A Practical Guide to Evil

[Lord Raziere]

I would challenge the notion that being named makes you worse at ruling.
Regular humans are already excellent at being utterly awful towards each other.
I doubt Above or Below can really improve on that.

And a named ruler would at least be likely to get some tools to improve efficiency,
and likely cut down on corruption, in the kingdom. If the King/Queen can see when your lying,
then its likely to cut down a lot on officials taking bribes, or skimming the tax money.

Well...I think your overlooking some things here.

A Named ruler also has a danger of starting to follow story logic rather than real world logic.

Like all the Dread Emperors and Empresses. suddenly they become The Villain and once they identify with that, they start making flying fortresses and crazy experiments and building pits and whatnot. Amadeus has said that other Black Knights weren't like him at all and outright embraced their role and powers, becoming incredibly powerful but also really stupid because of it.

meanwhile, lets look at the Saint of Swords. her story one of unwavering stand against evil, killing every threat her entire life, with no compromise with the enemy. and when time came to compromise, she didn't and died. and all those heroes that Cat and Black knight killed? they all charged in thinking that just because they're The Heroes they automatically win, when even narrative rules can be exploited.

and when you start thinking your life is a story, and let the story you think your in control your actions, well you get things like Traitorous, or any of the stupider heroes you see in the series. and then there is Malicia, supposedly a very reasonable person.....but then she decided to lean into the story of a Dread empress and being building a doomsday weapon, then a whole bunch of other stuff that makes her start sliding back into being just another crazy dread empress. and the former Heiress ghost here? she is a perfect example of thinking she was in the story her name gave her.

and once one starts thinking in that narrative, letting it confine and define oneself....well one kind of stop thinking of people as people, now don't they? after all, they're the "main character", and everyone else are side characters. they get caught up in the constant story beats and cliches they need to work with, that they don't consider the people around them. which is realistic!

after all, people in real life do stupid things because of the little narratives they make about themselves in real life all the time, convincing themselves of this and that to make themselves the center of their little world and that if they just do this or that, it'll all work out fine. its no surprise that when you give people awareness that the story logic is real and that you gain benefits from considering the big overarching narrative cliches over actually interacting with people as people, you end up with a long line of villains that never really succeeded followed by Named that decided to thinking differently for once, and a long line of heroes that lean into their tropes but have become inflexible in their thinking because what they have always done has always worked and because their force of good leans hard into an "all-knowing utilitarian force of cosmic good you can't comprehend" kind of narrative that has little concept of law being legitimate in a time where individual rights is far from being born as an idea in peoples minds yet.

you can't deny that the story logic is a big force in this world and can override a rulers consideration of their subjects, which has been shown many times from the Tyrant, to Malicia, to the Hierarch, to many other Dread Emperors, and I doubt, given the war-torn nature of Callow and such, that those "good kings" were any better. after all, if they had the realpolitik to and competence to recognize the problems of Praes and the underlying reasons why they keep fighting, rather than going "Praes is evil, so we're going to fight them, only choice that matters, no compromise because we're Good and they're Evil." wouldn't they have already solved this kind of thing?

sure there has been more political and real world thinking suddenly cropping up....but if we look further into the past, this is a transitional, perhaps every revolutionary time in this universe, one where many exceptions are occurring due to various conditions that had to go right for it to start happening at all. everything from Malicia and Black existing leading to a more reasonable Praes, to a Callowan suddenly taking on a Praesi name rather than following a Callowan narrative, to an orc suddenly taking on a new name of Adjutant, to villains winning against heroes, to Catherine uniting the Faerie realm, even to getting the trust of a hero on the other side of the fence to start considering this treaty she has, and finally this latest development of Cordelia refusing to be Named, are all pretty exceptional breaks of various narrative cycles in this universe.

and that was only perpetuated because people kept leaning into the stories and letting the story define the world through its rulers, remember that Names get more powerful the more you lean into the story, and less powerful the more you think real and use it as just another tool like Black does, and that both Amadeus and the former Thief, have both lost their Named status. sure, people can be horrible without the stories, but denying that the stories don't lead people into perpetuating these narrative cycles that have nothing to do with actual horribleness and everything to do the kind of fantasy hero thinking that can be cartoonish in its logic.