#the sad and complicated royal intrigue of doubledads

[tumblunni]

Let’s ramble a bit more about Changeling Sim ideas! This time a bit about the awkward lil royal family and their interlocking relationships~!

Kiddo

It our deuteroganist! Hello! The protagonist’s cute little daughter is actually the next heir to the faerie throne, sent to be raised by her as a challenge to prove that the human world has good in it and is worth saving. And also secretly because Xana Mega is pretty awkward and cute under her scary facade, and was worried she was too distant to make a good mother to her child. In the golden ending you can help patch up their relationship, even though Jackie is still the one Kiddo knows as her true mother, and her biological parent becomes more like the family’s aunt. Kiddo is technically half human, but it’s not because Xana Mega married a human or anything. Fairies don’t follow biological genetics, theyre grown from giant flowers after all! Xana created Kiddo entirely by herself, and she acquired her human side solely from being given to Jackie to raise. Baby fae are more metaphysically squishy than their older counterparts, the classic changeling ploy is simply to replace a human child with a fae baby and it’ll naturally shift into the shape of the human. For a time they’ll be just that- a fairy wearing a disguise. But if they don’t know theyre not human, they’ll grow into what they’re taught and completely transform into a real mortal around puberty. Changelings do tend to retain a heightened sense to the supernatural and occasionally a few odd abilities, but generally they’ll never return to what they once were. Traditionally nobody had a choice in this whole matter, it was a very sketchy and horrid practise of ancient fae who didnt even respect humans as real sentient people. But in this case Kiddo wasn’t replacing an existing human, and she’s being raised knowing of her origins. Eventually she’ll face the question of whether she wants to stay or return to being a fairy, but it’ll be 100% her own choice. Similarly, it’s her own choice whether she wants to take the throne or if she finds a different career choice during her adventures in this other world. Many endings for you, the player!

Xana Mega

The current queen of Mag Mell, an ominous towering figure who rules with strict efficiency and commands the current anti-human war. Everyone’s pretty damn scared of her, and she lives a very lonely life disconnected from her own people. Despite her frightening persona and dedication to all things rational, she’s called for this mysterious truce for the next 18 years, and is permitting certain humans to enter our realm?? Truly the queen works in mysterious ways... but is she going soft...? Deep down she’s really a kind person who feels she has to put up this front deliberately in order to retain order. Its half that and half not really knowing how to function well socially, since she’s been groomed to be a ruler from a young age and had to live with a distant father. Because she was scared she’d repeat his mistakes, she gave her child to somebody else... but ultimately has she just become the same absent parent? It doesnt matter, because at least the kid will have a good mother, even if it isn’t her. But the decision does haunt her, and she’s both excited and terrified of the day she’ll see the child again on her 18th birthday and she won’t recognise her. But hopefully (if the player does well) she’ll be able to see that Kiddo has grown up into a wonderful young woman and had a fullfilling life that makes it all worthwhile ^_^ Ultimately if you’d ever get to know the real Xana beneath the royal role, she’s a slightly adorable awkward dork with a weary sadness yet a childish joy for experiencing new things. When you’d given up hope on this stuff, its hard to restrain yourself! Its possible to get a super secret route where Jackie romances Xana and Kiddo acquires DOUBLEMUMS~! And they’re super cute going out together on Real Authentic Human World Dates while Xana flails happily like this small hotdog stand is disneyland. Who’da thought that after the war ended, the old queen would become a human world weeaboo as soon as she set foot in our dimension? ^_^

Alberich

Xana’s father and previous ruler. Known as the Good King, he was responsible for starting the grand reforms of society that Xana continues nowadays. If peace is ever achieved between humans and fae, he was the one who sewed the first seed even if he didn’t live to see it sprout. Despite his success as a ruler, he was pretty flawed as a father, and passed that on to his daughter. He couldn’t completely escape the trappings of ancient fairy tradition, and his daughter was mostly raised by maids and tutors while he remained just this distant silent figure she could never reach no matter how hard she tried. She never even knew very much about him since he died when she was young. The young queen was just left with a million different opinions everybody else had on him, coalescing into an abstract cluster of an unknowable, empty pillar of ideal regal emotionlessness. .....Of course, the real Alberich was just as far from this as she is! To those who personally knew him, he was a complete softhearted goofball whose overidealistic ramblings would surely doom the whole country. And isn’t that just why he’s so loveable? Ultimately, his failure as a father was just that... a failure. Xana tried to justify it as if he’d made the right decision to be distant, and she should become the same sort of person, and take it further to become distant to even her own citizens. But Alberich never pretended his decision was the right one, he was a good man who despite his best efforts didn’t know how to raise a child. He had no-one to learn from, and his fear of messing up is what caused him to flee from the concept of parenthood entirely. He thought that hiring the best educators and minders would help compensate for the ways he was lacking as a dad, never knowing that all his daughter wanted was the one thing he could give- love. :( In the end he perished sadly to a simple disease that could have been cured if the country’s infrastructure wasn’t so ravaged by the war with the humans. His decision to prioritize the remaining money towards protecting the citizens was what caused him to waste away from a simple fever. While a certain someone raced against the clock to fetch the medicine on foot, arriving just late enough to miss the chance to hold his hand as he passed away...

Rafferty

A simple court jester who was promoted to the king’s butler and eventually promoted/demoted (?) to the finance minister after the new queen took the throne. Why is he even in the royal family section...? He’s always been sort of a stuffy grumpy neat freak, but he used to be a symbol of fun amoungst the court once. Now he’s just become bitter and hateful, leading the anti-human sentiment and questioning the country’s leadership at every turn. He’s globally hated by all of his coworkers and suspected of being corrupt- he was the major scapegoat for the culprit in the king’s death, and never managed to shake the stigma. He’s only really here and has any sort of power because the king’s will secured his position for the foreseeable future. He’s also hated because (GASP!) he’s a disgusting former human turned fairy! In his former life he was a homeless peasant in the 1800s that Alberich brought home one day and hired as a servant. Everyone humoured the king with his new pet, but it started to get ridiculous when he gave the thing legal rights and a career! It’s tradition to just consider a fairy a fairy when they become one, and forget about whoever they were in their past life, but gossipping housewives like to ignore this rule and hold it against him anyway. Its also kinda why Rafferty has such a personal hate of humans, he used to be one and he’s seen nothing but the worst side of them... His role in the current story is really just to be a small obstacle in plotlines, and a possible befriendable character. I’m an optimistic person so I like stories of cliche ‘evil vizier’ type guys having more complex motives and being able to be redeemed in the end. In the end you can discover that the real secret behind him and the king was that they were actually dating, and Rafferty really was loyal to the kingdom all along. And he endured all this hate for so long because he doesn’t want to tarnish Alberich’s memory by letting people know about their affair. Xana is actually his biological daughter from when he was human, making him Kiddo’s grandpa. Neither of them knew this fact though, and in fact Xana was one of the people who hated him the most. She just knew him as her funny friend who kept her company when she was lonely as a child, one of her father’s servants who seemed to care about her more than the rest. So she took it as a personal betrayal when he was suspected of killing the king, and kept believing it well into her adult years. Its gonna be a messy reunion for them when the misunderstanding is all sorted out, but a happy one too, hopefully...

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A slightly unrelated side note but I ideally wanna make a full cast of court employees and lesser nobility! At the moment all I have is Rafferty, unnamed scribe dad and kiiiinda a cupid type figure I dont know much about yet? I dunno, I just got that concept in my brain while I was thinking about Raffles and Ritchi’s past back when he was king. I imagined maybe Rafferty did have at least one friend amoung the royal court who knew about his relationship with the king and supported them. And it sorta came together in my brain as some sort of champion of love and justice, and maybe designed around a traditional valentine’s day fairy cliche. But like a world weary chain smoker one? BUT still one that really is a kind loving figure, not a dark subversion or anything. I just feel like they’re someone worn down by seeing injustice in the world, and questioning other people’s definitions of love that’re being forced upon them. Someone who was doubting this country... I get the feeling they’ve left the plot by the time we get to the present, but I don’t know if they died or maybe they just left the country after the king died and they’d lost their last hope the place could change. But I do generally think maybe everyone who was in the fairy court back when Rafferty was jester is now dead and/or gone, he was the youngest member then and he’s the oldest one now. And he was hated by all his former friends, they died, and now he’s left being hated by all new people... But yeah I just have this good image of some broken but kind person finding a tiny bit of happiness realizing grumpy old rafferty found love, and reassuring him that they dont hold the same stupid homophobic ‘no dating humans’ views that everyone else is pushing. A brief bit of calm before the storm, making it even sadder that cupid just wasnt strong enough to keep trying after that hope died, and ran out even on rafferty, their last friend... I guess... a Nanu cupid?