Why are people so fascinated with royalty? And how does this relate to the bedrock of modern fantasy? These are the questions I put forth last Saturday. Today I’ll start spinning a few theories.
My first thought is going to seem obvious: Tradition. Fantasy is just the latest chapter in a long tradition of storytelling that begins with religious mythology, flows into more general folk stories, and has persisted into the age of professional publishing. If you think about it, some of the most enduring characters from around the world were all royalty.
Half the cast of the Iliad and Odyssey were Greek rulers. King Arthur was royalty. Even Sun Wukong, from Chinese legend, began his career as King of the Monkeys. So it’s traditional for the main characters in many stories to be kings or princes (more rarely queens or princesses). Sometimes the ruler is more of a background character who delegates tasks to other protagonists, but in an awful lot of tales, the king goes out having adventures personally.
Perhaps this is part of humanity’s ancient legacy. Descended from social apes who were led by an “alpha,” we may have a predisposition to look for such leaders in the real world, and in stories. We watch what they do, admire their actions, and share their victories. As humans have granted rulers ever more ceremony and finery, there’s the additional lure of riches and glamor that comes with being royalty.
After centuries of adulation, the concept of royalty has built up a mythic quality. We often see legends like that of King Arthur, where a king is prophesied to begin an era of peace and justice. Fantasy is full of chosen ones, lost heirs, and other characters that embody the mystique of royalty.
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Wyrmflight 
I am not an expert on primates, But humans do share around 99% of the same DNA as chimps and bonobos. Humans (“the naked ape” as Desmond Morris called us) have leaders or “alphas” in virtually everything. That’s whether or not those leaders have titles.
And for a long, long time, a tragedy was about noble/royal/divine characters, not about “regular people.” Comedies could be about regular people, but not tragedies because the lives of most people “weren’t important enough” to be tragic. It wasn’t until after the invention of the printing press, when non-royals started getting as rich or even richer than royalty, that the concept broadened.
And even in modern day, compare how many articles you can find about a nation’s leader or a movie star to how many you can find about anyone else. Those are about the closest thing America has to royalty.
It occurs to me there could also be some subconscious bias at work here. Selecting stories of royalty in fantasy and other genres (“Emperor of the Galaxy” in how many science fiction pieces?) further normalizes a system that requires acceptance of a story by a “ruler” before it’s distributed to the “masses.” I suspect most editors and publishers I know would be horrified by this thought and deny it vehemently, but still, as the major publishers consolidate more and more, thoughts like this cross my mind more frequently.
I think you’re right.
Let’s face it, if a book or movie about (fill in the blank) becomes extremely popular, there will likely be a kit more (fill in the blank) to come.
And it’s easier to write a story about X vs. Y, say, the Rebels vs. the Empire, than it is to write one where power is split among A and B and C and D and E and F and G and….
The popularity of a type of story also affects what authors submit. As an author, I want my work to sell, so why not write about what’s really popular right now? (The reason not to is that there’s a whole lot of competition writing the same type of story.)
That is such a great point, and also quite depressing.