The thing about the Arthurian legends - which, let us recall, are not a single static canon, but patched together from Welsh & Celtic mythologies as well as British lore, later additions by French authors and a ton of other stuff - is that playing them straight misses the point.

The pure ideals of the Round Table and Arthur's Knights, the quest for the Grail, the idea of a Golden Age - you can only take it at face value if you accept that reductive, pat idea of women as being either evil temptresses or helpless maidens. Otherwise, the women belie it.

Everything from the rape of Igrain to Guinevere and Lancelot, from Morgan le Fay to Nimue, shows that the men in the Arthurian legends consistently fail to live up to their own ideals. You can only maintain their heroic purity by painting the women as one-dimensional.

And yet, at the same time, the women are the most vital axes around which all the most central stories turn. You cannot have Uther without Igrain; you cannot have Arthur and Lancelot without Morgana and Guinevere; you cannot have Merlin without Nimue.

Every Arthurian adaptation fails because it neglects to interrogate the stories the men tell about themselves through the lens of the women - and the reason adaptations shrink from doing this? Is because, if you center the women, the claim to chivalry no longer holds water.

It's so much easier, isn't it, to paint Morgan le Fey as a scheming temptress than as a powerful, angry, hurting antihero whose mother was deceived and raped and denied justice; to see her trickery of Arthur as a purposeful mirror held up to Uther's actions.

It's so much easier to see Guinevere as a faithless adulteress than to examine the ingrained misogyny that forbade her from choosing her husband in the first place, because you can't make Arthur the king of a golden age while admitting he was purposefully sexist.

It's so much easier to write Nimue as a jealous, treacherous student who used her wiles against Merlin than to engage with their differences in age and power, Merlin's facilitation of the rape of Igrain; to grapple with a society that feared female power & denied them teaching.

The 1998 TV adaptation is far from perfect, but it's the most compelling Arthurian version around precisely because it tries, so hard, to care about the women and to examine how their treatment doesn't fit with the narrative of a perfect golden age.

And this is why Zack Snyder's version will be garbage: he does not write women. He very, very aggressively writes Male Stories: any Snyder-esque take on Arthur is doomed to failure before it starts, because I can already see him picturing Morgan le Fay in a sexy backless dress.

Guinevere will be hot & scheming and maybe, just for a tiny pinch of variety, sad. There will be naked fucking that Arthur walks in on, and all the angst about the betrayal will focus on Lancelot's manpain, not Guinevere's autonomy. Igrain and Nimue likely won't be there at all.

Anyway: Hollywood hire me to write a script/treatment of a queer feminist Arthurian story where the women have agency and the golden age is a myth; where the canonically Black knights show up (they exist!) and Galahad has a boyfriend, as he deserves.