kelasparmak:

sometimes i think no one could be sillier or make worse decisions than percival de rolo but then i remember all the ridiculous things done by actual arthurian knight perceval li gallois in various different versions of the story and just, here is a non-exhaustive list:

- forgot his own name

- found a damsel in distress and stole her ring. when asked she described him to her husband as ‘a strange-looking man’, which is an understatement given that he was wearing armour he made himself out of sticks.

- his unbelievably melodramatic response to a guy not wanting to sell him a horse:



- accidentally sold his soul to a demon in a dream. not to avenge the tragic deaths of his parents and his six brothers, or anything similarly heroic. this is the continuing saga of sir perceval trying to obtain a horse. this time he did technically succeed, but the horse the demon gave him was evil and tried to kill him. it took him a while of ‘this is probably fine and not something i need to give any thought to’ before he even noticed.

- was chosen to have the holy grail revealed to him due to the purity of his soul, which involved many extremely bizarre things happening in the court in front of him, and he was just like ‘… okay. anyway i’m going to bed’ (this broke the world for a while because he was supposed to ask.)



- promised his aunt he’d never have sex and did actually manage to keep that promise, but very nearly fucked the actual devil (this is specific to the grail cycle - in the welsh he does try to seduce a girl, but loses interest the moment she returns his affection. lots of women fall in love with him without him being interested or even necessarily noticing, though, which on one occasion results in him being made emperor of constantinople. he seems a bit confused by this, but not as confused as you’d expect, especially given that frankly he just seems a bit confused all the time.)

- found a wild lion, went ‘hey, my buddy yvain has a pet lion, so probably all lions are friendly’ and decided to cuddle it instead of fighting it (again, this is in the grail cycle. in the welsh ‘peredur’ he kills the lion, because it’s an aggressive wild animal and that is the sensible response.)

- got put in jail for being too attractive. kept escaping to go fight wicked knights, but returned and locked himself back up every time he did, because he’s a Man Of Honour.

- lost a game of chess even though he wasn’t even playing against anyone. threw a tantrum and chucked the board in a lake.

- went adventuring to avoid his responsibilities for ~seven years, leaving his sole surviving sister in charge of the castle he was supposed to be looking after, which resulted in her turning up at various points in different stories going ‘hey guys has anyone seen my useless fucking brother’ (but usually nicer - the welsh ‘ystorya seint greal’ gets points for her being super done with the whole thing and spending half the time criticising arthur so harshly that he starts crying)

- in ‘la queste del saint graal’ when she finally finds him we have this beautiful moment

everyone in arthurian romance is super bad at recognising each other but perceval consistently fails to recognise the surviving members of his family and has to be told who they are every single time. the one exception is ‘perlesvaux’, in which he is famous for constantly disguising himself to avoid his responsibilities. in reality this just means keeping his visor down and bearing different heraldry, but i like to imagine him with a fake moustache and doing a variety of accents.