Markup View

Author: Desertopa

Jan 26th 2013 at 5:30:58 PM

I'd expand the "for whatever reason" into an introduction to some possible reasons, both in-story and meta, for the use of the trope. Maybe the family [[{{Egopolis}} named the country after themselves]]. Maybe a foreign conqueror took the new surname to seem less like an outsider. Maybe the writer doesn't want to encourage the audience to bother themselves with questions about dynasties or house politics which will never be addressed in the story. Maybe the author isn't familiar with the concept of house or territorial surnames, and so gave the monarch the same name as the country as a sort of filler name(there are a lot of video game examples, and the emperor of Japan has never had a surname of any kind, at least as long as historians have been keeping track, as there's only ever been one imperial family of Japan. The imperial family is sometimes known as the Yamato Dynasty, Yamato being both an ancient name for Japan, and the name of the dominant ethnic group, which might lead authors to style fictional royal families in the same way.)