my mother—my "real life" mother, that is—once taught me that the last king ought to be hung with the guts of the last priest. I believed her then, and I believe her now. but there's a conflicting, contradictory side of me: the part that was drawn to mythology and fantasy about knights and monarchs and demigods.
the realms of Western popular imagination are, to an extreme degree, authoritarian. our media overflows with kings and generals and vigilante justice. when democracy is portrayed, it's generally as a victim that requires constant salvation. team heroism and collective action isn't totally absent from this landscape but it's very much out of fashion. Western culture puts such unbalanced emphasis on individual heroism and solitary leadership for an obvious reason: analogy with Jesus, whom Christians regard as the ideal king.
I am complicit. I have soaked up this material and perpetuated it. In particular I fell for J. R. R. Tolkien at an early age and he was hopelessly attached to the futile daydream of the perfectly humble monarch, who (like the Douglas Adams Ruler of the Universe) didn't want to rule. "Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses," said Tolkien.
Remind you of anyone?
My own (fictive) father, King Fluffybuns, apparently only wants to grow flowers and drink tea and give out Christmas presents; he seems to be a gentle, hands-off ruler, but there's only so much you can learn about an entire kingdom in a few lines of incidental dialogue. I do not think I am wrong in guessing that a substantial fraction of the Undertale fandom is attracted to the Tolkien-ish qualities of King Asgore, and love depicting him as a kindly fairytale king. it's a frequent composition in Undertale fan-art: King Asgore, Queen Toriel, Asriel and Frisk as the Royal children, the storybook portrait of a nuclear ruling family. (Usually I'm left out of that particular picture.) It's charming, right?
Well? is it? Should anyone still be idolizing kings—ANY kings? Is there really no place in the Western public imagination for democracy or collective leadership? Why must Western culture keep alive the daydream of the ideal king? In a thousand subtle and semi-conscious ways, we're encouraged to wait for Second Comings...we're taught to wait for a perfection that's never going to arrive.
I wanted to believe in it too. Whatever leftist spirit my RL mother passed along to me, it got squandered and dissipated in part because I was secretly entranced by ideal kings. I yearned for Arthur and Aragorn. And in my fictive life, I thought for a time that I'd found the fabled Good King (and a good father) in Asgore, Mr. Dad Guy. I feel silly, and worse than silly. I'm supposed to believe in freedom for eff's sake, not monarchies. Just who put the boss Monsters in charge, anyway?
Perhaps what the Underground needs most is Revolution, and the abolition of the monarchy.
~Chara