Arthur, King of Time and Space Arthur, King of Time and Space

Cast and FAQ

Last updated 11/10/09
with this notice that the planned two-year "working sabbatical"
was brought to a close after six months

CAST


Arthur Pendragon, captain of the starship Excalibur (also High King of all British space). Recently had his whole history undone by an enemy's time travel plot and was broken from admiral to cadet.

Guenevere of Camellaird. Arthur's wife, Excalibur chief surgeon. She's a doctor, not a queen. Oh wait yes she is.

Sir Lancelot du Lac. Excalibur's science- and executive- officer. Psst - he's half-alien. French. Oh, and he's having an affair with the queen. Since the time-travel plot there are two of him.

Merlin the eccentic time-traveler. Defeats megalomaniacs with bags of sweets and technologically-enhanced handtools. Last of the Avalonian sorcerers after their great Magic War with the Dragons.

The CAVE, Merlin's time machine. A door to a room that wasn't there before the door magically appeared. Capable of traveling anywhere in space and time (except, it seems sometimes, where Merlin's aiming).

Nimue, the sorcerer's apprentice. After Merlin's death she inherits the CAVE and travels time with her husband Sir Pelleas. Except the great Magic War resets everything so Nimue is Merlin's assistant again and now a Briton instead of an Avalonian.

Morgan le Fey. Merlin's apprentice before Nimue, and Arthur's half-sister. Then archenemy to both. Finally Lady of the Lake, leader of the Avalonian sorcerers.

Sir Mordred. Conceived by Arthur and Morgan before they knew they were siblings. On acknowledgement as Arthur's heir is made Prince Regent so Arthur can play starship captain full time.

Others of interest: Sir Gawaine of Lothian and Orkney, Excalibur chief engineer. Lady Elaine of Carbonek, Excalibur head nurse. The Dragons, xenophobic mutants with flamethrowers built into their travel devices.

FAQ

What's this "two point oh" crap? Have you
given up retelling King Arthur in realtime?
No! I'm just taking a break. In late 2008, about a year before update 2000 was due, I decided I would want to let normal AKOTAS lie fallow for a substantial period of time after that, to keep it fresh for the long haul.

But I still somehow wanted to maintain my streak of never missing an update even while AKOTAS was on sabbatical, somehow. When the idea of AKOTAS-2 came to me it engaged my enthusiasm the way your body craves certain food when it's in need of an element of that food.

Then it got to be the end of March 2009, and I began to feel that I was going very, very stale with AKOTAS and needed the sabbatical earlier than update 2000 in November - say, AKOTAS's fifth anniversary May 21. This was possibly, as has happened before, attributable to last-half-of-the-semester crunch. In that case, it would most likely clear up with the end of the semester two weeks before the anniversary, and the issue could be reassessed then. I didn't want to go on sabbatical before update 2000, because first I wanted to resolve Lancelot's Wild Man story and space Gareth's origin story, and Lancelot - gone for "two years" according to the sources - wouldn't be back to Camelot from Carbonek until late 2009 at the earliest. (Hm. I could always resolve Gareth's story after the sabbatical, in the fairy tale arc ...) But I'd do it at the anniversary instead of waiting, if I still thought AKOTAS needed it then. So here we are.

Oh. Okay, I guess. So when
will normal AKOTAS be back?
Current planning is to return to normal AKOTAS in 2011, when Nimue turns fourteen, coming of age in the baseline and space arcs; when the balance of the transition of Merlin's loss can be affected. This is subject to change without notice.

Well, what's the difference between normal
AKOTAS's premise and AKOTAS-2's premise?
AKOTAS-2 is a bit of a throwback. You know I draw fanfiction cartoons in "triangle style", right? One of the steps in the evolution between my fanfiction writing and AKOTAS was a melding between the fanfiction triangle cartoons and the King Arthur legends, called King Arthur in Time and Space. AKOTAS-2 is a revival of KAITAS (though it'll have some differences).

KAITAS was the Star Trek/Doctor Who fanfiction crossovers I created 1996-2004 with the franchises' proper nouns globally replaced by proper nouns from the King Arthur legends. Arthur for Kirk, Excalibur for Enterprise, Lancelot for Spock, Guenevere for McCoy, Merlin for the Doctor, Morgan or Nimue for the Doctor's girl companions, etc.; the cast pictures above probably illustrate the concept pretty clearly. KAITAS was the inspiration for the space arc in normal AKOTAS. And both Star Trek and Doctor Who have experienced revivals since I retired KAITAS at the inception of AKOTAS. Other screen properties were also brought into those fanfiction stories and were subsequently adopted into the expanded KAITAS universe as other legends and folklore; Hercules for Superman, Robin Hood for Babylon 5, Horus for Luke Skywalker, etc. Those other matchups - and/or revised or new ones - may appear in AKOTAS-2 as well.

In a way KAITAS was, and AKOTAS-2 is, crossover fanfiction of imaginary screen sources which are funhouse-mirror reflections of real screen sources. Maybe that's hard to follow, and not any more accessible to any given reader than normal fanfiction would be. (Accessibility was one of the reasons I decided to start AKOTAS. (Then I invented the time-jumping...)) Try it this way: I'm transforming tv heroes I love into public domain heroes I love, to satirize both.

Webcomics usually tell their stories
linearly like normal AKOTAS,
but fanfiction like your Hero of Three Faces
usually sets each individual installment
at whatever's the best point in the source's
chronology for the needs of the present story -
or, as it'll be in this case, the present gag.
Will AKOTAS-2 be linear or not?
Wow, I wouldn't've expected you to think of that question. AKOTAS-2, like triangle fanfiction, will not be linear. But, like triangle fanfiction, there are built-in visual cues for the reader to know at least generally when in the characters' history a given cartoon is set. Even the most casual Star Trek viewer knows that when starship crew are in the red, gold and blue uniforms it's early in their history, and when they're in the maroon uniforms with turtlenecks underneath it's late in their history; same for AKOTAS-2. If Merlin is time-traveling with Morgan it's early in the history, and if he's traveling with Nimue it's during or after his exile by his fellow Avalonian sorcerers; and if Nimue has inherited the time machine and is traveling with Sir Pelleas of the Round Table, it's late in history.

But then, the 21st century revivals of both the major screenworks that are AKOTAS-2 sources involved war across space and time, and changes to history: if Arthur's beardless and/or in a black uniform shirt and if Merlin is whining about being the last of the Avalonian sorcerers after the Magic War with the Dragons (as in the very first AKOTAS-2 cartoon), then it's new history.

Again, the cast pictures above may help make this clear. Below is a character timeline chart that may be of assistance to those with familiarity with the major events of the characters' screen histories.

Will you still be drawing The Hero of Three Faces,
or will all the fanfiction gags you might have drawn
be converted to AKOTAS-2?
KAITAS taught me that some fanfiction gags can be converted for King Arthur characters from the source characters, but some can't. Those that can't will continue to appear at The Hero of Three Faces.

Why are you doing AKOTAS-2 in
triangle style instead of line drawings?
Because I like triangle style. I like the minimalism and I like the way it doesn't show as badly that some days I was too tired to draw. Sometimes I wish I'd decided to do normal AKOTAS in triangles. And one of the things that made AKOTAS tiresome enough to need a sabbatical was the post-production on line drawing. Every once in awhile I actually reconsider the decision not to do regular AKOTAS in triangles. But I know some people don't like them. And I feel after all this time I've created a certain level of reasonable expectation that AKOTAS will be in line drawing, which I'm reasonably obliged to accomodate.

But AKOTAS-2 doesn't have an expectation of line drawings. Being based on KAITAS, it arguably rather has the expectation of triangles. Also, if I give up line drawing for the time I give up regular AKOTAS, when the hiatus is over I'll be just as eager to get back to line drawing as to AKOTAS. So, sorry. Deal.

Will you draw your female characters naked for me?
Probably. Nudity in triangle cartoons remains family-friendly, and in the cartoon archives on my original fanfiction website there's more nudity in KAITAS cartoons than in fanfiction cartoons. Be patient.
Arthur, King of Time and Space

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