29
Jul
This post is sponsored by When Lavie Tidhar set out to write his own Arthurian legend, he wanted to cut through the nationalistic myth-making into the bone of the original stories. “It’s supposed to be about chivalry and honor, and it’s . . . it’s not!” He told Clarkesworld. “Everyone else was doing the story the way we’re told it goes, not the way it actually goes.” The way it goes, in Tidhar’s By Force Alone, is as a bloody, bawdy gangster story where heroes are con men and England isn’t worth fighting for. Some of the ideas he uses appear in the…
15
Jul
Netflix’s new fantasy drama Cursed is an Arthurian retelling that asks an intriguing – and long overdue – question: What if the central figure of the story is a woman, instead of a man? For while there are several familiar female figures in the various legends of King Arthur, they’re not generally presented as the drivers of the action. Instead, they tend to live largely at the margins of stories about men, popping up just in time to fall in love, get kidnapped, or give birth to a son with a destiny that far outstrips their own. Cursed attempts to…
