Episode 67: Transcript

Episode: 67: King Arthur Must Die

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and everything else. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks rather a lot about science.

Annalee: [00:00:12] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] Today, we're going to be talking about King Arthur, possibly your favorite King, I don't even know. And the Holy Grail and the Sword in the Stone and Camelot and all that stuff. And it's gonna be super exciting. And we're incredibly lucky to be joined by a very special guest, Tracy Deonn, author of a brand new YA novel called Legendborn, which plays with Arthurian legends in a wonderful, delightful way. I'm super obsessed with this book, and I'm so excited to chat with Tracy. So let's get started.

[00:00:43] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] Tracy,let's just start off by talking about like the super basics of King Arthur. Like, is there any truth to the King Arthur story? And how did people come to be so obsessed with this particular medieval warlord instead of like, any of 100 other medieval warlords?

Tracy: [00:01:26] Yeah, the thing about legends and what makes them different than myths is that they do have a a historical kernel somewhere in there. And so there was a guy who was a warlord who was very good at fighting. I think one of the first written mentions is like, you know, but he was no Arthur. Comparing someone else to how they would not stand up to the prowess of this one dude, Arthur. 

[00:01:52] So, you know, I believe that there's a historical basis for King Arthur. I don't know if he actually existed. If he did, he didn't look like anyone we recognize today as King Arthur. So there's historicity, but yeah, you know, I think historians would argue a lot that there's really no fact. But there's a lot of fun.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:12] Mm hmm. But so why did King Arthur become such a big deal? And we talk a lot about the revival of King Arthur in the late 19th century. But what was King Arthur before the late 19th century? And when did when did it become such a big meme?

Tracy: [00:02:23] Yeah, you know, there are two sort of worlds of Arthurian literature. Before Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his his work Historia, the historical account of Britain, which is not very… it's like a pseudo history. There's before that, and then after, and the reason that people mark Geoffrey in that way, is because he really did pull together what I consider to be the previous sort of traditions around Arthur, which may be oral, which may be written down, and put the ones he liked in the order that he preferred into this text. And sort of mark it as this is part of the history of Britain as we know it. And it was such a political act. I mean, really, that type of creating a historical book that you know is not really true history. But putting all these stories in it and claiming it as such, is such a political act, right? 

[00:03:14] And I think that was his intention. I mean, I'm not a Geoffrey scholar. But the collection of it, some of the stories we know today are all wrapped up in that I call that book, really, a massively influential piece of fanfic.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:29] Yes!

Tracy: [00:03:29] Because he he definitely just pulled the parts he liked and rearranged them and made it what he wanted it to be. But it was, it was compelling. I think that gets to your question. It’s like, that spirit of rearranging Arthurian legends, because there really is no one legend. There's a collection of legends. That spirit of rearranging and the freedom of sort of orbiting certain themes and certain characters, is what I think has kept it alive. Because there's a sort of license built into Arthur, he resists a single story as a matter of course. And I think that that makes him very fun to play with.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:03] And of course, a lot of the Arthurian legends are super episodic. 

Tracy: [00:04:06] Mm hmm.

Annalee: [00:04:07] One thing I wanted to add, just to build on what Tracy was saying about the history that's super interesting, is that, as she was saying, these were oral legends. They were stories that people told kind of like fairy tales. And then once people started writing them down, it was in many places in England and in France, or the places that became England and France. These were some of the earliest poems that were written in people's spoken language, because the language of writing was Latin. If you were an educated person, you read and wrote Latin, and that was the official language of court documents and lots of other stuff. And so writing things down in English, or in French, was kind of a new idea. 

[00:04:53] And it also speaks to the fact that these were kind of homegrown legends, right. These weren't things that we got from the Romans. These were things that… Isay we like as if I was there. But these weren't things that were imposed by like Imperial forces from Rome, for example. These were things that people living in those countries were telling each other. And so I think that's part of why the big explosion in Arthurian mythology was during the early Middle Ages. Or really, like, I guess, the middle Middle Ages, before the 19th century, because that was a time when people were saying hey, maybe our native languages are worth preserving. Maybe we're not just in the shadow of ancient Rome anymore.

Tracy: [00:05:39] Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's partly… that’s a political act as well, right? So it's totally like, that's part of what the movement, I think there is a sort of a movement that that you can see forming around Arthur. And also the ability to sort of self-insert as a nation is sort of not lost to me. Monmouth was writing in like the 12th century. And then you've got, you know, the French writer who created Lancelot was also just sort of asserting his Frenchness and the sort of courtly mores that were a big part of France at that time. These were definitely political stories. Absolutely.

Annalee: [00:06:18] Yeah. You can have like nation Mary-Sue-ing.

Tracy: [00:06:21] Yes.

Annalee: [00:06:22] National Mary Sues.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:23] Oh my God, I love that.

Tracy: [00:06:24] I mean, Arthur is the original, like Mary Stu. I mean, he has to be. Or maybe that's Lancelot.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:31] I mean, yeah.

Annalee: [00:06:31] The Good Ship Lancelot.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:35] So we have a clip of John Boorman, the director of the movie Excalibur, discussing why the Arthurian legends are still so important. This is actually an interview from the Cannes Film Festival in 1981, via INA Culture, and let's just run it.

John Boorman: [00:06:49] This story, which has been told perhaps for 2000 years, and it’s really the power of it… I think it's because it's, in a way, a kind of model of the universe. It's the story of civilization. And I think that it reaches a certain point, the point we've reached, perhaps, civilization, and the Camelot. And then they discover, in the story, Arthur discovers King, that it is not… The material life is not enough, it then becomes, in the quest of the Grail… Becomes… is really a search for a way to transcend the material and to find the spiritual. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:38] So yeah, I mean, what I get from that clip is that, you know, first of all, very grandiose, but second of all, it feels like he's really kind of saying in a way that the story of Arthur is the story of civilization. And that it's the story of nation-building and creating governing institutions and Camelot, and the round table are these structures that people can belong to. Or least knights can belong to. That's kind of part of what he sees as the appeal of the story is that it's about building something. And do you think that there's some truth to that as far as why people still love Arthur so much?

Tracy: [00:08:11] I think so. I mean, I think about Camelot. And I don't mention Camelot a lot in my book. And that wasn't a space that I was drawn to which now I'm sort of wondering if I did that on purpose, you know, sort of like subconsciously. But, the idea of Camelot, of this place, that is a just place where people are treating each other with respect and there’s this idealism around the vision of this kingdom. I think that that's definitely there. I mean, it's very romantic, all of these. A lot of these tales are quite romantic. And when they're not romantic, they're filled with really steady beats of there's a blow, and then there is striving toward, and then there's a triumph. And I think nations are really good about creating those types of narratives around themselves.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:59] And of course, you know, John F. Kennedy's White House was always called Camelot. But Annalee, you had a theory as well, right?

Annalee: [00:09:05] Yeah. I mean, I think, kind of going back to what I was saying about how a lot of these early Arthurian poems were written in spoken languages. I think part of what draws us to these stories again and again is it's a kind way of having a connection with our history. And I kept kind of mulling over, like, why was there a big explosion of these stories during the Middle Ages, during like 12th, 13th, 14th century, and then again in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries. Why do we, what is it about these times that have made us kind of want to come back to these ancient historic tales?

[00:09:43] Again, it's kind of what Tracy was saying about if you want to build a nation, it's nice to have a little story about it and to have an exciting romantic story to about a dude who's really good with his sword or whatever. I also think that at this point, when we look back, this is just sort of a moment of historical meta, because we're looking back at the Arthurian legends as a kind of pseudo history, right. So this is like we're kind of pretending like this is our history, this great white king who united everybody with his giant sword. But when we look back at those stories now, we're also looking at an ancient story itself. So you can go back and read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in the original Middle English, which is amazing. Which is just written in the 14th century. And you're bathing in history by doing that. You're hearing a story from history. And it's a story about history. 

Tracy: [00:10:40] Right.

Annalee: [00:10:40] So it’s like a history within history, very meta, and I think it speaks to… we're in a very uncertain historical period right now. And I think we want to look back and say, all right, well, what were people talking about the last time we were in a really fucked up time in history when everything was changing? You know, when there was a great plague, for example, like that happened. 14th century, right?

Tracy: [00:11:03] Right.

Annalee: [00:11:03] We're working on a lot of these Arthurian romances. So, you know, I think we, in a weird way, we're we're kind of having a feudalist revival in our pop culture.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:14] And of course, the dark side of that is is that of all this sort of clinging to these legends in terms of uncertainty and also the the nation building is that white nationalists also want to seize King Arthur as a symbol. Like, the British National Party was holding a summer camp, which was described as a training ground for fascists and they called it Camp Excalibur. And so, it’s like, how do we push back against this attempt to claim medieval Europe and specifically King Arthur, for white nationalism?

Tracy: [00:11:47] You know, in some of the research that I was doing, I came across medieval scholars, particularly one Dr. Cord Whittaker, who writes a lot about this, and he's a black scholar who's who's talking about Arthuriana, but also just the imagined medieval and how that’s been utilized. And I wish I could say very simply, we pull out our receipts, and we pull out, you know, like people existed in the medieval and this person lived and all of that. But I think when you're talking about Arthur, I keep going back now to what you're saying, Annalee. It’s like that doesn't matter, actually. That type of historical citation is not what Arthur's about. So it would be difficult, not that I think we can really rationalize with white supremacists anyway. But it would be difficult to lean on it. So I think medievalists are doing their best. I think that it's happening in… What you're describing is happening in their departments. It's happening here in the United States. And they're doing their best with not just citations but also raising voices in interpretations and deep readings and close readings and banding together in real material current space to push back.

[00:13:00] What we can do as a people, I don't know. I mean, hopefully, I like to think that creative work can start to do some of that as well. But yeah, when you're talking about a fanfic built on a fanfic built on a fanfic that someone said was history one time. How you even undercut that when the whole… the powers and the imagination?

Annalee: [00:13:19] I mean, I guess you just hope that the modern fanfic crushes the old fanfic, the same way the Britons crushed the Vikings at the Battle of Maldon.

Tracy: [00:13:28] The fanfic wars. Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:34] The Battle of Maldon.

Annalee: [00:13:34] Sorry, that’s a deep cut for medievalists.

Tracy: [00:13:36] No. It’s brilliant. 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:39] I love it.

Tracy: [00:13:39] I think you're right actually. I'm just like our fanfic is more powerful than your fanfic our fanon beats yours, I think.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:47] And I'm a huge fan of Dorothy Kim, who's another medievalist who's been pushing back really hard core against this white supremacist reading of medieval Europe and has gotten a lot of grief for it, unfortunately.

[00:13:58] Before we move on, we've been talking about King Arthur as fanfic hero and as the original Mary Sue. He's also kind of the original chosen one, right? He's like the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the original Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, you know. Does every one of those stories that we're currently obsessed with of like Obi Wan Kenobi is Obi Wan Kenobi, the original Merlin or sorry, vice versa? Does every one of those stories go back to King Arthur in some way?

Tracy: [00:14:23] Oh, such a good question. We as humans, I think we really do love this idea. Because what you're talking about is the Sword in the Stone variation of Arthur, right? There's so many different versions of Arthur there's ridiculous tales of Arthur just being like a total jerk for no reason and other things where he's overly romantic or things where he’s just fighting people. But this specific story that you're talking about, the right person pulls a sword from the stone, that person shall be king. I really think that we are compulsively drawn to this idea that power can go to the right person. I find that incredibly seductive. Who is the right person? What is right? Always up for debate, very flexible, depending on who's telling the story, but I really think that people love that and keep returning to the idea. And it's an underdog story, right? It's underdog plus chosen one and oh my gosh, I think we eat that up.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:17] Especially when he starts out as Wart or whatever, in the T.H. White version or E.B. White version, where he starts out as Wart and it's like, he's just this scrappy little kid. And it just, yeah, I mean, it feels super powerful. He is the assistant pig keeper or whatever. I'm getting mixed up with with the guy from—

Annalee: [00:15:34] Lloyd Alexander.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:34] Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. The same kind of idea.

Annalee: [00:15:38] No, it's exactly the same idea. Right? The chosen one story often starts with someone who has been brought low, but they don't deserve to be low. 

Tracy: [00:15:48] Right. 

Annalee: [00:15:49] I want the story of the chosen one who actually is just low born. They really are just from the streets and rise up to be a king. I guess there's those stories too. But…

Charlie Jane: [00:16:00] There's definitely some of those. And it's…

Annalee: [00:16:02] That's not quite the same. 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:04] There's often some reason why they're the chosen one that's like… obviously they're chosen. But there's some something in their past or something in their heritage. Or, actually, Lovecraft Country, which we've just been watching has that thing where like, Atticus is the secret descendant of this evil wizard, kind of.

Annalee: [00:16:21] I wonder if this is why the Arthurian legends map so well onto white supremacy, because the chosen one has this pure blood? It’s all about oh, you don't deserve to be down in the mud because you have this like, king’s blood in your veins that unlocks the sword or whatever. 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:41] I think that's a lot of it. Yeah, for sure.

Tracy: [00:16:44] Yeah, I play with that a little bit, well, a lot a bit in Legendborn. And this idea that power is actually in your blood, and it can't be extracted, it's just, it is, and it was even true before you were born. This type of… the way that that can get attached. And you see that sometimes too with fantasy, like, there is something that still irks me to this day about any sort of story where it's just like, well, only the people who have that blood can have that power. Because what are we reinforcing in meatspace?

Charlie Jane: [00:17:16] Yeah, I feel like there's been a really good critique of that recently, the idea that, some people are born magical, and some people are just born not magical and there's nothing you can do about it.

[00:17:26] One of the things I love so far about Legendborn, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes, is the notion that there's different ways of being magical, and that different traditions and different people have it in different ways. There’s ether magic and there’s root magic, which sorry, that's a little bit of a spoiler.

Tracy: [00:17:42] I mean, I think the book cover kind of teases it, that there's two things happening. But yeah, I do think that the idea of power being something that you could—and also there’s—I will say that white supremacy is so obsessed with anti-miscegenation. The idea that you can control the bloodline as well. And I think the rest of us are all like, yeah, that's not possible. But white supremacists like to think you can. And I think that that thinking lends itself really well, again, to that sense of Arthur. If like, we just control it and keep the power isolated in these very specific ways. And controls our women. All the stuff. That we can kind of pull it all together, then we will maintain power over time. It’s such arrogance and it's also so ignorant, right, because you really can't do that.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:35] No, you really can't and it's super fucking disturbing, huh? 

[00:18:40] Okay, so we're gonna take a really quick break and then we're gonna come back and talk about King Arthur in pop culture today.

[00:18:46] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:59] It feels like there's been a lot of King Arthur in pop culture recently. There's the new Netflix show Cursed. There was Merlin a while ago there’s The Kid Who Would Be King, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, soon we're gonna be getting a new movie of the Green Knight. Why? Why is there so much King Arthur stuff in pop culture right now?

Tracy: [00:19:18] When we feel that we are in a sort of a difficult time in history, there is something so satisfying about locating yourself as being in history, to be able to say actually, this is a time in history, just like that back then was a time in history and we're all part of the same continuity. And sometimes those are bad times. And over the course of hundreds of years, you can mark when there are bad times and there are good times, which means that this bad time is not singular and everlasting. So I think there is probably a little bit of that happening.

[00:19:50] I mean don’t know—

Charlie Jane: [00:19:50] That’s such a cool way of putting it. 

Annalee: [00:19:51] I really liked what you were saying about the fantasy of power flowing to the right person, which is such a—especially right now, since an election is coming up in our country, and we're all kind of scared. Will the power flow to the wrong person? And I wonder if that impulse to tell stories about how power can flow to the right person. I wonder if there's just something that's reactionary about that? Maybe we should be trying to tell stories about how power doesn't ever belong to one person, you know, like you were talking about before. Maybe part of the problem with Arthurian legends is that it keeps training us to hope that the right person will come along. And instead, we should be saying, wait, maybe the right community should come along. Or maybe we, as they say, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, maybe we should have like, aren't they like anarcho-syndicalists or something?

Charlie Jane: [00:20:48] Or like an anarchist collective or whatever? Yeah.

Annalee: [00:20:50] Yeah. [crosstalk] Fuck the king.

[00:20:55] So I do wonder about that. I wonder if that's part of the problem is that we keep coming back to that wish.

Tracy: [00:21:02] Yeah, I was thinking about something I wrote in my author’s letter this year, and it was about welcoming people to the round table. And—

Charlie Jane: [00:21:08] Oh, I love that. 

Tracy: [00:21:09] Yeah, I really love this idea. And of course, the round table is probably the the most, I mean, aside from the magic sword, but probably the most ridiculous sort of concept that we bend however we want it to be because at some point, there was like 150 knights and other times, there's 13. And obviously, that table would not be able to exist at 150 people.

Annalee: [00:21:31] I don’t know. It could have been like a stacked table.

Tracy: [00:21:34] Yeah. Like this table outside, like, I just don't know how that happened. But I love this idea of us all sitting around the round table. And I think that's the other romantic thing that probably certain people are really drawn to. I mean, I'm sure. It’s very interesting to me that people who are drawn to that image versus Arthur, and I don't want to read too much into it, because I don't think it's quite two dimensional. But you know, a round table is a space where people can come together and represent all sorts of different perspectives and have different strengths because the knights all had different strengths. But they're equal at this table. And Arthur himself sat at the roundtable, so that in that moment, he was no better than them is a really beautiful notion. I feel like people cling to it sometimes.

Annalee: [00:22:19] Yeah, I have a question for you guys. Which is the thing that's happening now with a lot of the Arthur adaptations. I mean, I should say Arthurian legend adaptations, is that they're really focused on characters that are not Arthur, other than the Guy Ritchie movie which was terrible. And made no sense.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:36] That movie disappointed me.

Tracy: [00:22:37] Trash King Arthur, you mean? trash King Arthur?

Charlie Jane: [00:22:41] Are you a fan of trash King Arthur? 

Tracy: [00:22:43] I enjoy trash King Arthur for what it is. I think, um.

Annalee: [00:22:48] I mean, it is sublimely bad. It is definitely a so bad it’s good.

Tracy: [00:22:51] Yes.

Annalee: [00:22:54] It turns the corner.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:55] Kate Elliott loves that movie so much. Dude, never get into a conversation with her about it because she will just like… She's a stan for that movie.

Annalee: [00:23:03] I mean, it had some great moments. It's just completely silly. But I do love Arthur as like an urban scrapper. Like I don’t think we’ve had an urban Arthur before which was delightful because of course there would have been cities around. 

[00:23:19] But there’s Cursed, which is about the lady in the lake, which when I first heard the logline for that, I was like, holy shit, I want to know about the lady in the lake, like that sounds great. Or Merlin, I liked all of the books in the Crystal Cave series, Mary Stewart, which are all about Merlin. Came out in the ‘70s. So this is my question, is, which character do you guys kind of stan in the Arthurian universe? Like of the shows that are out there? Or things that you'd like to see other than Arthur, who do you need to delve into more?

Tracy: [00:23:53] I'm gonna say a couple of things. I think Morgana/Morgain has never really been nailed. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:01] Right? 

Tracy: [00:24:01] I think there's so much opportunity there. And I think we've, I encounter people just hitting the same note when it comes to that character. And so I'm really curious about that, and how that can be done. So that's definitely one. And I kind of am leaning towards just another knight that it doesn't really get mentioned, like, Kay, or somebody. Or Bors, even to some degree Mordred. Just one of the other knights that is actually if you go back in the text has some richness, but we just don't see it these days.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:42] Yeah, I have a real thing for Lancelot because his whole thing where he's like, messing around with Guinevere and he feels really guilty about it, and he kind of knows that he's destined to, at least in some versions, he's destined to betray Arthur. And it just, I don't know. I kind of stan Lancelot, a little bit. I also love Guinevere. I feel like there's some good versions where Guinevere is actually a total badass. 

[00:25:05] And you know, this is all making me want to rewatch the one Doctor Who episode that’s about King Arthur where like, Morgana is a total psycho who tries to destroy the world with nuclear weapons. And it's just—

Tracy: [00:25:14] Which Doctor is this?

Charlie Jane: [00:25:17] This is the seventh Doctor. I know, I always have to bring up Doctor Who on this podcast.

Annalee: [00:25:22] Every episode of the show contains some Doctor Who.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:25] It’s called Battlefield. It's actually… I'm gonna try to make Annalee rewatch it with me because it's actually kind of great. It's kind of great. And it ends with like Morgana trying to set off all the nuclear weapons on earth in order to bring about the apocalypse or whatever. And the trope of Battlefield is that they're waiting for King Arthur and he never shows up. 

[00:25:44] Actually, you know, slight segue. Of all the recent reimaginings of King Arthur, my personal favorite is from the other show that we always mention on this podcast, Legends of Tomorrow. Where they go back to King Arthur and it turns out that King Arthur is just some lovable dope. And really the whole thing was like a superhero from the 1940s named Stargirl went back in time and became Merlin and created the roundtable in order to do something. I don't remember. And Sara Lance hooks up with Guinevere, and it's just so delightful. It's just like, it hits all the right notes, I think.

Tracy: [00:26:19] I don’t watch that show. I keep catching episodes because my partner watches. I might just have to. Do you think I can dive in?

Charlie Jane: [00:26:27] Skip episodes—skip the first season.

Tracy: [00:26:29] Okay, okay.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:31] Skip first season, and then it’s great.

Annalee: [00:26:32] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:35] But I mean, the whole lesbian Guinevere thing that's just beautiful. 

Tracy: [00:26:39] And there's a Doctor Who connection, is there not? We’ve got Rip who’s Rory, so.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:43] Right, there is actually. Rip is in that episode too, although he's temporarily evil anyway, whatever. It doesn’t matter. So—

Annalee: [00:26:52] It's a show.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:54] We've actually got a clip from Cursed, the new Netflix show in which Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, meets Merlin for the first time. 

Cursed Clip: [00:27:01] You're him. You’re Merlin.

And you're the Wolf-Blood Witch. Dreaded wielder of the devil's tooth. 

You're making fun of me.

No. But you're playing a dangerous game young lady.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:20] That's a good moment to kind of talk about how do people approach the King Arthur story differently in current pop culture? And I feel like we hit on one of the main ways already, which is that they focus on characters other than Arthur a lot of the time. 

[00:27:35] But what else? I mean, I feel like Merlin is often really hot in 21st century versions of this story. He’s either like a cute teenager or he's just a shirtless dude and cursed or I don't know. What else do we do differently in 21st century King Arthur stories?

Tracy: [00:27:53] I think we have tended to—your example of Legends is a good one. I think we tend to show an Arthur from a different perspective, who is just like a dope. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:05] Mm hmm.

Tracy: [00:28:05] I think we sort of embraced that. And the old stories have examples of that, too. But I think we’ve sort of embraced the idea of, not only are we focusing on a different character, but that character sees the side of Arthur. This pre-noble Arthur. We like to see that he's actually a dude. And I think that Cursed, I haven't watched it, but I feel like from what I'm hearing and the clips I’ve seen that that—does that happen in Cursed? Like he's just like a dude. Like, he's not Arthur yet. He's not the epic, yet.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:35] It’s a prequel. So he's still kind of finding his feet and I think he’s just kind of there.

Tracy: [00:28:41] I like that. I think that's interesting. Merlin. Yeah, the hot Merlin thing. I mean…

Annalee: [00:28:47] Merlin is hot. 

Tracy: [00:28:49] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:28:48] Like, the end. You know.

Tracy: [00:28:50] Yeah, he is. I mean, and Merlin is probably, of all the characters in Arthuriana, he probably has the widest variance of depictions. He’s been a sort of a wild man in the woods. He's been a full on sort of antichrist even figure. He’s a cambion, he’s the child of an Incubus and a human woman. He's a good guy. He's really been all over the place. So I do think that we have not seen the last of the depictions of Merlin in all sorts of places. I hope people go darker with it because I actually feel like Merlin is kind of a dark character. And I hope they continue to do that, too.

Annalee: [00:29:29] He's kind of the Spock character, in a way, because it is making me think about how in Star Trek, now, Spock has kind of come to the fore as a more important and interesting character to explore than Kirk, who's the Arthur, who’s just sort of like punching people and—

Charlie Jane: [00:29:51] Double fist punching people, Annalee.

Annalee: [00:29:53] Double fist Yeah, no, as we learned on lower decks, and it does really intrigue me that Merlin has become really a big focus. 

[00:30:02] The other thing I was gonna say about modern day Arthurian retellings is it makes me think of, there was this cheesy Genghis Khan movie that came out like a decade ago. And the way that the movie is introduced, because it's supposed to be this gritty, realistic depiction, and they called it the true story of The Legend of Genghis Khan. 

[00:30:25] And I feel like that's kind of what Guy Ritchie was doing in his King Arthur movie. I feel like a lot of these new depictions are supposed to be like, the “true” story. Like he was really just a guy, he was just a scrapper. Merlin was just a alien from the future or whatever, right? Like it's always this kind of now we're getting back to the the real truth of this. Which, of course, as we've been saying, it's a legend, so there's no real truth. So it's all fake news all the way down.

Tracy: [00:30:56] It is.

Annalee: [00:30:57] Arthurian fake news.

Tracy: [00:30:59] The people who cling to the truth, like I really… I like that actually goes back to that conversation about white supremacy. You want there to be a singular truth and you keep hunting for it and digging for it, and not allowing that subjectivity is a thing. That perspectives of one thing, multiple perspectives of one thing can all be true at once, wild. If you can't allow for the variations of experience in the world, then you're just going to dig and dig and dig until you find the real true and then cling to that one. I just feel—it reminds me so much of people who find themselves often citing canon, and cannot release canon. They’re so attached to a story that is the story. That has the boundaries. And in this space, this is what's right and wrong and anything outside of that. Or this, when this writer took over Star Trek, that was not really the true canon. And this happens in Star Wars all the time. And I just liken it to that. That people are just searching for canon in Arthur and there is no real canon. There’s a body of work.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:08] It’s all retcons.

Tracy: [00:32:10] Yeah, it’s all retconned. Who has the true Arthur? I don't even know. You'd have to go—if you want to go back to that one mention I cited, that's the one we know about. But even that could be a repeat of a story because clearly that person already had heard of Arthur from somewhere else. So you could just keep digging and just fall out the other side of the story. There's nothing. Just embrace it. Embrace the narrative freedom. 

Annalee: [00:32:32] There is no original. There is no canon, yes.

[00:32:36] All right. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk all about one of the greatest adaptations of Arthurian legend by Tracy Deonn.

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Charlie Jane: [00:32:58] As I mentioned, at the start of the episode, I'm in the middle of reading Legendborn right now. It is just rocking my world. It's giving me so much life during like a really horrible time. And I just love this book so much. So Tracy, you know, what made you want to write a present day story that kind of centers on Arthurian lore, and how did you get into that? Because I know you didn't approach it head on.

Tracy: [00:33:18] Yeah, so I mean, I've always been a fan of Arthur. I’ve read The Dark Is Rising, I talk about this a lot, by Susan Cooper. It’s a contemporary fantasy series in the ‘70s set mostly in England, but a little bit in Wales, where Arthur was born. So much, s0 I knew about it. And I had Arthur in the back of my mind from loving those books. 

[00:33:39] But with this particular story, I really didn't start with Arthur at all. With Legendborn, I started with myself and a question. The main character in Legendborn, Bree has just lost her mother at the beginning of the book and that was very much based on me. I lost my mother at a young age. And within, gosh, like a couple weeks of that happening, I found out that she had gone through the same experience at my exact age, like within a couple months, and lost her mother. So I never met my grandmother. 

[00:34:06] And then I found out that that same thing happened to my grandmother. And I'm a writer, right, and a total geek, a second generation fan girl. And so I'm like, this is weird. Why would that happen? What sort of story would explain that? And so that's where I started, really. Was, what kind of story would make that make sense? 

[00:34:27] And then I started thinking about well, that's a story that the explanation is not available to me. And where else do we find that people's lives and losses are not documented? And we, in fact, there is no answer, and why to some people's deaths and lives and losses and triumphs get to be immortalized in legends and others don't. And of course, that turned me right back to Arthur. Just, this is a legend that has just never gone away. This person, this figure, and these images have just never gone away. So we keep talking about them.

[00:35:00] I think I went down a hole of who gets to be honored and recognized and whose death’s matter. And that led me to Arthur in a way that I said, okay, this is such a big conversation, actually. It's not just my family that I'm talking about. This is a book level discussion. 

[00:35:18] That's where I landed with Arthur, and then I just ran with it. I mean, there's so much fun to be had. So I just sort of dove into it and decided to embrace a magic system that would make it sort of believable that Arthur was a legend, but also was real and that that could have been carried forward into the modern day. Which is slightly an homage back again to Susan Cooper, because she did the same thing. Arthur was a story, but also real.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:44] Right. And I love the world building in your book where it's kind of like a secret society and kind of like a group of monster hunters, but also, they're preparing for this epic battle that they don't know when it's going to come. And how did you kind of build all that out of the Arthurian mythos?

Tracy: [00:35:58] I think I started out with some of the earlier writings like Le Morte d’Arthur and Idylls of the King. I think in both of those, there are a few lines with Tennyson in particular, where you get the sense that Arthur's fighting back beasts, and I feel—I'm not a Tennyson scholar, but I have feeling some of those lines are very wrongly so, about people. 

[00:36:24] But there's this idea that Arthur is out there protecting the world, not just from aspects of humanity, but also from monsters. And I really, I landed on that and just couldn't shake it. But in terms of how sort of to make that work with secret societies, I went to a university that had tons of secret societies. It’s a very old school, and UNC Chapel Hill, and they're all over the place. And everyone who is an undergraduate there is introduced to them, by way of name, or you know, even you can find their names on the website. Nobody knows how to get into them. That's why they're a secret society and not like a club or frat, there's no public recruitment, there's a lot of lineage going on. There's a lot of generational power legacies being passed and contained within those secret societies. It's mostly white dudes. It just seemed like that was how we could tie it all together. Monster hunters, who think quite a lot of themselves, but also have found a way to keep the table, “pure” in the modern day.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:27] One of the things that really jumps out at me in your book is the way that you kind of incorporate race into that and like you have all these little moments of microaggression. Like when people make weird remarks about the society becoming more diverse, or when they think that Bree is a caterer or whatever. And they're like, I want to talk to your manager. There's actually a, literally, I want to talk to your manager moment in the book, which is just so perfect. And so well observed. So how did this become a story about race? or How did race become part of this telling?

Tracy: [00:37:55] I call that person Umbrella Karen, because—the person who asks Bree to hold an umbrella because a reader told me that that was what they called them. And I was like that is totally an Umbrella Karen. So there's Karens in the book, for sure. 

[00:38:10] UNC Chapel Hill, like a lot of schools, was built by enslaved people. I grew up in the south. In the south, the question that I was asking at the beginning of the book of whose lives and loss do we remember? Whose deaths get memorialized? That question is in the air in the American South at all times. It's really a part of how we live. In the buildings that we walk through, the grounds that we travel over, the towns that we see. I mean, and it just seems so obvious to me that if I was going to set a book in the south—a book that asked those types of questions, I couldn't ignore how that impacts a black girl. How that impacts black people. 

[00:38:54] So my challenge to myself and really to the genre of contemporary fantasy was what if we walked forward, hand in hand contemporary on one side and fantasy on the other. And if I could use that genre to really explore power, wherever it shows up, whether or not that's tools of oppression, or magical power. If I could do that at the same time, and have those conversations go back and forth. Then I feel like I would be able to really push the genre forward, but also honor the place that I live, and honor the fact that all that's in the air now, and those are heavy questions, and those are, they're very real. And why wouldn't they be there at the same time? It would be me sort of ignoring reality if I had Bree move through that space and have no microaggressions at all.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:42] Yeah, definitely. Part of what I love about the book is that Bree doesn't feel like a chosen one. She feels like she's just determined to make sense of this mystery in her life and she's just kind of fighting to be a part of this thing that kind of is actively resisting her. And since King Arthur is the original chosen one story why did you choose to kind of make the main character, who's a wonderful character into not a chosen one?

Tracy: [00:40:07] I think that Bree had to be there for her own personal reasons at all times and not be drawn into the world for the shiny, for the people, not for the adventure, not for the monster hunting. And I think that that actually is partly why this particular book resonates on more than a King Arthurian sort of level, on more than an Arthurian bandwidth, or what have you. Because Bree’s really not there for King Arthur. And it just seemed like that was a way for me to get into the story and not set her up to be part of a mythos that the reader was already approaching the book with.

Charlie Jane: [00:40:52] Your book is one of two YA books about King Arthur that I've really loved in the past year or so the other being The Sword in the Stars by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy. And in both cases, they're kind of genre mashups, The Sword in the Stars is obviously King Arthur plus space opera. But yours feels like King Arthur plus, I don't know, a little bit of Buffy, a little bit, like, other kinds of contemporary fantasies about monster hunters and about like secret groups of monster hunters. Why is it cool? Or why is it kind of a natural thing to take the King Arthur story and mash it up with other stories?

Tracy: [00:41:25] When we look at the King Arthur stories, you find all the little sort of gems and nuances or embers and if you sort of blow on them in any one direction, the stories become quite flexible. So I feel like people, and when I say people, any of us who are working in Arthuriana and trying to contribute something new to the corpus of this 1500 year old fanfic we're pulling the drawer open and we're looking at all the different pieces because you can't write an all-inclusive. There is no like all-inclusive Day Spa Arthuriana. It’s impossible to touch all of the different iterations of of Arthur and all the different iterations of the knights.

[00:42:02] So I think we do what we can. We open the drawer, we look through, we pull out pieces we like put them into proportion we do and then if you are really into this idea of the warriors working together against a force bigger than the nation, bigger than their families, bigger than the village nearby, then it makes total sense that genre would make that into an evil force. Or, like with Buffy, just an evil group of people slash monsters that are coming at us. 

[00:42:31] But if you're really into this idea of leadership, and that theme, what does it mean to be a leader? And how do you embrace that? Then Arthur can be very much adapted to like a sort of, a colonial story if that's where you're going, which of course can happen a lot in genre.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:47] Or a superhero story.

Tracy: [00:42:49] Or a superhero story, an immigrant story. I think if you pick any one of these things, and just sort of push on them a little bit, then they fit so nicely with this the genre that we're already—with the rise of your genre in the last 20 years.

Annalee: [00:43:04] That's super interesting. We already asked you which Arthurian characters that you'd like to see more of, and I wonder if, to finish us up, you could tell us. If you had millions of dollars to make your own Arthur movie, what would it be like? 

Tracy: [00:43:20] Oh my goodness, um.

Annalee: [00:43:22] We've just showered you with like you've millions of dollars. You're gonna get special effects done by Peter Jackson. It's gonna be amazing. 

Tracy: [00:43:30] I mean, my instinct is just like you said, to make it not about Arthur. I would think I would do some sort of collection of various Arthurs. So maybe a little bit time travelly. Maybe this is a little bit Doctor Who-y, but like I think I’d pull from different eras of Arthurs and really have them come together and be able to put a to make that the study. But also, there's all sorts of narrative possibilities if you have multiple Arthurs in a room. And not just Arthur but other characters, too. I really want to see all the different groups, in sort of like a—

Charlie Jane: [00:44:05] Oh my God, that is perfect. I really want to see this movie now. 

Annalee: [00:44:08] Yeah. That would be amazing.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:10] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:44:10] I feel like this kind of—

Charlie Jane: [00:44:13] I’m dying to see this movie

Annalee: [00:44:12] Like an arthouse, flick. We're all the Arthurs. It’s like, well, I’m the bruiser Arthur. Well, I’m the thoughtful Arthur.

Tracy: [00:44:21] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:22] But like, Arthur keeps coming back from the dead over and over again. You can have like 15th century Arthur and 18th century Arthur and like 25th century Arthur. Like super space Arthur.

Annalee: [00:44:33] Yes, space Arthur. I want to have the Moorish Arthur who's like. Hello. Yes, we were black in the Middle Ages.

Tracy: [00:44:40] Yeah, all the different Merlins. I would just love to—I feel like there's probably something in there where we just—because we keep talking about how it's meta, so let's just lean hard into that.

Annalee: [00:44:51] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:51] For sure.

Annalee: [00:44:51] I am there. I am ready for full meta Arthur. 

[00:44:55] Well, thank you so much for joining us and talking to us about—

Charlie Jane: [00:44:57] Yeah, thank you.

Annalee: [00:44:57] The past 1500 years in fanfic. And so looking forward to your book. Where can people find your book and where can people find you online?

Tracy: [00:45:05] I'm at Tracy Deonn, T-R-A-C-Y-D-E-O-N-N on Instagram and Twitter and TracyDeonn.com. And if you go to my website then there are links for Legendborn. There may be a link up to win a signed copy by the time this episode airs, not sure.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:23] Yay! So worth it.

Annalee: [00:45:25] Awesome.

Tracy: [00:45:26] Yeah, and it will be out by the time you’re listening to this.

Annalee: [00:45:29] Excellent. Okay, everybody. Go get that book. That’s what you’re doing this afternoon.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:34] It’s so great. It will totally save you from despair. 

[00:45:38] So thank you so much for listening, this has been Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us in all the places that podcasts are found. In the trees, in the gutters, in the—

Annalee: [00:45:46] In the stone.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:46] In the stone. You can find us in the stone. Just find us everywhere. You know, if you like us, please support us on Patreon. We have a patreon at Patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. If you really like us, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and other places that you can leave reviews. 

[00:46:04] And thanks so much to our heroic and brilliant producer Veronica Simonetti and Chris Palmer for the music and thanks once again to you for listening. You are the best. Thank you. We’ll be back in two weeks. Bye!

Annalee: [00:46:13] Bye!

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