history/notes

[bloodings]

because canon (and the wiki, jesus christ) is a big ol' mess at the best of times, and an even bigger one when it comes to mordred. i did a more general timeline of arthur/arturia's rule over here; this post is for mordred-specific stuff. i'm largely going to use 'arthur' in this bc that's what mordred + the flashbacks do and it makes things easier.

tl;dr muh daddy issues. this flashback in the novel covers a lot of this if you like your history with a side dish of mordred's stupidity.

CAMELOT:

At some point during Arturia's rein after she married Guinevere, Merlin gave her a dick for a while because that's just apparently what he does... and this post is off to a great start already. Presumably the goal was allow her to have an heir, but it backfired massively when Arturia's half-sister Morgan secretly got hold of her sperm instead, and created a child with it. Her goal was to use said child to kill King Arthur, then take the throne for herself — since Morgan was Uther's firstborn, the fact that he created a 'perfect heir' rather than giving her the crown was a massive insult, enough for her to dedicate her whole life to (what she saw as) fixing things.

Mordred is, predictably, the homunculus that resulted from this clusterfuck. She aged incredibly fast, and just a few years after being 'born' was skilled enough with a sword to earn a place at the round table. Since she was an exact clone of her 'father', Morgan gave her a helmet to hide her identity, telling her never to remove it... because people might notice that hey, you sure look literally identical to our king, what's up with that. Nevermind how incredibly suspicious a knight that never removes her helmet/armour should be, but apparently everyone in Camelot (including the king) was happy to go along with it because of her skill and apparent loyalty.

(This is, incidentally, the reason she was recorded in 'history' as a man, and why most of the Knights of the Round Table have no idea about her real gender — even in Grand Order some of said knights still refer to her as being male and freak out the first time they see her face. Canon is weird.)

Anyway, Morgan's plan had already gone off the rails at this point. Mordred was supposed to hate the king, to want to kill him and nothing else, but there was one small problem: she absolutely loved the king. Even when others started to lose faith in Arthur, Mordred would question them, asking how they could turn against someone so perfect. Every decision the king made was for the good of the people; therefore, there was no possible reason to doubt him.

In an attempt to set things in motion again, Morgan exposed the truth to her: that she was the child, and effectively a clone, of the king. This led Mordred to confront Arthur, absolutely ecstatic about the idea of being the son of the 'man' she admired so much, only to be completely and utterly denied both the throne and her pedigree. Despite everything, Arthur had zero interest in her as anything more than another knight...

... and Mordred absolutely flipped her shit. Privately, at first, but every single iota of love she felt for King Arthur immediately turned to hate in that moment. Being denied the throne was one thing, but being denied her 'rightful' position as the king's son, the thing she was most proud of, was too much. Every single action she took from this point on was, in some way, designed to destroy Arthur completely: she seized upon Guinevere's infidelity, spreading rumours that a man whose wife could be so easily stolen was unfit to be king; all while continuing to serve loyally on the surface. If something bad was being said about Arthur in the kingdom, Mordred was probably behind it.

She finally went public when Arthur left the country, calling an emergency council and proclaiming that the king had fallen in battle. Having been put in the position of regent, she was accepted as king, crowned, and even mockingly proposed to Guinevere, all while knowing that Arthur was still alive. But when the truth got out, rather than execute Mordred, the people rallied behind her: to the public, she was the embodiment of their growling dislike of the ever-distant king. Arthur landed at Dover with his army, and Mordred met them with her own, screaming his name across the battlefield for days on end until they were finally face to face on the hill at Camlann.

After a lot of Righteous Yelling on Mordred's part, and Cold Indifference on Arthur's, the fight ended when Arthur stabbed Mordred in the chest with Rhongomyniad... except Mordred swung her sword one last time, taking off half of Arthur's face with it (and ensuring his death afterward). Helmet broken, Mordred reached out for the king as she died, but Arthur simply turned away, and Mordred conceded that, from beginning to end, the king had been nothing but ideal.

... But Britain had still fallen. The perfect king had failed. So, if she were given the chance to pull the sword from the stone instead, a chance to surpass her father... she would. Surely she could do even better than he had.

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