 The fantasy genre, as we know it, was created by J. R. R. Tolkien in the early 20th century with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Before that, fantasy mostly consisted of fairy tales and myths. The idea of creating a whole new world populated by different races and filled with magic is a relatively new idea. And yes, I know that Middle Earth is supposed to be our world in the distant past, but it's so far removed that it can be considered a separate world. It makes sense that almost all modern fantasy takes heavy inspiration from the works of Tolkien, either directly or indirectly. He was truly a foundational author. The weird thing isn't that people have taken inspiration from him. The weird thing is where they took inspiration from him. Making a hundred carbon copies of Middle Earth with elves and dwarves, putting everything at a medieval level of technology, making the plot revolve around a magical MacGuffin, making the main villain some sort of Dark Lord, implying that certain bloodlines are destined to rule and that the rest of us are inferior peons that need to get used to doing what we're told. Hang on, what was that last one? Oh no, this is one of THOSE video essays, isn't it? Alright, spoilers ahead for the following series. Lord of the Rings, Mistborn Era 1 & 2, Warbreaker, Powder Mage, and the Game of Thrones TV show. So we all know the plot to The Lord of the Rings. Long ago, there was an evil Dark Lord who tried to take over. He was stopped, but not killed, and now he's about to come back. The only way to save the world is to bring the magical artifact that holds the Dark Lord's soul to a place where it can be destroyed. The ones who take up the quest include a normal guy who can't fight, but is immune to the corrupting influence of the magic artifact, a wizard who guides them, a best friend, and a super badass warrior who's secretly the heir to a powerful kingdom. That last one is the one I want to focus on. His name is Aragorn, if you didn't know. In this series, he's the rightful heir to the throne of Gondor, which is why the last entry in the trilogy is called The Return of the King. Gondor is a big country that borders Mordor and is thus largely responsible for keeping the rest of the continent safe from Orca attacks. The kingdom went into a decline when the line of kings died out and a line of stewards took over, which in this case was basically just a monarchy by a different name. Things were bad and the kingdom started to shrink and lose power. Then, hundreds of years later, the rightful heir just happened to come along. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn takes the throne and then everything is okay again. The obvious implication here is that we just need to give power over to the right people and let them take care of everything. As long as the right guy has absolute power of life and death for everyone in Gondor, things will be great. He might have the ability to abuse his power, but he never would because, uh... This theme is bizarrely prevalent in all sorts of fantasy, especially epic fantasy. But wait, you might be saying. The fantasy genre has shifted quite a lot in recent years. More modern works have a different take on this, to which I ask, do they really? In Era 1 of the Mistborn series, the world is ruled by an immortal tyrant called the Lord Ruler. The Lord Ruler uses 90% of the population as slaves and is backed up by a small group of nobles who do his bidding. His rule is undoubtedly horrible for just about everyone, and when the heroes overthrow and kill him, it's a triumphant moment. And in the second book, the absolute despotic nature of the final empire is replaced with a constitutional monarchy. There's still a king, but he's reigned in by a legislature. The legislature is one-third nobles, one-third merchants, and one-third everybody else, so this obviously isn't ideal. The wealthy are still greatly overrepresented, but it's about as good as you can hope for in a pseudo-medieval setting. It's a significant step in the right direction. The thing is that, later on, King Ellen becomes a tyrant and it's portrayed as a good thing. For most of the second book, he's trying to balance the various factions within Luthadel and the outside powers trying to take the city by force. Despite his efforts, the legislature votes him out of power in a perfectly legal process that he himself invented to prevent any one man from becoming a tyrant. In the climax, there's a big epic battle and the good guys win. But while all of that is happening, Ellen's magical assassin wife goes around and kills most of the people who pose a threat to his power and forces the rest to swear allegiance to him as their absolute monarch. Also, Ellen isn't even present for this ceremony, and if he was, he would disapprove. The whole thing is kind of stupid when you say it out loud. Not to sound like I'm talking shit, of course. It's still an amazing book. By the time the last book rolls around, Ellen is the unquestioned ruler of the final empire, the man who united everything in the power vacuum left after the Lord ruler's death, and by taking control, he managed to make everything awesome. At one point, he literally states that the time for debates and legislatures is later when the crisis has passed. I don't know about the rest of you, but if my head of state seized absolute power by killing his rivals and then said that he would give up power at some unspecified point in the future, I'd be a tad worried. What was wrong with the Lord ruler wasn't that someone wielded absolute power over the lives of millions. The problem was that it wasn't the right person who wielded absolute power over the lives of millions. While we're on the subject of monarchy, let's talk about the divine right of kings. The short version of this is that a monarch was born into his position because God put him there, therefore all his subjects had to obey him or they were disobeying God. The European-Christian concept of divine right of kings didn't gain popularity until the late Middle Ages and early modern era since before then most monarchs didn't have the power to rule as despots, because, you know, feudalism. Many cultures had a similar idea such as the Chinese mandate of heaven, but since most fantasy literature is very strongly European coded and because divine right has served as the precursor to other forms of authoritarianism such as fascism, I've decided to refer to examples by that term. While divine right usually only referred to monarchs to help them consolidate their power, the same idea was used to justify the position of lower nobility as well. The sequel series to Mistborn is the Wax and Wayne series. After the world was wrecked and rebuilt, the government was restructured as well. The government there is run by a legislature who elects a governor as an executive. The legislature is half elected members and half aristocrats that inherited their position. Certainly a better, more egalitarian system than a monarchy, but obviously still skewed towards the upper classes. You'd think that the series would be focused on pointing out this flaw, instead it's all about wax, who coincidentally happens to be a noble, defending this system and learning that it's his responsibility to live in immense luxury and wealth because he votes on stuff sometimes. The people who try to overthrow this system are the bad guys here. For some reason. In another book by Brando Sando, Warbreaker, the god-king of Halandrin is revealed to be a figurehead who doesn't do any of the actual ruling. He's kept away from the levers of power at all levels and sequestered away from the populace so that they never find out what's going on. At the end, his powers are restored, allowing him to save the day and take control of Halandrin for real. We don't see much of the aftermath or his reign, but we're led to believe that everything was great, even though he's so uneducated he couldn't read until halfway through the book. Then there's the Wheel of Time, the Night Angel trilogy, the Summoner, and a bunch of others. They all follow this same basic pattern. As long as the right guy is in charge, things will go fine and the country will prosper. Weirdly enough, this ties into the chosen one trope that Epic Fantasy is so fond of. Wheel of Time is all about the reincarnation of an old hero coming back to save the world again. Many of the subplots in the series revolve around people not accepting that Rand is the Dragon Reborn and him having to subdue them. Then at the end, when they all start following his lead and doing whatever he says, the world is saved. While this isn't related to royalty per se, it's the same idea of letting God or the spirits or the universe just decide things for you and go along with what you're better say, and it's extremely common. There are only two modern series I can think of that refute this idea, but I'll save the spicy one for last. First is the Powder Mage Trilogy. The first book begins with the king being overthrown in a coup and replaced with a Democratic Republic as a government. This breaks a centuries-old contract that was made with the gods of their world, causing some of them to come down from heaven to set things back on the right path. It also aggravates their neighboring monarchs who don't want revolutionary fervor to spread inside their borders. Fantasy French Revolution, in other words. The story goes the way you'd expect. Bad guys are fought, the days saved, and in the end, Adroh stays a representative democracy. There's not much discussion on the merits of monarchy versus republic, it's just understood that modern audiences see the former as archaic, inefficient, and weighted against the majority of the population. It isn't just that the heroes destroy the monarchy, it's that they refute the notion that following the will of God is the best path. In Adroh, the people run things, for better or for worse. Mostly for better, since the gods in that series just destroy everything in sight. Now comes the fun part. I'm gonna talk about the ending to Game of Thrones. The entire point, and I do mean the entire point of that series, was to show off how letting someone be in charge just because they were born into the right family is both stupid and unjust. Eddard Stark is shown to be, air quotes around this part, a good lord who takes care of his people. Most of the other aristocrats shown range from men indifferent to their subjects to men who get sadistic pleasure from torturing and killing them. The legal system in place offers no protections for their victims whatsoever. We love the Starks because they're generally nice people, even while they're starting wars that get thousands of their own people killed for their own personal reasons. We hate the Lannisters because they start wars that get thousands of people killed for their own personal reasons, but they're mean about it. I'm not saying that Tywin and Cersei aren't awful people, because they are. They regularly lie, torture and abuse others for their own power. I'm saying that characters like Nedd and Robb Stark do similar things and we forgive them for it because they act nicer to their loved ones. Or are we forgetting how Nedd took a 10-year-old Theon hostage and threatened to execute him if his father acted out of line? Or how Jon hanged a child? Or how Catlin started a war that got thousands of her own people killed because she was sad about her son almost dying? Or how Robb escalated that war by declaring independence? In the end, whether someone is a good guy or a bad guy in the minds of the audience is defined not by how they treat their people or their effectiveness as rulers, but whether they help or hinder the Starks. Which brings me to Daenerys. She has a sympathetic backstory and goes through horrible abuse, which makes us all rightfully like her. Then when she comes to power, she goes around conquering everything in sight and killing everyone who gets in her way. And we're okay with this because when SHE lies and cheats and betrays, she's only hurting slave masters and people we the audience have never met. Remember when Peter Baelish betrayed Ned and we hated him forever after that? I guess that's different because we knew and liked Nedd, but we disliked the slave masters. I'm not saying that freeing slaves and killing their owners is bad. I'm saying that we as an audience were way too happy to cheer for someone killing their political opponents just because we disagreed with them. Sure, we all know that slavery is evil. The problem is that the masters of Slaver's Bay knew it was okay. The Dothraki knew it was okay to raid and pillage everything in sight. Cal Drogo knew it was okay to rape his teenage wife. Fascists know it's okay to murder members of lesser races. If you let yourself believe that those who oppose you are evil and deserve to be killed, you're allowing yourself to look past atrocities committed against them and you're shutting yourself down to the possibility that someone you disagree with might have a point. Call me crazy, but I don't think we should be encouraging people to use the power of the state to kill people they don't like. Daenerys was never going to break the wheel. She was the wheel, and it was shoved in our faces from the start. She was someone who took power by force, left a trail of destruction in her wake, justified it by claiming she had a superior bloodline, but somehow she was different than what came before? The biggest problem with believing that enlightened despots or benevolent dictators are a real thing is that it's a mindset that causes people to believe that any dictator they personally like falls into that category. George Double R Martin and the showrunners wrote these characters as likable and charismatic in order to draw us in, the same way politicians have always done. Then when Daenerys continued to act the exact same way she always had, a large portion of the show's fanbase lost their fucking minds. Our benevolent dictator would never do something bad to people that we like. She's only supposed to hurt those OTHER people. They actually acted this way before the show even ended. A lot of them read spoiler leaks and said that it would be bad before they even watched, which seems to contradict their claims that they're fine with the ending and only hate the execution. That and their constant fanart of John and Danny's incest, baby. Strangely enough, this is one of the few opinions that knee-jerk misogynists who want to distract from their toxicity by pointing to a likable female character and folk feminists whose activism only consists of discussing media and want someone to project themselves onto have in common. In the end, Bran gets the Iron Throne, not because he was born into it, but because those who chose him felt he was the best fit for the job. Whether you agree or not is another matter. The fact is that he wasn't simply destined for the throne from birth and he didn't come to power violently. Sansa was never destined to become the Queen of the North. She got chosen for the job by having most of her family killed and then proving herself a capable leader. And John became, essentially, King Beyond the Wall the same way. But a huge portion of the audience hated this ending. They hated that their benevolent ruler turned out to be not as benevolent as they initially thought. They hated that the pure-blooded, pretty, light-eyed lady with the strongest army didn't get to spend her life imposing her will on the people of Westeros. That says far more about them than it does about the quality of the last season, I think. Or rather, it says far more about how much the divine right of kings and other forms of authoritarianism have been mashed into our heads over the past hundred years. Or forever. Obviously not everyone who disliked the ending or the final season isn't exactly like this. They don't all hate the same things about it either. That's totally fine. We all have our own tastes and opinions. But you'll have to forgive my frustration when I've had to listen to people aggressively miss the point for the past seven months because they wanted their dragon queen to rule over all the plebeians with no constraints. In an era where authoritarianism and right-wing extremism are on the rise, I have to appreciate people like George D.R. Martin forcing people to look at the ugly sides of themselves. It's unfortunate that many of us are so opposed to introspection that they decided to demand HBO remake the last season to better suit their desires. Their desires in this case being a bog-standard fantasy ending that doesn't make you think. As a brief aside, if you're upset at me criticizing people who sent death threats to producers who made a TV show and in a way they didn't like, feel free to insult me in the comments below. It'll go a long way to dispelling the notion that you're childish and butthurt. I suppose the greater point I'm getting at is why the fuck should we be rooting for the rightful heir to take the throne? Why should we allow somebody to have the power of life and death over us? Why should we have to settle for a benevolent dictator instead of just not having a dictator at all? The fantasy genre has gone through a lot of changes over the years and in a lot of ways it's reflected how the world has changed, but in this sense it's gone backwards. Instead of taking a modern stance on things like magic systems, making the bad guys less evil, or having the protagonist burn down orphanages for shock value, maybe we should look for ways to stop encouraging people to accept letting someone have absolute power just because they have the correct ancestry. Thanks for watching. And thanks to all my patrons, especially Oppo Savilainen, Christopher Hawkins, Joseph Penderraft, and Melanie Austin. If you want to get stuff like early access and the ability to vote on future video topics, consider adding your name to the list. Be sure to subscribe, like this video, and leave a comment. Anyways, I'm going to put on a hazmat suit and check out the comment section. Bye.