would Ofelia's coup-ish thing in Lady & Tiger count as an autogolpe?
I won't lie, I had to look up what a golpe is. :D It's a super fun word, I might have Joan use it at some point.
Apparently Ofelia is actually committing an antiautogolpe!
So, a coup/golpe is when you seize power from a ruler. As Michaelis points out, Ofelia cannot have committed a coup, because by Galian law, as fucked up as Galian law is, she is the rightful ruler, heir to the duchy, and everyone agrees prior to discovering this that the heir to the duchy should rule. That's still actually one of my favorite parts of the book, where anti-monarchist elected former king Michaelis defends Ofelia's divine right of rule by way of making a legal point.
It turns out there IS such a thing as an autocoup or autogolpe, but legally it's defined as a ruler who, having attained power legally, attempts to retain power through illegal means. Ofelia is actually doing the opposite -- she was legally enthroned as the eldest heir of the duke, and is now attempting to relinquish power, but to do so she has to change the law. So -- antiautogolpe.
Joan is probably writing a paper on this for her polisci class. There must be a pun somewhere in it -- aha, got it:
Golpe'ing Methods: Seizing And Relinquishing Power in Contemporary Galia.
I really need to work on the Ofelia novel -- there's a scene at the start where Joan and Michaelis spend an afternoon deciding how they would invade and conquer Galia that's relevant to all this :D
