How come Kings and Queens are evil but Princesses are good and Princes are irrelevant?

Disney.

I recall back when the horse cartoon was first starting that Lauren Faust was complaining that they couldn't make the white sun horse a "queen" they had to make her a "princess" instead.

Hasbro executives claimed that thanks to Disney, queens are evil and princesses are good.

The king and queen are authority figures who can get in your way. Princesses exist to get sold off for political favor and be hostages. They are an appealing reward or objective for the pcs. Princes are overshadowed by kings and Queens in most cases.

Kings and Queens are authority figures and we live in an age where we don't exactly trust someone that far above us on the totem pole anymore.

Princesses are supposed to be virgins and pure of heart and all that jaz because they are the prize or the means by which alliances are forged. Either way their job is to be desirable on a personal and political level.

Princes technically are sort of like the princesses in that they can be used as diplomatic capital but they are also expected to at least have a passing acquaintance with the ways of war and at least know which end of the sword to hold. As a result the Prince is the protagonist in the story because he is expected to be more active. As a protagonist it is better for him to be bland so that the audience can imagine their traits on him. Like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix.

I like playing as kings. Even if they're just the masters of city-states or petty fiefdoms, I love the gravitas of the sheer concept.

Like Justice League's Aquaman, or the kings from Fate/Zero, or Conan the Barbarian. All the poetry, romanticism, and interpretations of the concept.

How should a game of kings be run?

If your dude is the King then wat about the other players feeling left out?

If DMPC is King then is just quest giver NPC with silly hat.

Is it possible to run a game where the players are Hero-kings of neighboring city states? How would that work?

Because pretty much everyone has drunk the democracy koolaid.

Because the only kings and queens you here about are the evil fuck ups that everyone was rushing to overthrow for abusing their powers. The good king of the next country over who treats his subjects justly, is admired by his neighbors, who loves his family and whose son only took the crown after his father's natural death never ruffled enough feathers to get written about.

Good kings do get written about, but only when they're deposed

I was sort of thinking that the players should be kings of their own lands, and every so often, they come together and talk about what they should all do to handle current events with a little bit of political manoeuvring so each of them are trying to get out ahead of everyone else.

Two ways, it depends on the scale of the game.

The first way is the "Actually playing as a god-damn king" way, which I am in a game right now. Basically you actually administer territory, get treated on par with other kings, control sizable areas, and lead armies. This often means a game of a wider scale. Dungeon crawling and trekking it really doesn't have as much of a point. Instead the game is focused on cataclysmic struggles between important persons, and armies.

Option 2 is the Fire Emblem or Greek Mythology way, where your PC controls a city-state or fiefdom that is either small or far away or both. This means that being a king is mostly a matter of status. Other kings and rulers treat you with respect [as a rule], you get to talk and act grandoise, and if there's a big battle at some point in the plot your PC is probably the one leading it.

The really important thing in running with nobility of any level, is to remember that some power doesn't equal infinite power. Just think logically on who this person actually is to the setting, and then carry that out to its conclusion.

For example lets say one of your PCs wants to play as the crown-princess of Major Fantasy Kingdom. There's no reason said PC can't, if you want to run such a game. That doesn't mean she can walk all over everyone. She can probably get free rooms at the Inn [or stay with nobility], but if she's a giant ass-hat, while the guards probably won't arrest her, there is little reason the local noble can't "Insist she remain at the castle for the duration of her stay", or 'request' she leave.

Someone hasn't been playing enough ck2.

The simple fact is, politics is a cutthroat game. Especially in feudal governments where stabbing the right person might make you king.

The heirs live a comparatively sheltered life compared to the more politically active parents, leading to some disconnect in the thinking and the measures regularly used between the two parties. The king is more likely to decapitate someone questioning his power/legitimacy/heir than your average princess is, and to the layman, this seems pretty cruel, but think about it this way:

If the king's legitimacy comes into question, claimants from other parts of the realm may decide to press their claims in battle, causing bloody civil war within the kingdom. Even if these wars are won by the king, the realm is still weakened, and open to a multitude of smaller internal conflicts, or even invasion by a rival realm. If cutting off the head off of some idiot talking shit about your claim to the throne can avoid all that, obviously that idiot's head will roll. But the average person will only see your eagerness to kill, not the absolute chaos that such meager bloodshed would avoid, leading to the stereotype of the "evil" king/queen.

The forced marriage of heirs to other princes/princesses is useful for setting up defensive pacts through marriage. There are always stories about heirs rejecting their roles and running off with some good looking stranger, and while this makes for a fun story, the detail of the kingdom possibly collapsing due to a lack of allies in war is typically left out. You're not really meant to think about this stuff a lot.

Basically this.

Like, the other reasons are largely true, but it really is all down to how pervasive Disney is at this point.

CK" isn't too bad depending on how you play it. If you start on the tutorial Ireland you get the best succession type and the right to take 3 concubines in addition to your wife.

Because of this you end up with a FUCKING HUGE clan like holy shit it's on 1053 and there a 4,000+ of us.

The thing is that you basically end up saturating the nobility of Ireland to the point where the other families can't easily avoid marrying into your family.

Then the plague rolls in an it's a numbers game. By sheer weight of numbers your clan end up with all the titles.

Just keep of doing that. Before you know it you've got Ireland, Pict/Scotland, Corwall, Wales and most of England.

Keep restriction on your vassals to absolute minimum. They might declare wars of conquest of their own volition but you are hand off king, you don't get involved. Kingdom spreads. Eventually all of the British Isles is part of the Celtic Tribal Empire ruled from the Imperial City of Dublin.

Then it starts happening in Brittany. From there it really starts to snowball.

I once took over half of Europe by this method having never once started a war of planned an assassination.

From dick, unity!

Really? It's like that?

I don't have any dlc, so i can only start in 1066, and most of my claims were the result of chancellor fabrication. It took me 400 years to establish Britannia alone, and the whole campaign was just an awful uphill slog of fabricate on 3-4 provinces, war, win, do nothing for 10 years, repeat.

Do you know a way I can stop de jure drift into eire? I essentially lost control of sucession after 100 years of controlling scotland.

Never heard of fairy tales ? That's where it comes from.
Kings and Queens abuse their autority to do vilainy, princesses and princes have to deal with their shit.
That's pretty much all there is to this.

Because you're gay

Get CK2+ mod.

Can't help you with the start date without DLC. A few months ago it was all 75% off so the might do special offers again.

I warn you it's not a quick way to play. It takes centuries for your clan to hit critical overflow numbers. Fill in time with pilgrimage and festivals and shit. Maybe try and resurrect old Celtic religion for that Double Irish flavor.

I killed Cthulhu.

WHO HERE REMEMBERS LORD BRITISH FROM FUCKING ULTIMA?

YEAH

HE'S WHY.

>How come Kings and Queens are evil
Usurpers gotta claim some reason for usurping thrones
>but Princesses are good
One way to usurp a throne is to marry into it via a princess.
>and Princes are irrelevant?
I blame prince of tennis.

>evil princesses
I made a horrible purple prose thing for this once

>lastgaspgrimoire.com/generators/the-seventh-order-of-the-random-generator/

Under "Strange Dragon Royalty"

>The Red Maharani is a vampire, and gemstones grow out from her body like tumours. She's clad in armor of slick dark insect carapaces, leaking molten metal at the joints. The purpose of her rule is the enslavement or genocide of all other species. The monarch can only be permanently killed under a hunter's moon. Her sovereignty is made evident with her sword, a blade of rainbows which cuts to the limit of the eye, and she is heralded by four dread horsemen.

>The Blue Tsarevna is two conjoined twins, identifying as a single being, with freakishly long, multiply-jointed fingers. She wears only a living cape of stinging flies. In all the world she will let no dissenting voice be heard. The monarch can only be permanently killed by fear, fire and frost all in conjunction. Her sovereignty is made evident by those parts of her which have been removed and replaced by marvellous artifices, and she comes mounted on a huge and ethereal butterfly, its wings painted with nightmares.

you forgot that if the king is good he's indisposed crusading or something

>king/queen
good
>prince/princess
good
>emperor/empress
obviously evil
>baron/baroness
needlessly cruel and evil
>count/countess
probably evil
>duke/duchess
mostly good but maybe unreliable

bonus round
>vizier/top general/adviser/second-in-command, etc.
pure evil, in league with the devil, plotting everyone's deaths, probably doesn't use coasters at banquets, etc.

Because if everything's fine and dandy, there's no conflict and no plot. The worse the situation, the higher the stakes.
Plus, it's easier to self-insert into the peasant who rises from rags to riches to rescue and eventually bang the princess than it is into the prince who's already rich and can't bang the princess because she's his sister. So the Princess has to be decent enough to warrant seducing, and the rest of the royals either not competent enough to solve the situation or Evil so the hero can step up.

>>emperor/empress
>obviously evil
Nice meme

>spoiled bra

Well, maybe next time the Royal Clothesmaster should think about keeping a large supply of fresh smallwear for the royal family.

Not if you work for that King as a Paladin and defend him until the end regardless what he does. Good times.

>Emperor
>Evil

Hate that.

this is fucking perfect, I really wish my gm would pull this on our group at some point...

>Oh the kingdom no longer exists, after they lost there most important ally, you know the
ones your princess was supposed to marry into?
>Well they got conquered without there assistance and now most of them are dead or fleeing while there sworn enemies sit on the throne.

>Thinks Princesses are good.

They aren't, they aren't, and they aren't. You fail everything, forever.

Kings and queens are symbols of the past and its mistakes.
Princes and princesses are symbols of future and the new hope it brings.
Princesses are more symbolic of hope because childbirth.

Does that sufficiently answer your question?

>Princesses are good
You mean loot.

Princesses are goods. You're both wrong

>Barons sit on the low ranking scales of ruling nobles in kingdom.
>They are evil.
I never understood this.

High ranking enough to be above common masses but low ranking enough that it feels more natural for them to try climb higher on the social ladder.

>High ranking enough to be above the common masses.
Barely. They are 1 rank above a knight in nobility chain.

>Princes are irrelevant

???

>not posting the superior version

The answer is literally 'Disney'.
No if, or buts about it.
Disney set those sterotypes in stone and like all sacred cows, the sooner it's slaughtered and made into sacred roast beef, the better.

The internet really was one of the most horrible mistakes of modern history.

I want to spitroast a Disney Princess!

So instead of getting princess' hand in marriage after saving her from her the evil stepmother the protagonist marries the queen instead and helps her to finish off what remains of the previous dynasty?

You've got it all wrong, mate. Kings and queens are generally good. They're also frequently invaded by The Empire, which is evil. By extension, emperors are evil. The advisor to the king is also evil, possibly because he's in collusion with The Empire.

Princes come in a variety of flavours. There's the noble prince who will inevitably need to avenge the untimely death of his father. The spoiled, hedonistic prince who makes everyone nervous as he clearly isn't fit to be king. The timid, ineffectual prince who's groomed to become a puppet king, usually by the evil advisor. The evil prince who's actively trying to overthrow his father(possibly because he's in cahoots with The Empire). And so on.

Princesses are largely irrelevant. Unless they're the sole survivor of the royal family, in which case they become important figureheads for The Resistance.

Hey, guys, what's going on in this thread?

Evil empire, senpai

Fantasy is for children, royal children are at least somewhat relatable to them, writers have daddy and mommy issues,

>empire
>evil
Nice meme

Innocence of youth.

As for why princes are usually less relevant, probably just because they are less burned into our collective minds as being something to be saved.

Princesses aren't good, they're Macguffins. Plot-relevant objects. Good people save the princess, or get to marry the princess as a reward.

A pale imitation of the original.

Because it's historically accurate.

Have you considered that the evil queen or king had to be an evil price or princess to get to that position? And all of the evil ruling royalty are just the ones that were the most effective at it?

Kings aren't evil, Emperors are

Teenage girls hate their parents making them ripe to be "rescued" by a "hero." Parents must be evil to make the two horny fuckers look good. Her brother is irrelevant.

Damn straight.

Monarchist for life! Death to Republican dogs.

People change as they grow up. The idealistic prince grows bitter and cold as the realities of rule hit him like a brick.

If you're same religion as the other kingdom/duchy, you can easily over the course of a few years get claimants to titles. I personally dislike it because of muh border gore, but given the amount of rebellious vassals and a revoke law, it comes out of the wash.

Haven't played pure vanilla ck2, but there should be an options screen for game control. If not, it may be time for mods and or summer sale of dlc.

Maybe low rank leads them to spite?

>Turn on radio!
>Nah, fuck it!
>Turn it off!
>Fear is your only God on the radio!
>Nah, fuck it!
>Turn it off!

I want to marry a cute, romantic, naive Princess that becomes a vicious, spiteful, depraved Queen!

>Emperor
>evil
Die.

Think of it in sitcom terms.
Mom and Dad are bumbling idiots.
Daughter is "becoming a woman", as they say. There is a very clear physical sign of her approaching adulthood that the Son just doesn't have.
There really is no Big Important Difference between a boy and a man, not the way there is between a girl and a woman. The Son is often left to his own devices because he's not important enough to spend time on.

Japan's way ahead of ya, bud.

>King is for good unless sorcerer king
>Queen is for evil unless warrior queen
>Princess is for headpats unless spoiled brat
>Prince is for rape only

Any questions?

>smallwear
Check out the Itty Bitty Titty Committee

And this is why Americans shouldn't touch shit they have no clue about

Wasn't Hamlet incredibly ineffectual? Like he never seemed like some dynamic personality

This.

It's because of the popularity of Disney and Disney's storytelling patterns.

I believe that Shield hero ln/manga had a evil princess and king

¨got framed for rape and such

>There really is no Big Important Difference between a boy and a man, not the way there is between a girl and a woman.

Are you... are you retarded?

Of all the Emperors I know of, he is unquestionably the evilest one, not even Palpatine matches up to his evil.

I like your purple prose user.
>>Prince is for rape only
Doing or being subjected to?

>this is what chaos actually believes
kek

This is what anyone who doesn't follow the Cult of Ignorance your Emperor set up believes, you mean. His Great Austisticness is not a good man, and lived through all of human history before committing the very same mistakes as all of the worst rulers humanity has ever had, and he did it across the entire galaxy rather than to just a portion of a single planet.

Princes were the original superhero in romanian and indo-persian folk.

Because you haven't consumed enough media to have noticed that's not true.

Faggot.

>Made humanity so dedicated to him that its incapable of properly taking care of itself when he's gone.
Never have I seen a bigger fuck up in a leader.

>Alexander the Great: How dare you molest the seas?
>Pirate: How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.

>>emperor/empress
>obviously evil
>Cyrus
>Darius
>Alexander
>Genghis Khan
>Kublai Khan
>Liu Che
>Ying Zheng
>Augustus
>Tiberius
>Constantine I
>Osman I
>Suleiman I
>Otto I
>Sigismund
>Charles V
>Cuitlahuac
>Cuauhtemoc
>Tokugawa Ieyasu
>Napoleon I
>Peter the Great
>Wilhelm I

If anything most "emperors" didn't live enough to do shit or sailed calm waters on the effort of the great ones. It was not the crown that made anglos and frenchies act like assholes and the 20th century emperors didn't have any chance against the siren's song of Marxism when presented to the overpopulous poor.

Do you have some kind of point?
Alexander The Great was a great military leader, not so much on the other shit.

>not so much on the other shit.
If we're talking about results, neither was the Emperor. I mean, the current state of the Imperium is pretty much the opposite of what he set out to do.
But I suppose we could claim that it was WH40K, so it couldn't have happened any other way and Emps was a patsy for shitty writing.

I'm the one who called the God-Emperor shit, dude, I know that already.

Oh, I thought you were the guy you replied to.
The point of the Alexander statement was to bolster your own point- instead of eliminating human flaws, Emps amplified them in scale.

Oh yeah, no problem dude. I don't play 40k, shits a bit too autistic and glorifying of human stupidity for me, but thanks for the support.

>How come Kings and Queens are evil but Princesses are good and Princes are irrelevant?

I can marry the princess, she can raise my children. Ergo I am motivated to see her as good or, at worst, redeemable.

The men and the old women, not so.

>How come OP can't make a decent thread

>Hasn't made the same thread since 2015

I think I can forgive OP. He is, as always, a faggot, but that's true for every thread.

>Shakespeare's one claim to fame is turning English from a "who even cares?" language to a language that could measure up to French and Spanish in terms of complexity and expressive force
>Let's remove the one thing Shakespeare did better than any other Anglophone poet from his works
This is about as retarded as the written version of a silent film.