do you ever stop and think about the fact that arthur noticed that merlin hadn’t smiled in like three days but he didnt notice that his whole ass wife was trying to kill him for weeks
much is made of the power balance between merthur, but it really is so complex and interesting to me.
arthur, obviously, is the prince and then later the king of a powerful kingdom, and merlin is his manservant, but merlin is said to be the most powerful sorcerer to have ever lived and is therefore theoretically more powerful than anyone we see in the entire show — including arthur — especially by series end. arthur has the ability to upend merlin’s entire life, and his emotional and mental hold over merlin is intense, but the power merlin frequently exerts over arthur is also substantial, and the power he could potentially exert even moreso.
in a lot of ways they are actually quite evenly matched, and would — as two of the most powerful characters in the show — find more of a power imbalance with pretty much any other main character pairing they might be in.
but if you do want to go with a juicy power imbalance angle, it isn’t quite so straightforward, and is less about the amount of power they both have and more about the types of power they have over the other, and if they’d ever use it, and how, and why, and when. and, crucially, the ways in which they frequently lack agency anyway, despite all their power… sometimes directly because of the other.
