YMMV / Arthurian Legend

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • In some stories, Gawain is Arthur's best knight and the ideal of chivalry. But in the Vulgate Cycle he's a flawed but principled hero. While in the Post-Vulgate Cycle he's a boorish, impulsive Ax-Crazy Anti-Hero. And in others, he's the Table's Boisterous Bruiser, good-natured and hot-blooded, but also dim-witted, impetuous, and a frequent tool in conspirators' plans.
  • Kay's furious, hot-tempered personality is explained away in Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach as a function of his job as Arthur's bouncer. Tons of people showed up to the castle every day claiming to be worthy knights when they really weren't, and it was Kay's job to sort out the bad ones from the good. This explains his really jerkish behavior when Percival arrives at Camelot. If that's the case, he would also be a mean Brit long before Simon Cowell was born. And what happened to his magic powers?
  • Is Mordred a rebellious and treacherous son or victim of fate? Moreover in even older tales where he's Arthur's legitimate nephew and not his son, was his takeover him enacting a grab for power or him just acting as a regent in his uncle's absence? The earliest tales say he and Arthur fell during a battle but were they fighting each other or were they on the same side? The text was extremely vague. Some of the other older Welsh text seem to make it evident Mordred, or rather his older name of Medraut, was a virtuous and heroic character; so his characterization as a villain is even more unusual of how that happened.
  • Medieval romancers occasionally note that, though an ally to Arthur, Merlin is actually evil, treacherous and disloyal by nature. He does take several questionable actions over the course of the story. In the even earlier stories, Merlin/Myrddin was called Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin the Wild). He was a wild, hairy man that lived alone in the wilderness for some time, receiving prophecies.
  • The character that receives the most alternative character interpretation is Morgan Le Fay due to the inconsistent characterization of her. Is she genuinely driven by wrath towards Uther for having her father killed so that he could have her mother (which in turn begat Arthur)? Or is she a sociopath who simply uses this tragedy as a Freudian Excuse to cause havoc For the Evulz? Is she not evil and/or antagonistic in the first place as some works (e.g. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini) imply? And what is her reason for taking her mortally wounded half-brother, Arthur, to Avalon to be healed? In the earliest stories Morgan Le Fay was simply Morgen, a mysterious/mystical healer possibly with no familial relationship to Arthur at first.
  • In the Vulgate Merlin, where Arthur supposedly "tricked" Morgause into sleeping with him, it was revealed that Morgause actually loved Arthur and apparently more than her own husband. Since she had her own children fight against King Lot for the sake of Arthur. While in the Vulgate Estoire del Saint Grail, which predates the Vulgate Merlin, it was Morgause who seemingly tricked Arthur into sleeping with her despite knowing that they were related. Or at least, Arthur believed that he was sleeping with his crush from Ireland. Albeit, they were both grief stricken, but the author never claimed that Morgause believed that she was sleeping with her husband. Nonetheless this seems to be the reason why Morgause engineers the incest herself in most modern accounts. While according to others, and possibly the original incest account, it was just good old adultery. Though in earlier accounts, there was no incest involved and Lot was the father of Mordred.
  • Guinevere is also often subject to different interpretations, with her portrayals ranging between a virtuous queen or a scheming adulteress. Another point of contention is her part in the love triangle: either her relationship with Arthur is merely an Arranged Marriage and she really loves Lancelot, or Arthur is her true love and her dalliance with Lancelot is either only a fling, brought on by manipulation from a third party (usually Morgause or Morgan), or cut out altogether to stick to the earliest versions where Lancelot didn't exist and Arthur/Guinevere was the established relationship.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • One would have better luck trying to find a penguin in the Sahara than finding any Arthurian stories from Ireland that depicts Arthur in any fashion other than a petty horse thief. A bit strange considering the many Irishmen in his court in Culhwch and Olwen, as well as his adventure in Ireland. This is thus likely to be a reaction to him becoming an English symbol, fueled by antagonism towards England.
  • Likewise, Scottish Arthurian literature composed after he got big with the English depicted Arthur and members of his court as tyrannical and lecherous villains, and portrayed Mordred's power grab as a legitimate action to reclaim his birth right. Some even paint Mordred in a favorable light as a enacting rule of law and making peace with his neighboring realms, namely the Scottish King Loth. As for Arthur's conception, in some Scottish accounts this is used to say he was illegitimate and therefore Mordred was actually the rightful heir (in this version being the son of Uther's sister).
• Badass Decay: Originally Kay (Cai) had magical/supernatural powers and was one of Arthur's best knights, considering wounds from Kay's sword couldn't be healed. Then Perceval shows up to Arthur's court. After Kay questions Perceval's abilities, insults fly and Kay slaps a woman that would only laugh when she saw the greatest knight (or strikes a dwarf and his she-dwarf who had been silent for the time they'd spent in the court only to immediately greet and praise Peredur/Percival), Perceval goes off on a quest and later defeats Kay, breaking his collarbone. The cycle repeats with newer knights, until Kay's only purpose in the stories only seems to be taunting and insulting new knights so they will get angry and go off on quests and make names for themselves just to prove Kay wrong.
• Base-Breaking Character: The whole Tristan and Iseult legend (which was originally its own myth) is subject to this. Some feel that it's an awkward fit into the Arthurian canon, especially since it's so similar to the Lancelot/Guinevere/Arthur Love Triangle. Another issue is that, in comparison to Lancelot and Guinevere, medieval sources treated Tristan and Iseult with a heavy degree of Protagonist-Centered Morality. It's notable that there are a lot of romantic songs or poems about the pair, but relatively little longer fiction, and even less that really integrates them into the wider Arthurian setting. When they do show up in general Arthuriana, it's not uncommon to see them portrayed less sympathetically than the older sources did.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Arthur's domain is typically depicted as Camelot, actually his capital, or England, which is an anachronism. In the romances his domain is sometimes called Logres ^note (probably from the medieval Welsh term Lloegyr, referring to roughly the area of Britain that became southwest England, and in modern Welsh Lloegr refers to England as a whole) and its greatest extent encompasses the entire island of Britain, Ireland, the entire Orkney archipelago, the Gallic region of Armorica, and more. Related to this is that he's sometimes called King of England, despite the Legend predating the concept of England and being set when there was only Britain.
  • Similarly, it is not uncommon to portray Arthur as Camelot's founder, when various versions of the legend portray it as a pre-existing city, sometimes Winchester.
• Fridge Horror: King Arthur will return to lead Britain in its Darkest Hour. He didn't get involved during the The Black Death or World War II. Then how bad must things get for him to wake up?
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Half of the classic stories come from France of all places. May be in part because British culture ended up fleeing to Brittany among other places after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. It's no coincidence that the French Lancelot was given so much attention by the later French writers, while the older Welsh knights like Bedivere and Kay were rarely featured and Kay's powers were never mentioned again.
  • To a lesser extent, the Scots, who, while unrelated to Arthur directly (they're Irish and Pictish mostly, with a little bit of Anglo-Saxon down south) got on the bandwagon as well. Since Arthur was appropriated as an English symbol, in response a few late medieval Scottish writers revised the stories from time to time to make it more favorable to their own kingdom, turning King Lot and Mordred into national heroes since they supposedly hailed from Lothian, a region later part of Scotland - though calling them Scottish is just as anachronistic as calling Arthur English.
  • And then there's the English, but then, it is pretty common for countries to celebrate their deep past while glossing over all the invasions and revolutions in between. It perhaps helps that modern genetic studies have shown that English ancestry is majority Celtic, with this increasing the further West one travels, thus explaining why it caught on as it did.
  • The Germans love Arthur too, particularly the Grail legends.
  • There is one work of Arthurian lore, Melekh Artus, written in Hebrew in 1279. The fact that Jews, who weren't exactly treated all that well during the times most Arthurian works were composed, also seemed to like Arthurian legend (sans the Grail stories) suggests that some ideals of the legend appealed to people outside its intended audience.
  • How enamored Americans are with Arthurian myth, despite their nation being founded upon the rejection of British monarchy. It helps that Arthur's kingship has really nothing to do with "The Crown" as an institution. The Round Table also tends to be reinterpreted as a proto-democratic thing.
  • The Japanese are in love with Arthur... well, a version of Arthur, anyways. And surprisingly, it's probably they who reference the earlier Celtic stuff the most these days, still in that context.
• Ho Yay: There's loads of this between Lancelot and Galehaut. When Galehaut sees Lancelot's battle prowess, he's so dazzled that he gives up his goal of claiming Arthur's kingdom and surrenders to the king just so he has a chance to become Lancelot's friend. Indeed, Lancelot and Galehaut become very close, so much so that whether their relationship was platonic or romantic is a subject of academic debate, much like with Achilles and Patroclus. Some stories even claim they get buried side by side. In the Vulgate Galehaut even dies of grief after thinking Lancelot has died and when Lancelot finds out Galehaut is dead he tries to kill himself... notably this is very similar to what happens when he and Guinevere each think the other has died.
• Magnificent Bastard: Morgan(a) La Fey serves as the most persistent and well-known adversary to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. Once depicted as a benevolent healer in the court, later portrayals turn her into the cunning, manipulative, and dangerous person well-known in popular culture. Always scheming to find some way to ruin the two, one of Morgan's more famous plans involved using the feud of two brothers, sending out a fake damsel to convince Arthur to duel as one of their champions, and planting fake scabbard to give her lover the best chance at slaying Arthur. She's not above using her spells or lying to escape certain capture either. Oftentimes, she approached victory only to have unforeseen circumstances thwart her such as Nimue removing the poison from a token of "atonement" or Iseult spilling the drinking horn that should have exposed Guinevere's infidelity instead. Eventually reconciling with Arthur and being there when he's taken to Avalon, Morgan La Fey nonetheless imprinted herself as one of the most famous examples of an Evil Sorceress in medieval literature.
• Memetic Badass: Before Galahad, before Lancelot, before Gawain, Arthur was this to the mythos that now bears his name. The Arthurian Welsh Triads in particular tend to either have Arthur (referred to as the Red Ravager) as the third (and thus most powerful example) of each triad, or the fourth, generally establishing that whatever the other three guys were known for, Arthur was it up to eleven. In fact, literally the earliest possible mention of Arthur accepted by most experts can be paraphrased as "This one guy is a Billy MacBadass to end all other badasses, but he was not Arthur."
• Memetic Mutation: The Black Knight. More significant as a character type than as an individual character. There was more than one but they're hardly ubiquitous in the medieval stories.
• One True Threesome: As so succinctly put by Overly Sarcastic Productions:
  Red: So, the moral of this complex, century-spanning story is: if Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot had all just been honest about their feelings and entered into a mutually supportive romantic relationship, we could have called it a poly-armoury. Thank you and good night! *cut to credits*
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The original information on Arthur focused on his ability to destroy Saxon armies whole-sale in twelve battles before dying in Pyrrhic Victory due to base treachery from his rival Mordred. Nowadays, the late romantic subplot of Lancelot dominates almost all retellings of the story, sometimes as the entire plot.
• Signature Scene: It wouldn't be Arthurian legend without mention of Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone. The Battle of Camlann is another notable moment.
• Values Dissonance: While par for the course with any old legend, there is one particular one that changes tied to the portrayals of quests and combat prowess: in the old Welsh legends, adventures and quests are group activities (Arthur himself is almost never without his Power Trio of himself, Cai, and Bedwyr) and there is nothing wrong with ganging up on bad guys, while the later Romance takes almost exclusively focus on single warrior adventures that are stuffed to the gills with jousting and even the villains tend to follow Mook Chivalry.
• Woolseyism: Merlin's name is derived from the Welsh "Myrddin," but it was changed by Geoffrey of Monmouth (who pretty much created/introduced him into the mythos, as the original Myrddin was wholly unconnected to Arthur) because "Merdin" would sound/look too much like the French "merde" and he wanted to avoid naming his prophetic wizard after the French word for poop. It's worth noting that his audience was French-speaking Normans. In Welsh the -dd would be pronounced as -th.

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