To-do list:

• Consensus was to keep the Royal Bastard name and clarify the description so that trope applies to all inherited authority/status positions. The description is being updated using the Sandbox.Royal Bastard sandbox; it needs to be swapped in before the thread can close.

Original post:

The trope description is very focused on a "child of a royal and a non-royal" definition, specifically. The main themes it focuses on are angst about heritage due to coming from different social classes, alienation from both the upper and lower classes, getting in the middle of a Succession Crisis occurs, attempts at legitimization by heirless parents, scheming by Bastard Bastards out for power, and a Rich Sibling, Poor Sibling dynamic with legitimate children.

The second paragraph is vaguer about this and uses non-royal nobility terms ("out of the succession and sometimes ostracized, yet too much of a noble to get along with their commoner side" and "If both sides are nobility, expect the scandal to be ten times greater.") but generally the wording sticks to very specifically royal terms.

The examples, however, have a large percentage of nobility-and-commoner bastards, and some nobility-and-nobility also, with no royal involvement:

(For reference, I will be classifying examples by the rank of their highest-ranking parent, so a royal-and-noble bastard would count as just a royal bastard. I'm also going to treat kings/queens, emperors and princes as a single class of royalty for simplicity.)

Examples:

Results:

• Royal bastards: 88/129 (68.2%)
• Noble bastards: 47/129 (36.4)
• Other (non-titled aristocrats, politicians, ranking clergy, etc.) bastards: 5/129 (3.9)
• Unspecified bastards: 2/129 (1.6)

About 40% of the examples do not involve royalty of any sort.

It's been suggested that the Noble Bastard redirect may be the cause of this confusion. I am absolutely certain that this is not the case for three reasons:

• One, that redirect is currently seeing no use outside of two Administrivia/Sandbox pages, so evidently it has a rather low wiki footprint.
• Two, it's only about a month old whereas the page has been around for a year (as it so happens, I requested the redirect myself, because of how many non-royal examples were present, just two days before this issue was first brought up last month).
• Three, it also so happens that the large presence of non-royal bastards has been a thing since the page was created. Below is a wick check of the page's original appearance when it was launched from TLP on September 25th, 2021:

Results:

• Royal bastards: 74/121 (61.1%)
• Noble bastards: 45/121 (37.2)
• Other (non-titled aristocrats, politicians, bishops, etc.) bastards: 5/121 (4.1)
• Unspecified bastards: 2/121 (1.7)

The ratio is basically the same — if anything, the non-royal examples are about a percent higher.

(Incidentally, not sure how relevant it is here, the laconic on the TLP was "An illegitimate child of royalty or nobility." The launched page laconic, unaltered since launch, is "An illegitimate child whose parent(s) are of royal/noble birth.")

I elected not to perform an inbound wick check because, since the page is only about nine months old, I do not expect that the inbound and on-page wicks will have had time to deviate from each other very much.

My suggestion is to broaden the description's wording and find a broader title, for three reasons:

• One, there's been no example drift — the page's current focus is basically the same as the one it had at launch. The original sponsor mainly just picked a bad title.
• Two, I do not really see a great deal of benefit to be drawn from diving royal from non-royal noble bastards. The basic narrative tropes in play are the same in both cases — the feelings of alienation, the character occupying a position halfway between social classes, problems over inheritance, hostility from legitimate siblings and/or stepparents, etc. The basic meat of this concept's narrative identity, the way in which this character's basic existence screws around with in-universe assumptions about inheritance, class and legitimacy and nobody knows where they fit, are basically the same regardless of whether they're a king's by-blow, a duke's or even a powerful politician's. I don't see a good reason to make overly granular distinctions about specific ranks of aristocracy here; it just isn't a narratively significant distinction.
• However, in light of that, the current title is overly narrow and misleading. Evidently it's already caused confusion as to what this trope means, and it's also the likely reason why noble bastards are significantly outnumbered by royal ones despite the original concept allowing for both.

Regarding a new title, I see two options. One, move the page to Noble Bastard and keep Royal Bastard as a redirect, because I think that people would be likelier to think of royalty is a special case of nobility than the other way around. Two, find a new, more generic title (and I would also keep the other two as redirects, myself).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 28th 2022 at 12:28:58 PM