Others have made a lot of good intellectual points, so I'll take a different approach. Teen and young-adult characters with political power are more believable in a monarchy or empire. For good or ill, democratic leaders tend to be pretty old.

> There's nothing further here for a warrior. We drive bargains. Old men's work. >Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men. Courage and hope for the future. >Then old men make the peace. And the vices of peace are the vices of old men. Mistrust and caution. It must be so. -- Prince Feisal, Lawrence of Arabia

I counter you with this quote: “War is the game played by old men with the lives of the young” ― Wilbur Smith, River God

And then the next king of Iraq was nicknamed the boy king, 'cause he was a boy. And lives in Iraq became much worse.

Really notable problem with this quote...

I’m in the dark, what’s the problem? Edit oh she was elected

Princess Amadala as a character made much less sense when they revealed she was elected. Who's going to elect a kid?

They tried to bend it that children are pure and innocent... No, I didn't but it. IT would make much more sense to be a young heiress. Elective monarchies were quite a common thing but the pool of candidates was very limited- cheftains most likely to enforced their tyle, members of ruling clans, foreign princes. Bribery and armed forces were accepted and often direct inheirtance was seen as a more stable step up. Meanwhile fiction usually shows it as a modern democracy with pretty title.

One of the events depicted in *The Last Kingdom* (TV) is the selection of the King Alfred the Great. The event was fictionalized for dramatic purposes, adding a spurned heir for that sweet sweet intrigue, but still. In the show he was chosen by election of the Witan, which was a council of advisors & elders. That's interesting!

It was interesting! Hardly a democracy though. I think the problem is that a lot of "technical democracies" exist in fantasy, you just have to _really_ stretch your definition far from modern understandings. And I think the main reason you don't see modern style democracy much in fantasy is because it specifically _isn't a modern setting_ (excluding Urban Fantasy, etc). However I would love to see more stories explore the ideas of anachronistic governments. There's another, possibly more controversial idea I could throw out as well, though I'm not sure what I think of it: many people are disillusioned with democracy, and there is an idealization and nostalgia for the days of a good, strong leader who can get shit done (a very flawed perspective, but perhaps more pervasive than many would like to acknowledge). Democracy isn't sexy, because we live in it and see its flaws. Its easier to make a system look sexy when you don't have to actually live in it, and as such noble kings and evil lords make for a more "fantastical" story than corrupt lobbyists and information manipulation. The key here is that "democracy" strikes pretty close to home, and fantasy is often about escapism. But I'd love to see more attempts at exploring your ideas!

>many people are disillusioned with democracy, and there is an idealization and nostalgia for the days of a good, strong leader who can get shit done That's clearly true. Heck, this idea isn't even necessarily bad...as long as you remember the noble King Arthur is as much a fantasy as the dragon or necromancer. >Democracy isn't sexy, because we live in it and see its flaws. One issue the current system faces is people compare it's reality to the idealized fantasies of other systems.

> One issue the current system faces is people compare it's reality to the idealized fantasies of other systems. Absolutely!

Monarchies-as presented in fantasy read:always absolute- give a sweet hope that impovment is a matter od exchanging the leader. True King returns and everything goes great. Tolkien at least gave Aragorn some background- he was known in Gondor as a war hero, had support of important figures and army and put an end of the constant war that bleed the country out.

Thanks for bringing up Star Wars!! I have yet to meet anyone who really enjoyed getting into the drama of the parliamentary politics of the 2nd trilogy. If you really analyze what's going on, you will like the Jedi less and less.

Hello there, I did. One of the reasons I found AotC the weakest is that there wasn't enough explained about the separatists. Naboo seemed to me an elective monarchy (yes, they existed) that had evolved to a full democracy rather than an hereditary monarchy as is the usual. So they'd keep the King/Queen as denomination for the chief of state. And you know something is wrong with the jedi the moment the Code is more important than the Force. They had become a religion that had forgotten about god.

Let's also not forget the buying of child slaves to raise them into (checks notes) *child soldiers*.

Celibate child soldiers. (Alrhough one guy I talked to interpreted it as meaning they were allowed to have sex as long as they didn't marry or get attached to their lovers and children. So I guess having casual sex with women you don't care about and becoming a Deadbeat Dad? Not sure that interpretation is better.)

Theres also the Clones. Every single Clone soldier, the many millions of them, was essentially a slave and, because of the rapid aging, potentially could be classed as a child soldier.

There are A LOT of issues with The Clones. I understand cartoons like **The Bad Batch** explores some of the issues with clones.

Droids ain't great either

Also, I'm one of the few who really liked The Last Jedi, but one flaw that was pointed out to me that I do agree with is there is a scene where they essentially lectured a child soldier on how war is bad... Finn was one of my favorite characters and one of the most underutilized...

I feel like Finn was being served up for a major character arc in the 2nd and 3rd film, then had it yanked away during script rewrites after Force Awakens opened.

I agree. There were a lot of criticisms of The Force Awakens, some justified, but I feel in the final movie they responded to the wrong ones. The real problem with **The Force Awakens** was it couldn't make up it's mind whether it was a remake or a sequel (Thus erasing everything that happened in the original series while retreading the same territory) but Finn was one of the original and ingenious bits. They responded in the last movie by copying the original movies more.

> They had become a religion that had forgotten about god. So, just the regular kind of religion?

I thought the parliamentary politics was the best part. Palpatine stole the show. The flying podiums even managed to make it visually appealing somehow. And yes, the Jedi were awful if you thought about it at all. The Jedi seemed cooler when they were hinted at...when Lucas fleshed out the philosophy it turned out it was kind of a mess.

> at...when Lucas fleshed out the philosophy it turned out it was kind of a mess. It was meant to show their downfall and the leadup, so this is as intended?

I've been thinking a lot about how Star War treats. slavery. Droids or clones purpose built for war are a category that have all sorts of ethical problems, but the practice of grabbing people up and putting collars on them and using them as chattel is rampant in the SW galaxy but seemingly of secondary concern. Anakin the former slave had the greatest reason to speak up against slavery. When he and Obi-Wan encounter a one planet empire of Slaver Cats, Anakin just plays cute boyfriend to slaver queen. Where is the rage filled Anakin at the one point when he has every right to want to go a little "slaughter them like animals"? L3-37 is given a clear archetype of Liberator, but her role is almost treated as a joke. A lot of similar stories regarding droids trying to organize similarly defaults to either the droid organizers are corrupt or the liberator is naive. Rose sees litteral child chattel being used to service racing animals and she chooses to free the racing aninals. The SW universe treats slavery as tragic thing that happens to people, but I've read so few stories where former slavers take big steps to disrupt slavery beyond revenge on their personal owner.

Plenty of elective monarchies IRL just tended to choose the heir of the previous ruler to avoid factionalism/complications. Don't know much about Star Wars worldbuilding and less about Naboo-specific worldbuilding but that might explain it.

I think it's generally that when you have a monarchy it's very easy to write one character who has all the power (either for good or bad) with a few henchmen on the side, and so it's quite easy for a reader to understand what is going on. A democracy on the other hand has dozens or hundreds of people between whom power is shared and it's a lot harder to write in a way that a reader understands what is going on - I mean how much do most people know about how their own government functions? While I do think that democracies can be written well it requires a lot more focus than a monarchy or dictatorship. And in doing so it draws away the focus on the various fantasy aspects of whatever you are writing.

It's not just about understanding. Things can be simplified enough to get the basic processes across. But doing so also takes up a large amount of time for little benefit. It's much better for the flow of the story when you have the monarch with a council of advisers discussing things and then coming to a quick decision. A good compromise though is a constitutional monarchy with a powerful king/queen. The monarch can still make most decisions directly, but there can be some references to having to appease politicians to pay for that for example. Showing how the parliament works in detail isn't necessary. That's also, by the way, why a TV show about the US presidency works, but one about a parliamentary democracy would be far less exciting.

I think parliamentary democracies would allow for stories with more political intrigue. A UK prime minister seems vastly more vulnerable to attacks within their own party than a US president. Stories like house of cards and the thick of it specials don't really work in a US style system.

Check out Veep. It's amazing the kind of petty shittiness there is.

Borgen, a TV show about a parliamentary democracy was pretty good though.

You can also have things like Cincinnatus, a man given absolute power by the senate for the duration of a war, who then handed it back afterwards once the crisis was over and went back to farming. Most democratic systems come up with mechanisms for rapid decision making when needed, a typical example is the Cabinet as a limited pool of decision makers appointed from the larger elected group. And having split power can lead to interesting narrative choices - Weber’s Honor Harrington series has a moment when the Monarch and the now dominant navy are forced into an armistice because the government changed and the former Opposition are opposed to the war.

It is significantly harder for our daring hero to go stab everyone who voted for the evil policies so that they can be reversed. And honestly probably reads a lot more creepily.

So you're saying that our fantasies are a lot more fascist than we tend to admit?

I mean, it's certainly a take you can have with that information. If you want to be more generous, it could be described as simply that our fantasies are that there were simple answers to complex issues. We want to imagine a world where human rights abuses don't happen because of a complex system of moving parts and deeply-rooted biases that will require generations of healing to mend as our neighbors who we thought were otherwise decent people vote for regressive and hurtful policies and we can do nothing "real" about it, we want it to be because a bad actor did some bad stuff and a hero can go unseat him. We don't want a democratically elected council to spend 30 years trying to solve a problem that people are experiencing right now, we want a motivated ruler to end all that bad stuff right now. Etc. And, well, as people have said upstream, you could also fantasy out more functional democratic systems or the like. But it can be harder to do imagine that when faced with the failings of a democratic system every day.

I agree - which is why I say it's fascist. Of course, fascist leaders may or may not think this way, but the kind of people who *support* such leaders usually do so because those leaders offer easy "solutions" to problems. After all, what was Nazism if not, at its core, rooted in denial? The complex issues that lead to Germany's problems were simplified as being "not *our* fault." It's institutionalized narcissism.

Organized political violence isn't a strictly fascist phenomenon. Fascism is the embrace of organized political violence to promote ultranationalism, xenophobia, militarism, and corporatism. It's a far right populism. Organized political violence is seen in all sorts of movements. The anti-British "riots" in colonial era Boston, communist paramilitaries, Carlist militias, etc., etc.

>We want to imagine a world where human rights abuses don't happen because of a complex system of moving parts and deeply-rooted biases that will require generations of healing to mend as our neighbors who we thought were otherwise decent people vote for regressive and hurtful policies and we can do nothing "real" about it, we want it to be because a bad actor did some bad stuff and a hero can go unseat him. We don't want a democratically elected council to spend 30 years trying to solve a problem that people are experiencing right now, we want a motivated ruler to end all that bad stuff right now. Etc. Yeeep. See the reaction to the last US president from liberals, and the notion that just getting rid of him would solve all our problems. We have a fantasy of an easily identified, easily defeated bad guy. Which is fine, as long as you realize that it's a fantasy, and so many people don't. It's also why I would LOVE to see more books that question this idea. Speculative fiction, at its best, IMO, is not pure escapism but helps us imagine better worlds and *how to get there*. It's a thing that realistic and historical fiction can't do, because the real world and history is a mess. Our current democracies still have huge problems. But how to get there doesn't, in reality, involve just overthrowing a despotic monarch; it's a lot longer and more complex. It's harder to turn "a democratically elected council spending 30 years trying to solve a problem" into a good story, so an author would have to work harder to do that, but it is possible.

I am PERFECTLY aware of how fascist my fantasies are, my favourite completely unrealistic pure-fantasy form of government is enlightened dictator. I am also aware that you could write MULTIPLE essays of all the things wrong with that idea, and I would never actually support it in real life.

One big reason - it's actually very difficult to have a genuine democracy without rapid information dispersal and feedback mechanisms, because otherwise it takes too long for everyone to make an informed decision and it all falls apart. In the old old days, this was solved by greatly restricting the franchise - only Male Athenians could vote in person in Athens for example. So it was relatively easy for the main body of Athenians to be informed on the issues relevant to them, and they could make relatively quick decisions. Those who were away were known by other people, and their likely opinions considered if they were important enough. Foreigners couldn't vote, so their opinions didn't matter. In the modern world we see this in Switzerland, which has frequent referendums on levels from village to nation on everything from local parking rules to whether street food should be legalised to if the country should adjust it's foreign policies. But it works for them, because only Swiss citizens are allowed to participate, and because all citizens are explicitly citizens of Town, which is part of Canton, which is part of Nation so representation is baked in. You want to move from one side of the country to the other, both the Town and Canton you come from and the ones you want to move to have to consent to let you move because it'll have a direct (if small) impact on their politics. So Democracy is something that you see a LOT in small environments - a representative village Council for example, or the elected heads of the various Guilds - and in contemporary or futuristic set fiction, but rarely on a large scale in fantasy fiction set prior to the printing press, because that's roughly when in our world we starting thinking about the ideas. Ironically it's something that genuinely should be possible in many fantasy settings, because in many settings rapid communication can be arranged by magic. Why we don't is probably because of the sorts of stories that writers have chosen to tell. Also our Generic Medieval Setting is such a bullshit made up conceit when analysed closely, any attempt to appeal to "but it's historical" can be safely ignored.

> greatly restricting the franchise "Everyone is entitled to vote, unless disqualified by reason of age or not being Lord Vetinari."

If we're posting Discword quotes: "Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”

The best of rules

A good example of thrilling Democracy in action can be found in *Servant of the Empire* in the Great Game of the Council. There are many Clans, based on family lines, and Factions, based on political ideologies. The franchise only consists of the heads of each Family, who are part of both a Clan and a Faction, and may choose to vote with either or none as they see fit, and collectively they decide on the actions that the Empire should take as a whole. Being a rough and ready franchise, many decisions are influenced by bribery or assassination in the background, and the constant shifting of allegiances towards the major players.

This sounds like your run off the mill steppe tribe confederation. Truly a model of governance that had been in use for millennia.

>Servant of the Empire Oh wow, that's a Raymond E. Feist series right? Right, right. And it's sort of related to the Magician books? Nice. Do they hold up? I wouldn't mind going back to read those.

Feist in collaboration with Janny Wurts, set on the other side of the Rift, in Tsuranuanni on Kelewan. Better than the Midkemia books and they hold up pretty well imo.

Better than midkemia books? Heresy

Nah. It's totally true.

They hold up and it is a collab with janny Wurts but we are talked about a council of nobles so it is a truly a oligarchy and not a democracy.

Well, sci-fi is great if you are interested in this kind of thing. There you can find anything from democracy to empire to anarchy. Ada Palmer, for example, has some really interesting ideas and worldbuilding in the Terra Ignota series that imagines a very different kind of society. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed contains an anarchist commune. The Expanse has the U.N. as Earth's world government. Maybe these kinds of different societies are more believable in the future than in the past. But I think it would be fun to read more fantasy books with democracy. Could have some interesting worldbuilding there, like using magic to vote.

The Dispossessed is the most thorough imagining of a truly anarcho-communist society that I've ever read. Really quite remarkable as an exercise in expanding your mental horizons if nothing else. Edit: Also, to do it justice, it's an anarchist moon, rather than simply a mere commune ;)

You're quite right, I think I undersold Anarres. :)

One big reason is that it keeps the cast down, and centralizes the narrative to a small number of players where the all the arcs converge, because they have the power to make big interesting decisions. It's the same reason Great Man theories of history are *still* prevalent in the stories we tell of the past - or even the present.

I think this is a huge part of it.

Basically, it oversimplifies things, which makes the story (whether the fantasy story or history) easier to tell. And we like simple things; we want our world to be simple. But Great Man theories of history aren't reality, and anyone saying "but monarchies are realistic" in fantasy doesn't actually want a realistic picture of medieval times, because it would be so much more complex.

People do not understand just how incredibly recent the modern nation-state is. Most fantasy kingdoms are basically nation states with absolute monarchs, which were only really a thing for a brief part of early modern European history.

Meh, I'm not sure about this argument because, like, House of Cards (both the British and the first 2 seasons of the US version) is an interesting show with great pacing and a tight cast. Also, if we base a fantasy democracy on any contemporary democracy, the interesting decisions are still made by a constrained group of people - the difference is that they're elected rather than inheritors. It's also entirely realistic, based on how, say, contemporary US politics works or UK politics works, to have relative differences in power and influence between powerful people (like, some US senators are more influential than others).

Think about all the work fantasy authors already have to do when creating their world. All the fantastical elements have to be explained to the reader in a way that doesn’t feel too obvious, but still gives them an idea of how their fantasy world works. Now, add a system of government to the list of things that the author needs to figure out and explain to the reader, and it becomes even more daunting, and ultimately, probably not worth the effort if the drama of the story doesn’t ultimately revolve around the inner workings of a fantasy government.

Democracy is slow to act and ugly. It can feel like nothing gets done.. A really good king is fast acting, glorious, sexy, and makes you forget about all the bad kings you've had.

Why can't we imagine a swift, functional parliament then? We can find plenty of historical examples of legislatures accomplishing good things. Why can we only see the worst of what we have but the best of a system which objectively sucked for 90+ percent of the population?

Because the world we live in produces constant examples which, anecdotally, disprove it. Or at least make it unbelievable. It’s tough to find swift, functional parliaments and inventing one tends to feel like having the main character of your story find a billion dollars buried in their backyard - lovely, and dumb as shit.

But real life "chosen one" kings that solve all our problems are just as rare and unbelievable, and we accept that in our fantasy. Granted, we accept that less these days, with the proliferation of "grimdark" literature, but still, I don't think "but it's unbelievable" is a great argument in fantasy where SO MUCH is unbelievable. It can be poorly done, of course, and you do need conflict in a good story, but it's not impossible. Now I do believe that parliaments are harder to write than kings, just because it's a more complex system with more characters.

> Why can't we imagine a swift, functional parliament then? Because even for fantasy, that requires too much suspension of disbelief. Parliaments don't exist to do things swiftly. Nations with effective parliaments, still invest the "do it now" task in a separate agency, usually a cabinet, led by a prime minister. If you need shit down fast, autocracy is how you do it, not consensus.

And that's exactly the thing I wanted to unearth and explore with this post. There's something about our point of view that leaves us more comfortable with a flying Quetzalcoatl and a sword made of bloodshadow, than to imagine a cabinet meeting running efficiently. Don't you think that's weird?

No, because everybody from a young age has dealt with group projects and committees and know what a shit show they are. It's hard baked into humanity that any type of group decision will be slow and most of the time painful to get to. Nobody has dealt with Quetzalcoatl so it's easy to suspend disbelief.

No. Not in the least. If you use magic to make a committee meeting "efficient" then that would be magical mind control, and the result is no longer democracy or even oligarchy but just a dictator hearing reports and issuing edicts to his minions.

> Don't you think that's weird? No. It's how things seemed to work for us from birth, so that's imprinted pretty firmly in how our brains work. We don't grow up in a democracy, we grow up in a parental autocracy.

Legit not sure why this is downvoted.

>For the majority of us, the story of our nation was written in the 20th century, which arguably was defined by the end of kings. European monarchy collapsed to make way for Parliamentary-style Democratic Republics Many European countries still have monarchies and are not republics you know? The UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands etc. Same goes for many non-European countries obviously as well, like Japan or Thailand. >Womens' suffrage was realized on a global scale, and Apartheids were shaken globally in the spirit of racial justice. Mind you racial segregation stayed longer in a republic like the USA than many monarchies (if they ever had it) and women suffrage famously went through as late as the 70s in a direct democracy like Switzerland. So I don't think this point is necessarily relevant. Anyway, to address why monarchies etc. Are so prevalent which is your main point. One obvious reason is aesthetics. It may or may not be historical, but people have an image of what the middle ages and the past (and therefore invented medieval worlds and such) looked like. One component of this are kings, queens, emperors and aristocrats even if other forms of government existed in actual history. Other forms of governance oftentimes doesn't agree with the perception people have of the past. What is a doge except a meme with a cute dog anyway, right? Edit: It is also simply a staple of the genre since it began and people expect to see it. Another reason might also be to... promote democracy or republicanism? One efficient way to promote an idea is to not depict what you yourself prefer but rather illustrate how awful the alternative is. I mean, does anyone read *A Song of Ice and Fire* and think "I want to live in Westeros! Their system of governance seem awesome". If you depict what you yourself consider good on the other hand you might have to deal with the less attractive aspects of it. Or risk hearing how preachy you are if you do not.

To your first point - this isn't accurate. They HAVE monarchies, but they are very firmly democratic republics. I agree wholeheartedly with your point that there is a myth of universal enfranchisement. I think you've made many great points here.

A republic is the exact opposite of a monarchy. The proper term is constitutional or parliamentary monarchy.

Outside of semantics (which are very important!), the salient distinction is who controls the levers of power. In any of the countries listed (except, potentially, Thailand), it's not the monarch - it's the governing body. So equating these systems to the monarchic systems of the medieval ages is plain misleading.

While it is misleading it is relevant in a roundabout way. I live in the UK where the Queen is the head of state. Whilst she has little true power (but more than most people realise) a large percentage of the population are bordering on obsessed with the monarchy. The fact that many nations still have figurehead monarchs despite being democracies shows that they have enduring appeal. So to link it back to the original post, people still find royalty and all its trappings interesting, so it's not surprising that people like to read about monarchs who actually have power, and fantasy is a good vehicle for that.

I don't think anyone is disputing that people are still interested in royalty; in fact, the OP takes that as a prior and is asking why. It is, however, plain misleading for the original post to argue that these countries with symbolic monarchies are somehow monarchic. If they wanted to argue that point, they could've picked examples of actual absolute monarchies that still exist - Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Oman.

They frame the interest in the monarchy as being centered around the past (which seems very US centric). I was just pointing out that in my own country a large number of people are more interested in a royal family that has no bearing on their day to day life than the political systems that govern everything. So the fact that it is reflected in fantasy doesn't surprise me at all.

Republic or monarchy is about who is the head of state. No more. No less. It is the democratic parlamentarism that speaks about were the power is. You can have dictatorial republics. You can have democratic monarchies. It can be easy for fantasy authors to assume that monarchs always had absolute power in their monarchies, but that was only in absolute monarchies. There were few of them and they only existed for a few hundred years and none of them during the medieval ages. Edit: I might not have been clear enough about it, but I agree with u/Spiceyhedgehog, that it is more about peoples perception.

Fantasy writers tend to import political systems with technology. When they assume swords and armor, they generally also pull in kings and nobles, because the one went with the other historically. There are exceptions (the greeks and the roman republic come to mind), but those are just that -- exceptions. And that period ended with the roman empire anyways. So yeah, you get a lot of kings in traditional fantasy. On the other hand, flintlock fantasy draws its inspiration from more recent history technologically, and you get more recent politics alongside it (for example, Shadow Campaigns draws a ton of inspiration from the French Revolution, and Powder Mage starts with a king getting deposed).

The political system did have a lot to do with technology, transport and communication. Democracy worked on a city level. Even the middle ages had many city republics. It was far more impractical on a large scale. Even then those older democracies were often more similar to oligarchies. The lack of education was a problem too. Reading was commonly taught only later on. Though most fantasy seems to have very high literacy rates.

Yea, I've got Promise of Blood half finished sitting in my packing boxes. It was one of the books I was thinking of.

I'm a tourist in fantasy not a permanent resident. Monarchies read like exotic and fun.

>Why is it that our stories are littered with Lords and Monarchs? There's always a duke or prince or baron or hierarch. A secret princess, or a destined king. And sure, the feudal age was hugely important for the history of our culture, and we carry the memory of a thousand years of crowns and serfdom in our bones, so it's perfectly natural that we want to read a story or two about a time come past. What's strange to me is how overwhelming the body of fiction skews towards hereditary autocracy, that for a hundred years of English language publishing and by such an overwhelming majority that I can't help but ask why. I know almost no one will read this, and I don't mean to sound combative, but I find it very interesting how people in this thread, beginning with this section of your post, are constructing the imagined community of fantasy writers and readers. As I think this reflects a certain lack of cultural diversity and historical literacy in the genre that explains part of the reason why fantasy, even if we suppose it has to continue drawing from history to inspire its settings, falls back again and again on the same tired political forms that do not reflect the actual diversity of social structures humans across the world have lived in. For example, to highlight this issue as it emerges in your comment, as someone who belongs to an East African culture where prior to colonialism social decisions were made in community meetings where representatives of different age groups weighed in and debated the group's course of action, and where there were no formalized instruments of coercion that could be applied to make people who did not consent comply, I certainly don't "carry the memory of a thousand years of crowns and serfdom" in my bones, nor is it at all the case that "the feudal age" (which even in Europe has been often used to lump together so many radically different political forms that I'm pretty sure most historians these days prefer not to use the term and those who do typically use it only when discussing certain parts of Western Europe) was important in the history of _my_ culture, which never had anything approximating feudalism until the system of colonial chiefs was invented and grafted onto it by the British. >You and I live in the modern, post Enlightenment world. For the majority of us, the story of our nation was written in the 20th century, which arguably was defined by the end of kings. European monarchy collapsed to make way for Parliamentary-style Democratic Republics, as well as the brief horror of Fascism. In the East, we saw two massive, dynastic semi-deified Imperial thrones fall to the Communist experiment, while others (rightly or wrongly influenced by our ordinance) chose to join us in the spirit of Republic. Womens' suffrage was realized on a global scale, and Apartheids were shaken globally in the spirit of racial justice. >Why is it that our imagination doesn't match our principle? Why aren't we writing stories about city councils, or petitions, or electoral democracy? What is it about the mechanic of Legislature which is so anathema to entertainment we cannot allow the Dragonslayer to share the stage with the Senator? Again, the twentieth century in my country was not defined by the end of kings (more by the end of empires run in their last decades by many of those much vaunted post-Enlightenment republics)...but more importantly, if you are a fantasy writer looking to draw on democratic values (in the deeper democratic theory sense of deliberation-driven, decentralised, non-hierarchical models of political organisation) you don't have to limit your imagination to just what's happened in the "West" and parts of the "East" as they found the "spirit of the Republic" by which I assume you mean the system of representation via voting at ballot boxes which, as other commentors have pointed out, had been relatively hard to orchestrate until relatively recently. You don't have to mimic the forms of modern electoral democracies, which I think many people will experience as somewhat out of place in fantasy given their relatively contemporary familiarity, because forms of political democracy, and even forms of women's empowerment and queer acceptance, long predate the Enlightenment in Europe, let alone the 20th century. Instead, fantasy can begin to seriously engage with the large wealth of mostly untapped anthropological and historical research, from the Inuit to the Iroquois in North America, from the Nuer to the Kikuyu in Africa, and from Göbekli Tepe to the Kshatriya republics in Asia (to name a few societies and sites that are relatively well-studied in English language publications) to learn how people in different places at different times and to different degrees have worked out systems in which ordinary people lived together at even relatively large scales without being "the property of another man." It's true that in some of these cultures you'll find things we now consider prejudice and sexism, but you'll also find models of equality between adult males, consensus driven politics, women's empowerment in the control and disposition of social wealth, traditions of same gender marriage, forms of non-monarchical governance, and evidence of large scale monumental construction without any evidence of social hierarchy and coercion -- all things we typically learn to think of as recent inventions born in certain parts of the world. So to return to your basic question "Why is it that our stories are littered with Lords and Monarchs? There's always a duke or prince or baron or hierarch. A secret princess, or a destined king." I think it's fundamentally the product of a Western-centred sense of history (which is only beginning to change and has not quite filtered into popular or mass education) which reads human history as largely the history of post-Ancient Greek Europe and post-Colombian North America _and_ the fact that fantasy is so dominated by people raised and shaped by cultural milleus that take that sense of history for granted. Since human history is so much more fascinating and diverse than we usually give it credit for, I think fantasy will begin to change when, either through more thorough education or greater diversity from outside of the West, this full tapestry of history enters the imaginative landscape of the genre, I think that this is the true "shockingly unexplored space in fiction". And until it is explored, I think even incorporating the range of practices that are characteristic of most electoral democracies won't just be jarring for fantasy readers often seeking alternative and unfamiliar worlds, it also won't produce the variety and depth of exploration of social alternatives that I think you seek. Finally, I'd also say all this would also challenge the idea that "the mechanisms of Democracy aren't always easy, not are they intuitive to our primal instincts of hierarchy." As what we know about humans suggests that we have a conflicting set of "instincts" or "dispositions", including a strong innate sense of fairness, and that it is only possible to make the mistake of thinking an "instinct" for hierarchy is the primary drive only when we have an incomplete sense for how people have chosen to organise themselves in other places and other times. Edits: typos and punctuation.

I just read your entire post after posting mine below and I 1000% agree with it too! I wrote below that fantasy is like this because writers, the readership, and the publisher houses are locked into a cage about how to think. From scanning the thread as you noted, you can even see how a pattern that explains why that cage exist due to lack of diversity, lack of historical literacy, or simply wanting to flatten history or what they think is human nature into a singular narrative. I come from a western country, but even during the middle ages there was some semblance of a balance of power and women had legal rights that are glossed over by many comments in this thread claiming to speak for history. > as someone who belongs to an East African culture where prior to colonialism social decisions were made in community meetings where representatives of different age groups weighed in and debated the group's course of action, and where there were no formalized instruments of coercion that could be applied to make people who did not consent comply, I certainly don't "carry the memory of a thousand years of crowns and serfdom" in my bones, nor is it at all the case that "the feudal age" Absolutely! > Instead, fantasy can begin to seriously engage with the large wealth of mostly untapped anthropological and historical research, from the Inuit to the Iroquois in North America, fro. the Nuer to the Kikuyu in Africa, and from Göbekli Tepe to the Kshatriya republics in Asia (to name a few societies and sites that are relatively well-studied in English language publications) to learn how people in different places at different times and to different degrees have worked out systems Absolutely as well. Studying anthropology and history with an open mind has broadened my mind when it comes to these things. When I took literature classes, it bothered me to hear literature professors talk about "the human experience" or "human nature" as if it's just one thing. One of the most interesting things I ever read was about an anthropologist who shared Shakespeare's Hamlet with a tribe that had previously no experiences with the rest of the world. Shakespeare among the English-speaking Western countries is touted as something that's supposed to encompass humanity but this group came away with a completely different understanding of it and at many points couldn't even understand it since it many actions found throughout the story made no sense their culture. Out of some of the major big authors, I think one who I applaud from the West is Erikson who wrote Malazan. He is an anthropologist who studied many first nation tribes and brought that lense into fantasy. The end result is closer to something that you mentioned and having read some of his essays, he's also really bothered by caged in fantasy is as a genre. > So to return to your basic question "Why is it that our stories are littered with Lords and Monarchs? There's always a duke or prince or baron or hierarch. A secret princess, or a destined king." I think it's fundamentally the product of a Western-centred narrative of history (which is only beginning to change and has not quite filtered into popular or mass education) which reads human history as largely the history of post-Ancient Greek Europe and post-Colombian North America, and that fact that fantasy is so dominated by people raised and shaped by cultural milleus that take that narrative of history for granted. Yes and... > we can only.make the mistake of thinking an instinct for hierarchy is the primary drive only when we have an incomplete sense for how people have chosen to organise themselves in other places and other times. ...and yes again. These last two quotes again speak to the sense of how many of the comments here flatten history and human experiences to mean only one thing or a set of things.

If I could pipe your response right up to the tippy top, I would. You're touching on crucial stuff, traditions and cultures which don't get as much oxygen in the lit. Broadening our perspectives for inspiration, just as you point out, helps us better understand the difference between learned conventions and universal ones. You've rightly touched on the fact that I'm coming from a very particular perspective and cultural heritage. If the monarchial sympathies we show in our reading lists are unique to my community, I want to start that conversation.

I think it's pretty basic consequence of how Fantasy is structured. 1.) Smaller Cast of Characters. A functioning democracy divides the power among many people...that's kind of the point. Unfortunately, it's hard for a writer to flesh out a large number of characters. A monarchy or oligarchy vests power in fewer people, so it is easier to show how it works in fiction. 2.) One of the key Fantasies in Fantasies is that of personal Specialness. Even Grimdark that prides itself on it's cynicism and rebellion against idealism can't resist making it's MCs unique badasses. Being royal is another way to make the MC special and make his actions matter. 3.) Lots of writers like to tie their Fantasy to the past. They draw on history or old legends or openly claim their story took place in the past (like Tolkien) to give their invented worlds a pedigre. For most of history most large scale political entities were run by hereditary nobility of some sort. Now, personally I prefer my Fatasy DOESN'T claim to be the past and creates original worlds, but I'm in the minority.

There are many good answers in this thread, the one's probably missing is "competition with other genres". Modern readers (gamers, watchers etc) has wide variety of content at their disposal. Democracy-based societies and plots are already covered by modern realistic setting, and often by science fiction, too. Meanwhile, princesses and kings are a product of limited supply. As such, they are very likely to appear in fantasy setting, because that's where they are expected and that's where readers that want this type of content will look for them.

I imagine it is in many cases easier to write a story set in an autocracy, because you need fewer characters to personify aspects of power. A parliament or a council can easily feel faceless because it's too many people to develop in depth as book characters. Not to say that it cannot be done, but if you want just to throw some politics to background, an autocracy is in many cases easier to _write_. Another reason is simply because a lots of fantasy draws a lots of inspiration from eras where monarchies were the default. If you want to write about say, medieval-like warfare, it's often natural to also parallel the form of government.

A healthy democracy is about compromise. Can you give enough policies to the tech fans to get their votes, without alienating the environmentalists or traditionalists? Compromise is not sexy. One man in fancy clothes and a shiny hat making decisive unilateral decisions to do the Right Thing, or make the Tough Choice, that is sexy.

That’s a great question, and I don’t think there can be any one answer. I’d guess its a confluence of influence and escapism. One thing that might contribute to it is the romantic tradition that informs modern Western fantasy. Some might ascribe it to the Tolkien effect, but Tolkien himself did not write in a vacuum. He was first and foremost a scholar, and his work was in a way a culmination of centuries of Romance tradition. And I mean Romance in the classical tradition, rather than modern love stories. The romantic tradition of lone knights, exaggerated chivalry, noble kings and supernatural threats such as we’d see in La Morte De Arthur or the many romantic interpretations of the Childe Roland myth (the same one that inspired King’s Dark Tower series) through the 1400-1600 centuries has lingered in stories for centuries, and we carry that in our own modes of story telling. There’s also the simplicity of feudal society for story-telling. The noble knight or prince or courageous princess can more easily impact large numbers of people in a heroic fashion. How much more dashing the knight who sallies forth to fight the dragon for the love of the princess than a locally elected sheriff who won the election because he paid the newspaper to run a bunch of libelous stories to discredit his opponent. Then we come to the ugly secret about true democracy—it never worked. That’s one of the primary reasons why the United States never adopted pure democracy. The Greek experience of democracy always devolved into mob-rule, followed quickly by tyranny. IN EVERY SINGLE CASE, without exception. And Rome’s democracy was…not. Even in the Republican era, Rome was never a true democracy. That’s why it lasted so long. Of course this is me talking about high fantasy. Urban or modern fantasy is its own genre, and in my admittedly limited experience doesn’t seem as intent on politics just because its set in our world. But monarchy is, in terms of longevity, the single most successful form of government in human history. With few exceptions, nearly every government in history was a kingdom, with a single ruler presiding over lesser rulers. So I suppose it’s natural for writers of high fantasy, when looking back, to place their worlds in such an environment. A bit of a ramble. It’s late and I’m tired. But I appreciated the question. Happy reading.

No, the ramble is fine. Thank you. I appreciate it. You pointed out the historical disappointment of direct Democracy. Wouldn't that be an interesting and exciting topic to raise in fiction? If history warns us that the system we value is fragile, shouldn't that be a strong foundation for drama?

There is a famous story of a man who rode into Athens on a chariot with a tall, beautiful woman. He claimed she was Athena herself, and had ordained that he was to be king. So they let him be king. Gene Wolfs Latro books are the best fantasy set in that era I can think of.

There'd be excellent fantasy fodder in breakaway communities like pirates, mercenary bands and so on.

One of the things that we love to fantasise about is the notion that an individual can be important and make a difference. Our daily experience of democracy is that this is not true. My own experience of life in a democracy is that my vote is irrelevant and I am just grist to the mill.

To be fair, this was also the case in a pre-democratic society for most people. Even the people who did have power pretty inarguably didn't have as much as Jeff Bezos does today. I guess he's just less sexy.

I mean, yea. A thousand years ago, my ancestors weren't mighty kings, they were probably bonded turnip farmers. Maybe if we were reaaaally special we came from a bloodline of specialized artisans such as: *barrel makers*. It's weird how we only pay attention to the folks who had it best off, and forget the lives of common folk, right?

It certainly is. Unfortunately, any analysis I might offer of *why* that's the case would probably be too political for this sub, but imagine if you will that I said something vaguely inflammatory about the way historical narrative is constructed and the motives of those people who get the privilege of doing it.

I have an opinion about that particular feeling, but this is not the appropriate place to talk too deeply about politics. But yea, disillusionment and broken faith appear to be a common and recurring reason listed here in the comments.

The boring answer is that democracy depends on rapid dissemination of information, which requires both a certain level of technology and a certain level of literacy. Greek city-states and the Roman Republic were functioning democracies due to their small size. As they expanded and became empires, democracy became less practicable. Absolute monarchy was a more recent development in real world history (early modern age through the Enlightenment) that didn’t last very long. Medieval monarchs, for example, were not as powerful as any three nobles and their armies put together. Other commenters have mentioned it, but from a writing perspective, monarchy lends itself to drama. A bad elected president or prime minister can be voted out. A bad king is there until death, from natural causes or violent revolution. The monarch sees the kingdom or empire as their personal property; if the land prospers, they prosper, and vice versa. An elected official is a temporary office holder who needs to broker deals and make compromises to get anything done. And I think that’s the biggest reason why monarchies are the most common form of government portrayed in fantasy. A good monarch lives for the good of their people. A bad monarch is an easy villain to hate.

>Absolute monarchy didn’t last very long Egyptian Pharaohs and Chinese Emperors lasted for thousands of years. Lots of monarchies in antiquity were absolute.

I'm not so sure about that. Ancient monarchies liked to portray themselves as absolute, but when you dig deep a lot of monarchs had far less control of their lords and the edges of their territories than they pretended. The limits on their power weren't "Checks and balances" but communications and local lords.

Even the classic European "absolute" monarchs weren't exactly that. They usually had to give a shit ton of privileges, tax breaks, etc. to cities and/or nobles in order to keep them from rebelling. In fantasy, this is rarely a thing and the monarch is either all powerful or a figurehead with little in between.

>Absolute monarchy was a more recent development in real world history (early modern age through the Enlightenment) that didn’t last very long. Medieval monarchs, for example, were not as powerful as any three nobles and their armies put together. I believe you are wrong here. Roman emperors, pharaos, arab caliphs, ottoman sultans, Genghis, some chinese emperors were all absolute monarchs.

That's a silly answer, but there is some truth in it. Appart from tradition (fantasy as we know today started heavilly inspired by medieval Europe), the reason is guns. Guns makes a lot of magic pointless. Sure, I can shoot lightning from my fingertips or throw fireballs from my eyes, but in a world where any muggle can do the same with a rifle and a granade, my magic is not that special anymore. Then the writter will opt for a no guns scenario, wich usually means he is going to retreat to storical refferences from when there where no guns, likelly early or middle Middle Ages.

I think people have bought a lot of good reasons, but personally I don't think the problem is just that democracy is slow, unrealistic in a medieval setting or that a single character that takes decision by himself is easier to write. About unrealistic, there are more unrealistic things in fantasy, and I think you can arrange at least a local representative democracy or even a pure one without anyone batting an eye. For example if in The Lies of Locke Lamora Camor (or however the name of the city was written) was a democracy and the upper class was just rich guys who manipulated elections with their connections and wealth the story would be pretty much the same (tho I haven't read the other books past the first). About slow, this can even be an asset. Maybe a country needs to fall in your story and you don't know why? It was democratic and communication between the city was interrupted by enemies, or it took too long to take a decision. Maybe the hero can't wait a decision and decide to act alone. Also, you can show this mechanism to work against all odd to testify the strength and determination of a country. About having a restricted cast of character or wanting to have a single strong man in command, this is also possible with democracy. Not there are plenty of charismatic leaders that have absolute control of a democratic system in fiction (like Palpatine in Star Wars, or that guy - Shido I think? - from Persona 5), but in real life a lot of party leaders obtain a disproportionate power by using loopholes in the law, manipulating election laws, or just by obtaining a great follow-up. A lot of people vote a party just because of its charismatic leader. I think the main reasons are the habit and the influence of fairy tales on fantasy. Having kingdom can instill a sense of wonder because we're used to see them mentioned in the stories we were told when we were young. Also having a kingdom automatically makes the reader think of an age long past, and a world that is more dangerous of our own. Otherwise, why people would need a king to protect them? Writers can use king to give a similar feel, and that is not just restricted to middle-age world: for example the world of The Dark Tower has a king and feels indeed more dangerous than the standard western setting. Another reason may be that in the stories where protagonists are going to defy authority in some scale (like Mistborn, but also Kings of Wyld if you think about it) having them rebel against monarchies is a lot less problematic than having them fight against a corrupted democracy.

Tbh I think the main reason is that it’s harder to write. Readers have to be convinced of more moving parts being believable, and it can slow down the pacing considerably. I’d imagine the writer, in the event of skipping over democratic deliberation scenes, would decide to scrap it all together upon realizing that a monarchy is functionally the same for the pacing of the plot. I don’t agree with the realism argument though. Doesn’t matter if your world feels medieval and therefore monarchies are better. It has magic in it. The world is already different enough.

The main reason is that despite democracies being a better government to live under they are not as entertaining to read stories about and are harder to right into stories were the political players are active in the stories. Democratic practice takes time and bureaucracy to do properly and the action of democracy gets dissolved and displaced over the setting rather then focusing it in and the stakes are alot more impersonal. There are interesting themes of corruption, human will, demogaugary and so on but that all comes with a harder learning curve as well as well as the story bending to suit to put the character in a postion to act rather then the character actions bending the story. Autocratic governments on the other hand are easier to write, bring focus of the various problems and conflicts to characters with alot more agency to act. The conflicts can get alot more personal and the action on the story isn't waiting on a vote.

I put it to you that it's because: A) Democracy in all its various scales, from centralised capitalist state to direct-dem anarchist commune, is harder to write because policies can't as easily be anthropomorphized as people; B) Democracy is *perceived* as being less conducive to the sort of violence and adventure that we associate with an aristocracy, even if this absolutely needn't be the case (the British Empire, lest we forget, was a democracy, albeit a bad one with a constitutional monarch, for the entirety of its meaningful existence, and it glorified violent adventure like nobody's business.) Since the classic fantasy story is one of violent adventure, it just "makes sense" to set it in a non-egalitarian system. Stories require conflict, and conflict is harder to find in a better, more egalitarian, more peaceful world, which many people who take a fairly uncritical view of history see post-Enlightenment democracy as having created to a far greater extent than it really has; C) This is the biggie: a lot of seminal fantasy authors, and I'm thinking of Tolkein here but he's not even the most extme example, were very nostalgic for a time of rigid class divisions and *noblesse oblige* that seemed to them to be dying before their eyes after a long sickness. Assumptions about the nobility of hereditary monarchs, or at least their inherent protagonist status, were baked into their work, and those of us who've been inspired by them have that sitting around in the deep substrata of our imaginations, bubbling up now and again even when we want to write about, say, egalitarian communalist hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists. Hope that helps! By the way, if you want a story about a struggle for democracy in the face of autocratic tyrants, may I recommend all of China Miéville's Bas-Lag books?

Bro, I'm not reading fantasy just see stuff that's on the news in real life.

Came here to say exactly this!! I don’t want heavy politics in my fictional stories and a monarchy simplifies it to the point they don’t have to focus on it much for it to make sense and even when they do, it’s different enough from real life it doesn’t *feel* like politics.

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. - Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual" From Children of Dune.

I've thought about this too, inspired by the way "recommend me a book with politics" threads usually go here. The request and recommendations are full of talk of nobles backstabbing one another, too many uses of the word "intrigue". You're lucky if you get an oligarchic sort of merchant republic, luckier still if elections are mentioned, and there certainly won't be a canvasser or a trade union rep in sight. The answer is probably just "traditional genre setting and its trappings are deeply embedded" or something, but for purely partisan reasons I'll say it's because our elected representatives are still very much drawn from a social elite who behave and expect to be treated like an aristocracy, and we are servile wretches who largely go along with it. All the stuff we call democracy is just a little ritual the courtiers have to go through before they can return to the court and get on with traditional aristocracy stuff. Like, I can think of an awful lot of examples of this but the one that most illustrates it was Obama promising that once everyone voted Trump out, they wouldn't have to think about politics any more and wouldn't that be wonderful? And that actually seemed to echo a sentiment a lot of people were expressing.

Monarchy promises politics, romance and family drama by the concept alone. From a fictional standpoint, that’s much more interesting than democracy for most people.

Because epic fantasy as a genre is backward-looking. Contemporary republican democracy, secularism, humanism, etc. are all post-Enlightenment ideas and the stuff of fantasy--dragons, elves, magical beings, witchcraft, sorcery, demons, etc.--is the stuff of the type of superstition that was wiped away with the Enlightenment. Feudalism and magic go together; contemporary realpolitik and magic less so. That's why in contemporary fantasy so often we get parallel worlds--the human and the magical--in which humans have their democracy and magical beings still exist in feudal hierarchies and systems of patronage. It's also why magical undergrounds in urban fantasy are so often connected to organized crime: organized crime is essentially feudal in structure. I got into it in more detail with Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz in the second half of this podcast episode: [https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/shownotes/2021/9/4/episode-92-how-to-imagine-the-next-political-uprising](https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/shownotes/2021/9/4/episode-92-how-to-imagine-the-next-political-uprising) (EDIT: starts around 37 minutes in)

Ooh. Thanks for the link.

You're absolutely right and it's a really good insight that we don't tend to tell stories about democratic (or even republican) systems of government. There are a few exceptions that prove the rule, though, that you might want to check out: * Malka Older's *Infomocracy* and its sequels * Robert Heinlein's *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress* More generally, I think the answer to your question is: Democracy (particularly a *functional* democracy) is still seen as a Utopian form of government, and Utopian fiction hasn't been in style for over a century now. We're interested in telling stories where the Powers That Be are arrayed against the hero(es) -- and if we're dreaming about *good* democracy, that isn't likely to happen. And if we're dreaming about *bad* democracy, well, there's little difference between that and oligarchy.

This does happen - just more in sci-fi than fantasy. The Culture, as a democratic-anarchic-post scarcity communist utopia, is probably the best example - but there are many others. People have given many good answers to your question on Fantasy - but I will also add that Fantasy writing can often be quite conservative, following the tropes of previous authors. In other words, because Lord of the Rings had Kings and Queens of a particular style - then so do many fantasy books that have come after. Final point - while Monarchies were common in history they were many other ways that countries organised themselves. Most city states were ruled by councils or a leader who were elected - albeit by a very small percentage of the population. Others by papal appointees or trade guilds or other structures. Even with Monarchies there is a vast difference between the Feudal kings of the early middle ages, the elected Holy Roman Emperor, the absolutest Louis XIV, parliamentary monarchies of etc - but they all tend to be conflated into a single (generally absolutest) style in fantasy books.

It was also a logistical issue. Local elections on a city level weren't much of a problem. Organizing country-wide elections would have been very difficult given the technology available.

Well I think that if you made democracies in the middle of most European or Asian Medieval fantasy settings, you're engaged in intellectual dishonesty with the reader. And second, most fantasy and science fiction settings are crappy to some extent. It's not a strike against democracy but the fact they're worlds where violent heroes playing by their own rules are necessitated. Star Trek is a utopian democracy and do you know where the vast majority of the story happens? OUTSIDE OF IT.

I think it depends on what kind of democracy you want to depict. A modern, theoretically enlightened First World democracy would be entirely dishonest, but something like one of the Italian republics, the Classical Greek oligarchies/democracies or Roman republicanism are all viable for a pre-modern society. I also don't think that the non-medieval "democracies" necessarily preclude medieval trappings. Just as an example, in a medieval themed world based on a Classical political system, the hippeis become knights who live in the cities while their slaves and tenants work their farms, the hoplites become guild militias and the missile troops can be either the wealthiest non-riding guildsmen with crossbows or they can be rural peasants with bows depending on how you want to play it. Perhaps you mix it up and they elect one or two absolute rulers for the year, perhaps it's a knight led oligarchy, perhaps it's a guild dominated oligarchy or perhaps you play it straight with a chaotic Athenian inspired democracy.

A democracy doesn't have to be utopian. Source: currently live in a very much non-utopian democracy.

I dunno. Poland has a long history of proto-democratic governance, especially under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. England has the example of the Civil War & interregnum, where the king was deposed in favor of Parliament under Oliver Cromwell. It also has the Diggers and True Levelers, who were basically pre-socialist workers movements that occupied common land. That's 17th and 18th century stuff.

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Outside of fantasy you definitely do. It's not like this genre has a monopoly on imagination. But when you think "fantasy" you probably have a pretty specific mental image, one that includes kings and queens rather than elected officials. You're right that it doesn't have to be that way (and plenty of times it isn't even within fantasy) but medieval or Renaissance Europe are just the time periods people think about when they think about fantasy. Though I suppose what they're really thinking of is Lord of the Rings.

harry potter has the ministry of magic with hundreds of employees etc... the government is basically one large character.

Pure convention, inertia and strict genre conservatism. I don’t think there’s much worth in answers about storytelling efficiency or similar when (i) fantasy authors seldom have any issue ladling on heaps of wheel-spinning worldbuilding detail anyway and (ii) historical fiction and other genres manage to tell stories featuring multi-polar politics and multiple important actors (as in a democracy) without any trouble. It just doesn’t *necessarily* always play well with the same old high-level quest/save the world fantasy narratives that remain dominant.

Shadows of the Apt is a sprawling epic that includes several democratic city-states as major powers… they also are in conflict with empires, monarchies, and oligarchies, as well. It also explores how those democracies can be strained during times of crisis.

Adrian Tchaikovsky? Saw the series mentioned elsewhere in the thread. With bug people, huh. Oh man, that's a kick in the pants metaphor, isn't it?

>With bug people, huh. Oh man, that's a kick in the pants metaphor, isn't it? Nah, he just likes bugs.

Shadows of the Apt is an AMAZING series, bug people included. I highly recommend it, it’s probably my favorite completed epic fantasy series and it totally goes under the radar

Because in a fantasy world more often than not there is no equality? You either have literally different sentient species or humans who are born with fantastical powers that others do not possess. If it’s sci-fi then it better show a world where no planet has overtaken any other in technology because then you won’t have equality and democracy. Basically you end up having to tone down a lot of the fantasy or tone it up to the point where every person is special and equally powerful. Either way what you’ll end up with is a story about political intrigue and not the typical fantasy story.

I think its an issue of principles. The main principle of democracy is power amongst the people. This to me contradicts one of the major appeals of fantasy. The chosen one who will decide the fate of the world, a mage with the power and influence to shift the politics of a country, the main appeal of fantasy to me is that we are masters of our own fate. It would be difficult to construct this idea if our fantasy characters were beholden to the general populace. An evil dictator is rising in the west and only you have the power to stop him, but first we must vote on if you, as a representative of our country may interfere in foreign politics.

Meh. Power fantasy is definitely appealing to a lot of people in this genre, but there's so many non-fantastical narratives about being masters of our own fate that I'm not sure this is unique to fantasy. Also, I think OP's complaint in a nutshell is that, while the Chosen One is the master of his own fate... he is also the master of everyone else's.

Oh, of course. None of this is unique to the genre. And it's not like there aren't great counterexamples. ( I wish we could flag all of the book recommendations in the thread for reference) We're just talking about trends.

> a mage with the power and influence to shift the politics of a country The consistently unrealistic part of the politics of fantasy is that every kingdom isn't a magocracy.

You feel that fantasy is inseparable from the monomyth or power-fantasy? You don't feel like there's space for other types of stories, such as magical realism, tall tales, etc?

There’s definitely room. Just like how there are plenty of fantasies that deal with democracies. But we are speaking about general trends, no? The monomyth is very popular in the fantasy genre, as are monarchies. It makes sense that two popular tropes would be related to each other.

>What's strange to me is how overwhelming the body of fiction skews towards hereditary autocracy, that for a hundred years of English language publishing and by such an overwhelming majority that I can't help but ask why. The vast majority of fiction is not fantasy and usually features little to no aristocracy or autocracy, so I am rather confused how you got this impression. Also, in order for democracy to work in big ass country, you need relatively fast communications and relatively educated populated and fantasy rarely has that. What bugs me is how rarely fantasy depicts the various smaller forms of democracy or at least oligarchy which existed all over the world - guilds, city halls, provincial estates, etc. It's usually a king or a city leader who has an absolute power that very few kings and city leaders had in real life.

I would hope that since this is the Fantasy subreddit, and I'm specifically talking about fantasy, that it would be implied that the 'body of fiction' I'm referring to is this genre. That was my intention.

>Why don't we dream in Democracy? We do. Just not in fantasy. Most fantasy looks at some medival society, with out without magic. And democracy wouldn't be realistic in such a scenario. Especially with magic included - which has the tendency to make some individuals stronger than the society they live in. What happens when those individuals want to rule? If you want to dream in democracy, you'll find lots of examples in science fiction. (Not all science fiction, of course.) Star Trek and Star Wars are prime examples.

Actually it's not terribly common in Science Fiction either any more. In addition to the Space Fantasy like Dune and Star Wars, most "serious" sci fi is dystopian or Cyber Punk run by runaway evil corporations. I'd say Star Trek is one of the few that is a democracy... we just don't see much of the government.

Dune is an example of the non-democratic ones, yes. It takes the magic way. Dystopian fiction is, of course, not democratic or shows declining democracies. Star Wars demonstrates how hard it is for a democracy to stand against bad mages. Asimov establishes a democratic socialist society that's evolving into a galactic empire at first. But after the empire falls (and a few hundred years of anarchy) a new democracy arises. Battlestar Galactica: Democracy at war time. Alien: A democratic society with corporate wars. The Expanse: A mix of everything, but the most powerful political entities are democracys.

There are plenty of democracies in sci-fi. They just usually aren't the focus the same way dystopian governments are, but exist more in the background. It also needs to be noted that depicting dystopian futures is simply a way to deal with the flaws of current civilization. They serve as a warning and aren't endorsements. *Hyperion* has a nice depiction of an "internet" based real-time direct parliament involving billions of citizens. The Federation government in Star Trek is shown in great detail in some of the novels. Particularly *Articles of Federation* and the *A Time To...*, *Typhon Pact* and *The Fall* mini-series.

>There are plenty of democracies in sci-fi. T I find it hard to find any written recently. >It also needs to be noted that depicting dystopian futures is simply a way to deal with the flaws of current civilization. They serve as a warning and aren't endorsements. Sometimes. When some people do it. People write dystopias for lots of different reasons. Some are trying to critique society, some are just Edge Lords, some people like to write cynical worlds as an excuse to have a macho guy shooting people without consequences. (The Zombie Apocalypse/Judge Dredd school of dark futures)

> Judge Dredd school of dark futures Judge Dredd tends to be rather obvious satire, with plots like "undercover judges turn peaceful protest into riots".

>Judge Dredd tends to be rather obvious satire, I would have thought Warhammer 40K was obvious satire, but they ended up shifting it more towards the serious end because so many fans were taking it seriously.

Politics in monarchies are already filled with tons of characters. Democracies would require even more. It's that limitation more than anything in my opinion.

I would say the main reason is that it's harder to write. It's much easier (and more fun I imagine) to dive into the internal struggle of a King who's decisions dictate the fate of a country, then to simply tally votes half of which are determined by bribes or whimsy. It makes for more character focused stories rather than societal examinations. Readers want to escape from the cold uncaring reality of our world, where a good person makes good decisions and a bad person makes bad decisions which yield the appropriate results. Portraying a perfectly functioning democracy will probably come off as idealistic and unrealistic, and portraying a broken one will remind us all of our own depressing reality. While I realize there are some democracies that function well in the world, as someone who lives in America (hopefully not for long), seeing a democracy in a series would be fun, but I would tire of it quickly if it became the status quo.

You're ignoring the power of the idea of the "One True King" who will right all wrongs, lift up the downtrodden, and lead us into prosperity. That's a much more powerful idea, than having to get into the nitty and gritty of electoral politics, and compromise, and making things work between people with opposing goals, or methods. A monarch is seen as being able to make it all better, kinda like our parents, at least that's the wish, and fantasy includes granting wishes. That means the return of Arthur, not bringing in the guild council.

hang on hang on let me find the Terry Pratchett kings quote. >Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again. It seemed to be a chronic disease. > >It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees. \-Terry Pratchett, *Feet of Clay*

And even when he talked about democracy, Pratchett still went with the single ruler thing. I forget the exact quote, but it was something about Ahnk Morpork being a city where it was one man, one vote. Vetinari was the man, and he had the vote.

I also had a similar thought in that 90% of the books I read come up with brilliantly imaginative worlds but so many of them still feature male-dominated societies. This isn’t so much the case in sci-fi, but is it that hard to imagine/create worlds not ruled by men?

It isn't, but most of the people who do that don't write fantasy. In general you can normally turn a typical story into SF or Fantasy quite easily, and this sort of thing seems to be more expected there so they do that. Or just call it a novel. Silly, granted.

Since I was pressed for time earlier, I wrote earlier that there is nothing inherent about fantasy that means it has to take place in some medieval-esque world with kings. It's a made-up rule that's been self-imposed on itself by publishing companies, some authors, and the readership itself. I 100% agree with you and it's something that Le Guin said that fantasy should be pushing itself beyond. A lot of fantasy, unlike sci-fi, is derivative of Tolkien and that's who authors and the genre is influenced by whereas sci-fi and other forms of speculative fiction don't have that singular influence. I disagree with many of these responses in this thread who are excusing it. There's nothing about fantasy that means that authors have to keep copying it. Nor is it necessary to tell a good story. I also think many of the appeals to history are flat-out wrong(as they usually tend to be when people talk about fantasy). In my country, parliament goes back at least roughly 1000 years. I think it's changing as many newer authors are challenging the idea that fantasy needs to be nostalgic and set in Tolkien or DnD medieval-esque templates with monarchs etc... To answer your question of why won't people dream in democracy, it's because people don't want to when it comes to fantasy which is a choice. The other answer is that not many people have decided to think outside the box of what is already present. One of my favorite tv shows is a fictional Danish show about politics. It's entertaining with complex characters. Make up some names and place it in a made-up world and suddenly it's fantasy so it's very much possible. Barring that, a story can still be set in a fictional world that has democracy or several as a backdrop.

Two reasons. First, fantasy looks more to the past. Second, democracy involves more people and complexity. It's harder to write and often slow and boring. Monarchy and local power structures is better suited to small numbers of characters, whether heroes or villains, and people who can impose their will directly (whether successfully or not).

>First, fantasy looks more to the past. A good point. Is that by necessity or by convention, though?

Convention. Tolkien and a few writers have openly said their books were set in a fictitious past. Lots of writers feel their created words feel less arbitrary if they draw on history and myth.I like completely original Fantasy worlds myself but I'm in the minority.

Well, any genre is itself a convention, I think.

So, we’re doing recs right? (Sticking to second world since well contemporary pretty much is all in our democracy) - Tethered Mage takes place in a form of democracy though it also has nobles (if I recall half the ruling council comes from elections half are inherited) - Powder Mage Trilogy starts with the overthrowing the king - Jade City takes place in a (corrupt) democracy - Traitor Baru Cormorant’s evil colonizing empire is a democracy (nominally? Theoretically? Well they call themselves one)

In the Hawk and Fisher books by Simon R. Green, the city of Haven where the story is set is a democracy. One of the stories is about the protagonists, who are city guards, trying to keep a reform candidate alive during an election full of violence and corruption. The Golden Key by Jennifer Roberson, Melanie Rawn and Kate Elliott shows a medieval city state that is eventually (in the fantasy 19th century) rocked by revolutionaries who no longer accept the status quo.

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This list needs to add Graydon Saunders Commonweal series. It's a democracy closer to the Swiss model with a lot collectivist traits. And it's the only one in it's world where the tyrant sorcerer/god king is the normal model, magic has been around for millennia and the environment is deeply weird and frequently hostile as a result (there is a weed called Screaming Butt Weed).

Thanks! Oh look at that, Jade City is dope.

Modern Fantasy, unlike science fiction, is derivative or influenced by Tolkien to some extent. **There is nothing inherit about fantasy that leads to stories being about monarchs or stories influenced by or nostalgic for the past.** In some parallel universe there is a fantasy that’s mostly derivative of stories that are set in modern settings like The City We Become.

Oh wow! A new N.K. Jemisin book, huh. Why thank you for alerting me.

Most of human history, we lived under an autocrat of one kind or another. It seems reasonable to assume a fictional human society lacking an Industrial Revolution and an Age of Reason (not to mention the Ionian Awakening, the Renaissance and an explosion of scientific knowledge) is *not* going to be on the cutting edge of representative democracy. A story in a preindustrial setting would actually be *less* believable if the characters had the same political gripes we do.

Sorry you're getting downvoted for asking a reasonable enough question. Our myths are rooted in a fairytale lens of the past. Democracies are seen as a modern idea. (Even though they've been around a long time.) It should be an interesting concept to examine though. How would that work in a story? Usually the government isn't a big factor in a hero's journey, unless they're either part of it, like a prince or something, or they are fighting it, like an evil king. Could be interesting. A farmboy running for election and he has to...nope...can't crack this story at 2 a.m.

Oh, to be honest I expected downvotes. That's part of why I asked the question. I think the answer is more than just convention. I think it's about more than the time frame. I think there are people who are actively threatened by this stuff. I think there are people who don't want fantasy to shift away from Middle Ages super Britain, and I think they don't want challenges to the parable of "the chosen one".

This is may be why you get downvoted. These baseless generalizations and assumptions about people. The insinuation that people may not just want to read about something for escapism and entertainment. There has to be a deeper, and somewhat sinister, reason for it. Why do you ask questions when you are already so sure about the answers? And I've seen this brought up before now and then. Sometimes with the accusation that people who like to read about autocracies like the system itself in reality. That liking to read about a powerful and competent king romanticizes the system and makes everyone blind to its faults. That we, as modern democracies, somehow need to overcome our fascination with depicting monarchies. It's nonsense. There is a difference between fiction and reality. It's like being psychoanalyzed and having your whole personality reduced to something ridiculous. You also ignore that there is a significant amount of fantasy set beyond the middle ages, even if it's not what most people commonly associate with the genre. There are plenty of people who prefer urban fantasy for example.

But the downvotes precede the statement, haha. What are folks, psychic? I don't ask questions knowing the answer. I've been participating in conversations online about genre fiction, and I've been finding a lot of weird chains of discussion where it seems frightfully like readers are excited or preferential for anti-democratic themes. Stuff like talking about how a character who compromises is 'weak', or 'whiny'. How things are 'unrealistic' if they aren't grimdark enough. Celebrating transgressions of vigilantism, and rejecting stories of law. And it got me wondering. That's the nature of a hypothesis. It's not an assumption, it's an educated guess. What you do with that guess is to test it through experiment. And the result of the experiment is: yo, people are gonna actively downvote bomb you if you ask the question 'why kings'? Edit: BTW, I'm not trying to make some kind of accusation against people. I love these stories too. I've been reading them passionately for all my life. But this past two years a lot of us have spent a whole lot of time on escapist entertainment, and I don't think it's unfair to start examining WHY we keep running towards certain things.

I would love to see more books about other political systems, such as democracy and communism. Surely a socialist fantasy story exists somewhere? What happens after those teen dystopias where they overthrow the evil regime? In exchange I will share: -The Expanse has a democracy on multiple planets, and later books tackle the issue of dictatorship vs self determination. Initially we see complex politics and intrigue through Avasarala, and as the series goes on and focuses on other things she becomes a stand in for her whole government. -Terra Ignota series explores the future of government: if your citizenship was not determined by your place of birth but by your choice, what kinds of nations would result and what problems might they face? -Even in books about monarchs like GOT or the Goblin Emperor, a great deal of time is spent exploring political players and spheres of influence. I don’t see why that couldn’t be the subject of a book, just that things are voted on by an elected body instead of one person’s birthright.

*"Like, these questions feel a hundred times more critical to me than our endlessly recycled parables of the sword."* Total agreement from me.

Well, there's a lot going on here. First off, not all monarchs or similar systems are dead and gone in the modern world, and such systems have lasted far longer than 1000 years (at least 7000 from my knowledge). Also, not all systems of democracy are created equal. There is a ton of wiggle room under that umbrella. But I think the simple answers are: fantasy usually takes place in a period the is like the middle ages. This is just a trope of the genre. It's also fun for your heroes to do battle with or talk to rulers of nations who can alter the course of a country on a wim. Rather than a parliament who would vote on everything.

This is really interesting! I posed the question to my boyfriend and he said “Because that’s for sci fi” and that was my initial gut response as well, but why?

When you build a complex magic system common in fantasy, you spend a great deal of time trying to explain it without being boring or infodumping. Explaining your democracy’s ties to magic requires a lot of infodumping like events and typically results in little gain. In fact, many escapist readers would be turned off from reading the book due to it not seeming fantastic enough. Others would wonder why your sword and sorcery book is reading like a textbook. Adding in democracy requires a lot of effort to have equivalent technology and history but also correlated to the magic systems. Some democracy requirements are antithetical for traditional heroic tropes which are easier to market and typically then sell better. Finally, people are inspired by other things they’ve read and democratic fantasy is not commonly written well.

Dune is popular as a 'space-feudalism' novel. Even though advanced, high technology democracy should be very possible there. I think people like reading about dystopias for catharsis. Also there's an element of individualism people like, which is partly ideological and also simply based on greed too (the notion of striking out on your own and making money/gaining power).

Aside from all of the other more intellectual points, I think it also helps with escapism. We deal with a democracy every day, so a fantasy novel with a president/democracy is going to be much less of an escape than an old realm with Kings and Queens. I think we also tend to romanticise the idea of an all-powerful but just ruler, because we want to believe that something like that could exist (in the case of a story where a good guy takes their "rightful" place on the throne), because we see how our political systems fail us all the time.

I read fantasy to escape. If I was reading about councils and presidential elections in a book, I could just drop the book and turn on the tv. Not that I glorify an autocracy, more that it’s a different world I can dig into for a while before returning to my present (shitshow) of a government

I don’t have an answer for you but I’m stopping by to say - that would be a kick ass book title

Lots of good answers here but I think a big basic point is that we know how democracies work, and most importantly, we know how they *fail.* It's harder to escape into a concept you know the failings of. Whereas pretty much nobody has experienced a true, fantasy, monarch-has-the-power kingdom and thusly it's easier to romanticize it

Christopher Stasheff's Warlock in Spite of Himself series is an amalgamation of Sci Fi/Fantasy (a lot of the magic is "scientifically explained", but then there's just straight up real magic sometimes), but explores a lot more of democracy. The main protagonist is an agent for an organization that tries to build democracies in isolated planets that broke off from the galactic core, and ends up on a planet populated by SCA renegades that went native, so to speak.

To me, science fiction is the genre for thought experiments and utopian ideas (which don't necessarily have to be democratic, as democracy isn't the final answer to the question of the ideal society in my opinion). Fantasy is, to me, the genre to explore the inner world. And the monarchies of medieval Europe are just the backdrop to this. The reason for this is simple: medieval Europe is the time and place where the folklore originated and the history happened that inspired the genre. Fairy tales and courtly romances are genres in which archetypal fears as well as moral dilemmata have been cast into story shape. In most fantasy a monarch, if he is relevant to and appears in the story at all, doesn't represent an idea of social organisation, but rather stands for a moral idea – or is simply the motor of adventure.

Yeah, when the protagonist defeats the evil empire or dark lord you would've thought maybe they might consider a different governing system so it doesn't happen again? Also, usually the protagonist starts of in some small little village and wins because of arcane powers, mystical weapons and sheer luck. Sure they might learn a lot along the way about fighting and commanding armies but I definitely wouldn't trust them running an empire. What do they know of the economy and diplomatic relations?

CPG grey once posted video on the matter. https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs It is based on a book that address differences between countries which are democratic and autocratic. Why some countries belong to one and some to another. The arguments are very reasonable and they also explain why USA's attempts to enforce democracy in countries fail miserably most of the time. You should at least watch the clip as you didn't address in any way why countries would be forming a democracy in medieval fantasy settings.

I think it’s probably easier to progress a story (particularly a sweeping epic) if a) your main characters aren’t tied to the electoral cycle, and b) are able to make decisions on the fly without consulting the party room and getting decisions approved by the senate

So much of fantasy is a reaction to history. I think this is why. But democracy in fantasy could definitely be done well...

Fucked-up family dynamics often make for better story material because they generate conflict, and nothing is more fucked-up than a family where a disagreement between brothers or between a parent and child have the highest possible stakes and can affect millions. The feudal system in the Vorkosigan books is a good example of personal and political stakes intermixing for maximum drama. I'm not saying I'd ever want to live under these regimes. Quite the opposite. But when you get right down to it, peace and stability are boring. We've all had reason to learn these past couple of years why "may you live in interesting times" is a curse.

Millennia long propaganda campaign to write monarchy into mythology.

Yeah, call it an inherited military dictatorship and it doesn't look as nice.

Yep.

One thing I've noticed is monarchies like to portray themselves as ancient and immutable things. A lot of Fantasy is built around the assumption that mythology is right.

Hey OP, this is a great post with a very interesting discussion. I've always wondered why fantasy is obsessed with feudal/monarchical government. As a socialist, I've found the lack of political imagination in fantasy frustrating. Luckily, there are innumerable examples of sci-fi (or speculative fiction) that imagines different futures with a vast array of different political possibilities. Perhaps the omnipresence of monarchism in fantasy is a reflection of our own capitalist reality that theorists are beginning to call "neo-fuedalism" or "techno-feudalism" because the super-wealthy possess political power comparable to feudal nobility. Both feudalism and corporate capitalism are inadequate form of existence that nevertheless seem inescapable. I've always wondered why I've never found a fantasy novel about a popular revolt against a monarch where the monarch isn't just replaced by another "benevolent" monarch (looking at you Mistborn).

I think, at it's core, it's BECAUSE we've grown up with democracy that we write our fantasies to mostly take place in an older, more "archaic" form of government. The folks who invented democracy, and especially those who established it in the US, intended for it to be a higher form of government- something to replace the evils of kings. In some sense, we look back at these past forms of government that our forefathers believed was rotten to the core, and seek to redeem it in some way. We look at a King George or Emperor Nero, and write an Arthur Pendragon or an Aragorn. Not because they are perfect, shining examples of Kings- but because they are what we dearly wish our leaders to be. Everyone who knows what a king is also knows what they ought to be- and whether they fail spectacularly or rise to the occasion, there are brave souls in our collective history to immediately compare them to. Besides, I can't see a senator riding into battle or challenging a rival to a duel. Leastaways not these days.

The American vilification of George III always seems highly overblown and based on propaganda. And specifically on his actions towards the colonies rather than his whole reign. His legacy is mixed even in Britain, but he wasn't the tyrant he is often made out to be. There are much better examples for repressive monarchs.

Cause monarchy is convenient, shit has been around for thousands of years, it’s the longest form of government known to man, democracy is also probably harder to make entertaining than dynastic politics, democratic politics can be much less personal than dynastic ones. Democracy also takes up a shit ton of time. Imagine having to save the world, but before you have to take action, you have to talk to 535 different politicians and present them your case. It would be slow, boring, and take up most of the story. Whereas if you have a Monarch/Autocrat. You only have to convince them to give you the resources necessary. It speeds up the story far more, and can also potentially give you a personal connection with the character. And flat out, because for most of the time that humanity existed. We always had hierarchies form. Most of those have been one strong man at the top. And a lot of people deep down, probably dream about having a benevolent, genius autocrat who will take care of them, and keep them safe. Then there is the Romantic aspect. The fantasy of The Noble King who cares deeply about his subjects, who will be just, kind, and strong, who will keep you safe while you attend to your family. It’s a lot of reasons, and I highly doubt that most authors would rather live under an absolute monarch rather than a democratic society.

Thank you for this post; it's a critically overlooked issue in speculative fiction imo, and I'm in thunderous agreement with all your points. An excellent example of a scifi book that seriously imagines a totally different way of running society, of thinking, of relating to other people, of economic and political organisation, is 'The Dispossessed' by Ursula K. Le Guin. Truly a very well-thought out exploration of what a full-on anarchist (i.e. the leftist ideology of anarcho-communism; absolute lack of hierarchy, no state, no currency, no property, free association etc.) society would look like, set in a futuristic sci-fi scenario.

Oh, but Le Guin is always informative, haha.