There is a huge debate going on about The Pendragon Cycle and, as arguably its biggest cheerleader since the beginning, I cannot let it go by without weighing in. The debate circulates around nudity and intimacy as depicted on the show, specifically with the character Charis, played by Rose Reid. The complaints revolve around whether scenes during which she is scantily clad or kissing her husband are too racy for a Christian show.
I have reviewed the entire show from the beginning and have made various commentaries about its amazing quality and the wholesomeness of its entertainment. Specifically, I wrote a piece that examined the four main female characters of this male-centered fantasy series, including Charis and her sister, the villain Morgian. One of the things that I admired about the show was how powerful women could be portrayed as feminine, without having them overwhelm the men around them even as princesses and queens (with the exception of Morgian, who is using feminine wiles rather than brute strength).
However, there are segments of the viewing audience who think Charis’s costumes and her marriage scene with Taliesin went too far. She is scantily clad in the beginning of the first episode and appears to be entirely nude during the wedding scene.
The beginning of the show takes place in Atlantis, Charis’s ill-fated home, which was based on ancient Minoa. She is a bull leaper, which was a real sport in that era, and the costume she is wearing in these scenes is taken directly from Minoan artwork. Judgments of this scene are thus judging the morality of ancient Minoans by standards that did not apply, since Christianity wouldn’t appear in the world for 1200 years. Charis later converts to Christianity, and even before that, never wears the bull-leaping uniform again.
However, if it is immoral to depict ancient civilizations as they were, that is presentism. There are a lot of complaints from the same people about presentism in movies like The Odyssey or shows like Rings of Power, but apparently there is concern for the souls of the actors who had to wear the bull-leaping uniform because it was so revealing to modern sensibilities.
Even more concerning to some is the mere suggestion that Charis might have been topless with her husband when they consummated their marriage. For the record, I don’t know if Rose Reid, who played Charis, was actually topless or wearing some kind of concealing binder; with Jeremy Boreing in charge, I am inclined to believe that he would have preserved his actress and co-writer’s modesty even while implying nudity in the scene.
More importantly, at least to me, is the positive depiction of marital relations. Very few films these days portray marriages, much less good, healthy ones, and Christian marriages are the stuff of Christian networks. The Pendragon Cycle has inserted a depiction of a loving Christian marriage and how husband and wife should act behind closed doors.
What has been the alternative? A lot of characters in movies are either divorced or dysfunctional in relationships. The men in these fictional depictions are almost entirely at fault; when they still have relationships with exes, they are often the ones who admit to wrongdoing, while the female characters are allowed to grow and make mistakes. Where there are children involved, there is often a contentious mother who isn’t thrilled about the kids seeing their father, to the point where these characters disparage their exes in front of their children with impunity. This is accepted as normal.
A major trend in sitcoms, especially starting around the 1990s, was a hapless Schmoe of a father figure who bumbled through the episode’s plot, made a lot of embarrassing mistakes, and ultimately had to have the family matriarch fix it all. This usually involved the men being terrible in social situations, not knowing a thing about their own children, and not even knowing basic things about the household, like how to use a stove or a washing machine. A “normal” marriage, if we are to believe pop culture, requires a woman to rein in the excesses of her husband, who is basically a large, oblivious child.
Dating and romance are the worst-depicted aspects of sex and relationships in popular culture. If we were to listen to what we are being told by our books, movies, shows, and other media, dating is a matter of hopping from bed to bed to car backseat, having sex until you find someone you like to have it with. The kinkier the sex, the better. Graphic sex scenes show people in positions just this side of pornographic and present them as average, rather than sensationalist. It is not unusual to see full nudity from men as well as women.
Contrast this with the bare back and shoulders of Charis in the wedding scene of The Pendragon Cycle. We are not shown graphic sex; we are not shown a woman who dominates a stupid husband. We are shown an ideal of what a Christian marriage looks like in an intimate setting, a contrast to the inundation of messaging that disparages such unions. Without actually being shown the sex, we are shown that loving sex between a married couple doesn’t have to be either a chore or the next Paris Hilton sex tape.
This is not “fantasy fanaticism,” either. What that scene in The Pendragon Cycle shows is an alternative to the bombardment of sex and dysfunction in relationships, especially marriages. What we’re being shown is that it is possible to have a healthy romantic partnership, one that includes sex, but without all the depravity that the rest of our media claims is normal. The trite suggestion that new couples should ask older couples what marriage should be like falls flat – when these older couples are too prude for The Pendragon Cycle because of Rose Reid’s bare shoulders, what wisdom are they honestly going to impart to their younger peers?
Right now, when it comes to depictions of sex, relationships, romance, dating, and marriage, the lunatics are running the asylum and teaching the rest of us that there’s no such thing as a functional marriage with a positive sex life. The choices presented are to either enter the threshold and see gratuitous kink, or not enter the threshold at all. And by not being allowed to see it at all, we are denied a counterview to the gratuitous kink.
The Pendragon Cycle gave us a third option: to enter the threshold and see something wholesome and pure, made of love and mutual respect rather than lust and sexism. Instead of shuttering the door to the Christian marriage bed in the name of some kind of misguided modesty, Jeremy Boreing showed the world what a healthy wedding night can look like.
Most Christian broadcasting avoids these themes, but I don’t believe The Pendragon Cycle was made just for a Christian audience. I have always held that the message of the show is universal and can be appreciated outside of Christian conservative circles if given a chance. Now that it is being given that chance, it is actually reaching the people it was intended to reach – as of this writing, it is the #5 series in the US on Amazon Prime. People who are not Christian or are on the fence about Christianity are getting to see that there is something other than what they’ve been shown.
We can put that kind of depiction back behind closed doors and call it immoral, but that means the only voices anyone is hearing about marital relations are the ones telling us that marriage doesn’t matter. That means the role models for what sex looks like are the ones who are promoting unhealthy ideas and kink. If all anyone sees is the lunatic fringe, the lunatic fringe becomes the norm.
Is that really what we want? Over a scene where all we see is an actress’s bare back and cuts away after the kiss?
