Some Unserious Fulgrim And Ferrus Manus Doodles Because I Have Been Also Crying About Them

Please tell me your red hilt conspiracy theory. I know very little about the narrative surrounding the sword so I’m curious.

oh my god. okay okay i got into it like a few months ago and that post is so incomprehensible so this time i am going to attempt to not just rant like an insane person.

okay. lets go chronologically through le morte, my main source for this whole thing.

In Book 2 chapter 1, a damsel arrives at court challenging people to draw a sword from a scabbard. They fail and she continues on, meeting Balin on the road, who successfully draws her sword in chapter two, which is summarized thusly:

“Balin, arrayed like a poor knight, pulled out the sword, which afterward was the cause of his death.”

He refuses to return it to the maiden, who warns him that “ye are not wise to keep the sword from me, for ye shall slay with the sword the best friend that ye have, and the man that ye most love in the world, and the sword shall be your destruction.”

Soon, as she predicts, Balin, after doing a whoopsy daisy Dolourous Stroke, kills his brother Balan and is mortally wounded in the same battle. Merlin shows up, buries them both, switches the handle of Balins sword with a red handle, and says:

“there shall never man handle this sword but the best knight of the world, and that shall be Sir Launcelot or else Galahad his son, and Launcelot with this sword shall slay the man that in the world he loved best, that shall be Sir Gawaine“ (book 2 chapter xix)

Then he plunks the sword in a rock and sends it magically floating in the river. Cut to like thirty years later, the rock floats to Camelot, arriving at exactly the same time as Galahad. uh oh galahad!

In the vulgate grail quest, the knights find this rock, and it is first presented to Lancelot, who refuses to attempt to draw the sword. Arthur then asks Gawain, who also initially refuses, but is unable to deny Arthur when he gives him a direct command. Gawain reluctantly attempts to draw the sword and fails, whereupon Lancelot immediately gives him shit for it even though it wasn’t his fault--! he is warned that this will have dire consequences.

whatever. Then, because percival <3 percival tries it, specifically so gawain wont be embarassed at being the only one to fail. i love percival so much. he also fails though. then galahad tries it and succeeds. horay!

(this goes down much the same in le morte, and lancelot says: “My lord Sir Gawaine, said Sir Launcelot, now wit ye well this sword shall touch you so sore that ye shall will ye had never set your hand thereto for the best castle of this realm.” again, not his fault, but go off i guess lancelot)

except not horay. this is where the speculation starts in earnest but:

knights in the grail trio who die on the grail quest: galahad, percival

knights in the grail trio who dont die on the grail quest: bors

knights in the grail trio who touch the red hilted sword: galahad, percival

knights in the grail trio who dont touch it: bors

ya know??????

anyway so galahad dies and the sword gets passed to lancelot, who uses it to eventually deal a fatal blow to gawain, fulfilling both the prophecy of the sword and the doom gawain earned by attempting to draw it.

conclusion: sword bad. should have kept secace instead. fuck the sword with the red hilt all my homies hate the sword with the red hilt

Modern AU

So based on that last ask with King Arthur is he choosing to fall in love with Gwen even if she has a high chance of falling for Lancealot? If so, it's tragic. Doomed to love another that won't fully love you back.

Does Arthur even just tell Lancenalot to get the hell put of the kingdom some loops?

I think it's more like-

You become aware of your existence somewhere around the age of 3. You were born under mysterious circumstances you don't know the details of. The first time through, you were growing up in a castle. Lately you find you are growing up among peasantry.

Maybe you have brothers. Maybe you have a sister. Maybe you're an only child. Your family is distant either way. They speak welsh. They speak latin. They speak french. They speak english with american attempts at british accents.

The first few times through, there wasn't a sword. Now it's a consistent presence - a shimmering blade stuck in a plain anvil or a large boulder, haunting your hometown or a nearby forest glade. It looks different every time, feels different in your hands. It was made for you.

There are more trials every time. In the first stories the crown was yours from birth. Lately it's been further and further away, behind more tribulations and tournaments and beasts to slay. More guidance from the ageless old man you remember from the earliest days, the welsh days. He's different every time. Everything's different every time. And still nothing changes.

The crown is yours. It's inevitable. And when the crown passes into your hands, it carries the kingdom with it. It's yours now. And it's going to thrive! You hardly need to do anything. Heroes flock to you and pledge themselves as knights, then spend the decades tearing off on wild quests and adventures, getting into the kind of trouble that serendipitously always keeps the kingdom safe. The adventures feel familiar, but never quite play out the same way. Chalices, black knights, fairy women, questing beasts. You rarely see them for yourself. You're too important, after all. You're the kingdom's beating heart.

You have a queen. You don't spend much time with her. It's jarring how much she changes every time. You hate how much it surprises you the times she genuinely loves you; you never really get to enjoy it. The kingdom doesn't run itself, even if just having you around seems to make the forests grow thick and the rivers run clear. Mostly you spend time with her when you're rescuing her from abduction. You very rarely have children together. You miss them.

It didn't used to end in fire, but lately it never ends in anything but, and you never know when it's going to start. You're never home when it starts, but you spend so much time out tending the kingdom or questing anyway. But you always learn too late - treachery. Your knight, your vassal, your bastard child, your lady love. Camelot is burning. You watch your life's work precede you into the grave.

You die. You sleep under the mountain. You dream. It's quiet.

Somewhere in the world, a writer picks up a pen, and you become aware of existence somewhere around the age of 3.

Today's Detail Diatribe was, as always, awesome and I loved it. More rambling about Castlevania and it's themes is always welcome. Now onto the important questions, can we get the Golden Trio on the dash? Their dancing antics were a constant delight.

can do

imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

The new page be going crazy ngl

Erin better get a hug AND SOON.

The Black Rage and Red Thirst imply a further range or color coded ailments within the blood angels. Such as the Green Ache, the Yellow Rash, the Pink Yearn and the Blue Balls.

there's a rare special kind of girl you can only find adrift in the hulks of ruined spacecraft or long buried tombs or inside sealed canisters with warning signs all over

So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir?  The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?

Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better.  Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such.  Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.  

That means that in this case there are three options.  (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive.  (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to.  (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.