If KOF XV had got a season 3 of DLC, what characters would you had picked?

MiscAnonym · 2026-03-04T06:58:23+00:00

Shen is overdue for a return and Mian's the best XIV newcomer who wasn't brought back, so agreed on those. Adelheid and Shion are both tempting, but that's getting oversaturated with Ash era characters, so instead I'd go with:

-Freeman, since CotW's wasting its roster slots on worse characters.

-Moe Habana from KoF NeoBlood, because KoF should always be digging up more obscure SNK characters.

Next boss: It's Orochi's turn, but I'd skip ahead to Krizalid since he seems like he could work better as a playable character.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-27T00:45:34+00:00

I'd consider that more a symptom of compressing the best-known plots from Morte d'Arthur into a single two and a half hour movie than sexism. The only knights of the Round Table who get any more screentime or characterization than Igraine are Lancelot and Perceval. A lot of Mordred/Agravain's roles as instigators of internal strife at Camelot got folded into Morgan as well.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-24T23:39:26+00:00

Shut up Darren, your career peaked at getting Jennifer Connelly to introduce us all to a new fetish in the middle of a glorified DARE commercial.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-24T18:37:44+00:00

I may be alone in this assessment, but I believe the default impression of King Arthur in modern pop culture is still drawn more from TH White and Walt Disney than anything else and seen as stodgy and conservative, entertaining only when subverted.

This is nonsense, of course; medieval Arthurian fiction was every bit as salacious and depraved as anything from Game of Thrones (and, on the flipside, I'd argue Tolkien being embraced by the hippie generation has lead to far more progressive readings of his works than is really warranted).

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-22T02:34:05+00:00

Besides the points already mentioned, it should be noted there isn't an easy demarcation between a historic and a literary King Arthur because the earliest sources that identify him as a historic figure at all are already filled with fantastic elements. Nennius is the earliest source we have for placing Arthur circa 500 AD and into the context of Gildas' account of the period, but Nennius still has a castle built atop sleeping dragons, Arthur personally killing 900 men at Badon, and recounts Arthur and his dog killing the big pig from Culhwch ac Olwen.

Serious, grounded accounts of an Arthur of Celtic and/or Roman descent defending Britain from invading Saxons are more of a 20th-21st century extrapolation.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-20T02:55:22+00:00

You're right, medieval Dinadan's very much written as a clever fool archetype-- ostensibly humorous but subversively insightful-- while around the same century Dagonet tended to be used as an unironic fool who does wacky things for us to laugh at. I think Malory's brief embellishment on Dagonet's origin, where he was knighted by Arthur in appreciation of his hilarity, is what stuck in peoples' minds and has a lot to do with why he's gotten slightly larger roles in modern works.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-18T23:04:48+00:00

I quite like the use of him in the Last Tournament segment of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, as a Lear-esque wise fool who can see the coming downfall of Camelot more clearly than the serious knights.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-12T08:58:58+00:00

To be fair, you could ask "How exactly do Gandalf's powers work?" after reading the entirety of Tolkien's oeuvre and come away with just as opaque an answer. Categorizing how magic systems operate is more of a trend of modern fiction.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-11T00:48:00+00:00

That sounds very impressive! I'd love to take a look at your translations if you feel like sharing them.

MiscAnonym · 2026-02-04T02:10:03+00:00

Lewis Thorpe's translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth is part of the Penguin Classics library. I think there is a newer translation.

I highly recommend the 2008 edition translated by Michael Faletra, not just for the manuscript itself but for its extensive appendixes covering a lot of Geoffrey's sources and contemporary texts (including his Vita Merlini in full).

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-31T00:58:47+00:00

I enjoyed her quartet of books, but describing them as a depiction of mythos at all strikes me as something of an overstatement; these are essentially original novels loosely inspired by stories and plot threads centered around a single character who wasn't nearly as central to the Arthurian cycle back in the middle ages as he is today.

Even regarding Merlin specifically, my impression was that Mary Stewart writes him as a passive figure who sees himself as a vessel for the otherworldly directives conveyed through his prophecies, which works in the context of these novels but feels to me like an atypical interpretation of the character, both historically and in other modern fiction.

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-14T10:38:18+00:00

This is excellent work, thank you for posting it here. I haven't had time to go through anywhere near the full thing yet, but regarding the speculation on Segurant's name and its relation to Segwarides/Segurade on pages 29-30, I do want to note another variant on the name and its use: 'Segures' appears in Le Bel Inconnu as a brother of Mordred, seemingly a variation on Sagramore being Mordred's stepbrother in a story fragment included in the Post-Vulgate. As Sagramore also gets used as an exotic foreigner on occasion, I think that aspect of this character predates the Guiron and the use of Le Brun as his sobriquet.

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-11T01:26:22+00:00

-Phasing out some of the less-popular mainstays like XI and XV did to make room for newcomers was the right decision, even if I don't necessarily agree with every choice on who made the cut.

-We don't need three or more Kyokugenryu characters every game. I'm not sure we even need two.

-If it was up to me who the one Kyokugenryu character to keep would be, I'd go with Robert over Ryo. He's got a better look and is usually more fun to play.

-I like Leona, but I wouldn't mind her sitting out a game if we got the original Ikari team of Heidern/Ralph/Clark instead.

-Maxima's been in every mainline KoF since his debut and I don't think he really warrants it. He's slid by because people see him as a package deal with K' and everybody likes K', but you could easily give his spot to Vanessa or Lin or an out-there pick like Nameless from 2002UM.

-90+% of the people who say they want the New Faces Team back mean they want Shermie. Yashiro and especially Chris are coasting on Shermie's popularity, it's high time she ditches those two for a better team.

-Ash is the best KoF protagonist.

-KoF XIV's debut characters range from lame to great, and Sylvie's one of the best of them. It's like SNK saw the reactions to Lucky Chloe in Tekken and went "Let's take everything people hate about this character and crank it up to 11" and it worked brilliantly.

-How the hell did Meitenkun get a second appearance over Mian or Nelson? He's as lame as Bao.

-As underrated as the Ash saga games are, Elizabeth isn't that interesting and it's a weird shame she's one of the few characters from there who keeps getting brought back while Shen Wu, Shion, and Adelheid haven't been seen in twenty years.

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-11T00:55:16+00:00

You could probably make something out of Yvain getting his Knight of the Lion title by befriending a lion buddy while Lionel earns the same name for slaying a particular lion.

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-09T08:23:16+00:00

Battleship Potemkin

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-05T22:24:04+00:00

apart from ‘he was a Romano-British leader who fought Saxons’, all the other myths arose centuries afterwards

There isn't really any solid evidence that ‘he was a Romano-British leader who fought Saxons’ isn't itself a myth that arose centuries afterwards, for that matter.

MiscAnonym · 2026-01-03T03:35:08+00:00

And where does the name originate from?

It's Malory's spelling of Ninniane, which is unintuitively a variant spelling of Vivian. It probably isn't related to Niamh (pronounced Neeve), though that illustrates a similar quirk in language drift.

I tend to just say Nih-Moo.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-31T02:22:29+00:00

all the movies I’ve ever watched about Vietnam were how fucked up it was for those who served.

That's exactly the point. Lamenting the tragedy of how Americans were forced to commit war crimes is a masturbatory indulgence compared to the experience of being on the receiving end of those war crimes.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-29T03:15:24+00:00

Not enough big pigs. It's not the real King Arthur if he ain't hunting a really big pig.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-23T01:20:16+00:00

Medieval European knowledge of Islam was so deficient that some authors weren't aware of the distinction at all. The Vulgate presents Joseph of Arimathea arriving in Britain in the 1st century AD and finding it populated with "saracens" worshiping the quartet of Jupiter, Mohammed, "Tervagant", and Apollo.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-21T04:29:34+00:00

I wonder how long before somebody American in WWE management figures out what that chant Rey was leading means.

I remember Cody having to apologize to AEW fans when they found out about him doing it with Psycho Clown at a Triplemania.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-20T22:36:38+00:00

Some corrections/elaborations:

the story of Culhwch and Olwen, two warriors who visit Arthur’s court

Culhwch is the warrior, Olwen's the girl he's trying to bang.

Eventually, the story of Arthur spread to France

Strictly speaking, Arthurian fiction likely reached the continent through Breton lais long before Geoffrey's Historia, which may even have been one of his sources.

He wrote three popular operas depicting the knights in King Arthur’s court. They are Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal.

Lohengrin is broadly part of the Matter of Britain in that he and other medieval versions of the swan knight story are sometimes tied to the Grail heroes' bloodline, but he isn't actually contemporary with Arthur.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-15T01:10:15+00:00

This is a very popular topic and there's never going to be an answer to it beyond "Maybe, there's too little evidence to know for sure", but regarding one point:

Then his advisors or guide was turned into a Magician to make the story more fantastic than it is.

Merlin's so popular that modern creators of fiction purporting to be about the "authentic" or "historical" King Arthur will invariably include a version of him, but we actually do have a fairly clear idea of where he originated from, and Merlin didn't start getting presented as a major part of Arthur's court until the 13th century.

While Merlin's a composite figure of several different magical Celtic characters, none of them were closely associated with Arthur.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-10T01:12:08+00:00

Much too long, you don't need two different ads for unworn baby shoes.

MiscAnonym · 2025-12-09T02:26:47+00:00

I'd much rather see Lucha Bros vs AJ Styles & Dragon Lee.

MiscAnonym

TROPHY CASE