I’m going to come out-right and say it, I don’t like the fact that the Kingdom Raven comes from/lives in is called Queen Kingdom. It makes sense, both in terms of what the in-verse society seems to value more in a character fairytale-wise (Snow White), and in terms of the Evil Queen being more important to the narrative story-wise (EAH) than the Good King. But at the same time it makes no sense.
I’m not even going to nit-pick at it being called a Kingdom when it being named after the Evil Queen implies it’s a Queendom. Queen Queendom would be a stupid name for a country, and it’s not even the only one to be called a Kingdom when the Queen is the one clearly in charge.
But I have other reasons with disliking it. Such as the outright lunacy that is having your primary sovereign be someone who signed a binding magical contract at the age of fifteen to get arrested or die before having kids. Or how the original Snow White story has the Evil Queen marrying into the family, suggesting a patrilineal succession (or at least Good King to future Good King).
So the Good King is the one left running the Kingdom after his wife is arrested and he was probably running the Kingdom before he married the Evil Queen. That makes the Kingdom Raven calls home The Good King’s Kingdom. And no. I’m not going to call it King Kingdom because that’s stupid.
I’m putting the rest under a line-break.
So we’ve established that the ruler of this Kingdom is The Good King, and now the Kingdom needs a name. Unfortunately, the same kind of lazy kingdom naming that most of the other kingdoms in the series get won’t work here. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an in-verse naming formula that can’t be used: puns and wordplay.
Originally, I was just going to call the Kingdom Goodfellow, which is obviously the words ‘good’ and ‘fellow’ put together. But then I spelt it wrong, leading to Goodfallow, and I wondered “what is a fallow?”
Fallow can be used to refer to different things, but the two that I’m choosing to focus on here are: the breed of deer that’s called a fallow deer, and the shade of yellow. Because now the kingdom has two things, a national animal and a national colour.
Well, three things. It also has a name.
This might not seem important, especially having a national colour for a kingdom when the characters all seem to have their own colour schemes (Raven and the Evil Queen wearing purple, silvers, and blacks, and The Good King wearing red and gold the one time he’s talked about that I can recall). But having a national symbol in mind for a kingdom is useful if I ever need to describe that kingdom’s seal or the colours on their flag.
So the Kingdom’s called Goodfallow, it has a couple of national symbols that can be linked back to the name, does this mean that the other characters in any fanfiction I write using this now call it Goodfallow also?
No. Where’s the fun in that?
After all, it is still canon-typical that most of the character’s would call the kingdom Queen Kingdom. For example, in the books the reader’s first look at Apple White has her calling some of the dwarfs working for her Pouty and Sloppy when their names are actually Frank and Phil, and even laughs and calls one of them silly when they try to correct her. Because the dwarfs having names like Frank and Phil don’t fit into her own personal ideal of what her fairytale and happily ever after are going to look like, and Raven coming from a kingdom called Goodfallow rather than one called Queen Kingdom also won’t fit into what she wants the narrative to be.
Of course, Apple White isn’t the only character in Ever After High. She does, however, share the same goals and ideals as Headmaster Grimm and as the Headmaster of the school he might even have some power over the course content in the Geografairy class that appears to be a compulsory subject.
The question is now whether or not Raven tries to fight it.
On one hand, she could. She’s the senior authority at Ever After High when it comes to the name of her own country, and insisting it is called something else is going to be massively disrespectful given she’s the Princess and presumed heir. You know that her friends are going to support her, and some of the other characters that aren’t necessarily Rebels but are respectful will too. While anyone still trying to save the sinking ship will look like an asshole and a very rude one at that.
On the other hand, there could be a reason for the misunderstanding and a reason for Raven to keep everyone else ignorant. The royal family in Goodfallow might want it that way.
Think about it, the Good King married someone who, at least as far as he’s concerned, signed a magically binding contract to be evil. Whatever his motives for doing this (and I have ideas on that of my own), there would have been some kind of acknowledgement that doing so could lead to the kingdom going to war. Marrying a main character could well be an acceptable in-verse reason for changing the name of the Kingdom, and changing the name of the Kingdom could well mean the need to reprint “updated” maps.
Presumably, these maps would have up-to-date information in regard to main roads used for trade routes, or have a particular note on which towns and cities are fortified and which aren’t, or mark areas where the geography of the landscape would be marshy and therefore a poor choice of battleground.
If Raven has little reason to believe that the future Rulers of the kingdoms that neighbour hers are going to accept her as her father’s successor, which is reasonable considering the push back against Raven being good. Then she’s not going to want to give up the military advantage she has when it comes to the defense of her boarders.
Especially, not when the biggest person pushing against her is her own niece, who due to a) brief in-verse implications about the Evil Queen marrying Queen White’s father means Queen White would have a biological claim - though generally speaking marrying into another royal family means abdicating titles held in one’s own home kingdom, and b) the original Snow White story has the Good King dying before the story takes place and the Evil Queen dying at Snow’s wedding to the Prince - presumably leaving the two of them in control of that kingdom as well as the kingdom that the Prince came from if he had a claim to the throne himself.
If White Kingdom does boarder Goodfallow the political drama Apple attempting to force Raven into being Evil would hold (and given the Storybook of Legends show Raven as being homeless after being banished by Apple) is a story in itself.
Most of what we see or hear when it comes to the succession systems in the universe that Ever After High is set in relates to fairytales and the inheritance of specific character roles. Many of the fairytale royalty are born into their royal bloodlines or otherwise marry in. But there are some kingdoms where things aren’t as easy as that. One such kingdom is the Good King’s Kingdom – which I named Goodfallow in another post.
The Good King is a fairytale character, but his role in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is small. In fact, depending on the adaption of the story you read he might have already died by the time the story has officially begun. He’s not quite dead yet in the series, seeing as he’s still raising Raven Queen, but it is never acknowledged that Raven is in line for the throne. Not even as a “Hey, maybe Raven has her dad’s destiny…” kind of way, which you would expect given Raven is constantly fighting for any destiny other than her mother’s. Going that route might seem like too easy a fix to acknowledge in the series, especially early on, no matter how powerful a red herring that would be for the readers. It could have even been used to make Grimm start to worry on whether or not he actually guessed right when it comes to writing the fake book. Grimm doubting himself would have been great, even more so if it’s a big thing to have forgotten that the Good King needs an heir too.
The potential for drama aside, there must have been something else that made everyone think they were right so conclusively (and I’m not speaking of the gendered characters, there are too many female characters who have their father’s destinies for that to be the reason).
Then I had an idea.
The Goodfallow Crown
I wanted to create a succession system for Goodfallow that would be able to stand up to the Storybook of Legends on something akin to even ground. Obviously, I didn’t want it to have such a grand scale. But I knew I wanted something magical, and I knew I wanted it to be possible that the Storybook of Legends (the original) could guess wrong. (I mean what even is the point of having an antagonist as powerful and insufferable as Headmaster Grimm if he wasn’t able to grasp at some straws to save face and avoid even the harshest of punishments?). Still I wanted Grimm to be arrogant enough that he wouldn’t have worried about Raven’s position as the Evil Queen until she was throwing the book in his face on Legacy Day.
This meant I needed something with so many possibilities that something like the Storybook of Legends would have a hard time even coming up with the most likely outcome for the Next Good King. Something that could be affected up until the moment that the Good King has been crowned. And something that had the magical power to break the magical contract to the Storybook of Legends that signing it would create without extensive repercussions – something that would cause a page to fall out on its own if need be.
Also it needed to be something that played into what a Good King should be, it is what is choosing the reigning monarch after all.
In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Evil Queen is defined by her attitude and treatment of the kingdom’s people, so it only makes sense that the Good King be defined in the same way. So I played with the idea of the Good King being an elected position that passed down the bloodline out of convenience and all the things that real life kings and queens have to do to make sure that the people don’t start up a revolution. Something like the Sword in the Stone from King Arthur’s legends could do that, the same could be said for Thor’s Hammer (though I wasn’t actually thinking of Mjolnir when spider-mapping ideas).
I couldn’t see it being an actual sword, as cool as it would be for the Good King to actually have the kingdom’s blessing of sorts to raise his sword at those who wronged him. And after reading the fairytale Prince Darling, where there is a ring that pricks the young Prince on the finger every time he does something wrong in hopes that it will make him into a good person, I thought of using a crown.
The Goodfallow Crown, named such because it is the physical manifestation of the collective will of all the citizens of Goodfallow ticks a lot of the boxes for what I wanted.
It’s magic, powerful enough to break the bindings created by the Storybook of Legends because I’m the author and I say so. A lot of citizens in Goodfallow mean a lot of different possibilities for whether or not they think a candidate is the best for the Good King. It can still be meddled with before the inheritance ceremony, popularity and propaganda are going to be important – the same goes for whether or not a candidate knows what they’re doing. In turn this could be what makes Grimm so arrogant in his assertions that Raven will have her mother’s destiny.
The students at Ever After High are shown to be scared of Raven to the point they scream and run away from her. At the start of the books she assumes that this is just a side effect from her destiny as her mother had mentioned that something of the sort would happen when she reached a certain age. But it could be argued that this has more to do with how bullying of Raven (or any supposedly-evil-aligned character) was encouraged by Grimm or other members of the faculty, high tensions from how close Legacy Day is for her etc. Because Raven does get more popular as the books go on, and because the characters act a similar way in the beginning of the show’s canon it could be argued that she get’s popular enough to win Thronecoming.
But it’s not just Raven’s lack of popularity. Grimm makes all the final class decisions when it comes to what subject’s students can take, so he can ensure that Raven never takes classes that would prepare her for being the Good King (Kingdom Management, Throne Economics, etc…) and then there’s the low possibility that the people of Goodfallow would accept someone who willingly signs up to potentially marry the king of a neighbouring country, abuse their power, and even get arrested or die before having kids as their Ruler. This is one case where the Storybook of Legends doesn’t need to be real for the damage to be done. And Grimm has no reason to not be arrogant about his guesses until Legacy Day where Raven declares she wants to write her own destiny on the in-verse equivalent of international television he’s not going to worry too much.
The tangent into Grimm’s motives and assumptions show that having Goodfallow’s succession system be like this will only add another layer to some of the things going on in the series, and this can even be applied to other characters too. Raven would have grown up in a kingdom where your actions mean more then what you say, so even agreeing to sign the Storybook of Legends and live her own life after would have not been in the cards for her (not to mention it would cheapen Apple’s own story if she asked that of Raven), and Queen White would have also grown up in Goodfallow given the Good King is her father as well, and that could add a really interesting layer to her own character and her obsession with popularity. Especially in the context of the Class of Classics comic which shows that Snow was once a studious student like Apple was but has now seemingly forgone that in favour of focusing on popularity (which is the same in the books as well as Dragon Games). It certainly speaks of there being more to her character then what we’ve gotten.
Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how the Good Fallow Crown works.
It seems a bit much to have someone attempt to wear the crown for the first time on their coronation, and I’m also understanding of the fact that it’s technically headwear and therefore can’t get heavier if the kingdom seems to disagree with an idea or something else – also Goodfallow isn’t a hivemind? So there would need to be some kind of inheritance test. Perhaps for officially declaring a Crown Prince or Princess.
Historically, Crown Princes or Princesses seem to given the title when they are ready for it. With the announcement happening sometime between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, unless their parents were dead, and they were ruling through a Regent. Raven is fifteen when Legacy Day takes place so sixteen seems like a more reasonable time for the ceremony to happen. Though obviously some of the kingdoms would name their children the Crown Prince or Princess earlier (I’m thinking Briar and Hopper might have been given their titles when their Magic Touch developed, given its significance to their stories).
So the sixteen year old heir would try the crown on. It would be impractical for the circle of people who can hold or lift the crown to be small a la Thor’s Hammer, especially when it’s the literal Will of the People. So, magical girl transformation?
Very basic, plain clothes are to be worn with no jewellery – because you might lose it otherwise. If the people agree with the Prince or Princess being a good candidate for the throne then they’ll get decked out in finery when the magic is a match. If not then there’s no change. (Not that that prevents rumours from spreading to the contrary).
“Rumour has it the Evil Queen tried to wear the crown once and it set her on fire.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that’s why her hair is like that now.”
Of course, the changes don’t stop at the Inheritance Ceremony. Just because the Goodfallow Crown doesn’t get infinitely heavier when the Good King does something the people don’t agree with that doesn’t mean that nothing happens. Raven’s dad is described as being bald in the books, and I like to think that the reason for that is the people of Goodfallow not agreeing with him marrying the Evil Queen, while still understanding why he did it. But there would likely be other affects as well. Such as increased stress, anxiety, paranoia, etc. Maybe a lack of motivation in his day to day life? I don’t know, but the Goodfallow Crown does take the phrase “Heavy is the head that wears the crown” to a whole new meaning.
I love the whole thought of this, as evidenced by the fact it takes up almost three whole pages in a Word Document. Definitely one of my favourite pieces of worldbuilding I’ve done for any fandom ever.
