Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27201587-20151012143335/@comment-5106672-20151022171919

Applegirl wrote: ChocolatEyes613 wrote: CTrent29 wrote:

Arthur looked white to me. His intentions and actions may be evil Arthur's intentions are not evil, they are just obssessive. He feels like Merlin played a cruel joke in him, by giving him the prophecy about Excalibur.

I'm not sure how I feel about Merlin giving Arthur the prophecy from such a young age. It gave Arthur time and years to think about how the prophecy would fulfill his destiny and how great it'd be for him, which may have given him the wrong impression of what he would get out of freeing Excalibur and being king. If Merlin giving Arthur the prophecy at such a tender age is to be blamed, Arthur himself is not without faults either. He got hope of a better and meaningful life as more than just a stable boy by hearing the prophecy, but in the face of trouble with Excalibur, he dealt with it the wrong way. I think it would have been better if he had announced to the villagers he did pull out Excalibur, but also show them the missing half, and actually publicly proclaim that he would do his best to unite the sword with its missing half. Maybe that choice would have been better since it's technically not even his fault that Excalibur is missing its blade. His descent into obsession, I think, comes from the strain of hiding the secret and the taking on all the burden of trying to fix the issue, while also fearing what his people will think of him if they learned he lied to them. That's the interesting thing about prophecies in OUAT: they don't depict what's going to happen, but merely set in motion the events with people making them come to pass through their actions. That happened to both Rumple's prophecies, to Arthur's, and almost to Snow's (the Unicorn one about Emma – which is the only one that came true in an unrelated way).

So I'd say, trust no one, especially prophecies!