Yeah, I've definitely struggled to find a starting place for Arthurian and Robin Hood legends, even though it's also hard to avoid seeing SOME kind of telling of those stories popping up in pop culture. That's interesting information on how the Arthur mythos has been used as political propaganda and formation of national identity at various times. In the U.S. I feel like it's more used for like a peak "medieval knight/chivalry" aesthetic rather than being particularly political.
And yeah for sure, WWI was devastating, and there's a portion of the population that saw what was happening leading up to WWII and could tell it was going to be nothing good and so were extremely cautious about going to war again. But then it kind of quickly turned out that WWII (while still very much a meat grinder) was also a very different sort of situation.
Regarding the recurring female-on-male rape stories, I also wonder if these stories come out of an oral tradition that is later written down, it's possible that people conflate certain characters and elements together and so a story that initially involves characters A & B gets transplanted onto similar characters C & D, or people see an interesting plot element in one story and transfer it to another. I'm not sure if that's what happened here, but it makes me wonder. I'm not sure if concerns over bastardry were part of it. They could be, but at least in the stories in Once and Future King, Lancelot doesn't seem a very important/major lord where inheritance is important, and his bastard is Galahad who is one of the purest knights. Meanwhile, Arthur IS very important and his bastard Mordred is the big bad -- it fits the pattern very well. But also, in this book, Arthur and Guinevere never had any trueborn children. Maybe there was a different, competing line of inheritance in other stories, but in this book at least, it wasn't an element/raised as a possibility that anyone other than Mordred could have inherited, but maybe that was the original intent of the myth? It's a bit puzzling.
I have not seen Excalibur. It sounds interesting! I'll see if I can find it anywhere to watch.
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And yeah for sure, WWI was devastating, and there's a portion of the population that saw what was happening leading up to WWII and could tell it was going to be nothing good and so were extremely cautious about going to war again. But then it kind of quickly turned out that WWII (while still very much a meat grinder) was also a very different sort of situation.
Regarding the recurring female-on-male rape stories, I also wonder if these stories come out of an oral tradition that is later written down, it's possible that people conflate certain characters and elements together and so a story that initially involves characters A & B gets transplanted onto similar characters C & D, or people see an interesting plot element in one story and transfer it to another. I'm not sure if that's what happened here, but it makes me wonder. I'm not sure if concerns over bastardry were part of it. They could be, but at least in the stories in Once and Future King, Lancelot doesn't seem a very important/major lord where inheritance is important, and his bastard is Galahad who is one of the purest knights. Meanwhile, Arthur IS very important and his bastard Mordred is the big bad -- it fits the pattern very well. But also, in this book, Arthur and Guinevere never had any trueborn children. Maybe there was a different, competing line of inheritance in other stories, but in this book at least, it wasn't an element/raised as a possibility that anyone other than Mordred could have inherited, but maybe that was the original intent of the myth? It's a bit puzzling.
I have not seen Excalibur. It sounds interesting! I'll see if I can find it anywhere to watch.