of putting her off - someone who he knew was a gifted healer - he’d taught her something? Guided her? Or at last given her direction? She’s ooga booga Arthur’s downfall but who really put that downfall in motion - her, or Merlin?

To be frank, a lot of my opinion here is formed by the fact that Stewart pioneered the romantic thriller genre and has a massive amount of work featuring young smart capable women solving their terrible problems through their skills and ingenuity. It’s telling, to me, that she includes a scene of Merlin being cruel to Morgause - rejecting her - and then turns her into a near-caricature of A Bad Woman. There’s many scenes where Merlin is just like “women. Idk man. Real mysteries.” And the men around him are all “lol you know NOTHING about women (including the fact that they are humans & have thoughts, emotions, and interior lives) haha! Damn. That’s sad.”

He refuses to see women as humans capable of being his equal, and those women are his downfall.

All men carry the seeds of their own destruction, including him.