| This article is about the Lost King of Anglecynn. For other uses of "Arthur", see Arthur (disambiguation) |
Arthur Isaac Blum, known on Aerb as Uther Penndraig, was the best friend of Juniper Smith on Earth and is now the Lost King of Anglecynn. Seemingly transported to Aerb by similar circumstances to Juniper and helped by a mysterious 'knack' of superhuman learning ability, Arthur took on the name of Uther Penndraig and set off to righting every wrong on Aerb for thirty-four years, before going missing for five centuries. An incredibly influential Aerbian figure, Uther is credited for most of Aerb's culture and major establishments, despite dark rumors about his later years.
“To go back to being Arthur again, to talk about the past with someone … well, I suppose this is what this message has become. I should be giving you warnings, I suppose, or secret histories, but either the narrative here is that this is a flight of fancy and a final send-off for the past I knew, or this is the narrative thread that draws you into the web. None of it really matters anyway.”
- —Uther Penndraig, Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World"
Appearance[]
Arthur has blue eyes[2] and curly, grown out hair.[3] He's a little bit overweight.[4] Arthur is not made out of bees[citation needed], nor is he on fire[citation needed].
As Uther, he is tall and muscular to the degree of looking intimidating, with more defined facial features, and wears a full beard, his long curly hair being more of a kingly mane.[5][6]
Personality[]
In Juniper's likely sugarcoated opinion,[7] Arthur was the backbone of their Tabletop Roleplaying group, a great guy and unashamed geek with the ability to invest himself in whatever was presented to him. He joined every activity their school offered, from decathlons to mock trials, but was always there for Juniper.[8] He was smart, though not exactly popular, and he was a little awkward when he wasn't with Juniper's group.[9]
In reality, Arthur loved arguing, particularly from a devil's advocate perspective, and often baited people into arguments he was already set up to win. His friends indulged him, but it was more fun for him than for everyone else, though he didn't seem to realize that.[10] He had very superficial, somewhat dehumanizing views on women, to the extent of rating them by how 'dateable' they were,[11][12] but he wasn't at all successful romantically before his 'death'.[13]
As Uther, he grappled with the concept of narrative to the point of obsession,[14] and he was secretive, afraid that telling people too much about his origins would take the 'story' in some unexpected direction.[15] Uther's endless crises and obsession with narrative eventually made him conclude Aerb was some kind of false world that didn't 'matter'. This might have led him to commit the terrible things he did, perhaps with the intention of being able to go back home.[16][17][18]
Biography[]
Arthur was transported into the body of a young Aerbian man named Isiah of Colm on 9 BE. After Isiah's family was slain by the Dark Lord, Arthur 'refused the call' and instead became a playwright for a theater troupe for three years, writing plays based on Earth media. An adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring upset the Dark Lord, which finally forced him to take up the sword Avengion and become Uther Penndraig.Greychapel
References
- ↑ Arthur’s brother was nine years older than him, and I was never quite sure which of them was the mistake, if either was. It seemed like a long gap between children, enough that in a lot of ways, Arthur was effectively an only child. Arthur’s father was an engineer, and his mother worked part-time at a store that sold wool, which she did mostly to fill her days, since it wasn’t like they needed the money. He didn’t talk about his family that much, except to say that his brother was fairly distant and his mother was on medication for depression and anxiety. Arthur’s father was an old-school geek, with a small library of fantasy and science fiction, but most of it was ancient and yellowed -- and, honestly, kind of trash, the pulpy kind of stuff that had mostly gone out of fashion.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" - ↑ “I own this place,” said Uther, looking over the building with his cold blue eyes.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 91: "An Open House" - ↑ I say Uther, because it was a far cry from Arthur as I’d known him. He was tall, well-muscled, with his facial features more defined than they’d been on Earth. He was older too. I would have guessed thirties, if not older. He had the same nose though, the same color eyes, and curly hair that was grown out, here less of an affectation, more of a kingly mane. He hadn’t had a beard at sixteen though. He’d always joked that he couldn’t grow one.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World" - ↑ He wasn’t very athletic at all, and a little bit overweight, which maybe didn’t help how the other kids felt about him.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" - ↑ Uther stretched slightly, drawing himself to his full height. He was tall, taller than I was, and I’d gained a few inches as the game had added onto my physique. Uther was an intimidating man. I’d known that, but I’d underestimated the extent.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World" - ↑ Uther was usually pictured as thirty or forty, with a full beard. I was convinced that underneath that, he was Arthur, but that confidence wasn’t really based on the physical similarities.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 97: "Rapping at my Chamber Door" - ↑ Don’t go making up some fake version of me that never really existed, because it feels better not to think about all the ways that I was flawed. I’m not saying that you did that with Arthur, but you totally did that with Arthur.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 120: "Deceptions" - ↑ Arthur was the backbone of our group. Even when he wasn’t playing a leader, he would take point and ensure that the plot kept moving forward. He was a total geek, but he knew that he was a geek, and didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought about him. When we played, he was usually the only one to put on a voice and stay in character. I was the one making the worlds, but Arthur was the one that really made them come to life, because he had this ability to just instantly invest himself in whatever was presented to him.
More than that, he could read me really well. It was my habit to get an idea in my head and start up a campaign with reckless enthusiasm, then get bored of it after a few weeks and keep chugging on without really feeling that spark of inspiration anymore. Arthur was always the one to bail me out, to say “How about we try something new next week?” without ever calling attention to the fact that I had lost the thread. The first few times he did it, I just breathed a sigh of relief, not noticing that he had been acting in my interest. He was a great guy, super busy with basically every non-athletic activity that our school offered (academic decathlon, mathletes, mock trial, yearbook, etc.), but always there for me despite that.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 4: "Reaver" - ↑ He wasn’t very athletic at all, and a little bit overweight, which maybe didn’t help how the other kids felt about him.
He was, maybe, a little bit awkward sometimes, though I never really noticed it when he was with our group, probably because I’d adapted to it.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" - ↑ “Moral philosophy isn’t my forte, but Arthur liked the subject enough that he set himself to playing devil’s advocate--”
“Playing what?” asked Fenn, her frown deepening.
“Fucking idioms,” I replied. “He liked to argue, maybe more than he ever liked anything else in his life, and that was one of the best things about him, in part because he could come up with some really, really entertaining arguments that he would put a lot of thought into. A lot of the time he argued from a position that he didn’t really agree with -- he thought that was best practice if you wanted to actually understand the world -- and, anyway, he was always pitting himself against me, trying to get me to declare a moral position that he could attack against.” Looking back, it was probably more fun for him than for me, but part of being a friend was working to indulge each other’s eccentricities.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 71: "The Soul of Discretion" - ↑ “Okay, so figure there are a hundred fifty students in our class, plus the same a grade up and down,” said Arthur. We were walking home from school, with a stop at the gas station on the way for chips and pop. “But give the grades above and below us a penalty, because we don’t have classes with those girls, which means propinquity isn’t in effect. Figure maybe a hundred fifty legitimately dateable girls in the dating pool, more or less. That’s a rough guess.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay.”
“Half of them are below average,” said Arthur. “But there are lots of different metrics you can use, and they’ll be below average in different ways. Take Heidi, right? Super hot, dumb as a brick. So if half are below average on intelligence, and half are below average in looks, then that’s something like a quarter that are above average in both.”
“Um, no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Looks and intelligence are correlated, for health if no other reason, but socioeconomics too, probably.” That was around the time I’d first discovered the word ‘socioeconomics’, and I used it a lot, probably more than I should have.
“Sure, sure,” said Arthur. “Were you the one I was talking to about the Flynn effect?”
“Doesn’t sound familiar,” I said.
“Well, whatever,” Arthur continued. “We’re just getting rough numbers. If we accept a quarter of a hundred fifty, that’s thirty-seven, but that’s the pool that are just above average on the first two metrics.”
“I’m not sure how important looks are,” I said.
Arthur rolled his eyes.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" - ↑ “It sucks, because she’s perfect for me,” said Arthur with a sigh. He was laying on my bed while I took my turn playing Mario. “Like, she’s not perfect, but she’s perfect for me. Even all of the stuff we disagree on, she’s got sensible reasons for, and it’s like,” I saw him gesture vaguely from my peripheral vision, “Like the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts.” He paused. “There’s some kind of pun there. ‘Her hole is more than the sum of her parts’?”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 96: "A Portrait of the King as a Young Man" - ↑ “Yeah, I am,” said Reimer, rubbing his forearm. “The difference between the two of us is that I know I’m an asshole, and you prance around like you were his bestest friend in the whole world. You and Tiff could have told him, he’d have been upset but at least it would have spared him being made a fool of. He died a virgin, pining after her, and you were just laughing behind his back about what a moron he was.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 42: "A Pleasant Interlude in Kansas" - ↑ “Uther had an obsession with narrative,” said Amaryllis, a little too loudly and quickly. She had moved back over to the table and was looking at the book. “It doesn’t show in his body of work, but if we assume that most of those novels and plays are plagiarized from or inspired by Earth, then we can still fall back on his non-fiction, which probably pulls from the ideas of Earth as well, but still contains his own framing of those ideas.”
“Amaryllis is searching for meaning in our journey,” said Grak.
“Yes, but, no. Uther searched for meaning in his journey,” said Amaryllis, “His personal life story mapped fairly well to the model of universal narrative he constructed, which his modern editor thinks is just an aspect of Uther’s mythmaking, or maybe that Uther’s works reflected who he was as a person and his own personal journey informed those works. Reading this, it’s pretty clear to me that Uther wasn’t just talking in the abstract, he was grappling with something.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 54: "Looper" - ↑ “This is the closest that I’ve ever come to telling anyone on Aerb where I’m really from,” he said. “Sitting behind uncrackable wards, with a mirror I spent three weeks testing … I sometimes wonder why I bother with maintaining the silence. My peculiar form of insanity would cost me political power if it were known to the public, certainly, but my knights? My wife and children? Perhaps I feel like saying it out loud would take the story in some unexpected direction I’m not prepared to handle. I’ve been playing the part of Uther Penndraig for over two decades now, and I’ve gotten good at it. To go back to being Arthur again, to talk about the past with someone …
—Worth the Candle Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World" - ↑ “I’m not sure about the others, but you? You’ll have figured things out. The coincidences, the improbabilities, the way that things seem to fit just right, character arcs that are completed in the final seconds of the last battle. I don’t know how much of my biography you’ll have read, or how much you’ll have learned about me, but if you don’t see the patterns in your own life, I’m sure you’ll see them in mine. Looking back, it all seems so trite. So many NPCs with their sob stories, so many love interests, paraded around in front of me before their inevitable deaths. I’ll admit to being affected, at first.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 109: "The Veil of the World" - ↑ “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s … how old was he, exactly? Thirty-three? And still hung up on her? And that’s not … it was you, an infantile creature that he was using, and --” I shook my head. My stomach was still churning. It felt like child abuse to me, somehow.
“I didn’t care, at the time,” said Zona. “What did nudity mean to me, when it was just an illusion that I was projecting?” She gestured to Tiff’s form. “This isn’t my body, my house is the body, if you’d like to stretch the analogy. Even after I was smart enough to understand, the sexual relations didn’t bother me. No, it was the obvious shame he felt, the threats he made afterward, the way he tossed me aside once I’d served his purposes.”
“And so he did,” I swallowed. “It was … he made you, ah.”
“To the extent I was able,” said Tiff -- Zona. My heart sank. “Not that morning. It took him some time to build up to it. And once he had, that was apparently enough for him. He said to Vervain that he’d understood the lesson that the house and the pit were meant to teach him.”
—Worth the Candle Chapter 92: "Shades" - ↑ I tried to think through the implications of what Heshnel had said. Vervain was a DMPC. No, Uther thought that Vervain was a DMPC, and that’s almost certainly why he killed him. It fit with what I knew about Vervain eerily well. The very first thing that I’d thought, when I’d learned about Vervain from Solace, was that his powers sounded suspiciously like Powers as the Plot Demands. But for him to be a literal avatar for the Dungeon Master had implications about the Dungeon Master’s role in all of this. And, naturally, it was possible that Uther was wrong, driven to suspect Vervain because of the insane cycles of narrative.
—Worth the Candle Chapter 126: "Ever Onward"