Queen Regnant Puns

I am talking about the "male dominated -10" shitty relationship debuff or something like that. Thx for reading 😤

Maybe this is more a question for /r/rant, but I always get annoyed by this. In real life, the husband of a ruling queen (known as a queen regnant) is usually called the prince consort and is addressed as a prince, like Prince Phillip. Occasionally monarchies use different terminology and call them the king consort, but that's the exception.

But every time I've seen it come up in fiction, marrying a queen makes you a king. And I generally get the impression that they have official power.

WTF Casting Agency:

- I cannot fathom why they did not make Balfey King Louis XVI. He's already a King Louis XVI Expy (awkward, airheaded but skilled in his hobbies, nice, fat, harshly judged by his father, naive, kindhearted, but ultimately unfit for a position of power) and he wasn't being used anywhere else.

- Why Alminas of all people as Marc Anthony? They cast a pacifist to play an actual warlord? The only possible reason I can think of is that they already used Barbalius, but even so, Leslie and Willow weren't used and either one would have made a WAY better Marc Anthony.

- That casting choice is almost as baffling as casting Alan as Ptolemy, which was so bizarre that I'm not even gonna talk about it.

- Yes, Zoe as Sir Robert Dudley was hot and a good choice. I'm bummed that they skipped the part where he married and knocked up one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting (we could have had a young!Christie cameo) behind her back, but it was still pretty good.

- Lou should have been Mary Tudor. Don't even @ me.

- Alan should have been Grigory Potemkin. There are too many parallels to miss (A soldier who came from humble origins, but worked his way to the top of the military, the social ladder and eventually won the heart of a powerful woman). I cannot think of a single reason why they would cast Carlos. Also, she didn't meet Grigory until her usurpation, they were not pals before she was Empress.

- Empress Maria Theresa was one of the baddest bitches in European history and casting Eliza as her personally offended me. At least have the decency to use Tilla or Christie.

- On that note, I'm mad we didn't see Eliza as Princess Joanna since they're basically the same person. (Narcissistic, fallen noble who abused and exploited her brilliant daughter for a drop of clout; fucking up everything, acting like a seaward, and reaping unearned benefits all the way.)

Historical Hero Upgrades:

- I'm gonna start by pointing out that these women, while great leaders, were also massive seawards and/or criminals because almost every major European ruler was one back in the day.

- Cleopatra may or may not have (but totally did) murder her brother so that she could be the sole ruler of Egypt. She also banged Caesar, bore his child, and brought it up as much as she could, he denied fathering the baby, but most historians agree it was his. (The second one isn't really bad, I just thought it was kinda interesting.)

- Queen Elizabeth I was tolerant

THERE IS A CLICHÉ—content is king—that almost every Bollywood personality spouts, but nobody really believes in. Content is of course not king. On the chessboard of a movie’s essential components, it may be a rook or a knight, maybe even a pawn. But it certainly isn’t a king. A Hindi film’s success is dependent on a vast array of other things, from the way a film is positioned and marketed when it is released, to the way the film’s star projects him or herself.

Perhaps nobody understands this better than Kangana Ranaut, the star of Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. Films do not work because great actors star in them. It is because brands do. And Ranaut has been working on her brand, at least for half a decade ever since her break-out film Queen released; that was arguably the first female coming-of-age story in Bollywood, where a naive girl embarks on a journey of self-discovery after her fiancé calls off their wedding. One can perhaps argue that by the end of the film, it isn’t just the lead character, Rani, who finds herself. Even the actor playing her, Kangana Ranaut, does.

There are two ways you look at the phenomenon known as Kangana Ranaut. There is Ranaut, the fearless feminist. The talented woman from a small town who may have no industry godfathers but is unafraid of calling out the hypocrisy and nepotism in the industry. People don’t want her in the industry, she tells us, because she is an outspoken woman. Then there is the other view. As Karan Johar once said, “You cannot be this victim every time and have a sad story to tell about how you’ve been terrorised by the bad world of the industry.” She has built a church on stones nobody has really flung at her. Some of her recent collaborators claim she hijacks projects.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Ranaut is an outsider who has made it in one of the most competitive and protected industries on her own. She is also smart enough to know that the only way you can win here is by breaking rules. She has converted what one would imagine ould serve as impediments in the film industry—her accent, the fact that she has no film connections and hails from a small Indian town—into advantages and weaponised them.

It is not her fearlessness that has brought her here, or her talent. It is her smarts. And being smart sometimes requires being duplicitous.

Bollywood is at an interesting point. The end of three Khans appears to be near (they have begun delivering turkeys). And the

Empress Matilda and Eleanor of Brittany both were the right heirs to England, and both were passed over in favor of male claimants. Matilda at least had some support and fought a war for it, but Eleanor was pretty much acknowledged as the legal heir, but then tossed in prison and ignored for her entire life.

400 years later, with the disputed succession between Jane and Mary, there was again a bit of conflict, but this time fighting for the rival rights of two female claimants. Mary was then installed, and was followed by her extremely successful sister.

Obviously 400 years is a tremendous amount of time, but still it begs the question in my mind, were there any specific changes in politics or cultural norms that allowed the nobility of the 16th century to be firmly behind a female monarch, while those in the 12th century basically gave a sympathetic nod and preferred to back a usurper they didn't even like?

Hi there, I'm a long-time lurker, first time poster. Great subreddit, I really enjoy reading it!

So, I've got a question:

for most of history (both western and not), women were discriminated and not considered worthy of holding political power. I assume this was because they were considered intellectually inferior or 'irrational'.

But...how does this fit with the fact that queen regnants existed and were no worse than kings at their 'job' ?

In fact, from what I understand quite a few of these queens were actually better at ruling than the average king, and this not just from our modern point of view - I am pretty sure these queens were fairly popular and respected by their subjects.

In addition to history proper, there's also legendary-mythological queens like Dido, the Queen of Sheba, and so on, and they were generally not portrayed as incompetent (even if we can still see how their portrayal was sexist in some other ways)

How do we explain the inconsistency? They believed that women should not be given power because they could not handle it...but they also accepted that a queen could do a good job ruling.

Was that just hypocrisy? Did they believe that these women were the exception and not the rule? Were sex stereotypes different for noble women, so they believed that a royal woman could rule like a royal man, but that the equivalent was not true for lower-ranked people?

EDIT: I realized I did not phrase my post as a direct question. Sorry about that!

I was watching my computer process and thinking about the few European female monarchs I knew of (as one does), and wondered how many ruling queens there had actually been around the world. Imagine my surprise when Wiki listed hundreds if not over a thousand! I want to know about them but obviously can't read about them all, so I thought I'd ask the historians here for suggestions.

Who I've already read about and the extent of my knowledge: Cleopatra, Theodora and Boudica, and the main British ones, (Mary, Elizabeth I and II, Victoria).

Thanks to any who respond!

Assuming a male-preference primogeniture and no Dance of the Dragons struggle goes on.