Okay, so if you could have seen me watching Merlin last night, you would have thought I was a crazy person. (And maybe you'd have been right.) When Merlin said that about magic having a place in Camelot, I actually paused it, quietly shouted at him for a good minute and a half, and proceeded to shake my head with a tirade of sarcastic comments the rest of the episode.
Yeah. I'm a bit of a fangirl.
The show is becoming so complicated; I love it, and I had to write this to explain the whole situation to myself.
Jealousy
To have created Arthur to lead Camelot, and then to place a curse so heavy upon him—it was beyond Merlin's comprehension. As it had always been, the gods were to him a complex puzzle that was impossible to solve.
To the gods, he was the puzzle.
Emrys. The one who they'd thought held such potential for their cause, to whom they'd given more power than any man before, expecting it to make his thoughts and decisions more like theirs. He was not what they had expected. He had had the chance to set free the Old Religion, to set them up high on their pedestals before the people, as he was meant to do, as he was created to do, and he had changed the path. "There is no place for magic in Camelot." That was the worst kind of rebellion.
They did not have love, such a base human quality, and so they would never understand him though they once thought they did. They would never understand why he looked into Arthur's wide, blue eyes before that flickering fire, so close to the cave where the Triple Goddess gave her judgments, and decided that he would rather welcome the judgment on Camelot than see Arthur die.
They had created Arthur to be Emrys's playing piece, the crowned figure he guided across the board under their authority. They did not expect mighty Emrys to love the human king, or at least they did not expect him not to love them first.
But against their plans, his human heart had come to love Arthur.
Love had made the unity of Emrys and The Once and Future King a failed expectation.
And so, jealous of Arthur, they condemned him, and so condemned them both.
I actually like to think of the gods as nice, though, and that they have a good reason for everything that will not end in doom and destruction; this is just a tragic way of explaining last night's episode that will hopefully be disproved later this season. Hopefully.
By the way, next chapter of Our Brother's Keeper will be posted later tonight, if you were looking for it.
Thanks for reading!