I meant to follow up sooner, but things have been rather hectic here. It’s finally calmed down, though, and I should be able to maintain a more regular schedule for the near future. With that being said, let’s get into what I was wanting to talk about in greater detail.
You see, I don’t just detail the immediately relevant information in my peripheral materials. The breadth and scope go well beyond what is revealed in the stories themselves. Perhaps one day compendia of these materials will be made for the benefit of the most die-hard fans, but for now it’s just stuff I use to explore my worlds and make them more complete.
One of the things about the Cross Arc is the much broader latitude I enjoy compared to the original three Arcs. Yes, as the author I have the power to do whatever I want, but each Arc is governed by a certain internal logic and bound by a particular set of rules. There are also boundaries to the setting as well. The Tellus and Earth Arcs are restricted to one world and the Space Arc to the solar system, but the Cross Arc spans the entire galaxy and is set far enough in the future that I don’t need to worry about rooting myself in real-world history as much. I can make all manner of worlds with the tech, culture and history that’ll best serve the story.
Most of my recent work on Junker Jorg has involved more fully realizing the world of Miravel where the story takes place. Our protagonist hails from the Kingdom of Byrandia, but, ironically, I spent so much time not on Byrandia but rather its archrival, the Kingdom of the Palatine (commonly known as Palatinia). I have no small interest in genealogy and I’ve detailed the family trees of a number of characters across the Five Arcs. In drawing up the family tree for the Palatinian royal family, I devised an interesting concept that started to run away with me.
We should all be familiar with the principle of male primogeniture for inheritance. Well, the Palatinians go a step further. You see, the eldest surviving son will inherit a man’s title and holding, but for the next generation, it’s the eldest surviving male of the entire clan who is next in line. If the second generation heir has an elder sister and she bears a son, that son will be the first in line to inherit once the second generation heir dies or bequeaths his inheritance. The order of succession of kings has a further wrinkle. When a reigning king dies or abdicates the throne, the crown goes to the next eligible male heir in that generation of the clan, based on both the internal primogeniture of the individual family as well as that of founders of each branch of the family. Ergo, the descendants of King Marcellus I’s eldest daughter Marcella take precedence over those of his youngest son Julian (though, technically, Prince Julian’s line died out with him as his sole heir was his daughter Juliana, who died at age three). This sounds interesting enough, but there’s a key problem to it. Normally, I simply ignore the irrelevant branches of the family tree and follow the line of succession. With this construct of Palatinian inheritance law and the order of succession, I had to detail every single branch generation after generation. The Palatinian naming convention made this a little easier, following a pseudo-Roman model.
Allow me to make this momentary detour to detail this naming convention. The firstborn, male or female, is named after the father, the second after the mother, the third after the paternal grandfather, the fourth after the maternal grandfather, then the paternal grandmother and the maternal grandmother and the paternal grandfather’s father and so on and so forth. If any two names are the same (which would happen when the father is the firstborn male and you get to the third child), a variant is used. This meant I didn’t have to spend too much time agonizing over names, but I did have to keep track of the increasingly tangled lines of succession.
Going back, to my problem, I started making a move to simplify the tree that also had a good in-world justification. As the more distant branches would be further down the line in the order of succession and risk missing their chance at the throne entirely (and, conversely, the branches at the front of the line might not see the crown again for a while if the more distant branches have younger heirs that outlive their own in a given generation), they begin to intermarry. Typically, nothing closer than second cousin marriages are permitted, but this didn’t always hold. Now, when two cousins in the royal family marry, the placement of the heirs depends on the parent who’s furthest up the line. (Ergo, the descendants of Princess Marcella were in high demand.) This mess of kissing cousins only went so far to streamline the family. After spending days on this dang tree, I was wanting to take more drastic measures. Enter Julius the Gardener.
If I was getting frustrated with this convoluted system, imagine how it must be for a man of ambition eager for his day in the sun. Julius the Gardener got his byname because of his pledge to “prune the family tree”. And prune he did. He led a three-year campaign of assassination known as the Julian Revolt which killed off pretty much all of the royal family save for his own descendants (though his eldest son Cassius was one of the casualties of reprisal attacks). Julius is one of the more evil characters I’ve created, a shameless kinslayer and oathbreaker who cared only about gaining the throne and preserving it for his descendants and his descendants alone. One particular episode involves a man later vilified as “Yohannes the Coward” because of his vain bid to save himself and his family from Julius’ purge by renouncing his birthright and place in the line of succession. Guess what? It didn’t work. Yohannes, his wife, four children, and young ward (the daughter of his cousin) are all mercilessly slaughtered. I’m even toying around with writing a short about this sordid episode, so be on the lookout for that.
Julius the Gardener, who became King Julius III, did a pretty solid job of paring down the royal family, but I figure all that bloodletting isn’t going to just stop. Enter the 100-year curse of Goetia the Heretic. (She’s a story for another day.) Now, whether you believe in the curse of an exiled witch princess is real or not is up to you, but the end result is that the royal family goes extinct and I get to start over again with a new dynasty. For the time being, at least, catching up to the timeframe of the story is enough for me.
So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing, mostly. Days of work spinning an overcomplicated web of blood and incest. What else would I be doing? ^_^;
