To be perfectly honest, I hate tragedies too. I get so sucked in, so utterly wrapped up in the story, that when everything falls apart, my spirit breaks a bit, and I get depressed in real life and end up spending days of just burying myself in romantic comedies or just plain comedies to pick myself up again. That is, in all honesty, why I was very hesitant to watch Merlin at all. The Arthurian legend and variants of it are the worst kind of tragedy to me, because the better the writing, the more it hurts. Do you know the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley? I read that when I was 14, got sucked into it, and was depressed for a month after I finished. (Possibly my trepidations about this Guinevere originate in Bradley's version of Gwenhwyfar, because I seriously hated her closed-minded ways.)
Maybe I'd feel differently about that book if I read it again now, but I don't much feel like risking it. It's like the Fountainhead, or Crime and Punishment: they make me think, and take me on a profoundly emotional and intellectual journey, but it's so very sad and painful that I never quite want to relive it.
Actually, no, that's not quite entirely true: I am tempted to reread C&P. And I'm debating the idea of reading Atlas Shrugged.
And here I am, getting side-tracked. I'd also rather have watched Arthur uniting Albion and rescinding the ban on magic after learning about Merlin, though I have my doubts as to whether they'd ever have given us a straight up happy ending. (After all, isn't the crux of the legend the idea that Arthur will rise again, to rejoin his trusted warlock who awaits that day?) All I mean to say is that I see why they did it how they did: they made the characters and their relationships more important than the formation of this mythical kingdom, which is a decision that I can be fairly happy with, since ultimately I derived a ridiculous amount of enjoyment out of the Merlin/Arthur relationship dynamic. :P
Re: Part 2 II B
To be perfectly honest, I hate tragedies too. I get so sucked in, so utterly wrapped up in the story, that when everything falls apart, my spirit breaks a bit, and I get depressed in real life and end up spending days of just burying myself in romantic comedies or just plain comedies to pick myself up again. That is, in all honesty, why I was very hesitant to watch Merlin at all. The Arthurian legend and variants of it are the worst kind of tragedy to me, because the better the writing, the more it hurts. Do you know the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley? I read that when I was 14, got sucked into it, and was depressed for a month after I finished. (Possibly my trepidations about this Guinevere originate in Bradley's version of Gwenhwyfar, because I seriously hated her closed-minded ways.)
Maybe I'd feel differently about that book if I read it again now, but I don't much feel like risking it. It's like the Fountainhead, or Crime and Punishment: they make me think, and take me on a profoundly emotional and intellectual journey, but it's so very sad and painful that I never quite want to relive it.
Actually, no, that's not quite entirely true: I am tempted to reread C&P. And I'm debating the idea of reading Atlas Shrugged.
And here I am, getting side-tracked. I'd also rather have watched Arthur uniting Albion and rescinding the ban on magic after learning about Merlin, though I have my doubts as to whether they'd ever have given us a straight up happy ending. (After all, isn't the crux of the legend the idea that Arthur will rise again, to rejoin his trusted warlock who awaits that day?) All I mean to say is that I see why they did it how they did: they made the characters and their relationships more important than the formation of this mythical kingdom, which is a decision that I can be fairly happy with, since ultimately I derived a ridiculous amount of enjoyment out of the Merlin/Arthur relationship dynamic. :P