Some Notes on the Destruction

It feels great to have the longest entry uploaded! Now let me talk about it some more (spoilers, naturally).

Firstly, huge thanks to my girlfriend, whose role as proofreader...proof-listener...stretched over multiple days this time.

Second, huge thanks to Thaliarchus, who guided me valiantly as I continued to drag new forms of poetry the English language makes inherently awkward before him. Which leads me into some bragging I do have to do: Morgan's little mourning poem is in sapphic verse.

As in, the format popularised by Sappho of Lesbos, which is notoriously tricky to fit into the syllabic structure of English. But I was very enamoured by the idea of capping off the tragedy of these particular messed-up sapphics with it as soon as I thought of it, and its difference neatly underlines that this is the only verse ever made by the character speaking it. Made doubly tricky by it also keeping to the loose rosc rules I've been employing (see previous post). "In-universe", as it were, it's possible the poem is just seen as one of these pseudo-rosc pieces that happens to have an unusual shape. (It also became something of a point of honour that our transgender hero be the one to use it. In an era where divide and conquer tactics are being used to attempt to drive a wedge between our communities, I wanted to weave the insistence into the structural fabric of the story: Morgan is a lesbian.)

Also related the topic of Shrike's end, I want to talk about the Waking Well. In concept, this exists because I wanted a mechanism to enable "that bit in kamen rider episode 13 where he fights all the revived monsters" (right before fighting a lizard monster with a rock; a wyrm with a stone, if you will). Medieval Irish lit presented a useful way of framing a resurrection device: the well the Tuatha Dé throw their dead in to revive them in Cath Maige Tuired. But readers familiar with other traditions of medieval insular storytelling may have noticed the Well here shares some details (the silence of those it revives, the sacrificial manner of its destruction by a guilty antihero) with a different resurrection device: the cauldron from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, an important Welsh legend.

I wanted to address this because I do want to take care to avoid "thoughtless pan-Celticism"; that is, throwing in elements from Irish/Welsh/Scottish etc. legend at random into each other without thought because something, something, mystical Celtic vibes, when these are distinct and living cultures. I hope I have been more careful when choosing this one moment to dip into this source of inspiration. Including these details from Mabinogi Branwen, of course, benefits the story I wrote; it allows for a bittersweet final moment for a major character, while explaining what happened to the Well to stop it being used again, and also why those resurrected warriors would serve their would-be enemies to begin with. But it also draws on one of the most likely avenues of direct influence between the literature of medieval Wales and Ireland. Welsh legends on multiple occasions associate magic cauldrons with Ireland--the one in Mabinogi Branwen belongs to the king of Ireland (is given as a gift by the king of Britain? I forget), and features a similar motif in its backstory (using a house-sized cauldron to trick and burn your enemies) as the Ulster cycle story Mesca Ulad (not to mention the similarity in its powers with the well from CMT). Meanwhile in the early Arthurian story Culhwch ac Olwen, the heroes venture to Ireland to claim a magic cauldron from its king. (Furthermore, this is a little less direct, but the story of the magic cauldron of Cerridwen in Hanes Taliesin bears a certain resemblance to the sequence of events surrounding how Finn Mac Cumhaill got his supernatural wisdom)

This isn't a definitive chain of unassailable logic, but it is an interesting web of associations, and I think supports the choice being made here as not being baseless. (Incidentally if you want to see more direct, if minor, crossover between the two traditions, there's an episode in the central Finn cycle story, Acallam na Senórach, where Arthur makes a cameo to steal some dogs; and a poem about the death of Cú Roi, or "Corroi", in the Book of Taliesin)

I don't know how many more of these dev diary posts there will be between this and the next story instalment, but it'll be at least one, because I want to talk about some funny names (again).