Heir Club for Men: Difference between revisions

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Although most common in stories about royalty, this trope also includes the common people. This trope is about heirs, and it is not intended to cover cases where the parent(s) merely wish for a boy (or girl) because they would like one, but is only when they wish for one to continue the family name--whenname—when tradition demands it.

== [[Fairy Tale|Fairy Tales]]s ==

** Other tales of this type include: "[https://web.archive.org/web/20130718151024/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/donkeyskin/stories/allfur.html All-Kinds-of-Fur]", "[https://web.archive.org/web/20131020230909/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/donkeyskin/stories/kingdaughter.html The King Who Wished Marry To His Daughter]", "[https://web.archive.org/web/20130620100644/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/donkeyskin/stories/shebear.html The She-Bear]", "[https://web.archive.org/web/20140325092007/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/donkeyskin/stories/margerywhitecoat.html Margery White Coats]", and "[http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510b.html#canziani Golden-Teeth]".

* In "[https://web.archive.org/web/20130718151309/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/donkeyskin/stories/catskin.html Catskin]", the nobleman doesn't care about his daughter because he wants a son. When she grows up, he orders her married off to the first man who will have her and she has to run away.

* In ''[[Pan's Labyrinth|Pans Labyrinth]]'', Captain Vidal is determined to have a male heir no matter the cost to his wife or his stepdaughter.

* ''[[Caligula]]'': the emperor refused to marry Caesonia until she bore him a son. When his sister Drusilla pointed out that it would be impossible to tell if the child was actually his, he replied that he would simply keep her under constant guard. The guards would be homosexuals. Who'd been castrated.

{{quote| '''King:''' ''(as servant brings the baby)'' I have no doubt it's a prince this time! You will bow to him, daughters, for he is SUPERIOR!<br />

''(unwraps the baby on-screen, vagina ensues)''<br />

* Frederich is shown praying desperately for a son in ''[[Snow White: A Tale of Terror|Snow White a Tale of Terror]]''. It seems to be the only reason he married Claudia as he is still in love with his dead wife. Claudia, who admitted to her mirror that she really loved him, is not happy when she realizes this.

* ''[[The Assassins of Tamurin]]'': The success of Makina Seval's plot hinges on her adopted daughter Ashken having a male heir with Ardavan. Nilang assures Lale she has a contingency plan -- ifplan—if Ashken's first child should happen to be female, she will quickly be [[Switched At Birth]] with a male child before anyone is the wiser.

* In the first book of Melanie Rawn's ''Sunrunner'' series, ''[[Dragon Prince]]'', the realm is in an incredibly fragile political situation due solely to the fact High Prince Roelstra has ''seventeen'' daughters, yet no male heir; like Henry VIII in real life, Roelstra has put aside wife after wife, and his daughters (legitimate and illegitimate) are both opportun''ists'' and opportun''ities'', politically. One of the book's key intrigues rests on ensuring (via an elaborate deception) that Roelstra's fourth and current wife bears -- orbears—or ''appears'' to bear -- abear—a son.

{{quote| ''What better way to grieve than to create new life?''}}

* ''[[The Palace]]'' featured a haughty princess scheming to dethrone her younger brother by destroying his reputation. (There was also another brother in line before her, but getting rid of him would be a [[Royal Brat|piece of cake]] -- assuming—assuming the public [[The Wrongful Heir to the Throne|even let him become king]] in the first place.)

* [[Gender -Inverted Trope]]: The dual office of Empress and Apostle of Begnion in ''[[Fire Emblem]]: Path of Radiance'' and ''Radiant Dawn''. {{spoiler|The two offices are inadvertently separated when the first-born female of the current generation is thought to have been assassinated, leaving an Empress who cannot hear the Goddess's voice. The true apostle isn't dead, though.}}

* [[Gender -Inverted Trope]]: the Fey Clan in ''[[Ace Attorney]]'' values females over males because only women can be spirit mediums. This means that if a couple has a daughter, the father gets pressed out of the light from ''both'' directions. End result: Kurain Village, home of the Fey Clan, has an ''extremely'' disproportionate divorce rate for its size.

* [[Gender -Inverted Trope]]... Again: In ''[[Suikoden V]]'', the country of Falerna is ruled by a royal house who practice female inheritance of the throne. The Queen rules the country and takes a male consort (decided by an [[Inevitable Tournament]] between the country's various noble houses and other competitors), who becomes commander of the country's armies and Knight Commander of the Queen's royal knights. The main character, who is the eldest-born prince, has no right of succession and is groomed to becoming a statesman or a general in the armies, while his younger sister is groomed to be Queen.

* In [[World of Warcraft]], it' sindicated that [[Parents as People|Magni]] was disappointed because his only child Moira was not a male heir. As a ressultresult, Moira became quite bitter, and eventually fell in love with the Dark Iron Dwarves' emperor, before returning to Ironforge to claim her throne after her father [[Taken for Granite|turned into diamond]] in a ritual gone wrong.

* [[Gender -Inverted Trope]] in ''[[Drowtales]]'' due to a matriarchal society. Thanks to an injury from an enemy, Quain'tana has been unable to produce a suitable ''female'' heir for her clan despite having several daughters. The first hates her and mingles freely with the enemy, the second is possessed by a demon, and her adopted daughter was disowned after being tainted and generally considered a failure. She eventually resorts to {{spoiler|stealing her eldest daughter's first child}} to solve this.

{{quote| '''Marge''': Sweetie, sometimes a daddy and a mommy decide to live apart. It's not your fault. It's just that you came out the wrong sex and ruined everything.<br />

'''Homer''': So grow a penis or get lost.<br />

'''Lisa''': (grunts and struggles) I can't.<br />

'''Homer''': Bye bye!<br />

'''Lisa''': Well why can't your heir be female. Or why can't we elect our leaders?<br />

'''Homer''': I wonder if I could cannonize a child?<br />

* [[Henry VIII]] of England divorced his first wife because of this. He even went so far as to reject the Roman Catholic Church because they wouldn't let him get his marriages annulled. He had some justification--hisjustification—his father was an upstart who'd taken the throne after a [[Wars of the Roses|long civil war]], and he couldn't be sure a daughter would be accepted. To make matters worse, enemies could make a very good case that each of his daughters was illegitimate--andillegitimate—and in the case of Elizabeth, that she wasn't even his daughter. See: [[The House of Tudor]] for more on him and his family, including Elizabeth I.

** The Kingdom of Hannover was once in a personal union with the United Kingdom, but they only allowed male heirs causing a split when [[Queen VickyVictoria|Victoria]] became Queen.

* Parodied in [https://web.archive.org/web/20100219104149/http://www.theonion.com/content/news/clinton_chastises_hillary_for this] Onion article.

* Absolutely [[Truth in Television]] throughout most of history, and in much of the world. You were an unfortunate queen if you couldn't bear a son -- ifson—if you were lucky, the king wouldn't set you aside. Otherwise, you'd end up divorced, beheaded, poisoned, locked up in a convent, etc. Princesses becoming queens regnant (ruling queens) had all sorts of problems. No one wanted a female ruler, because if she married her kingdom would, most likely, be combined with that of her husband. The Iberian kingdoms solved this problem by having their queens marry their close blood relatives, so the crown stayed inside the kingdom. Queen Maria I of Portugal married her UNCLE to avoid marrying a foreign prince. They had 3three surviving children, and their eldest son married in turn married his aunt (Maria's sister). Mercifully, this marriage produced no children. A lot of kingdoms (notably France) refused to allow women to inherit the throne at all.

** The Iberian example above was not the worst in that corner of Europe. The House of Hapsburg lucked into Castile/Aragon/Burgundy/the Low Countries because the Houses of Valois and Trastámara married a princess into their dynasty and failed to pop out a male heir. To avoid being on the receiving end of this the two branches of their house swapped most of their princesses between the Spanish and Austrian courts. The long term effects of [[wikipedia:Image:Carlos segundo80.png|this policy]]... did not [https://web.archive.org/web/20091027030202/http://www.xs4all.nl/~monarchs/madmonarchs/carlos2/carlos2_bio.htm work out too well] for the [[wikipedia:War of the Spanish Succession|Madrid branch]], and the male line of the Vienna branch puttered to a halt not long afterwards with [[wikipedia:War of the Austrian Succession|predictable results]] (luckily for them, the people who ended up the heirs were content to ''call'' themselves Habsburgs).

** The abovementionedabove-mentioned French Salic Law that prohibits females from ruling France or inheriting noble titles in their own right dates from the 6th Century and directly caused, among other things, the Hundred Years War. On the other hand, it also prevented many English upstarts (since a lot of French princesses married English kings) from staking their claim.

*** Fair point, but, Caesar was the law during his last years. If he wanted Caesarion to be his lawful heir he would have made it so (and there were many among his assassins who feared he might). Caesar was just smart enough to know that while he could adjust the law to make Caesarion his legal heir, the Roman population would probably not accept it, so he chose his well-apt great-nephew instead.

* In Japan, there was a rather large controversy about there not being a suitable male heir to inherit the imperial throne, such that it came to the point that they were about to change the constitution to allow a woman to do so. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view re:regarding tradition v.versus feminism) someone finally popped out a boy, meaning that the question was staved off for at least another generation.

*** The actual problem is not a female emperor - there were already some. But in the whole time none of them had a child that inherited the throne. By now this already developed into an unofficial rule and having only a baby girl means that nobody after her can inherit. Another part of the problem is that all other lines of the imperial family were given surnames (=making them commoners which cannot inherit) after WWII[[World War II]] and no distant cousin can come to the rescue after it.

**** In recent years{{when}} though public opinion has been warming up to Camilla, and when Charles does become King in due time, there might be very few who would object to a Queen Camilla.

* The Netherlands avert this BIG- time. When Prince Willem gains the throne, he will be the first male monarch on the Dutch throne in over ''120 years''.

* It was this issue that started a period in English history known as The Anarchy, when Henry I named his lone surviving child, Matilda, his heir. It was a bit more complicated, in that not only were the Anglo-Norman barons wary of having a woman on the throne, but her husband was from Anjou, Normandy's rival. A faction of barons helped Stephen of Blois onto the throne, which plunged England into 19 years of civil war until a resolution was reached where Stephen's own sons would be bypassed for succession in favor of Matilda's son, the future Henry II, who was the founder of England's Plantagenet dynasty, which of course produced some of England's most famous kings, likeincluding Richard the Lionheart, Edward I 'Longshanks', and Edward III.

** CourseOf course, by then Stephen only had one legitimate son left, who had no interest in ruling.

*** The situation was even more complicated than that: Salic law didn't just bar women from the throne;, it also barred male claimants who were descended from the royal bloodline via female ancestors; since medieval European princesses invariably married foreign kings and dukes, this was put into place to keep the crown passing into the hands of a foreigner. Although it was legally reinforced in France in the early 1300's ([[Hundred Years' War|precisely because the French nobility could foresee the aforementioned emergency occurring in the near-to-middling future]]), it actually existed since the days of the Frankish Empire and was legally extant at the time of the Anarchy. In the case of the Anarchy, the scenario was this: On one hand, a woman who was the heiress of the previous king (and Duke of Normandy; that part is important because it was really questionable whether or not the Salic Law applied in England); on the other hand, a man who was the son of a daughter of William the Conqueror and was himself considered to be non-Norman... lawyers had a field day with this. One of the accomplishments of the Anarchy, by the by, was to establish both the legal principle of the Salic Law not applying in Britain and the idea that practically, a woman could not hold the English crown... both of which had ''huge'' reprecussionsrepercussions [[The House of Tudor|a few generations down the line]].

* Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, reacted differently to the fact that neither of his sons survived: He thought that was a sign that the monarchy was doomed. This was one reason he showed no resistance to being overthrown. Sadly, Brazil pretty much went to hell after his overthrow (republican rule was a ploy by the wealthy landowning <ref>and until a year before the establishment of the Republic, slaveowningslave-owning</ref> elite as a ploy to maintain power).

[[Category:HeirWill Cluband forInheritance MenTropes]]