I keep thinking back to that historian who was asked whether the musical Camelot, the NBC miniseries Merlin or Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail was the most "authentic" and he said Monty Python easily
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
The thing being, King Arthur was originally just a bunch of wacky stories Random folk tales and legends stitched together with one vague throughline of continuity The absurd Monty Python string of meandering comedy gags is extremely true to that spirit
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
And honestly, that sounds ideal! You have a setting and an aesthetic, plus a few built-in characters and events. After that, do whatever you want. Comic or serious, musical or prose.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
Especially the hint that he maybe sorta existed IRL, but who really knows about those days? Legend and romance is this whole kind of genre that we lost because of actual historians.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
You do have to admire Geoffrey of Monmouth for trying to pull all of this into a single, chronological list of kings, while also integrating it with the Trojan War and the Bible.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
It'd be like if we were able to trace Steve Rogers' ancestry back to Sansa Stark.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
Or Arya, probably, given that she was the one who left for the West without knowing what was there. You have her wash up in Massachusetts, marry Squanto, and then somehow have their daughter be Martha Washington.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
And yes, none of that makes even vague chronological sense, much less the inherent problems in continuity like Westeros not having a naval route to Massachusetts. But who cares! Wheeeeeeeee
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Replying to @mssilverstein @bazzalisk and
Philip Jose Farmer tried to do this with his "Wold-Newton universe", based on the idea that the real life meteorite that landed in Wold Newton in Yorkshire in 1795 carried with it some divine spark that created a bloodline bound for greatness
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
I.e. a family tree of all the famous heroic and villainous fictional characters from British and American literature through the 19th and 20th centuries A predecessor to Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
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One part that tickled me was the idea that the Dolittle branch of the family developed a gift for languages Dr. John Dolittle's gift enabled him to communicate with all animal species while his distant cousin Eliza only communicated across social classes
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