this is a hostage situation

sickness @merthurmicrofic // animals @merlinbingo

"The Dragonlords' Special Envoy"

...is not at all how Arthur imagined him. 😏

and the framing that “arthur gave her an opportunity to talk reasonably and she refused” puts the burden of reasonableness entirely on the person being oppressed. why would she owe arthur a calm conversation. why is the expectation that the victim of systemic violence has to negotiate politely with the system before resisting it. thats not a neutral standard, thats asking her to bend her knee to the exact structure that killed her people and calling her stubborn for refusing.

she didnt “stick to her guns” in some abstract principled stubbornness. she made a choice grounded in the very reasonable belief that arthur, despite individual moments of growth, still represented and enforced a violent system. and these double standards with kara are GLARING. merlin kills people constantly throughout this show. he kills to protect arthur, in service of the same crown that murders magic users, and yet most of the fandom celebrates this. nobody calls merlin a murderer who needs to be executed for his crimes. nobody says he should have just talked it out reasonably. if kara had been a man, this would be framed as heroic resistance against tyranny. but shes a woman, and a woman who refuses to perform graciousness toward her oppressors doesnt get the same narrative mercy, does she :) kara’s act of resistance against the actual architecture of her own people’s genocide is just something she has to deal with the consequences of, right?

and this isnt a hypothetical pattern, it shows up constantly with how real resistance gets talked about too. people who fight back against colonisation, against apartheid, against genocide, get held to this exact same impossible standard after the fact. why didnt they just negotiate?why didn’t they try the reasonable channels first?? why did they have to resort to violence??? the people asking these questions are rarely asking them about the violence of the oppressor, only the violence of the resistance. its a very old rhetorical move and its not neutral, its a tool for delegitimising people who fought back against something that was already killing them.