Royals Doing Stuff

Out for the weekend, so I’m drafting this Saturday Note a little bit earlier than usual. This one’s inspired by the novel I was reading earlier in the week, Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi.

Teeth feeling weird again, and I don’t like that.  I’m almost done with Stray Gods, at least my first run, and I made some choices I regret! It’s all part of the process, though.

Royals Doing Stuff

This week I read Saara El-Arifi’s Cleopatra, which is overall a good novel (I have Questions about the ending–we shan’t get into that here), though something that struck me as strange throughout: these characters do a lot of their own dirty work. This isn’t a fatal flaw in the book, okay? It’s just odd. There’s a character who, as history tells us, gets killed–instead of ordering the soldiers to do it, one of the royals does it herself. Another character, a military leader of some renown, straight-up assassinates a guy in the street while he’s preaching to a crowd.

This all seems… unlikely.

Look, I know why the author went with it. It’s because the drama works better if our main characters are proactively doing stuff. Going into the specifics of having royals and generals order things to be done means that actions take much longer to be shown on the page, and you have to introduce a separate character (realistically, several separate characters) to interact with and do the things their rulers want them to do. When a king wants someone dead, it’s probably not likely he’s even the same room as the guy getting offed, but that doesn’t make as great drama, so it’s better to have that all happen with the characters present, and have the main characters actually doing the things like killing people, or going on quests, or meeting with spies in covert locations.

I have some issues with Holly Black’s Folk of the Air trilogy, but one thing I do like is that the protagonist very early on is not only not a royal, she becomes a spy for the king, and so she gets to do a lot of those things without it being questionable as to why she’s the one doing it.

Video games definitely have a problem with this, at least action and fantasy-type games. There’s a Tumblr post wondering why, in Dragon Age: Inquisition, you are the one going out gathering supplies, securing alliances, and going on dangerous quests when theoretically, you’re a leader of a powerful organization that should have other people to do that for you. I think the worst example, though, is possibly Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, because the player character is literally Dracula, the Prince of Darkness, and he has to go out and do everything himself. Yeah, the Plot has it so that he’s recently awakened and weakened, but, uh… there should still be minions for that. The fantasy of playing as effing Dracula is undermined by the fact that he plays like any other video game protagonist.

You want the players to feel cool and important and that their actions/decisions hold weight with the wider world, yet you don’t want to actually have them delegate because you want them to actually do things.

Likewise, in books, you want the reader to follow characters taking important actions on the world around them and dealing with the consequences; it’s a lot harder to do that if everything is done through intermediaries, though. 

I mean, there’s a reason that so many Arthurian stories focus on the knights rather than on Arthur himself. Presumably, he’s busy running the kingdom. There are even versions, like the stage play Camelot, where we see Arthur trying to do some administrative reform (his conversation with King Pellinore about making the court system). And even then, that story is explicitly showing us a lot of time not during the adventures of the Round Table’s knights.

Also, The Goblin Emperor is a masterclass on how to write royals in a fantasy story in a way that makes sense, but we can sit here all day talking about The Goblin Emperor.

So, like, I get it, I get that you want the readers to be witness to the action and the drama and all, but you can’t really expect me to read a general stabbing a guy in the street in a public assassination and then not expect me to raise questions like, “Why didn’t he order someone else to do it?” You can’t have a queen stab a guy and not have me ask, “Why didn’t she order one of her guards to do it?” Maybe that’s a weird stumbling block for me to have, but when we’re talking about, saying, Egyptian royalty, I do not get the impression that they’d be taking these actions themselves. They would have to be working through someone else. Yeah, occasional acts here and there, maybe, if they’re spur-of-the-moment decisions. Many of these, however, are not, and that doesn’t quite work for me. I suspect it won’t work for a lot of the audience, as well.

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