new vid - "The Lightning Strike" - Alexander/Merlin/Kings
The Lightning Strike
Fandom: Alexander/Merlin/Kings
Song/Artist: The Lightning Strike (i) What If This Storm Ends by Snow Patrol
Duration: 4:41 minutes
Summary: Name us a king.
Spoilers: All of Alexander and Kings, up to Merlin s4.
Premiered at vividcon. Thanks to absolutedestiny for magic tech advice, lolachrome for beta, and thedothatgirl for the lovely banner.
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What if this storm ends?
And I don't see you as you are now
Ever again
The perfect halo of gold hair and lightning
Sets you off against the planet's last dance
Just for a minute, the silver forked sky
Lit you up like a star that I will follow
Now it's found us, like I have found you
I don't want to run
Just overwhelm me
What if this storm ends?
And leaves us nothing
Except a memory, a distant echo
I want pinned down, I want unsettled
Rattle cage after cage until my blood boils
I want to see you as you are now
Every single day that I am living
Painted in flames, peeling thunder
Be the lightning in me that strikes relentless
This vid is similar to Climbing up the Walls in form. Why always 3 fandoms in my multifandom meta vids? I think 3 is the minimum sample size; for me 2 is not so much a pattern as it is coincidence.
But Kings was always going to be the redheaded stepchild to the more natural partnership of Alexander and Merlin. I think the viewer has to wilfully disregard some context in order for the vid to work as intended, and it should be viewed primarily as Bible!Jonathan/David rather than Kings!Jack/David. I think the show was certainly heading that way and we would have gotten some beautiful Jack-falls-in-love-with-David stories in another season or so, but if wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak. When in doubt, I resort to my usual game plan: “Look, it’s Michelangelo!” *runs away*
What I most wanted was to show how the central stories and ideas endure, regardless of era and interpretation. It’s mostly about the in-context Platonic Love (in the “Plato’s Symposium definition of love” sense), but also meta in the sense that it’s ultimately about the storytelling tradition, the artistic tradition, and the rather self-aggrandising notion of this vid itself adding in some tiny way to that vast body of work.
I think a darker interpretation is readily available. Something about glorifying warmongering and white men taking over their world with their ideology. It was unintended, but it pretty much fell out of the woodwork fully-formed, so take of that what you will.
Watched a lot of documentaries in sourcing, and I particularly recommend How Art Made the World, which was truly fantastic. I especially liked the episode on how images by themselves weren’t all that emotionally engaging until someone came up with the idea to marry them to music, and suddenly the skies opened up with possibility. You don’t have to tell that to a vidder twice.
Oh, and also this, because it’s hilarious. Old, old painting of Arthur vs Darth Vader. Well, it’s supposed to be Mordred, but the resemblance is uncanny.
