Thursday, April 22, 2021

Fantasy stories where Royal Blood gives you Superpowers.

I find this topic interesting to analyze.

On the one hand if you're going to have genetically inherited Superpowers or Magical Affinities be a thing in your fictional setting, it actually seems far more plausible to me that they would become the ruling class rather then the X-Men based standard of making them oppressed minorities.

However on the other hand real world Hereditary Monarchies have been justified by claims that the Royal Bloodline descends from Demigods or when Christianized have some God granted miracle power to vindicate their Divine Right to Rule. So doing this in a Fantasy or Sci-Fi story can intentionally or not seem like vindication of actual Royalist beliefs.

A lot of old 19th Century Novels that don't have fantastical elements do involve lost heirs to titles of Nobility where the lost rightful heir is identified by some Heirloom or Birthmark.  I can see how it would make sense when translating those tropes into a Fantastical setting to use some sort of Super Power or Magical Ability instead.

"The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known." from The Lord of The Rings is the most directly based on the real world equivalent.  The Royal Touch associated with both French and English Kings.  And yeah the Inklings more then any other famous writers of Fantasy were Medievalists in their real world politics.  More recently the Royal Touch has been cited by Da Vinci Code supporters as evidence that the Merovingians descended from Jesus.

In Game Of Thrones and the Novels it's based on the Targaryen ablity to control Dragons is the source of their Divine Right to rule.  People who liked how the final season ended tend to paint the complainers like Lindsay Ellis as the ultimate Girl Boss Feminists who suddenly support Hereditary Monarchy when it's a Woman.  Those critics have in fact made it clear it's about the character development, and suggesting Targaryen madness is simply biological determinism does not actually disagree with Eugenics.

In Attack On Titan those with royal blood can alter memories and it seems also command Titans, or help Titan Shifters control Titans.  And indeed Krista/Historia's arc over the course of Season 2 and the first part of season 3 is the best Return of The Queen arc I've seen so far.

But I want to talk last about something more obscure.  Aldnoah Zero an Anime from 2014 I watched recently on HBOMax.  

It's a Real Robots Mecha show using a lot of tropes codified by Gundam.  But in Gundam the super powers that exist for the purpose of limiting the ability to pilot Gundams to specific people are more like Childhood's End (even calling them Newtypes seems to play on language from that book).  But in this show it's an ability the Royal Family of the Martian Empire was given by some technology of an ancient lost Martian civilization, but that they can also loan to others making them Nobles.  When The Princess does this it tends to be by Kissing them on the Lips.

So this show unlike a lot of Mecha does wind up seeming like a straight forward endorsement of Royalism.  The key to making Peace in the end is getting the good Royal on the Throne.

It also reminds me how a lot of the concepts related to Courtly Love in old Chretien de Troyes style Medieval Romances kind of resemble the modern Internet concept of Simping.  In this Anime whether you're a good guy or a bad guy isn't determined by which side of the War you're on, but whether or not you're Simping for Princess Asseylum.

Those are the four that popped into my head right away as I decided to make this post.  Feel free to comment with other examples you find interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment