Title: Fire
Fandom: Merlin
Characters/Pairings: Gwen/Morgana
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,100
Summary: The Festival of Fire is strictly for the wedded, but Morgana is in the mood for breaking rules.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Merlin, this is purely for entertainment purposes.
Note: This was written for humanpieceoftoast’s birthday, though it’s a little late…
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I swear that if someone else tries to make that argument that all Morgana needs to make her whole is a man/’love interest’ then I will actually scream.
Let’s exclude for a moment the fact that she has already had subtextual love interests.
Now that has been put aside, we will deal only with canon and what has been stated/shown on the show.
Morgana has had no canon love interest and this has been repeatedly touted by people in this fandom as the cause of her ‘descent’. Or, at the very least, that getting a love interest would be a possible ‘cure’.
I really do not understand this as a concept. The idea that women alone are predisposed to or even inevitably determined towards mental or emotional instability has been around in several forms for thousands of years. There has been the concept of hysteria, which culminated in the explosion of the use of sexual stimulation to cure ‘hysteria’ in women in the 19th century. There has also been the repetitive portrayal of ‘spinsters’ in fiction as ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ and the inevitable social stigma that this helped to perpetuate.
But really, where is the rational or empirical evidence for this as real phenomenon?
And where is the equivalent for so called ‘perpetual bachelors’?
I will agree that there is at least some aspect of a ‘lack of love’ which has played a part in Morgana’s development into an enemy of the Pendragon establishment. But this lack of love is explicitly a lack of ‘family’ love.
It is the lack of unconditional love from her father figure (later revealed to be her father by blood) and brother figure (also later revealed to be related to her by blood) that drove her to so despise them.
She grew up in no doubt that those with magic would be punished for this by execution. And as time passed, her magic began to assert itself in more and more unignorable ways. That meant she was very much aware of how superficial her family’s love for her was and how quickly they would withdraw that love if they ever found out who she truly was.
It was that thought that festered and turned her love for them into hatred.
It has nothing to do with her lack of romantic love.
Now, let’s bring subtext back into the equation. Morgana has had as strong subtext with Morgause and Gwen as Arthur and Merlin have ever had, with much less screen time being allotted to it.
Even if these ‘relaitonships’ were never consummated, it is obvious that Morgana has had romantic or romantic-bordering feelings towards them. As far as I and a lot of people (not only people who ship her with Gwen or Morgause but also with Arthur or Merlin) are concerned, she has had romantic interests. Note, that ‘romantic interests’ don’t have to be consummated. So she has had them.
And this brings me onto the ridiculous practice of shipping her with any random male from another fandom just for the sake of finding her a love interest. I get that this is a reaction from her het-inclined fans to the fact that they don’t see a satisfactory het ship for her in Merlin, but the fact there is an almost obsessive need to find something to validate her heterosexuality is insulting.
I also know that cross-over shipping can be fun. But with het cross-over ships with Morgana it has become endemic. And it is that which smacks of casual-homophobia or at the least of obsessive heteronormativism.
There has been nothing that has definitively stated her sexuality as being heterosexual or otherwise. And as far as a lot of us are concerned, she has shown far more inclination towards to being at least bisexual. She has flirted to death with female characters on the show, but also with some of the male characters.
She is an unknown quantity, sexually speaking.
She hasn’t had a major canonical love interest but this has contributed in no way to why she is who she is now. She has become who is through intolerance and hatred, not a lack of man/love interest.
And before anyone accuses me of accusing people of anything, I’m not. I’m just trying to educate you in my point of view and the point of view of a lot of the other people I primarily personally engage with in this fandom.
Katie McGrath and Anthony Head Interview with Geek Syndicate at the BFI Merlin Series 3 Screening [X]
Katie McGrath and Anthony Head Interview with Geek Syndicate at the BFI Merlin Series 3 Screening [x]
