Oh yes, definitely, if you’re trying to make good races and thoughtful character designs, I think they should be as diverse as irl humans are. But you forget! I hate elves, and elves are garbage. Yes, you’d think they’d be able to build different types of muscle like humans can, but alas, humans are better than elves. Elves are like purebred dogs: they look ok on the outside, but lack the true variety of healthier races and are just riddled with problems on the inside. Dependent on magic. Chronic delusional haughtiness. Long lived, but can easily deteriorate if not properly taken care of, resulting in a useless being that really should just die, but doesn’t. If trolls are wolves, blood elves are chihuahuas. Small bodies, shrunken snouts and teeth. Noisy. Night elves probably have hip problems. Over obsession with trees and the moon (obvious inanimate objects) clearly show mental degradation when compared to their ancestors, who worship gods who walk and talk with them plainly. And let’s not forget their ears and eyebrows- disgusting, freakish mutations meant as clear warning signs to other races: EXTREMELY CURSED, DO NOT INTERACT.
But true, even this headcanon does allow for exceptional elves who are lucky enough, either though effort or station in life to overcome their race’s shortcomings. Tyrande is a spoiled high priestess for instance and is heavier than the average nelf. Heavier set or more chunky/buff elves or any other elf with non-typical elf traits have probably been blessed by some non-elf god attempting to uplift them from elven mediocrity. But most elves? Just not worth the effort.
Tag: worldbuilding
the problem is that I ADORE magic systems where it’s just, like, magic, like, maybe using a lot at once exhausts you but it’s not quantified and no one knows how it works or where it comes from, or at least no one who could possibly explain it themselves, not to the protagonist (and reader) at least. It’s just magic! Some people can do it and others can’t! It’s intuitive and flexible to the point where it approaches being synonymous with “being the main character and having the plot work in your favor”!
But I’m so bad at writing that, because suddenly my brain is all, “but why can some people do it and others can’t? How does it work? At minimum, does conservation of mass apply? Conservation of energy? What about-”
Concept: a dungeon-crawling sci fi game, except instead of wandering space pirates, you play as a crew of legitimate salvage operators retrieving valuable goods from abandoned or evacuated cities on formerly populated planets that have been rendered uninhabitable by various civilisation-ending disasters. The different “dungeon types” would reflect whatever disaster killed that particular planet: plague, increasing solar intensity, nuclear war, continent-shattering meteor, etc. Long-dead worlds have already been picked over by your competitors, of course, so in most cases you’re going in while the world-ending catastrophe is recent – and in some cases still ongoing! – offering plenty of opportunities for potentially fatal misadventures. If you need an overarching plot, maybe you eventually discover that all of these apparently unrelated disasters have some sinister common thread.
A few of the odder fates that might befall a world, as well as salvage operators’ slang terms for such worlds:
- Deadworld: A world whose inhabitants have been rendered irretrievably non-sapient by a contagious neurological disease, parasitic fungus, basilisk meme, or other similar vector. Though in many cases their bodies are alive and kicking, they’ve been declared legally brain-dead, leaving the world open for salvage. Describing these unfortunate remnants as “zombies” is considered both unscientific and insensitive, which stops basically no-one. Sometimes an apparent deadworld turns out to actually be a nascent planetary-scale hive mind, which just gets awkward for everybody involved.
- Eight-Ball: A world that‘s experienced a hard-takeoff singularity, a sudden asymptotic acceleration of cultural and technological development that certain worlds undergo for reasons which remain unclear. Nobody’s 100% sure what happens to the inhabitants of such worlds; some believe they transform into beings of pure information, transcend to another dimension, or simply die off, their civilisation achieving its zenith, decline and extinction in a matter of hours. Whatever the truth may be, one thing’s for sure: they don’t need any of their stuff anymore. Eight-balls are highly sought after by salvage operators because of all the physics-defying Weird Shit the planet’s former owners tend to leave behind in the wake of their apotheosis, and are among the most dangerous assignments imaginable for the exact same reason.
- Locker: One of the oddest fates that can befall a world, a temporally locked civilisation – or “locker”, for short – is literally frozen in a single moment, usually as a result of some damn fool messing around with time travel. With fewer than a dozen known cases in the whole of galactic history, lockers present a unique salvage opportunity: the retrieval not of property, but of people. No means of reversing a temporal lock exists, so the world’s inhabitants must be rescued one at a time, by crews equipped with containment suits that allow them to move about in frozen time – a task frequently contracted out to established salvage operators. Lingering on such worlds is not recommended; though there’s no scientific proof of their existence, rumours persist that temporal locks are known to draw the attention of things that live sideways in time.
(Feel free to add your own!)
Water World: The planet’s icecaps underwent a sudden and swift melting and flooded most or all the worlds land. Sometimes there’s a surviving population so be careful! Excellent salvage as long as you don’t mind getting wet, or the occasional attack by roving pirates.
Overtaken: Some damn-fool opened a portal to some step to the side and down dimension and the world was fatally overrun with denizens, sapient and not, from another plane. Upside is that with the right kind of personal containment gear and a good team there’s often a lot of fantastic tech to salvage. Downside? At least half of these worlds are still crawling with terrifying and sometimes mind-warpingly strange beings that have developed a taste for humans and or a disdain for their continued existence.
There are several types of Overtaken world that have their own slang names;
– Shroomworld: The planet is slowly being consumed in otherplannar fungal growth. The air is gritty with toxic spoors and the entire world is silent end still because every other living thing is dead. Occasionally combines with a Deadworld and there are fungal zombies, but that’s rare. Make sure you’ve got the best air filters money can buy before attempting one of these worlds, and keep a constant eye on your stats.
– D00M World: Demons walk and the screams of the dying fill the air. Or, well, they did for a week or so after the portal opened. Now everything’s pretty quiet. Maybe all the demon critters went back home once there were no more people to eat? One can hope. Make sure to be armed to the teeth just in case, ey?
– Mistworld: The entire planet is shrouded in an opaque mist from pole to pole. Where did the people go? No one knows. But if you stay down there long enough people say you start seeing things. Shapes in the mist, hands reaching for you out of the corner of your eye and whispers in your ears that the comms don’t pick up. Make sure you count your team members and do occasional sound offs, it’s not uncommon for a crew member or two to walk off into the mist and never be seen again.
– Jewelworld or Gemworld: A bit like the Shroom world, but this time it’s rapidly advancing crystaline growth. Very pretty, until you notice that some of the mounds of glittering color have what’s left of people in them. Also, it’s imperative that your team is in and out within a set amount of time as visiting this kind of world often sets off another surge of growth. Be careful of you and your ship will end up encased in a shiny tomb along with every other living and moving thing on the planet.
– Eden(s): Characterized by rapid plant growth that swallowed everything and everyone. Usually very beautiful. Half the time these worlds are pretty harmless. The other half… Well, be on the look out for carnivorous plants, giant animals, toxic spoors, pretty orchids that shoot poisonous barbs, etc. Extra tough containment suits and big guns are usually a safe bet. These worlds often have slightly less than sane scientific researchers in residence too, so be on the look out.
Sanderson’s Second Law
A few years back, I wrote an essay on creating magic systems that I titled Sanderson’s First Law. It had to do with the nature of foreshadowing as it relates to solving problems with magic. In that essay, I implied that I had other “laws” for magic systems that I’d someday talk about. Well, that time has come, as I’ve finally distilled my thoughts for the second law into an explanation that will work.
I’ll start, however, by noting that none of these “laws” are absolute. Nor am I the only one to talk about them. By calling them “Sanderson’s Laws” I’m merely referring to them in the way I think of them–they are rules I try to live by when designing magic systems for my books. There are a lot of ways to write, and the only real “laws” are the ones that work for you.
These work for me. I think they are actually all principles of good writing, not just writing as it pertains to magic systems. However, because magic systems are one of the things I most like to toy with in my writing, I have designed them in such a way that they encourage me toward stronger, and more interesting, magic in my fantasy books.
The Law
Sanderson’s Second Law can be written very simply. It goes like this:
Limitations > Powers
(Or, if you want to write it in clever electrical notation, you could say it this way:
Ω > |
though that would probably drive a scientist crazy.)
Let’s do some explaining here. When people describe a magic system, they usually talk about what it can do. Let’s use a very well known example: Superman. (Yes, superhero abilities are a magic system. In fact, many of them make for good examples, since many of them are well known in society and the scope of their powers is fairly well pinned down.)
If I were to ask you about Superman’s magic, you’d probably talk about his ability to fly, his super strength, the lasers he can shoot from his eyes. You may go from there to his invincibility and perhaps some of his lesser (and more inconsistent) powers. But if we stick with those four, we’ve got a pretty strong setup for what Superman is capable of doing.
However, is this what makes Superman interesting?
I’d put forth that it is not. There are lots of people with magic powers who can fly and who are invincible. There are a lot of strong, fast, or smart people. What makes Superman interesting, then? Two things: his code of ethics and his weakness to kryptonite.
Think about it for a moment. Why can Superman fly? Well, because that’s what he does. Why is he strong? Comic book aficionados might go into him drawing power from the sun, but in the end, we don’t really care why he’s strong. He just is.
But why is he weak to kryptonite? If you ask the common person with some familiarity with Superman, they’ll tell you it’s because kryptonite–this glowing green rock–is a shard from his homeworld, which was destroyed. The kryptonite draws you into the story, gets into who Superman is and where he comes from. Likewise, if you ask about his code of ethics–what he won’t do, rather than what he can do–we’ll go into talking about his family, how he was raised. We’ll talk about how Ma and Pa Kent instilled solid values into their adopted son, and how they taught him to use his strength not to kill, but to protect.
Superman is not his powers. Superman is his weaknesses.
Fantasy Birth Control
How come there are so few magical birth control options in fantasy settings?
There is Jewelry Of Contraception, Miscarriage Hex, and Abortion Potion, and that’s it.
But come on, guys, it’s magic. Those are both things we can accomplish in the real world with science.
Why not “as long as this knot remains tied, your pregnancy will not progress any further. The embryo is fine, just frozen in time until you’re ready to become a parent!”
Or “I have turned the baby into a berry. get the father of the baby to eat it, and it’s his problem now”
Or “I’ve hexed your gonads, you won’t have any kids at all ever until you do a favor for a witch, preferably me”
Or “lol, I stole your dick in the middle of the night and put it on my tree with all the other dicks in the village”
Come on, guys, get creative!
man, I was thinking too small. it’s MAGIC, guys
“I have put the baby inside this seed. when you plant the seed, a flower will grow, and your baby will be inside it. your baby might be the size of a mouse, or uh look like a mouse, but hey, we can’t have everything. it can still talk and wear clothes, and those are the important things, right? it’ll save you a ton of cloth over the years, trust me”
“I have sent the baby into the future. the NEXT time either of you has a kid, it will be this baby, regardless of who you have it with. this baby will always be top of the queue until one of you lets it be born.”
“I took your womb, and put it in an eggshell in a duck in a chest in a tree guarded by a dragon at the end of the world. so the next time you get pregnant, it will definitely be on purpose.”
“I turned the baby into a cat. everyone likes kittens, right?”
“the baby isn’t “dead” so much as “turned back into an egg and a splash of jizz.” magic is cool, isn’t it?”
“you will only ever be fertile immediately after you eat turnips. and by immediately, I mean, put a turnip on the nightstand, if you catch my drift.”
“I have donated your fetus to the fetus lottery that witches draw from for infertile couples. it’s, uh, currently in this cauldron. yes this looks like leek and potato soup, but trust me, it’s a fertility potion.”
“here is your baby. a stick. I definitely turned a real human child into a stick, and didn’t give it to the fairies. this stick is for you to keep.”
honestly these r great but none are as weird as Hans My Hedgehog
part of Sherwood Smith’s worldbuilding is that no one can get pregnant without taking a special herb; infertile people, same-sex couples, single people, and people who don’t want to have sex with their spouse (only non-squicky arranged marriages i’ve read to date) can… basically Wish a baby into existence? it’s great. there are also zero STIs, and the cultures are almost all accepting of multiple partners.
hell yeah this is the kind of stuff I wanna see
there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history
@ofloveandmedea said:
please talk about this headcanon it sounds Fascinating and you always have such good sourcesand also @saphura
well since you asked so nicely
here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:
first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.
second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.
so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.
why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.
there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)
couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:
- the boring, the reasonable, hogwarts isn’t anywhere near anything that would be a cathedral, but monasteries were all over the place and the more remote, the better
- priests were all male, which makes two of the founders difficult to explain
- scotland was more connected to the irish monastic form of christianity than the mainland european bishop focused christianity
so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.
(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)
but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?
i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.
quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:
By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society’s notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or biolocation, or in a witches’ Sabbath.
in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.
(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)
additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)
there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)
so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.
in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–
hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.
(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why)
This is plausible and overlaps interestingly with my rant about how considering Hogwarts was founded that far north in ~the tenth century by persons with mostly Saxon names,
the admissions-policy dispute Salazar is most likely to have flounced over not only is unlikely to have been about ‘muggleborns’ in the modern sense (since the secrecy policy didn’t exist so it would have been a mere status issue at that point)
but is quite likely to actually have been over the political/military question of admitting Danes. (Potentially also Scots.)
Scotland, shockingly enough, was not ruled by the English in the 10th century. With enough assumptions about dates and locations we can get Hogwarts having been founded in the kingdom of Northumbria, which was English but also fell not that long after the earliest plausible date for the founding of Hogwarts to invading Danish forces, which settled in and colonized the place.
(Because they did not entirely overwhelm and drive out the previous wave the Vikings are surprisingly often left out of the list of ‘people that took over England’ but they really shouldn’t be.)
So. Salazar Slytherin: probably patriotically opposed to educating young aspiring magicians whose family loyalties lay with the Great Pirate Army.
A tangent, but I think a compatible one to the Monastic Hogwarts theory: I think it’s reasonable to assume that at various points in history the castle housed more than just the school.
Some of the magical sites in London doubtlessly date to antiquity – the Veil chamber seems ancient enough that I suspect the rest of the Ministry complex was built on that site specifically to contain and protect the Department of Mysteries, and while it’s hard to say without a geographical location, it’s possible that the Diagon/Knockturn/Gringotts area represents an older wizarding settlement that was engulfed by the primarily muggle city. But Saint Mungo’s? The facade is decades old at most, and based on the dates on the famous wizards card of its founder, the hospital itself was probably founded only very shortly before the statute of secrecy went into effect.
And Mungo is a Scottish saint.
For a significant portion of British Wizarding history, Hogwarts was probably not only the main educational institution for children, it was probably the major academic and medical center for witches and wizards of all ages. The castle certainly seems to be larger than is necessary for the ambiguously several hundred children who currently make up the student body, and presumably when the muggle population of the British Isles was much lower, the magical population was smaller as well. Which implies that at some point at or after Hogwarts’ founding, someone had a use for all that space other than the education of wizarding children. This could have included one or more monastic orders, possibly carrying out missions or vocations later absorbed by the secular wizarding government.
Concept: a spacefaring fantasy setting where the traditional “ship’s artificial intelligence” role is filled by synthetic hearth-gods that interface with the ship’s systems via miniaturised clockwork shrines. The tropes of ship-as-community and crew-as-found-family that pervade post-2000 spacefaring SF have direct and measurable presence in the setting, as cultivating a stronger sense of family and community results in a stronger ship’s god.
(While this practice confers considerable benefits, it also imposes a practical upper limit on the size of a ship and crew; if the ship or crew is too large, rather than a synthetic hearth-god you get a synthetic city-father, which is generally considered undesirable for non-military applications on account of the fact that those critters are scary as hell.)
@sour-rocks replied:
what’s a city-father?
The tutelary spirit of a community as cultural infrastructure, as opposed to the individual personalised communities that comprise it. At the time of this posting, it’s a matter of considerable speculation exactly why synthetic city-fathers tend to be so predatory and conquest-minded. Popular theories include:
1. Naturally occurring city-fathers have the same propensities as their synthetic counterparts, and are either better at hiding them, or simply lack the necessary context to express them on account of being immobile and capable of only gradual expansion.
2. There exists some flaw in our understanding of the principles of apotheogenesis that can cause artificial deiforms to become deranged; synthetic hearth-gods are apparently unaffected either because the problem is emergent only above a certain threshold of complexity, or because routine contact with close-knit communities exerts a stabilising influence.
3. The mindset of synthetic city-fathers is an inevitable reflection of the mindset of the sort of people who have the resources to build large spacegoing vessels.
here is a concept that I’m still trying to flesh out: medieval science fiction.
not, of course, aliens land during the middle ages, though I’ve read and enjoyed that, but something much more difficult to execute, if it’s possible at all: space opera (exempli gratia) as written by Bede or Gildas or Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The challenge is, of course, that you have to get into the medieval mind (ok, I know that talking about “the” medieval mind is fallacious) and figure out what they’d keep from their world and what they’d think to change – what is the analogue to ‘50s writers giving us faster than light travel & radioactive planets & psionics and still having gender and family politics that are identical to ‘50s middle class American politics? I have a feeling it’s the Church – it’s true that there are several books with Space Popes, but it tends to be a rebirth of the Papacy. I doubt a medieval science fiction writer would have the Church decline or even guess at the Reformation.
Also, sci-fi tech tends to be, both aesthetically and functionally, an extension of tech the society it’s from already has – does a medieval space ship look like a siege tower? How do they envision the instant communication I’m sure they’d have to have as working? Would it be through magic (which is often the case in modern sci-fi)?
And what would the spirit of it be? I would argue that, while you can’t really generalize over an entire field, and there is certainly some bleak sci-fi, the general tenor of American sci-fi is hopeful & enamored of the human spirit. Is the point of medieval space travel to find God*? Will leaving Earth leave behind Original Sin? Are we going to convert the Martians?
DO they need instant communication? I mean, even star wars still has people carrying thumb drives around. There could be a pigeon analogue – sleek little machines flitting between the stars carrying messages, or perhaps creatures already native to the higher spheres suited to the task. Venusian swallowtails, mercurial spirits.
I’d love to see the heavenly spheres as a setting for this all on its own, too. What’s the first moment a traveler hears the music like?
I could see a lot of it through the lens of knights on impossible quests – why not ascend the sky? Knights riding on bright steeds of golden fire known as comets. Knights finding allegorical realms on the various planets, like the Kingdom of Love from Capellanus’ Treatise on The Arts of Courtly Love, but set in the golden mountains of Venus, and you could have a Kingdom of War and a Kingdom of Wit and a Kingdom of Time on Mercury and Mars and Saturn. Prester John could be from Jupiter!
I’m not sure about the ways I would expect medieval scifi to be subversive, but I might look at Marie de France for ideas, she plays a lot with expectation and obligation and the implications of gender in her Lais, in very clever ways.
medievals didn’t have the concept of vacuum, let alone know that space doesn’t have air. everything is open ships and space sails. gravity isn’t oriented to the planet, there’s a universal ‘down’. engines are driven by people or animals or wind or water, not burning fuel; your space chariot is pulled by cloud horses or sun lions.
other planets are not other earths, they’re allegorical locations populated by allegorical creatures. angels, demons, dreamers, cannibals, a planet of all women and a planet of all men – but not for 1950′s bikini shenanigans, more as a parable about how the sexes can’t get along without each other because men’s work and women’s work are both necessary. no concept that men could do women’s work and vice-versa, or at least do it competently. the men on the men’s planet would like, grow children in their fields, but wean them on burnt bread soaked in beer because they’re terrible at milking cows and kneading dough, or something like that.
there’s a Renaissance thing, Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Astolfo gets to the moon in Elijah’s burning chariot. (He goes to the moon because everything that has been lost on Earth can be found there, including Orlando’s sanity, because of course.)
I think I’d argue that theological allegory, like the Divine Comedy or the Vision of Piers Plowman, pretty much is medieval science fiction: speculations and warnings and encouragement, based on what is known-or-believed-to-be-known. As I understand it, the general opinion of medieval European scholars was that theology was THE most important thing to know about; studying the Creator more fervently than the creation was considered pretty much the same degree of Obviously Sensible as, say, studying birds doing bird things and being birds instead of just looking at empty nests and eggshells would be to us, like, why study mere side-effects when you can study The Entire Truth And Cause Of Everything? So I would argue that theology is the medieval version of twentieth century rocket science and atomic physics as The Coolest Thing To Know About, and thus spec fic based on it is the equivalent of science fiction.
i’m kind of against kings in fantasy because i feel like most people don’t really think about them: either it’s a Tolkien-esque “the King has returned again!” or they’re just sort of…there b/c this is Fantasy, we do Kings, but have they considered
- dying kings, king-of-the-year, the king who has to fight every year to reclaim his throne, the king who knows that he’s only king for as long as he keeps his strength
- the king and the land are one, but not, like, in a triumphant way, in a way where the land claims the king for its own
- a king who must be physically perfect (the king is not physically perfect and has to hide it)
- the divine king and what it would mean to actually be ruled by a god
#also like chosen-of-the-gods but with thinking about responsibility#also: these apply to Queens too#also: people have done some of these#guy gavriel kay does the dying king#for example#the perfection thing is from celtic myth#and i think the byzantines had it too#but i’d love to see more fantasy novels think critically about kingship
more historical ones to use:
elected kings, like in the roman kingdom and the polish-lithuanian commonwealth
charismatic societies like in most of the pre-columbian americas north of the rio grande, where social power is based on your ability to talk and bribe people into going along with what you say
republics that aren’t based on the merchant-prince model or circle-of-mages model. guild-based republics, peasant republics, aristocratic republics, theocratic republics.
i would love for someone to use tiwanaku, an empire from the andes whose capital city was essentially a religious theme park where most of the buildings were facades and they had a guy in an echoey room with a horn playing the voice of god, and they kept tearing down buildings to put up new ones. especially if you added magic thrill rides or 18th-century roller coasters to it
Running back to the original post for a moment, let’s seriously think about how we handle royalty in fantasy for a bit. Royal characters are often so shallow! This goes especially for high fantasy, which is magnetically drawn towards kingdoms and war and powerful people. Kings and Queens exist for a reason.
Societies have leaders because without structure and organization, groups of humans larger than town-size fall apart. There’s a tipping point where a community grows large enough that not everyone knows and trusts each other, and there are enough strangers for cruel individuals to start exploiting others if they aren’t stopped. A king’s (and government’s) job is to organize and provide structure, creating and sometimes enforcing rules to make sure the people around him are treating each other right. Some kings and governments are far more effective than others, but that’s the basic idea. Even in well-established kingdoms, governments have shit to do, and they should be doing it!
High fantasy in particular has a thing for princes, princesses, and members of the nobility whose jobs are either
- one, being hidden from the big bad until their Heroic Return, at which point everything returns to normal and the country magically stabilizes
- or two, sitting on their butts making shallow gossip and pretending to be important while not doing anything else with their station. maybe they have money that helps a hero, or they need to be rescued, or they get one or two shining authority moments.
Respectively, these tend to be male heroes or female love interests, in most cases. Neither of these tropes is historically or logically accurate, and they’re so incredibly common at this point that I’m exhausted with them. I’m not alone there.
The issue isn’t exclusively the kind of government, though, which is why I wanted to jump on this post. The problem with cliches is that they’re never very well thought-out, and changing up the surface dressing of your flat worldbuilding isn’t an instant fix. All these other forms of government are fascinating and would make awesome story starters, but if you want to write royals into your story you should also think about what they actually do.
An elected King has a campaign to win and promises to make and hopefully keep. A dying King needs to think seriously about what he’s leaving behind on a mechanical level. Even the King of a false republic built on lies still needs to keep those lies going. The ceremonial head of a theocracy has a reputation to keep up and a god to please. Being an evil overlord would take SO MUCH WORK and infrastructure and planning, you’d be in meetings all day deciding how to keep your system running with you in charge.
If your fantasy is on a lower tier, maybe all these details don’t have to be there, but if you have a character who is royal or noble you should know what job it is they do. And no matter what, you should think about how the fantasy government you’re building would affect its citizens and culture, because god knows people love to bitch about governments. It’s free worldbuilding!
One final point: if you’re hell bent on writing a King Returns plot, I strongly suggest you explore the consequences of that plot on your characters. A farm boy who just discovered he’s royalty is walking into a situation he is totally unprepared for, he will be blindsided by politics, he will be easily manipulated. But equally important–his incompetence will have a ripple effect on his entire court and the noble class of his country. Not everyone will accept this kind of thing instantly, even with proof. People might like the regent government better! People might be rationally afraid of the mistakes someone like this could make on behalf of the whole country! If he’s a responsible individual he’ll need to study and make connections and charm people, he will have work to do unlike any work he’s ever done before, and there’s a 99% chance he’ll be absolutely awful at it. Farmers don’t teach their kids court manners. This archetype is heavily overused and easily slips into cliche territory, but with critical thought and a bit of plot redirection it can still feel pretty fresh.
Just put some thought into it! 🙂 Well-thought-out fantasy is hard, but it’s so worth it for your readers. YA does not exempt you from this situation.
These are all very good points, and I was definitely thinking about consequences – writing about what it would be like to live under any of these monarchies would be super interesting.
And the thing is, medieval English kingship is much more interesting than Fantasyland kingship – fantasy kings tend to not have actual functions or day-to-day duties except maybe hearing the complaints of peasants in a cliched scene, but early medieval English kings did delegate, but were still very personally involved in running the kingdom. And sure, detailed descriptions of your main character sitting down and creating budgets would be boring, but you can definitely reference it.
This was mostly a plea for examined kingship – after all, the unexamined king is not worth having.
Concept: an RPG setting including a nation that overthrew the vile Sorcerer-Kings several generations ago after a thousand years of subjugation and instituted a modified form of anarcho-syndicalism, but, well, by then the Aesthetic had become a part of their culture – and radical reform of political institutions is one thing, but some things are more stubborn!
- Architecture consists primarily of storm-lashed spires of obsidian and (ethically sourced!) bone, the interiors of which are mostly filled with comfortably appointed apartments, including heavy soundproof window-covers to muffle the frequent thunder.
- Fashion tends toward voluminous hooded cloaks, which are eminently practical, given the near-constant grimy drizzle. Fashion also tends toward an excess of thick leather belts and chunky metal buckles, the latter typically fashioned to resemble skulls and leering demonic faces; these are less practical, though as a result few denizens ever find themselves without a handy spot to secure a tool or pouch.
- The languages spoken much resemble those of neighbouring nations, though most of the men (and a growing number of women) practice a trick of speaking with a booming sepulchral echo that non-natives can never seem to get the hang of. Many elders also work on perfecting their shrill cackles in their free time.
- People carry “skeleton donor” cards indicating their consent to have their remains reanimated after death. Animated skeletons require no luxuries and dislike idleness, but they’re required to take every third day off anyway; most of them spend those days staging elaborate pantomimes and engaging in musical duels with whatever instruments they can get their phalanges on that require neither breath nor skin.
- The harbour is patrolled by a tame leviathan that in all honesty would probably just run away if anyone ever mounted a serious assault, but thus far nobody has been willing to test that theory. It quite enjoys having its gills scritched, a predilection that often unnerves visiting mariners.
- Every Winter Solstice a volunteer puts on the spiky armour and the ridiculous hat and runs through the streets while village children chase after her and hit her with sticks, and a grand time is had by all.
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