etirabys:

the older I get the more ruffled I am when I read fantasy books with characters who are good kings. it’s nice that you are a good king but (humorless fun hater voice) kings shouldn’t exist and all these scenes where the emotional oomph hinges on “you could have been a dickbag facing no consequences but you went out of your way to be nice instead” have a sour undertaste.

(I don’t mean this as a condemnation of the genre or people who have fun with it – I expect to have nonzero fun reading this kind of thing for the rest of my life, there’s something really id-tickling about powerful people who exercise power well.)

Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark is good because the relevant monarch characters’ goal is to abolish the monarchy when they ascend to power, but on other axes the trilogy is 3/5 for me, so not a strong rec.

I think people more commonly get this way about fictional billionaires because current billionaires are real and unlikeable people who tend to have crushed many bodies underfoot in the process of obtaining their position, but I find their existence strictly less offensive than that of kings, who, like Genghis Khan, get less flak because they’re further away from us despite greater crimes.

This really bugged me about the Game of Thrones adaptation, the books were very squarely against the idea of a “good king”, and especially that being one would help you replace a “bad king”, that what seemed bad-as-in-morally-wrong-as-seen-from-democratic-liberalism was just good-as-in-instrumentally-competent-as-seen-from-feudalism

Like Ned Stark, in abjuring rulership in favor of the interests of the realm, concerned with truth and legitimacy, personally bearing burdens instead of manipulating others in court political games – the archetypal good ruler! Which is exactly why he’s decapitated as soon as things kick off.

Lady Stark! Cares about the status of women! Thinks her daughter for the Lannister son is a fair prisoner exchange! Proud to have raised a son who wants to marry the woman he loves and impregnated rather than a political match!

Which earns her the Red Wedding, not even as punishment for breaking patriarchal norms but because those norms were downstream of the implications that power comes from inherited territory.

And that’s really lost in the show. Danerys – she’s really the best stand-in, drawing some of her power with the charisma of righteous acts, and “be wary of endowing trauma with charismatic power, traumatized people won’t necessarily use it in healing ways”, that’s a pretty interesting 2010s message really.

But like – she freed the slaves! They proclaim her Mother of Dragons and swear loyalty to her!… slavishly. You eventually realize her army is no more loyal and capable than when she owned it, only now she has to try to reorder society to try and feed it, while her previous landowning allies fund terrorism against her, she might herself have to marry a stranger for the second time to salvage it, and critically she is even further from her goal of sailing across the sea and retaking Westeros

Which was a corrective to decades of fantasy moral Mary-Sueing, as if the moral norms of mass-market softcover purchasers would somehow give an advantage in feudal rulership