Writing sucks, I love it

Nobility isn't just a vibe. Every title on this list used to mean something specific, land owned, duties owed, and exactly how much power a person had over the people beneath them. Here's the hierarchy, top to bottom, plus the special cases that trip people up.

The Sovereigns

Emperor/Empress — Sits above a king. Rules over multiple kingdoms or territories rather than just one, historically. Think the Holy Roman Emperor, or Queen Victoria's later title of Empress of India.

King/Queen Regnant — The sovereign ruler of a single kingdom in their own right. "Regnant" specifically means she rules, as opposed to a queen who's just married to one.

Tsar/Tsarina — The Russian equivalent, literally derived from "Caesar."

Kaiser — The German equivalent, same Caesar root, different flavor.

Archduke/Archduchess — An Austrian Habsburg-specific title, ranking above a regular duke but below an emperor. Useful if you want a tier between king and duke without inventing one.

Immediate Royal Family

Prince/Princess — A child or close relative of the monarch. In British tradition, it also extends to spouses of princes, which trips up a lot of writers who assume it's blood-only.

Crown Prince/Princess — Specifically the heir apparent, not just any prince.

Grand Duke/Duchess — Used for smaller sovereign states entirely (Luxembourg still has one) or for junior royals in places like Russia. Ranks below a king but above a regular duke.

Prince Consort — The husband of a reigning queen. Prince Albert is the textbook example, married to Victoria but never a king himself.

Queen Consort — The wife of a reigning king. Not a ruler in her own right, just married to one.

Country-Specific Heir Titles

Worth knowing if you want your world to feel less generically medieval-European and more specific:

Dauphin — the French heir apparent

Tsarevich — the Russian heir apparent

Infante/Infanta — Spanish and Portuguese term for a royal child who isn't the heir apparent

Regency & Special Circumstances

This is the section most lists skip, and it's exactly the kind of detail that makes a fictional court feel lived-in.

Regent — Anyone (a person, sometimes a council) who rules temporarily on behalf of a monarch who can't, usually because they're a minor, incapacitated, or absent.

Prince Regent — Specifically a prince acting as regent. The most famous real example is George, who ruled as Prince Regent for years while his father, George III, was unfit to rule, before becoming George IV himself.

Queen Mother — The mother of the current reigning monarch, once she's no longer queen consort or queen regnant herself. It's an honorary title, not a governing one.

Dowager [Title] — Applies to widows generally, not just queens. A Dowager Duchess or Dowager Countess is the widow of the previous title-holder, still using the title while her heir holds the actual position.

Heir Apparent vs. Heir Presumptive — An heir apparent can't be displaced by anyone born later. An heir presumptive can be, if someone with a stronger claim shows up (say, a son born after a daughter was next in line). This distinction alone can drive an entire succession plot.

The Peerage (hereditary, non-royal nobility)

Duke/Duchess — The highest rank below royalty. Historically ruled an actual duchy, meaning real territory and real armies, not just a fancy name.

Marquess/Marchioness — Ruled border territories, the "marches," that needed extra defense. That's genuinely where the name comes from.

Earl — The specifically British term for this tier. Comes from the Old English/Norse "jarl," and it's the oldest of the English titles, older than duke or marquess.

Count/Countess — The Continental European equivalent of an earl. Oddly, there's no male "earless" counterpart term, an earl's wife is still called a countess.

Viscount/Viscountess — Literally "vice-count," acting as a deputy to a count. A step down, still meaningful.

Baron/Baroness — The lowest formal rank of the peerage, but still a direct vassal to the crown rather than to another noble.

Titled but Not Peerage

Baronet — Hereditary, but not technically part of the peerage. A British-specific quirk that trips people up constantly.

Knight/Dame — Granted for life, not inherited. Earned through service rather than blood, which makes it a useful title for a character who rose up rather than was born into power.

Prince-Bishop — A real historical oddity, a bishop who also held temporal, political power over territory, common in the Holy Roman Empire. Genuinely useful if your world blends religious and political authority.

Lord/Lady — A general courtesy title that gets applied loosely across several of the ranks above. Not a rank on its own so much as a way of addressing one.

Untitled but Still Someone

Esquire/Gentry — Landowning, educated, socially significant, but no actual title. Your side character who's clearly well-off but not nobility probably belongs here.

Chatelaine — Not a rank, but a real functional role, the woman (often but not always the lady of the house) who ran an entire castle's household. Worth knowing if you want a character with real day-to-day power that has nothing to do with her title.

Quick note on forms of address, since getting this wrong is its own kind of tell: monarchs are "Your Majesty," dukes and duchesses are "Your Grace," most other peers are "My Lord/My Lady," and knights are addressed by first name with "Sir" or "Dame" in front of it, never the surname alone.

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Aka "If You're Thinking, "My Idea Isn't Original Enough," Please Let Me Hold Your Hand For Two Minutes."

I see this take constantly on BookTok, Booksta and other reading communities.

"This trope has been done x amount of time before."

Congratulations! You've discovered literature! Everything has been done before!

Enemies to lovers predates indoor plumbing. Found family has existed since mythology. "There was only one bed" is probably older than your great-great-great-grandparents. Retellings have existed for literal millennia. Arthurian legends have been rebooted more times than Spider-Man.

We're all playing with the same storytelling Lego bricks! Some of us are simply determined to make those bricks kiss!

A few people seem to treat “this has been done before” as if it's some kind of devastating criticism. But... that's what a trope is.

Stories have always been built on recurring ideas, archetypes, themes, and structures. The interesting question has never been "Has anyone ever written this before?"

The interesting question is "What are you bringing to it?"

Because nobody else has your experiences, your sense of humor, your emotional baggage, your dialogue, your pacing, your weird obsession with describing rain, or your inexplicable need to make every emotionally unavailable man adopt a child.

BookTok (and some reading communities) sometimes acts like originality is the highest artistic virtue, right up until someone says "Enemies to lovers." Or "Dark academia." Or "Who did this to you?" Or "Found family." Or "Dragons." Or "Vampires." Or "Beauty and the Beast." Or "Hades and Persephone." Or even the famous "Touch her and die."

Then suddenly everyone's foaming at the mouth with excitement. Which is almost as if people don't actually want completely original stories.

They want familiar stories told well. Nobody walks into a bakery and goes, "Ugh. Bread. Again?"

Nobody refuses to listen to music because, "tragically", someone has already written a love song. Nobody stops watching detective shows because Sherlock Holmes already solved a mystery.

Execution has always mattered more than novelty. And before anyone says, "Well, what about Shakespeare?"

Half of Shakespeare wasn't original either. Romeo & Juliet wasn't an original plot. The man, like so many others, borrowed plots and tropes all the time.

The Lion King is Hamlet. West Side Story is Romeo & Juliet. Clueless is Emma. Ten Things I Hate About You is The Taming of the Shrew. The Divine Comedy is essentially Dante writing a historical and political self-insert fanfiction with an outrageously ambitious worldbuilding budget.

If you're sitting there thinking, "My idea isn't unique enough.."

Please stop. Respectfully. Lovingly. Gently.

You are not competing with every story ever told over the last several thousand years. You're competing with whether someone closes your book thinking, "Damn. I had a great time."

Book communities will spend six months tweeting about how "chosen one stories are dead," "enemies to lovers is overdone," "academia is boring now," and "romantasy is ruining literature"... then preorder a book that contains every single one of those things because the sprayed edges are shiny and the marketing team hired someone who knows how to edit a dramatic TikTok.

I think people don't actually hate tropes. They hate bad marketing. The exact same story gets called "derivative" when it's self-published, and "genre-defining" when a major publisher wraps it in foil embossing and sends twenty influencers a PR box the size of a refrigerator.

There are books with genuinely fresh ideas that disappear into obscurity because they didn't have a marketing budget, and there are books whose entire personality is "Shadow Daddy #48" that become cultural events.

We don't have a trope fatigue problem nearly as much as we have a recommendation fatigue problem.

People aren't tired of enemies to lovers. They're tired of seeing the same five books recommended as if the genre stopped evolving in 2022. We need yours.

dark and stormy day

absolute vat of tea

Lying to the reader

Lying to themselves

Simply misinformed

Not paying attention

Has weird priorities

Assumed you knew

Hates you personally

Bad at communicating

Easily sidetracked

Will believe anything

Has weird prejudices

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.