Troperville
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My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.
So you've usurped your half-brother's throne and your control is complete. Seems like the thing to do is to kill your noble half-brother and bury the corpse in a pauper's grave. But you're a nice Evil Overlord, so you opt simply to throw your brother, the one person who could cast your authority to rule your entire empire into doubt, into prison and forget to tell anyone that he's your brother.
Of course, the hero discovers that the noble half-brother is still alive and frees him, restoring order to the kingdom, making the reader ask Why Dont You Just Shoot Him before the hero shows up?
Sometimes this is justified on the grounds that shedding Royal Blood has side-effects, or that the land will suffer if the rightful king dies.
The essential criteria for this trope:
- Noble prisoner
- The fact that you are keeping him or refusing to let him go is kept secret from the guards and/or the people at large
- Releasing the prisoner would put the overlord's reign (or plans to reign) in jeopardy.
Examples:
Literature
- In The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas père (Trope Namer), King Louis XIV has a twin brother who is kept in the Bastille — by their mother, the dowager queen — to avoid the possibility that he might usurp the throne. To make sure that the guards do not get the wrong idea, the man is placed in a secure part of the prison and forced to wear an iron mask to conceal his identity.
- This is based on accounts of a real prisoner in the Bastille (among other prisons) forced to wear a mask. His identity was never revealed.
- This also subverts expectations as the attempt fails, unlike in all its myriad adaptions
- In some versions of Robin Hood, John claims to be raising money to free King Richard returning from the crusades, but in reality is using the money to stay in power.
- The Prisoner Of Zenda
- Parodied in the Discworld novel The Truth, which involves a plot to dethrone Lord Vetinari by framing him for a crime using a man who looks just like him. After the plot is thwarted, William De Worde asks Lord Vetinari if he's giving his look-alike this treatment. Vetinari responds that the man is, in fact, alive and now employed being a stand-in for Lord Vetinari when the real one is unavailable.
- On the other hand, for which of the two is being mistaken for the other more dangerous...? Rhetorical question, of course.
- The Mage In The Iron Mask (Nobles series).
- In Ursula K Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged meets two people alone on a desert island, barely capable of understanding human speech. In The Tombs of Atuan Tenar explains that they were the last children of a royal line, and the God-Emperor was afraid to kill them, since they had Royal Blood, so he abandoned them there, very young. Subverted in that Ged did not rescue them; in fact, they were terrified at the prospect of leaving their island.
- Eye Of The Dragon by Stephen King.
- Subverted in Hamlet, in which Claudius did kill his brother, but did not bet on his ghost rising up and telling his son about it.
- Tsarmina's nice-guy brother in the Redwall book Mossflower.
- One of the Xanth novels has the good King Omen imprisoned in secret by his usurper brother Oary. When foiled, Oary admits that he would have been more successful if he'd killed Omen, but he's not quite evil enough to kill his own brother.
- In the manga Berserk, the old king of Midland imprisonned the ambitious Griffith to get him tortured during one full year, until his old comrades from the band of the Hawk saved him.
Film
- The Man In the Iron Mask has had several adaptions. Richard Chamberlain starred in one where the older twin son had been spirited away, for leverage to make the younger one a puppet king, so the younger one was not, in fact, responsible. But he found out and ordered his brother imprisoned with the mask so no one could use it. The older one was rescued and managed to confuse the younger's flunkies so that his brother was sent off for the same fate.
The younger brother was afraid that their being twins meant there might be some connection, so that killing him would be dangerous.
Tabletop RPG
Video Games
- In Arcanum Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura, while on prison island, the player can stumble upon an old man, who turns out to be thought-to-be-dead rightful king of kingdom of Cumbria. Inevitably, player can help him regain the throne, and inevitably, under his command the kingdom thrives. This is, however, due to his willingness to commence reforms and accept technology (which, by the way, was the reason why he was couped out of power by his technology hating brother), not some kind of magical property of Royal Blood.
- Appears in Lunar: The Silver Star. Lemia had her memory wiped by an enchanted mask and is locked away in the dungeon while the usurper takes her place. The cast doesn't realise who she is upon finding her, and free her mainly out of pity and disgust at her... less-than-pleasant condition.
- A subversion of this appears in the Kingdom Hearts series, with the character Diz. in reality Ansem the Wise, his kingdom and his very name are taken by his apprentice, Xehanort, whose Heartless and Nobody are the main antagonists of Kingdom Hearts I and II seperately.
Real Life
- The legend of the Man in the Iron Mask was based on actual records found from Bastille, but very little remains of the real events. In fact the man was a captured spy, who wore a silk mask to preserve his identity from most of the wardens for diplomatic reasons. Also, Bastille was a quite comfortable prison, even by modern standards, housing mainly aristocratic prisoners who had been imprisoned for political reasons. Since many of them were eventually released, and even gained major positions afterwards, it was of everybody's best interest to treat them well during their stay.
- Aversion: The Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the II (the guy who took Constantinopole) realised that having siblings around to challenge the throne was not a good thing for the ruler and the kingdom so he not only recommended fratricide, he legalised it (on a royal level) and put together a framework to deal with troublesome siblings. It was only removed during the later periods of the empire and overall, it is generally considered a success.
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