God Save Us From the Queen/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Queens in power are always evil.

  • Straight: The queen oppresses her people and is extremely vain.
  • Exaggerated:
    • The kingdom has a long line of queens with nicknames like "the terrible" and "the castrating."
    • As a princess, she was fine -- but once she becomes the queen, she turns into a terror.
  • Justified:
  • Inverted: The High Queen and/or Everything's Better with Princesses
  • Subverted: The queen seems to be a tyrannical bitch, but is actually doing what she does out of genuine concern for her people.
  • Double Subverted: The evil queen explains that she is acting out of concern for her people, but when push comes to shove she's willing to make them suffer for her own gain.
  • Parodied:
    • All queens in the world are evil.
    • The main villians are Queen(the band).
  • Deconstructed:
    • Queens are all evil, but mainly because the society is so horribly sexist that mind-warping abuse is heaped on young women to the point that any one who gets into power is driven by a combination of vengeance and possibly insanity.
    • Alternately, she isn't quite as evil in comparison to your typical ruler of the period / locale, but she gets a bad reputation precisely because society is sexist and she's a woman--things that a male king could get away with are considered "atrocities" when she commits them because women are supposed to be gentle.
  • Reconstructed: The queen's wickedness is part of the Machiavellian Magnificent Bastard traits that got her to the throne in the first place, given that it's a male-dominated medieval setting. A nicer woman would never have made it.
  • Zig Zagged: The queen IS wicked but does something noble, but only because it serves her ends as well.
  • Averted: There is no queen or the queen is not in power. Or, the queen is fairly reasonable, but not perfect.
  • Enforced: The show's hero backstory has him as an orphan. During his adventures he already found and fought his long-lost evil father, so writers want to use a long-lost evil mother. As she won't be appealing as a direct opponent, they go with the "Evil Queen" stereotype.
  • Lampshaded: "People are oppressed, and Black Guards look too sexy and stud. Must be an Evil Queen."
  • Invoked: A misogynist states "She's a woman in power of course she's evil!" about the queen.
  • Defied: The queen is naturally mean-spirited, but forces herself to be nice since she doesn't want to come across as evil or oppressive.
  • Discussed: "Yes, that's Queen Marianne. She's evil."
  • Conversed: "Why is the Queen always evil in these shows?"

Back to God Save Us From the Queen now, or I'll have you on a gibbet!

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