All my life I have been a fan of villains.
Specifically, all my life I have been the kind of fan who looks at villains and instantly goes, “Oh, you’re doing all that because you’re gay”. Maleagant is no exception to this impulse – he has, in fact, become a gay interpretation I have immediately become a fervent champion of. However, this is apparently not how most people engage with Maleagant, so I find myself in the position of running defence for the most generic villain of all time – both in terms of specifically finding him gay and more generally finding him very charming.
It’s not difficult to mount a defence for Maleagant in literary history sense. He may have fallen by the wayside compared to the likes of Mordred and Morgan, but he stands quite strongly as an important point in development for the cowardly duplicitous villain. Even if he has never thrived outside his origin – people aren’t that interested in reading Knight of the Cart over and over, for whatever reason – it’s quite the origin to have. However, my defence doesn’t come from a historical point I’m fond of. It’s a very modern defence, in fact. I looked at a profoundly generic villain and saw an insecure, petulant child – acting out because he’s gay, of course – and I want you to see that too, because it’s the cutest thing in the world.
This won’t be a particularly formal analysis. There simply isn’t enough in the text to go off for a deep dive, and even if there was, I don’t have the academic credentials to back it up. To that end, this post will be half justifying my interpretation of him as gay, and half gushing about things I like about him. This is also focused exclusively on the French/high medieval version. For reference, I first read the Comfort translation and have subsequently read the Raffel translation, and will be referencing both for this post. The Vulgate translation used is edited by Lacy.
The first and most obvious hurdle to declaring Maleagant as gay is his broad characterisation as a Guinevere simp by basically anyone who reads Knight of the Cart. To that I counter: no he isn’t. The thing about this characterisation is that Maleagant himself says or does very little that would indicate an interest in Guinevere, and I don’t believe abducting her to begin with counts on that front. He abducts her as part of his broader power play he’s trying to pull off with Arthur and his court – he wants Guinevere as a bargaining chip so he has an excuse to fight strong knights.
It’s true in Raffel he refers to her as “my beloved” (line 3285), but as that’s the start and end of it I’m more inclined to interpret it as part of his general digging-his-heels-in brattiness (for reference, Comfort doesn’t have him refer to her in any such terms – he just says he won’t give her up), particularly because he makes a bigger deal about it being about honour. Any declaration of attraction is done by other characters – Bademagus says as much – but never Maleagant. He also never indicates any real frustration at not being able to see Guinevere, though this is again said by Bademagus. To that end, I interpret what Bademagus says as his interpretation of Maleagant’s reasoning, not Maleagant’s actual motives in truth. This leads me to the conclusion that he has no particular care for her as a person, and only values her so far as a tool to get what he really wants – attention from men.
I am a shipper in general, but not when it comes to this. I think Maleagant is gay, but he is not gay for Lancelot in specific. In this case, he’s doing fandom-parlance intricate rituals. It’s often used in the parlance to justify a specific ship, but here, I think they’re generalised – he has some awareness that he wants specific, sustained attention from men, can’t articulate what that attention is or why he wants it, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get it from whoever he can get it from.
Maleagant is substantially more enthusiastic about interactions with men – fights with them, in particular, such as with “[…]If he’s hungry for a fight, / I’m at least a hundred times hungrier!” (Raffel, lines 3463-3464). Genuinely, I could probably just scour through the rest of the poem and bulk up this paragraph with anything aggressive and vindictive he says about Lancelot. In any case, it’s not just fighting men, but beating them that he’s particularly interested in – he wants to put himself in a place of dominance above all other knights, and spirals out into anger and shame at the idea of not being able to dominate other men properly, ultimately leading to his own pointless death. He is fundamentally very insecure about his professed superiority, from his repeated declarations in front of Arthur’s court, locking Lancelot away to try and win by default, and going back to his own dad to brag about all this (and subsequently getting a dressing-down for it). That sort of needing the attention but fearing it if it’s not on his particular (difficult) terms only adds to the gay interpretation to me, but I can’t articulate specifically why – something about the contradiction of desire and fear.
There is also the matter of Maleagant accusing Kay and Guinevere of sleeping together. Frankly, I never interpreted this as jealousy at all – he just saw an opportunity to cause problems and ran with it. He does have his hangups about fighting strong men, but also, he just likes to cause problems in general. Him talking down to them about it (line ~4760 and onwards in Raffel) reads more like rubbing it in and trying to prove his own superiority in this way, too. Maleagant certainly seems to basically drop the idea after he starts fighting Lancelot about it, and becomes refocused on fighting Lancelot for its own sake.
All this so far is based on the original Knight of the Cart to develop this post in the same way my original thoughts developed. However, in the end, none of this playing in the margins of interpretation matters, because the Vulgate gifts me a perfect core on a silver platter.
Maleagant’s presence in the Vulgate is mostly a pretty direct adaptation of Knight of the Cart, but they do try to weave him in to the overall story earlier. Because of that, we get him going to a tournament with Bademagus, Galehaut and Lancelot, which gives us this incredible extract:
Now Galehaut and his great retinue were on their way to court, and he and [Lancelot] often rode apart from the others. Lancelot was very glad that Galehaut was looking much better than before and so felt sure that what Galehaut had given him to understand was indeed true. But Meleagant could not take his eyes off Lancelot because of the great affection that Galehaut showed him; he was jarred by it and made envious, and it set his heart on edge.
It’s a complete slam dunk. Lancelot and Galehaut are quite explicitly romantic in the Vulgate, so being envious of the affection between them can really only be interpreted one way. I maintain generalised intricate rituals for the Vulgate Maleagant, so in this case it’s he has to do all this stuff to get attention from men, but these guys just have what he can’t get! How dare they! Which leads to him taking out that frustration and envy on Lancelot by illegally sharpening his lance and stabbing Lancelot through the leg at the tournament. This is completely pre-Knight of the Cart – he’s doing this out of pure envy that they’re gay and in love!
(If one simply must pick a specific ship, I would actually argue in favour of Maleagant/Galehaut-by-proxy instead of Maleagant/Lancelot. Envious of the affection between them, and he takes that out by trying to eliminate Lancelot… you know.)
After this in the Vulgate, it’s a fairly straight Knight of the Cart adaptation, so there’s nothing else for me to add here – my initial analysis applies here, too, so that’s about as much as I can accomplish. So, with nothing more to extrapolate, I want to talk about how cute he is! Especially so in the Raffel translation – it’s very lively, and makes him really over the top.
Cuteness is, of course, subjective. I am certainly much more primed to find Maleagant charming than most. But this post is, at its heart, a recruitment drive – I want other people to see and love Maleagant like I do. Even if you aren’t all-in on him being gay, at least walk with me in my world where he sees Guinevere as a tool to get what he wants, rather than being interested in her as an end in itself. I’ve already mentioned it in my analysis above, but this makes him fundamentally extremely insecure. He’s not just Evil McGuy doing evil things because they’re evil (okay, he kind of still is, but even so), he’s an overcompensating brat desperate for attention and approval. On some level he really does believe his own bravado and thinks he’s that good, but deeper down, he absolutely knows he isn’t. It makes me want to soak him in milk and smack him into the wall.
It would be a decent structural mimic to the first half of this post to go through Knight of the Cart sequentially, but I really want to jump to this, from after he locks up Lancelot and goes to Arthur’s court like “hey where’s Lancelot is he scared of me lol”:
And then Meleagant left
King Arthur’s court, and rode
Until he reached the court
Of King Bademagu, his father.
And to show his father how very
Fierce and brave he was,
He carefully composed his face
In ways wonderful to behold.
I’m throwing up. I’ve been throwing up about this since I read the Raffel translation. He does get a total dressing down by his dad after this who immediately sees through his nonsense, which makes this all the cuter. He’s preening so much and thinks he’s so smart and strong and everyone is so scared of him, but everyone can tell he’s a cowardly idiot and sees right through him. Isn’t it really the cutest? Don’t you just love this kind of completely pathetic, incompetent villain?
There’s also the matter of his anger and shame spirals, especially after his first fight with Lancelot gets stopped:
“What’s this? You think it’s fine
To go on fighting, after
He’s stopped? You act like a savage!
It’s far too late for heroics:
Everyone knows he’s won,
Everyone knows you’ve been beaten!”
Out of his mind with shame,
Meleagant denied
Defeat: “Have you gone blind?
There’s something wrong with your eyes!
Anyone who thinks I’ve been beaten
Is surely as blind as a bat!”
This is only a partial extract since posting the entire thing of Lancelot stopping the fight on Guievere’s orders and Maleagant still going would make this post reallym unweildy, but it’s the same cute and pathetic and incompetent villain framing here. He’s a terrible brat who can’t face that his skills don’t match up to his ego, and he clearly has a lot of sort of mental safeguards to prevent him from ever confronting this in normal circumstances. Lancelot, though, affectionately, is not normal. In general, Maleagant constantly having to be held back and controlled by Bademagus is so charming. He wants to project that truly strong and evil and cunning image, but gets undermined at every turn and doesn’t have the strength or the will to push back, which only further emphasises how hopeless he is.
I also really like Maleagant talking down to Guinevere and Kay after he accuses them of sleeping together. I can imagine the smug look on his face so easily, and he’s so self-satisfied about finding something he can needle them with. Deciding he’s such a genius for locking Lancelot away so he comes off as strong by default without having to actually work for it and win a fight is so cute. Also his meltdown at the end before he has to fight Lancelot at the final time… realising how bad he fucked up and how this was all for nothing… truly so cute, though it’s far too long to justify posting as an extract, so you’ll simply have to read it yourself. Really, you could pick anything in Knight of the Cart about him and I’d tell you it was cute. Please try reading it from my perspective, with this love of incompetent villains in mind, and I’m sure you’ll come to appreciate him!
Also, I said that this was only focused on the French version, but I do want to mention the Knight of the Cart chapter in the Morte, because him immediately crying and throwing up at the idea of having to fight Lancelot and begging Guinevere to get him to back down is so cute.
Please love Maleagant. He’s cuter thank you think!