100 days of enemy recs: 12. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

[melannen]

I put this on my list partly in hopes that the Dev Patel movie would turn on a firehose of Gawain/Bercilak/Lady fanfic for me. Alas, early reviews seem to be that while it is a good film, it is not that sort of a film.

Luckily there is still (Some! not a lot! but Some!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fanfic on AO3 that I can read!

(If you don't know the plot of this one: Sir Gawain gets himself roped into a game with a magical knight such that he is honor-bound to let the knight behead him at a certain time and place, and near the place is a castle with a very friendly but odd lord and lady, and they rope him into another game where anything Gawain is given during the day, he must give to the Lord in turn that evening (and vice versa) and the Lady keeps giving him kisses, so he is honor-bound to pass them on to her Lord! (In the end it turns out the Lord was also the magical knight and since Gawain was so honorable and such a good kisser he gets to not get beheaded after all, and then they all go back to the castle and have a party.)

Anyway. Yeah. Here are two fics!

• my heartly service (1297 words) by pelican_in_its_piety
  Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Lady Bertilak/Gawain/Bertilak de Hautdesert, Lady Bertilak/Gawain, Gawain/Bertilak de Hautdesert
  Additional Tags: a wee bit of fealty kink, kiss exchange carried to its logical conclusion, sameflash treat
  
  In which Gawain is given more than kisses


• Shame To Them Who Think Evil Of This (1020 words) by Rymenhild
  Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Gawain/Bertilak/Bertilak's Lady
  
  A newly uncovered manuscript fragment of the poem.

Comments

[kore]

Oh awesome!

The movie looks gorgeous, and Dev Patel is gorgeous....but it's really not what I wanted. sigh

[melannen]

Yeah, people are saying it's a lovely art film if you want an art film, but it seems unlikely to grow a giant fandom. And if it did, it seems unlikely the fandom would be OT3. What a lost opportunity. (Also Dev Patel deserves a giant fandom for *something*.)

[pedanther]

My favourite fic with this trio is The Green Year, but I don't think it qualifies as enemies-to-lovers; it's doing something different.

[melannen]

That is a good one! I considered including it (I'm not being super strict about what the dynamic in the fics is) but I kind of feel like it's not so much a Sir Gawain And The Green Knight fic as a general Arthurian fic? It brings in so much of not only other Arthurian sources but also a bunch of the neo-Celtic interpretations that were added on in the 20th century. Which I like, but isn't really what I'm looking for when I want Gawain and Bercilak sharing kisses!

[holyschist]

To be honest, I couldn't even like it as an art film - I didn't think the cinematography was great, it had some truly awful CGI, the script kind of clunked, and most importantly, I don't think it had anything coherent to say about its themes (certainly not anything coherent engaging with the original text, which it mostly ignored). It was all backlighting and yellow filters and ambiguity (because ambiguity = depth, apparently!!).

The actors really deserved better all around, and so did we.

Dev Patel was super pretty, but man, I did not like the movie's take on Gawain, so that kind of ruined even shallow ogling.

[melannen]

Poor Gawain. He always gets screwed over in adaptations, right back to like, de Troyes, even though he is a sweetie. :( Perhaps he has a curse. (Now I want to prompt a fanfic about an Arthurian story in which Gawain has a curse that after he is gone nobody will ever tell a story about him that is true, or something like that.)

[holyschist]

Yeah, part of my problem with this Gawain was that he was pretty much a dick throughout and never really seemed to realize this was the root of some of his problems and like, he could maybe try NOT being a dick. His first instincts in any tough situation are pretty much "lie and bargain." It just...well, all the characters just had very little in common besides their names with the Arthurian characters. And I didn't like these characters (with the exception of St. Winifred, who...Gawain is kind of a dick to, in a way that doesn't ring true at all for someone who's been aiming his whole life at chivalrous knighthood).

Now I want to prompt a fanfic about an Arthurian story in which Gawain has a curse that after he is gone nobody will ever tell a story about him that is true, or something like that.

This would explain so much, really.