As you all well know, I am very much into Arthuriana, and I am writing an Arthurian retelling.
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.
And no, I don't believe such an interpretation will lead to a work that's inherently cynical or nihilistic. If anything, I think it adds to the tragedy, and I think questions such as these can make for a good story.
