#without base knowledge or a prior interest in gawain as a character some readers were not willing to invest in the story

[queer-ragnelle]

re: the meme about the public being kotrt illiterate...

we know lancelot is "of the lake," & the trio of grail knights, & gawain. they seem like low hanging fruit. but i assure you even those are not well known characters outside literary circles. random people you ask would probably recognize lancelot's name, if you said it, but if you asked who king arthur's champion was or where lancelot grew up, could they answer? i can say that as someone with a dog named "sir percival," it's rare someone knows who that is, let alone galahad or poor bors. now gawain is a funny one bc he is so so popular in arthurian texts across time & languages, yet nobody i worked with knew who he was until dev patel played him in the green knight (2021).

i say this as someone who has been arthuriana blogging for over a decade now. i came here (to my old account) from deviantart bc i was alone in my obsession with gawain/ragnelle over there. popular amongst ourselves though these characters may be, even if we attempt to compensate with what we would assume are "easy" answers, they really aren't.

#i say this also as a novelist who struggled to find beta readers who knew who tf gawain is #that or someone who cared to learn through the process of beta reading #sooooo many people were like giving critique & then saying oh im not the target audience #babe if you are a reader then you are the target audience #yet gawains family tree proved challenging to the people i was finding #without base knowledge or a prior interest in gawain as a character some readers were not willing to invest in the story #admittedly i had exceptionally bad experiences with beta readers but #still even gawain or lancelot are not as obvious as you would think! #my post