Not science fiction or (exactly) fantasy, but I had fun outlining it ... especially coming up with variant ways to express "brainless beauty":
Consider a parody of Ruritanian romance. I call it, I Am Your Evil Cousin. The “heroine” is a brainless beauty, and her valorous sweetheart a masculine equivalent. She has so thoroughly spoiled her pre-adolescent brother, legitimate heir to a virtually-independent principality, in his every selfish whim throughout his life (as did their parents before an accident at sea killed them), that he’s become the story’s closest thing to a true villain. The boy actually doesn’t mean badly most of the time, but he’s been made wholly unable to recognize the ill effects of his poor choices. And they’re invariably poor choices.
The title character, smarter than this trio of imbeciles put together (not a difficult feat), realizes that if they take power, their land will swiftly collapse in poverty and be divided up by powerful, greedy neighbors (realms in the style of 1848-ish Continental Europe). He therefore schemes to make his lovely-but-unutterably-stupid cousin think he’s plotting her brother’s murder. If he can goad her and her musclebrained gallant into fleeing with the child across a border into one of those neighboring nations, they will have forfeited the boy’s claim to rule.
In addition to saving the land from a regime of foolishness, “usurping” the throne this way will allow the “villain” to wed the woman he loves. Of intelligence matching his, and good looks more lively than the insipid ingenue’s, she isn’t of the nobility at all; thus the haughty little boy, to say nothing of the two dullards who’d be his regents, would forbid any such mésalliance. Hypocritical to a fault, they’d have no objection to Our Villain maintaining his lady-love as a “kept woman” (a position she currently pretends to hold, though she makes a decent living on her own in a respectable line of work … the specific nature of which I haven’t selected. An apothecary, mayhap … useful for drugging or pretending to poison someone). Even a morganatic marriage, however, would be beyond the pale. The “lower orders,” these spoiled aristocrats feel, are useful and deserve oh-so-very condescending goodwill so long as they remain obedient and loyal to “their betters,” but must never be allowed pretensions of equality in the sight of God, much less before the law.
Incidentally, the thickheaded beauty (the female one, that is) has developed the delusion that her “scoundrel” cousin ardently desires to wed her, not simply to strengthen his claim to the crown, but driven by “the one true love he may ever have felt,” as she puts it. Even while she’s desperate to escape him, this romantic feeling she imagines him to entertain flatters the conceited dimwit. Her kinsman is fairly good-looking and rather charming in his sardonic way, although nowhere near the masculine perfection and mindless bravura of her cavalier.
His (genuinely) cunning plan succeeds. At just the moment when the Idiots Three think they’ve reached safety, he shows up with a troop of horse, having deduced precisely which route they’d take, and explains that the boy is no longer heir to the throne. The “Evil Cousin” also tells them he’s already arranged to send the three a monthly remittance that will let them live in great comfort, if not quite the baroque “magnificence” they’d anticipated, in a major foreign capital (somewhere sophisticatedly wicked such as Paris or Vienna). He and his cavalrymen (brought along solely to ensure the brave-and-handsome knothead doesn’t try anything extra-foolish) then trot off — galloping would’ve been very dramatic, but not particularly sensible.
Inspired by Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester, especially by the part when the heroine offers that, to make up for having written a novel using Sylvester as a model for the villain’s appearance (Sylvester has splendidly sinister-looking eyebrows), she can write a sequel that explains the villain had a non-evil reason for his actions.
Consider a parody of Ruritanian romance. I call it, I Am Your Evil Cousin. The “heroine” is a brainless beauty, and her valorous sweetheart a masculine equivalent. She has so thoroughly spoiled her pre-adolescent brother, legitimate heir to a virtually-independent principality, in his every selfish whim throughout his life (as did their parents before an accident at sea killed them), that he’s become the story’s closest thing to a true villain. The boy actually doesn’t mean badly most of the time, but he’s been made wholly unable to recognize the ill effects of his poor choices. And they’re invariably poor choices.
The title character, smarter than this trio of imbeciles put together (not a difficult feat), realizes that if they take power, their land will swiftly collapse in poverty and be divided up by powerful, greedy neighbors (realms in the style of 1848-ish Continental Europe). He therefore schemes to make his lovely-but-unutterably-stupid cousin think he’s plotting her brother’s murder. If he can goad her and her musclebrained gallant into fleeing with the child across a border into one of those neighboring nations, they will have forfeited the boy’s claim to rule.
In addition to saving the land from a regime of foolishness, “usurping” the throne this way will allow the “villain” to wed the woman he loves. Of intelligence matching his, and good looks more lively than the insipid ingenue’s, she isn’t of the nobility at all; thus the haughty little boy, to say nothing of the two dullards who’d be his regents, would forbid any such mésalliance. Hypocritical to a fault, they’d have no objection to Our Villain maintaining his lady-love as a “kept woman” (a position she currently pretends to hold, though she makes a decent living on her own in a respectable line of work … the specific nature of which I haven’t selected. An apothecary, mayhap … useful for drugging or pretending to poison someone). Even a morganatic marriage, however, would be beyond the pale. The “lower orders,” these spoiled aristocrats feel, are useful and deserve oh-so-very condescending goodwill so long as they remain obedient and loyal to “their betters,” but must never be allowed pretensions of equality in the sight of God, much less before the law.
Incidentally, the thickheaded beauty (the female one, that is) has developed the delusion that her “scoundrel” cousin ardently desires to wed her, not simply to strengthen his claim to the crown, but driven by “the one true love he may ever have felt,” as she puts it. Even while she’s desperate to escape him, this romantic feeling she imagines him to entertain flatters the conceited dimwit. Her kinsman is fairly good-looking and rather charming in his sardonic way, although nowhere near the masculine perfection and mindless bravura of her cavalier.
His (genuinely) cunning plan succeeds. At just the moment when the Idiots Three think they’ve reached safety, he shows up with a troop of horse, having deduced precisely which route they’d take, and explains that the boy is no longer heir to the throne. The “Evil Cousin” also tells them he’s already arranged to send the three a monthly remittance that will let them live in great comfort, if not quite the baroque “magnificence” they’d anticipated, in a major foreign capital (somewhere sophisticatedly wicked such as Paris or Vienna). He and his cavalrymen (brought along solely to ensure the brave-and-handsome knothead doesn’t try anything extra-foolish) then trot off — galloping would’ve been very dramatic, but not particularly sensible.
Inspired by Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester, especially by the part when the heroine offers that, to make up for having written a novel using Sylvester as a model for the villain’s appearance (Sylvester has splendidly sinister-looking eyebrows), she can write a sequel that explains the villain had a non-evil reason for his actions.
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"The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that this was some killer weed."
"The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that this was some killer weed."