Hi! So, I know you’re not giving too many spoilers and I hope this isn’t repetitive but I would like to know if you will go in depth with Drarry? I find them such an intriguing couple fr their dynamic is so !!!! And I personally would love a 50k fic focused on them after you finish the general trama of TGK. Like I know it’s not gonna happen but I would love to. I think there’s a lot to build between them and I’m so excited for how you’re gonna approach that subject. Have a nice week! 🌷
so i'm planning to have at least one standalone fic that's drarry specific for the golden king. it'll take place during the death hallow section of the story, but im not sure how indepth i will go.
i have a long plan for their lives after the war is over, so i may write a side fic for that as well. we shall see.
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"The Green Knight" is visually stunning, but it kinda missed the point — and that's a good thing (5/5)
Finally, continuing from part 4....
THE MORAL
So, finally, Gawain reaches the Green Chapel on Christimas Day, where he finds the Green Knight waiting for him.
In the poem, if you recall, Gawain had spent 3 relatively quiet days in the lord's house, and carries the girdle with him purely as a "guarantee", out of fear of death, and as a symbol of his broken promise. Just as he reaches the Chapel, the Knight is there sharpening his axe. He asks Gawain to stretch his neck, which Gawain does. Three times the knight swings his axe, and at last he makes only a small scratch on Gawain's neck. When the latter lifts his head, he sees the transformed Lord in front of him, who says "That's for the girdle". This leaves Gawain covered in shame, and he confesses his wrongs. The Green Knight then forgives him, gives him his green belt, and they part ways in friendship.
This poem is so interesting because it shows Gawain, portrayed as the symbol of chivalrous perfection, being human. And it's ok. When Gawain sinks into guilt and shame for what he has done, the Green Knight kindly calls him "the most blameless knight in all the land". People make mistakes, and it doesn't make you damnable. It just makes you human. That's basically it.
Whereas in the movie, things happen differently.
First, he is constantly warned that the girdle he uses could effectively protect him.
It's clearly a big deal
But upon arriving at the chapel and facing his death, Gawain flees. In the end, he doesn't even trust the girdle. This completely breaks the viewers' expectations, and leads to a long montage of his future life where he is crowned King.
and PLEASE notice how the scene is all green with a bluish light. Remember? The illusion, the fantastic. His portrait in the background seems to be right but when you remember that it was originally upside down you realize that in this scene it is inverted? The hints were there all along.
In this future, Gawain faces not only the external consequences of his broken promises, but the internal ones as well. Because he is protected by the girdle, nothing hits him directly, but for the first time, he is confronted all at once with the full responsibility of his own selfishness. Because until that moment, he had gone through all the quests, all the lessons, but he hadn't actually learned anything. He hadn't really changed. The five virtues had done little for him.
To end this vision, to get out of this self-imposed nightmare, he rips the girdle out.
Also note how compared to the scene above, the light here gets a little whiter?
When you watch this scene minding the correlation between the girdle and the umbilical cord, that's when he cuts this cord. He actively accepts facing the world without the maternal protection he has always sought and clung to. In a way, he grows up.
And then, we found out that all of that had been a vision of Gawain, not real. And that's when he's really transformed, which is when he thinks about the consequences of his actions BEFORE doing something. Which took him 2 hours to learn. BUT HE DID
And when he realizes that he finds peace, and this supports the idea that white light is a symbol of it. Because compare these two scenes:
Notice how the lighting is heavily yellow
Now, after his transformation, the light is all white. He had a revelation, and the yellow conflict vanished.
It's only then, that the Green Knight holds up his axe, and gives Gawain the moral reward of his journey.
It's also interesting because in this scene, for the first time we can see the Green Knight's true color without any interference from colored lighting. This is another way that white can mean revelation. And here we can notice that his eyes are yellow. Remember, humanity? Beautiful, right?
This movie is not about a traditional morality. It's about growing up. It's about learning to cope with life outside your mother's wings. It's about honesty, confusion, and the lies we tell when we're fooling ourselves trying to prove something. It's about how thinking of the consequences of our actions can be more useful and broader than morals of virtue. And it can also be about breaking a cycle of violence (since he chooses not to follow the path of decay mirrored by his uncle).
In the end, this film successfully modernizes a classic story of Christian morality. Don't get me wrong, it's not groundbreaking (in the end, there's still a grand act of redemption and all that, something that in one hand, the original surprises). But while telling a story of the most humane knight in the virtuosity of Arthurian legends, The Green Knight chooses to focus more on humanity than on virtue, and maybe this is a way to make us look at this character today and have the same impression of the original tale, the conflict between human nature and morals — and how we can manage to have both.
It chooses not to tell the story of a perfect man who in the end turns out to be flawed, but of a flawed man who in the end manages to wield to something greater than himself. He represents both his failures and the ideals he tries to reach, as we all do. And that's ok.
And in the end he apparently dies BUT THAT'S OK TOO
Anyway, this was my take! Thank you so much for reading!!!
*QUICK ADD-ON: SO, I saw a lot of debate whereas he dies in the end or not, so I'll just leave my take here real quick. To my understanding, that last line resonates to this scene:
"Oh, I wish I could see the new you" the Lord says. So technically, the old Gawain (the one who entered the Green Chapel and would make the vision choices) does indeed die, and he leaves the chapel a new man (but not in the way he thought during the dialogue with the Lord). Just as the Lady says in her monologue about colors, even if you rip out the green, it grows back, just as the Green Knight stayed alive even after having his head cut off. Because in this movie green is both death and life, so actually green can mean rebirth and the title Green Knight may actually be about it and it might actually also be Gawain Gawain is also the Green Knight and that's it now I'm really done thank you byee
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the ultimate issue I had with the green knight was that, to me, it didn’t fulfill the promise it made either to the audience or to the story
first I will say how beautiful! brilliant! cinematic gold and absolutely batshit weird in the best of ways
and that was the promise at the outset - this film will be weird, it will be dark and lovely, and it will tell us the full tale. lowery et al do an incredible job of making medieval symbols (the holly branch, the girdle) feel presciently modern at the outset, and that led me through the film with such a thrill. the first half, I was completely on board with the small shifts and additions, because we had the imagery SET and tone felt RIGHT and I was rearing to get to the castle!
and that’s where it fell apart a bit.
from the beginning we can see that this adaptation makes Gawain greener (hmm) than he is in the poem (to my reading at least!). here, he’s consumed with shame for his lack of experiences and he buries that shame in being a bit of a carousing brat. at the beginning, that choice made a lot of sense to me, and dev patel imbues such depth and pathos with every glance that who could complain. but the story is one of cycles and growth and return and Gawain has to grow to be able to go back. that was the first failure at the castle and to the story. it’s important to get at his cleverness, to see him be able to spar with the lady without being immediately overcome. his greed and fear should win out, but only just. and of course the importance of sets of threes - I would have liked to have seen it, especially in a movie that has already established how beautifully it can render a medieval symbolic device into a narrative device that makes sense today (without full knowledge of the story, even).
so the unfulfilled game leads to an unfulfilled chapel. the cyclic unity of the three strokes and the final nick - why not lean in? in some ways I can understand the desire for ambiguity at the end, but the ambiguity is there in the poem too, if you let it. if you look for Gawain’s shame you’ll see it ringing out. the girdle was rightly focused on but its promise is left untied. why not let Gawain go back to Camelot, ostensibly a hero who’s won the game, but really still a lad who wears green about his waist as a reminder of failure? the real pathos and pain is him having to see the court take up the symbol of his fear and make it a joke, turn it to something meaningless. that’s the unfulfilled promise to the story, and the audience too, because we miss gawain’s growth away from greenness and into a kind of adulthood that’s filled with great quests and destiny, but also pain too.
but perhaps I’m too harsh. gawain’s question, “is this all there is?” is the right thing to ask and that line alone might drive at some of the movie’s deliberate lack of fulfillment. because one way or another, yes. that is all there is.
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Honestly for me I just…didn’t find The Green Knight all THAT ambiguous. You just had to accept the magic and the myth and the fae wildness of it all and then like…idk it all made sense
Like every new element introduced along Gawain’s journey took him further away from the Christian, the mundane, the “normal” world he was used to and deeper into the Pagan, fae, “unreal” side. From the tame to the feral. From Arthur, his uncle very much grounded in the empirical world, to Morgan, his mother (in this version), who was decidedly uncanny.
It started w the bandit kid, who APPEARED normal, but honestly I have my doubts about him because he was giving me major trickster god vibes, esp when Gawain’s sash showed up, then his horse, and then the kid was on the same battlefield during the ending montage. AND he got his ax back? Like. Yeah. Not your average bandit. Just randomly dropping the shit he stole off with spirits and witches along the way.
Anyway my point is I felt like the movie guided you into the uncanny slowly, like stepping into a pool…or like a psychopomp guiding you into the underworld. You know. Like a fox. Because of the gradual exposure, by the time you got to Alicia Vikander taking Gawain’s daguerreotype it was like “sure yeah this might as well be happening. I’m good.”
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