In my opinion, monarchies are one of the most immoral forms of government. You have a small class of people who deem themselves greater than anyone else in the land merely because their parents had a certain name and passed it on to them. Not only is there this sense of entitlement and superiority, but the masses bow to these people and go along with it, effectively giving up their liberties merely for the comfort of having someone tell them what to do.
Seriously, why should Britain pay for your life of leisure? Isn't a military salary good enough?
For those of you who might remember from high school (I read it on my own), but Thomas Paine had some things to say about monarchies at the beginning of his pamphlet Common Sense. In talking about the nature of a hereditary system, Paine says,
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
Don't mess with...Virginia?
Some harsh words that, if said by an MP in Parliament today, would probably ruffle some feathers. Yes, there are anti-royalists in the British government today, but words this strong would be deemed a little too much, at least. And Paine said them more than 230 years ago.
The institution of a monarchy is un-American at its core. As can be evidenced by the rest of Common Sense (of which John Adams said, “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain” without it), the American republic was established as an exact contradiction to the system of a monarchy. Instead of having a family rule in perpetuity (at least until the next guy came along, killed everyone, and said God chose him), Americans elect representatives who serve for certain periods of time, after which their constituents can choose the previously elected again or go another route with someone new. In the American system, there isn’t even a “ruler”, there are merely those representing the interests of the people.
Now, it makes sense for someone like J.R.R. Tolkien to write lovingly about monarchies in The Lord of the Rings. After all, he was British, and (politically) a royalist before anything else. He loved the pageantry of kings and queens and found divine inspiration in their rule (never mind all of the kings who screwed everything up, were swine, and committed borderline genocide on those who thought differently from them). But, when it comes to an American writing fantasy, we all seem to immediately go to the monarchy as well like little writer sheep following the original (Tolkien).
"Just as long as I'm not the one getting persecuted, I'm good with it!" - Tolkien (citation needed)
Another factor to throw in, is that most fantasies are written in medieval periods which naturally gravitate towards heavy centralization of government due mostly to the fact that, without exception, the masses are stupid and uneducated in medieval periods. That’s why they’re medieval instead of modern. There can be only one source of education when it’s highly expensive and impractical when most people are so close to death everyday that all they have time for is harvesting or finding food and making more kids to help in the fields. It makes sense from a naturalistic perspective (something I’ll touch on again in another post, possibly).
However, and I could be really wrong about this (I read The Lord of the Rings and not much else outside of that in the fantasy realms), but monarchies are still seen as the only alternative, and usually as a positive in modern fantasy, especially American fantasy. I can get it, to a degree. It’s cool to have the banners, the crowns, and the genuflecting to an authority in chain mail, but I must point back to Thomas Paine and the original idea of the immorality of monarchies at their core: they’re un-American at best and outright evil at worst.
This was my high school...pretty much.
This all started while watching the first episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation. I had known almost nothing about the show/book before I started watching the previewed fifteen minutes. I just knew that those fifteen minutes were well shot, well acted, and intriguing. I really enjoyed the first episode (I’m guessing that those calling it the best show on television have seen more than the first episode because there wasn’t enough of an impression there to take me anywhere close to that pronouncement), but I began to have this nagging question in my mind: why would an American write a fantasy novel about a bunch of people fighting over a crown? It’s….un-American.
Good, violent, boobie filled, stuff.
In my novel (buy!buy!buy!) A Quest through Winter Sleep, I do fall into that trap, partially. The world is set in a medieval period with a queen as the head of a government, but she’s nowhere near the focus of the novel. No, she’s in two scenes, and she’s not portrayed all that positively. People tell our main character, Fanny, that they owe so much to her, but Fanny knows that the queen never helped her during any tough harvests, and that she’s barely helping her at all on her journey to find her mother. She decides that monarchies and loyalties to princes are unnecessary elements of the outside world that she wants nothing to do with. So, I used the idea of a monarchy, but I neither focus on nor prop it up.
To give you a further look into the future, I will say that I have several books planned in this little series of mine (none of which are directly related to any others), and the third book does follow the actions of a queen during a time of war, and I plan on making her look good, but that’s one element in a larger work that watches a country evolve from medieval to futuristic. I even had a whole timeline worked out (I lost the notebook it was in a few years ago and have hated myself for it ever since) where I tracked the evolution of the country from monarchy to democratic republic. None of the books would have taken place during that period (although I probably could have written one or two), but I’m always watching for the world to move on, unlike almost every other major fantasy work (I think The Golden Compass is a good exception to this) where the entirety of eternity will be spent in the medieval period, which means that the authors can keep their invented countries in monarchies in perpetuity. They don’t seen any evolution of the world, they want to keep their masses in subjugation to princes who make war for years at a time instead of moving on to a world where commerce is used instead.
How….un-American.
But, then again, I could be completely wrong and someone will write back to me with a thousand examples of fantasy that have broken free from these ideas, in which case I will respond with the redefinition of fantasy in this post to mean “mainstream fantasy”, and pray for the best.
