All empires are evil. Or so one MGC member was told by a very confused alpha reader, who couldn’t quite get that in this particular world, the empire belonged to the good guys. Star Wars had made “evil empire” the default state for this particular reader. The reader struggled a bit getting used to the good guys working for an empire.
On the other hand, I default to empire as not necessarily bad or good, but probably good. My background is the Holy Roman Empire 2.0, and the Habsburgs, so empire can be a good thing, or at least neutral.
That’s a minor point, but good to keep in mind when you work on your setting and world building. What we as writers assume isn’t necessarily what our readers take things to be. Just like genre cues need to be clear, so too we might need to be clear. I was reading a draft manuscript and thought from the opening scene, “OK, steampunk. It has a train, sounds like a train station,” and built a mental picture. Then … it turned into science fiction, and stayed that way. The whiplash was considerable, and it was not the author’s fault. I read train and assumed steampunk. The author, on the other hand, was thinking about colony worlds, technology mixes, and was envisioning something more like the Japanese Bullet Trains, but more so. A bit more visual description, a slightly different word choice for the station and people there, and voila, colony world transport that is clearly sci fi.
A lot of modern fantasy has been about flipping or reversing archetypes and tropes, so in some ways it has become easier. Readers half-expect dragons as good guys, self-rescuing princesses, elves that use iron, and that sort of thing. However, pop culture is not always our friend. You might field complaints if you stick with the original traditional version of a tale people think they know, or know only from the House of Mouse version. Vampires as soulless; ancient evil, dragons that make Smaug look friendly; tricksters that are not allies in the end … Signal it and signal it clearly. On a slightly related note, beware once common turns of phrase that have become euphemisms or have pop-culture meanings from movies and video games.
This also means keeping up with tropes in adjacent subgenres, so you can steer clear of them if needed. If you write high fantasy, beware of dark haired gents in leather jackets appearing in the first chapter. That signals PNR or urban fantasy unless you clearly show a high fantasy setting. (This applies to cover art, too, or especially.) Since I write urban fantasy, not PNR, I don’t do “dangerous dude in leather.” Although it might be fun to have that while winking and nodding to my readers that the character is not going to be 1) vampire or shifter of some kind, or 2) fall in lust with same.
Note that the above applies to Western standard fantasy and sci fi. Asian and South Asian and Middle Eastern fantasy have their own patterns and tropes, and writers who are going that direction need to look into those. We don’t have to abide by the pattern entirely, but it helps to make sense of how those stories “work,” or don’t work, and to suss out what some of the basic assumptions are for both readers and writers.
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Why Do You Think That? Reader Assumptions vs. Author Assumptions”
The irony is that the Star Wars empire was clearly based on the Roman, and to tell the truth, the Empire was the good guy there because Augustus put an end to the violence of the Late Republic. It gives an — effect when watching Star Wars.
But on the subverting — oh, yes. I have read so many typical Not Your Typical Fairy-tale Princesses that I tell people that Alissandra of The Princess Seeks Her Fortune IS a Typical Fairy-tale Princess and thus unique. I may get funny looks, but no one denies it.
Self-rescuing princesses are often done in a very annoying manner. If your princess expresses contempt for princesses who do not rescue themselves, she is invoking Nemesis as surely as Wiley Coyote bragging of his infallible plan. If it doesn’t come back to hit to her, it’s structurally unsound.
Especially since this carries the lesson that abuse victims deserve to be abused and should not be helped. If they were worth anything, they would have rescued themselves.
The irony is that the Star Wars empire was clearly based on the Roman, and to tell the truth, the Empire was the good guy there because Augustus put an end to the violence of the Late Republic. It gives an — effect when watching Star Wars.
I thought Palpatine’s empire was supposed to be based on Nazi Germany? That’s the usual argument I hear online, anyway. And it does pay to remember that one big difference between Augustus’s empire and Palpatine’s was that Palpatine was the one who caused all the violence he ‘saved’ everyone from.
Especially since this carries the lesson that abuse victims deserve to be abused and should not be helped. If they were worth anything, they would have rescued themselves.
Ow. Never thought of it that way before. I’ll be looking at those stories a little differently from now on.
Imagery but not history.
True, historically the Senate lasted throughout the Empire, but the casual pop imagery turns from Republic to Empire with a full-blown emperor. And omits the violence that made it so welcome.
Watch out for mixed audiences when dispensing clues of any kind, not just for overall tropes, but also for expertise drops.
For example, a casual audience may “know things that just aren’t so”, while an expert audience may scorn the background explanations of things they’re already familiar with. If the details of those knowledge areas are important to the plot, some compromise of infodump needs to happen.
My first series concerned a modern man dropped into the position of huntsman for the Wild Hunt, and my initial target audience was a bunch of people who foxhunt for fun (Tally ho!). As with all sports & enthusiasms, there’s a lot to know that mattered to the plot, and it had to be “right” without over-tedious explanation for normies. On the other hand, my foxhunting audience (which clearly didn’t read much speculative fiction) was not familiar with the conventions of “Man visits Elfland” or “Wild Hunt” sorts of stories, so I had to be a bit more heavy-handed with that trope. (Since those readers all knew me, I got those puzzled genre questions in person.)
Sometimes you can make the info-dump serve other purposes, to characterize one as ignorant and the other knowledgeable. Or the expert is passionate about some detail that others aren’t even aware exists, let alone the controversies over it.
My first thought about empires having value was, of course!, from The Life of Brian:
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
How do you balance that with today’s vision of evil empires?
There are very few unmitigated goods without cost to someone or a truly awful evil because someone benefits from that evil.
Most modern people think that sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health arise spontaneously and need no assistance to even keep in repair.
Sadly, you are correct!
I firmly believe that many people believe electricity works simply because they believe that it does.
“Just get shikarred yourself. That’s all.”
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/municipal.html
I recall some stories where something unjust in an empire is supposedly changed just by having the Empress say, “Okay, everyone stop doing this bad thing that we’ve been doing for over a thousand years. Right now, Because I say so.” And of course everyone does so immediately except for the strawman evil conservative bigoted reactionary.
Plus the lower classes are 100% in favor of getting rid of the old system, with both its abuses and such protections as exist, in support of one they know nothing about except that they’re told it is ‘better, so stop asking questions’.
Having read some Russian history about what happened under certain czars who tried to force progress on their subjects, I wonder if it wouldn’t be the downtrodden peasants who were the most adamantly opposed to the grand social crusade. And how much violence and tyranny the ‘good Empress’ would need to use to force stubborn subjects to be nice and do what she wanted.
If the peasants are living close to the bone, and fear that “improvements” will cause them to tip into hunger if everything doesn’t work perfectly, then oh, yes, the peasants will balk. And if they have traditional community rights that the modern reformers tread upon, well, see the German Peasants’ Rebellion among others.
Recently read Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria by Scott O. Moore. Had an interesting section on how they coped with Joseph’s failed reforms. Mostly by emphasizing his good will but discussing his failure to consider the temper of the people
I’ve mentioned that to a few people, about peasants having traditional rights. I was bluntly told that “There ain’t no such animal” (as peasants with rights) and that of course the lower orders would welcome liberation by the New Order once they were politically awakened or some such thing.
Must. Resist. Urge. To. Lecture. With. Footnotes and citations.
I tried that with them. Once. I was blown off with the usual response of “TL;DR”, when I wasn’t just jeered at for providing the information.
And then there’re the unspotted 2nd and 3rd order effects that cause serious problems.
E.g. the Enclosure Acts in England. Taking a village’s land holdings, split into many small strips each owned by one of multiple families and rationalising them into several larger plots seems to make sense from the modern perspective. I’m only vaguely familiar with farming, but fields owned by the same farmer seems to be how its generally done these days.
But. Since it needed to be done without perception of bias, it required external experts to come in and figure out where the new land boundaries would be. These experts needed paying, the fee was split across the landowning families in proportion to the amount of land each received in the settlement. But while many of the larger landowners were able to pay the fee without much difficulty, received wisdom is that many of the smaller landowners had to borrow money to pay their share, and then many had to sell their land to repay the moneylenders.
I suspect if these issues had been known in advance, the vast majority of the smaller landowners would have preferred the original system.
The absolute monarch who can fix everything if you only get the word to him is a useful trope and shorthand, but like most cliches, it works perfectly only in the background. Zooming in requires more.
It was made worse in this story as the only parts of the ’empire’ we saw were a royal palace – it seemingly didn’t have any town or city nearby, just the palace by itself.* Oh, and a slum called the Wallows, which was often described as ‘dangerous’. Which doesn’t help much, given that I understand that slums are dangerous anywhere.
Though the roads seemed pretty safe given that a foreign embassy bearing tribute and gifts for the Empress was able to travel a distance roughly equivalent to the east to west coast of the USA without an escort or guards in perfect safety.**
*– To be fair this was a fantasy story and the palace was built on and around a sacred healing pool. But you’d think that there would be some sort of homes for the nobles and bureaucrats nearby.
** — Again, to be fair, three members of the embassy were actual fire-breathing dragons. Not very big dragons, but still. I suspect that’s the sort of thing that makes robbers keep their distance.
It’s interesting when a fantasy story doesn’t do this. IIRC, Brandon Sanderson’s first Mistborn trilogy and Brent Weeks’ Night Angel trilogy had reformer kings who had a hard time consolidating their power and getting their agenda through. Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera is another case where being the rightful king doesn’t make things any easier, although that’s more about power and survival than culture.
Something I discovered from my own writing, if I have an alien empire out there running around, they must be -doing- something.
Economic activity, such as putting very expensive starships out into the void to go places, can’t be done on a whim, or just because. There must be a compelling reason, one that makes it unthinkable that they would fail to do it.
Also, given my space empires are made of AI machines that live mostly on entangled quantum compute networks, the reason can’t be mere curiosity or to collect materials from other star systems. They can already make anything they can think of at home.
Finally, why have an “empire” that holds territory in the first place? They don’t -need- territory, and if somebody else comes along to bully them, they can simply leave.
I had to come up with something sufficiently daunting that powerful machine intelligences would band together and work hard to prevent it.
Explaining all that, and explaining why such a civilization would not bother with Earth, took up a whole book. ~:D Plus romance!
Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac series toys with this. One of the main drivers of expansion is resource capture, but there’s also a lot of psychology at play—AI, human, and alien.
“Vampires as soulless; ancient evil, dragons that make Smaug look friendly; tricksters that are not allies in the end … Signal it and signal it clearly.”
Putting your own spin on the concepts can help, assuming it doesn’t distract from the main story. Giving your classical-style vampire a unique design or history helps check the novelty box so your reader isn’t left waiting for the twist that they’re actually good.
The same thing applies to characters. The richer and realer the character, the more they can fill an archetypal role in the story without signaling a subversion. (That’s my theory, anyway.)