I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
Touching on the monarchism worship, I gotta gripe about a game I was playing that does exactly this in a setting that I think could use a lot more exploring since it’s quite literally right up our ideological alley.
In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel you’re set into a world that’s blurring the line between the very end of the high middle ages and the industrial revolution / era of imperialism where the old feudal world’s just beginning to transition into an industrial society.
You get to see a proverbial Holy Roman Empire / German Empire (here’s another one that grinds my gears, why is it always the fucking krauts) with its political and economic structures coming under the stresses of change that occurs as the bourgeoisie begins to grow in economic power, education becomes more normalized, technological developments leads to automation and increases in productivity, etc. Its essentially a story of “what if we made a fantasy version of the emergence of the Victorian Era”.
It’s a very interesting story with very enjoyable worldbuilding that really makes you think about how rapidly shit began to change. Of course the actual game itself is tropy as hell and back again with plenty of annoying shit that’s common for weeb shit, but what really tilted me was how there was a fucking revolutionary movement in the game and you think “oh shit are we gonna see conflict between the developing bourgeois and the entrenched feudal powers?” And boy did it fucking subvert my expectations for the worse.
It turns out it was a fucking counter-revolutionary movement of the feudal aristocracy hell-bent on rolling back the reforms granted on behalf of the “lower classes” and to decentralize the government to restore power to the regional lords aka themselves so they could restore dignity and honor to the empire and put the uppity peasants in their place.
I was so fucking tilted by that and it didn’t stop there, if it wasn’t for the outright over-the-top anime fantasy plot making me go “wtf kind of campy shit are they gonna come up with next” keeping me somewhat interested in following the story, I might have dropped it by like game 3.
Idk, the Bismarck analogue guy (Osbourne?) was supposed to be a representation of the emergent bourgeoisie taking control from and over the aristocracy. The emperor was basically a puppet of his - not even given voiced lines - and the state had begun to be fully centralized. The peasantry and proletariat at that time weren’t as class conscious, politically coherent, or as organized as the bourgeoisie were.
The game’s politics seem to be consistent with how history played out.
The krauts had an aristocratic revolt around the time period between the formation of the north german confederation and of the formation of the German empire?
The way that the bourgeoisie arrested and seized control from aristocracy and monarchy, (e.g, England) making the latter into the symbol of the state and central authority and undermining the former’s dominance in shaping the future of the country, yes.
I think the Erebonian empire’s situation can be compared to Meiji era Japan, where an oligarchy emerged to bring Japan away from isolationist feudalism to imperialist bourgeois democracy, modernization, and industrialization.
Oh shit, yeah you definitely could say the erebonian civil war is comparable to the Boshin war. Hell I think that’s a more accurate theory of what real historical event theyre basing the game story on but with a layer of sourkraut on top