Chat corner 151: Nobility and royalty

[annathecrow]

Welcome to the Monday chat corner!

This week's topic is nobility and royalty - the queens and kings, princes and princesses, counts, dukes, and all the other titled elite of the Galaxy Far Far Away.

(Do Jedi Knights count? I don't know! What do you think?)

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Not on the topic, but a few SW items. I have been enjoying the Women of Star Wars series that colls has been doing https://colls.dreamwidth.org/tag/women+of+star+wars

Also, speaking of the women of Star Wars I got a gift bag. I've picked up a few gift bags to use as grocery totes (they're not great as they're pretty fragile, but it works well enough for certain kinds of items). But it is fun to be able to use fannish totes and I really like the all-women SW one.

[atamascolily]

Jedi Knights should count, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Lucas intended them to be addressed as "sir" which got cut/changed at some point in the revision process. But you can't have a fairy tale in space without space royalty!

This also makes me wonder if Lucas had originally envisioned "the Senate" to be less like the modern American version and more akin to the ancient Roman one, where only patricians and aristocrats could hold office and co-existed along with emperors and other nobility. I think the politics of the prequels might have been less jarring if that had been the case--also, it would help explain why Palpatine waited so long to dissolve the senate.

[havendale]

I feel like the treatment of royalty/nobility is one of those areas where you do see a bit of tension between Star Wars as pulpy adventure and Star Wars as serious drama – Naboo giving actual political power to a fourteen-year-old queen is just a fun worldbuilding detail in TPM, but starts to feel slightly implausible by the time we get to the semi-realistic rise of space fascism in ROTS.

Come to think of it, I’m curious whether there are any SW monarchies where the monarch’s role is purely ceremonial?