I have been looking for some ideas, for my urban fantasy WIP, and there is a plot that involves a government or a royal family secret, some scandal or conspiracy. One of my characters, a journalist, is going to want to get to the truth of that scandal/secret/conspiracy.The story is set n England, it is a constitutional monarchy as it is in real life, but with made up people. It is about cencorship, demoncracy, telling the truth, justice.
The Queen eats corgis Prince Philip had a mistress The Queen is a secret source for a national newspaper and has been leaking stories about the government The Government has been awarding contracts to their mates, ignoring tendering rules, and those mates are running off with the money and providing nothing in return. Having written that last on I think you might be best just googling UK government scandals. You can't imagine anything worse than reality.
The crown prince is a twit who only married his wife because he needed a baby mama to produce an heir. He is still in love with another woman, and likes to talk to that woman (who is married to someone else) about sucking her toes, while the princess has an affair with a member of her personal staff. And you want to write a story about the royal family?
What if one of the princes and the z-list actress he married were hiding out in the colonies in hopes of people forgetting the royal family's ties to pedophile sex-traffickers? What if accusations of boy-buggering weren't particularly new to them? Sure am glad this is fiction we're talking about...
(Long sigh of Brit-envy.) How have we gotten by for plots in this country for the last 240 years without a royal family to inspire us? Political scandal here is so dull and tawdry by comparison.
That couldn't possibly be as whacky as royals/politicians in real life. This is one of those cases where you probably have to dumb down reality to make it believable.
Having a monarch wouldn't necessarily make things more interesting. Canada technically never left Her Majesty's realm. The only real difference is that, unlike in the States, the people and organizations fucking things up in Canada have a lot of R's and HM's in their acronyms. Really, I'm surprised the concept of "GUBU" never caught on in the States, seeing as the USA and (the Republic of) Ireland have the somewhat odd distinction of being the only two major English-speaking countries that (to my knowledge) are not de jure part of the British monarchy.
The easiest/most effective way to make up something plausible is usually to research the real world equivalent, understand how the thing works in real life, then apply that knowledge to whatever fictional elements you need for your story to work. In addition to us Brits, I believe the Danes and the Belgians also have a few doozies as far as royal family scandals go. I'm not sure a lot of them really involve democracy so much, it's usually more human drama (so-and-so is gay, so-and-so is having an affair) or straight up criminal conduct (so-and-so has ties to a sex-trafficking paedophile).
Coined by an Irish politician, I think when the attorney general had a house guest who was subsequently convicted of murder, it stands for Grotesque Unbelievable Bizarre and Unprecedented. If memory serves me correctly.
Given the percentage of Americans of Irish and Scotch-Irish descent, it's not as odd as one might think at first.
Well, having the Irish elite's pet bum go on an ill-conceived crime spree because he's running out of dad's money was bad enough, but it ultimately turned out that the guy who came up with the term was pretty GUBU himself: private island, offshore bank accounts, overly cozy relations with the IRA, etc etc. Well yes, but I don't see those phrases used very often in political discourse. The closest American equivalent I can think of is the urge to affix the -gate suffix to everything.
My personal favorite was his advice to us all to "tighten our belts" in the 1980's when the entire population aged under 30 was emigrating and he was regularly fucking off to paris to have his designer shirts fitted.
Actually no. My favourite is really his minister for finance, who subsequently became taoiseach(prime minister) who explained the brown bags of money by stating he didn't have a bank account. The minister of finance who dealt exclusively in cash because he didn't have a bank account. You really couldn't make this shit up. The money, apparently, came about after a particularly good day at the track. Give me a break.
Yeah and generally happy to be so. Sometimes you have to wonder but I believe everywhere has similar stuff going on, matter of flavour really.
I imagine the 'princess' just secretly being a really feminine prince might be a good one. given how squealchy people are about trans rights and the like it might be a bit dodgy. But it doesn't even have to be trans, the prince can literally just look really feminine. Sure that kinda thing really only happens in anime [*glares at steins gate*] but hey, it's fiction.