Heir Club for Men: Difference between revisions

== [[Fairy Tale]]s ==

* The king and queen in "[[Donkeyskin]]" only had a daughter, and were content with this. But the queen fell ill and died without leaving a male heir, but not before saddling him with the additional restriction that his new wife equal her in beauty and other attributes. Which, after many failed considerations, leads him to the conclusion that his new wife should be {{spoiler|[[Parental Incest|his own daughter]]}}. Because that would be more acceptable than simply {{spoiler|letting her inherit the throne}}. {{spoiler|She manages to escape that situation, and marry a prince, to boot. Thankfully, the prince is not her brother}}.

*** There is a kinder version of that tale in which the requirements (the new queen must be as beautiful as the old one with the same golden hair) are the same and the princess is the only one who fulfills them. However the king merely decides to marry her off to one of his advisers and she opts to run away rather than be forced into a loveless marriage.

 

 

* [[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—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—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.

** Nowadays, the UK partially averts this: Women may inherit, [[Double Standard|but only if they have no living brothers]]. Moves are underway to at least talk about changing it. In Britain we prefer seismic changes to happen [[Department of Redundancy Department|gradually over time if at all necessary]]. [[The House of Stuart|Big changes in a short period]] can be very unseemly.

* 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—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 three surviving children, and their eldest son 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.

** As noted above, this has had rather terrible consequences for China. However, India has not been immune to the same pressures: despite the absence of a policy ''requiring'' that families limit their size, increasing prosperity and a government awareness campaign on overpopulation have caused many Indians to want to limit the size of their families (typically 2-3 children). However, the traditional attitudes remain, and many Indian women selectively abort female children, although this is technically illegal. While the gender ratios in India are nowhere nearly as skewed as in China, it is a problem that the Indian government is taking quite seriously.

*** Lest you think that this is a problem of India and China only, the phenomenon is actually running rampant in the increasingly-prosperous nations of Asia, and to a much lesser extent Africa as well. Perhaps surprisingly, the developing countries of the Arab World have been largely exempt from this; explanations range from the explicit ban on killing female newborns in Islam<ref>A pre-Islamic Arab custom explicitly denounced by God and the Prophet as barbaric</ref> and the abortion taboo in Islamic culture to the Arab custom of giving a dower rather than a dowry (i.e. the groom and his family pay/give a gift to the bride and her family, not the other way around, as in India).

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Royalty and Nobility Tropes]]

[[Category:Princely Tropes]]

[[Category:Fairy Tale Tropes]]

[[Category:Will and Inheritance Tropes]]