Strange Things About the Monarchy in the Slayersverse
I think the big thing that jumps out at me is how unconcerned the monarchs in the Slayersverse are to producing more children, when producing as many children as possible has traditionally been one of the big goals for most monarchs. Especially in an age where infant and child mortality was high even for the wealthy (Queen Anne of England had 17 pregnancies, 12 of them stillbirths, and of the ones that survived, only one lived to be older than 2, and he died in childhood, so she had 17 pregnancies and no heirs that were biological children).
Royal women tended to marry in their teens and were expected to start producing children. If a spouse died, it was expected that the surviving spouse would remarry to further diplomacy and produce more heirs. Yet in the Slayersverse, this does not seem to be as much of a preoccupation. A. Naga is in her 20s, unmarried, and if she is betrothed, it is never mentioned (keep in mind, it was not uncommon to arrange engagements between monarchs in infancy, though often those deals fell apart during the passage of time. Mary Queen of Scots was engaged when she was 6 months old to Edward VI of England, but when that fell through, she was sent to France at the age of 5 to live with her new fiance's family and get used to the ways of the French court. Naturally, she did not marry him at the age of 5, she was 16 when that happened). B. Similarly, Amelia is not married and there is no mention on an engagement, even though she is at least 17 by Revo/Evo. C. The number of children among the royals is small. Naga and Amelia's age gap is rather large, especially considering a royal woman would not nurse her children (Anne Boleyn tried. Henry VIII said no. She didn't press the issue, thus ensuring her head remained attached to her neck for a few more years). Alfred appears to be the only child of Christopher. If Randy has children they are never mentioned. Likely the reason is because HK didn't want to bog the story down with too many characters. Still, looking at other royal families, Martina appears to be an only child, and I can't think of any royal family depicted in the series where there are numerous children. They could be there, but they are absent. D. That Prince Phil never remarried is strange. Given he is set to inherit the throne and given that HK has said that women can't inherit the throne in Saillune (though there appears to be some debate on this), he would be under a lot of pressure to re-marry and father more kids. Though hopefully he wouldn't go all Henry VIII about it. Christopher, also, for all intents and purposes appears to be a widower (either that or women in Saillune really stay out of official business, though Amelia would seem to contradict this). And Martina's father has also never appeared with a queen. Once again, the more likely reason is not to muddy the story with too many characters. Potential Fanon Explanation (not sure how much weight I give any of these): -Perhaps, because of religious or cultural taboos, remarriage after the death of a spouse is forbidden in the Slayersverse, and that extends to the monarchy. -Prince Phil's renowned ugliness means that it is very difficult to find someone who would marry him. OK, seriously, after working for several years with meth addicts who smelled like rotten shrimp and whose teeth were rotting out of their gums and it was physically painful for me to look at them because my teeth would start to ache in response (damn empathy), whose skin was grey, scabbed, and who knows what else, yet they still were pregnant/recently fathered children/sexually active, I've come to believe that there is no level of ugly that someone won't fuck. So the good news for Phil is that if he wants to embark on marriage again, someone somewhere would have him. -Infant and child mortality could be low because of sorcery and may be comparable to what we see in our modern times, especially in a place like Saillune. This would be why there isn't a lot of focus on breeding like rabbits. As Louis VII of France discovered, having a plethora of male heirs reach adulthood becomes a curse as they start to bicker over who gets what and start wars with each other, so they may deliberately limit family size. -At the same time, a high infant/child mortality could also explain why there aren't a lot of royal children. Many don't survive. The problem with this one, though, is that it would make no sense to let the surviving royal children gallivant across the continent without bodyguards and the like. On this note we go into... Privacy! Privacy was damn hard to come upon for royals! In England, they even had an official Groom of the Stool, no, not the type of stool you step on to reach the china you put out of the kids reach, I'm talking excrement stool, basically, this person's job was to assist the king as he took a shit and examine the contents to make sure the king was healthy. And you thought your job sucked! But it was actually a coveted post because you had the kings confidence and trust. For the king of England, though, not even bowel movements were private. Many royals never even slept alone, and this isn't even in the sexual sense. Royal women shared their beds with other noble women, and it was a great honor for a woman to be asked to sleep with the queen. This did happen with the men, though not to the extent it did with the women, but people would not have concluded that a prince who shared a bed with another man was engaging in anything sexual. Sleeping alone is a rather modern invention. Royals were surrounded by people morning, noon and night. Royal women had a group of ladies in waiting to attend them. Men similarly were surrounded by people. So the lack of other nobles surrounding Amelia, Phil, Naga, etc, is strange. That Naga in particular would travel without a companion is strange (you could argue that as Amelia always traveled with other members the Slayers group, with the exception of the one time she went to find Phil, that she had people with her even if they weren't nobles). Possible Fanon Explanations: -It's hard to say, but it's possible that the royal courts in the Slayersverse are at an early stage of evolution, before the varied and strange jobs involving stool collection could be invented. So perhaps they did have privacy in the bathroom at least, and perhaps the role of the ladies in waiting to constantly attend to a royal woman, had not been firmly established yet. I'd briefly created a lady in waiting for Naga but ended up writing her out. Amelia never mentions one, is never seen with one, and given that in the novels we meet her at the Saillune court, if it was expected for the princesses to be attended by one then we should have seen her then. -This one is rather cynical, but a kingdom that grants its royal daughters so much freedom is also at odds with one that would not let them inherit power, though perhaps there is a sinister purpose...them dying in a heroic adventure on the road and paving the way for the next male heir. In the novels, though, Phil does take an active role in trying to keep Amelia out of the action (at one point picking her up and telling her that the battle scene is no place for a little girl), YET he lets her travel with Lina and Gourry under dangerous circumstances. Perhaps the tradition of women traveling on their own for a bit was created for that purpose (though the reasons why were lost to history), and since it's a tradition Phil feels he has to honor it even if he doesn't like it, and the royal daughters, heady with teenage rebellion and itching to get away from court and stretch their wings and, being teenagers, convinced of their invincibility would riot if it was done away with. On a related note, one question I've seen different people take different approaches to is the question of whether or not marriages are arranged. Given that Naga and Amelia do have so much freedom to travel without being under the watchful eye of the court, that tends to confer a degree of sexual freedom to meet potential partners, fall in love, etc, that would wreck problems with the whole arranged marriage thing. At the same time, social pressure can be enough, given as I went to high school with a significant percentage of people who had immigrated from India, and a few (though not the majority) of them had been betrothed in high school and were still expected to travel to go to college and stuff, but they also accepted the arranged marriage because of family pressure. That said, I like the idea of princesses who get to go out and have fun rather than live their lives in a gilded cage at the mercy of their sovereign (and Catherine of Aragon's story drastically shows how those fortunes can rise and fall precipitously, particularly if you had the bad luck to be married to a sociopath). I like that Amelia addressed Phil as "daddy" rather than "My Supreme and Illustrious and Royal Father and King" or whatever (not that royal fathers didn't love their children and their children didn't love them). It may not make much logical sense, but it makes for a good story.
