Five lessons I learned from reading approx. a billionty King Arthur stories as a kid
1. It's possible to love more than one person at a time.
OBVIOUS ONE, I know. But for the longest time, this was the only story I knew of where that was true. There are lots of stories about finding your one true love and marrying them, a few stories about loving several people one after another. The other great courtly-love romances-- I'm thinking Tristan and Isolde primarily here-- are about two people in love, and the man one of them happens to be married to. Isolde does not love Mark. Tristan certainly does not love Mark. And I think that's why they hold way less interest for me. Arthur and Guenever and Lancelot /all/ love each other so /much/ and that's what makes it a tragedy, but, looked at in a slightly different light, it's a centuries-old poly love story that everybody knows about and that still gets told and retold. And that's pretty neat.
2. Even the people everyone loves sometimes hate themselves.
So here is this guy, right, and he is the best knight in the world. And he believes in God so strongly that it sometimes makes people really dislike him. But he has a secret-- Not the being in love with the queen thing, that's pretty much an open secret. No, the compelling thing about Lancelot is that he hates himself. Pretty much everyone is either in love with Lancelot or wants to be Lancelot... Except Lancelot. Who feels like he HAS to be the best all the time in order to cover up the fact that he knows, deep down, that he's a terrible person who doesn't deserve any of the nice things he has. I have five first cousins all around the same age as me, and I got designated The Smart One from a pretty early age. So I was walking around waiting to be found out as secretly a terrible stupid mess, and here was this guy, this HERO, and he felt the same! That was kind of a revelation.
3. Men have to let women make decisions about their own bodies.
So does everybody know the tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady? Because that, right there, is the moral of the story. This really ugly woman comes to Camelot demanding to marry a knight for plot reasons. Gawain is contractually bound to help any woman, so he marries her. She wakes him up in the middle of the night and she's suddenly beautiful! She explains to him that she's cursed, but that now that she's married the curse is half-off. She can either be beautiful in the day and ugly in the night or vice versa, according to what Gawain decides. So he decides to let HER choose, which breaks the curse completely. And they live happily ever after, at least until her death.
Yep. That's right. Sir Gawain vanquishes evil through the power of being pro-choice. This is an explicitly pro-choice fairy tale. How awesome is that?
4. You don't always have to confront bullies.
Okay so when you're a kid in school, they tell you if someone is bullying you to tell a teacher right away or whatever, right? But I didn't get properly bullied until middle school. And twelve year old kids are the actual worst people. So I knew that if I said anything to teachers, I would NEVER hear the end of it from the asshole bully kid. And I felt bad about it, because I kept thinking, none of my heroes would stand for this, they would have hit him or cleverly insulted him or something. And then I remembered Sir Gareth.
Sir Gareth, AKA Beaumains, is basically the Cinderella story of the Arthurian mythos. Sir Kay bullies the crap out of him. And then he goes on a quest with a snarky princesses who ALSO bullies the crap out of him. And he just takes it, But over the course of his adventures he shows everyone that he is actually really fucking cool and worthy of respect, and at the end he gets his lifelong dream (being knighted by Lancelot. I told you, everybody loves Lancelot). And y'know what? I think, long-term, learning to be awesome in spite of being bullied may actually be more useful than confrontation.
5. Not every good story has a happy ending.
This was pretty much the first tragedy I ever read. (Clearly, it stuck with me.) The idea that you COULD resolve a story that way was shocking and new and weird to me at age, what, eight? Nine? I had gone through the book expecting something to happen, something that would make everything all right in the end, but that something never came. But it's a beautiful, honest, /right/ ending, even if it isn't a happy one. A large part of my heart really desperately wants them to find a happy ending (I think, subconsciously, that's why I read so many King Arthur books in such quick succession when I was a kid. Trying to find the one that ended better.), but I know it'd be dishonest. Sure, you could tack on a happy ending like the Victorians did to Shakespeare, but it wouldn't feel /right./ Sometimes, the only satisfying ending isn't a happy one. To tie this into comics, because clearly I have to tie everything in to comics-- I seriously don't think Death in the Family would have worked as a story if the poll had gone the other way.
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