Once upon a time, in a magical and faraway land, there were three princes whose problem was that they didn’t know their ages, and that was very, very bad.
To be more specific, they did not know their comparative ages, which was the cause of great concern. Ignorance of one’s precise age is not pleasant, but it’s not fatal; it’s interesting and perhaps weird to be unaware of quite how long one has been on the planet, but the average male life expectancy of the time period was so depressingly low that, having looked it up, I omitted it from the story because it would really distract you away from the whole rest of the thing, and perhaps make you say, “I have my doubts about the modern world, but has life expectancy really tripled since the 13th century? Surely that says something positive about a modern world in which we are increasingly encouraged to see only the negatives,” and… where was I?
Right. The Princes did not know how old they were, but what’s worse, they didn’t know the order in which they were born.
This was disastrous, because, as everyone knows, in any proper fairy tale, the oldest son is headstrong and overconfident and probably a bit of an arrogant jerk, and at some point he goes out into the world to seek his fortune, only to meet with disaster; and the second-oldest is almost as confident and (in later tales, those which ascribe personality to the moving parts of the story) has some other, similar character flaw, possibly because being one heartbeat away from rulership isn’t good for a young man’s sense of humility (but we’ll get to that; not right now, but at some later date; patience!)—
—and he, too, meets with disaster; and it is the youngest son who is more cautious and more compassionate and therefore doesn’t snub all the little people (who are secretly terribly important, not in the general sense of ‘there are no little people, everyone is important’, but rather in the sense of, ‘You thought this person was a landless serf, but she is actually a thousand-year-old enchantress under a curse and she’s got the magic comb you need to get your hair right)—and therefore he survives, and wins the hand of the fair person-whose-hand-he-eventually-seeks-because-getting-married-is-a-tidy-shorthand-for-“happy”-in-this-kind-of-story, and possibly rescues his brothers
(unless they’re dead; actually, basically, they are dead. I mean, if it’s an earlier, more gruesome narrative, they’re probably just plain deceased. If it’s a later one, they’ve learned valuable life lessons, and stopped being jerks, and that’s great, but it’s also an ego-death. In this case, it’s a “good” death, but let’s not forget that the original personality needs to meet its demise in order to make the character arc worthwhile. Slaying who you are to become what you might be is meaningful, but it’s painful, too.)
Now, you might be wondering how they were unaware of their relative ages (wouldn’t one of them have seen the other two growing up? Unless you separate them, which I definitely considered as a possibility, but then I decided that it was too sinister, especially since it would involve silencing, not one person, but all the people who raised them, and that seems needlessly dark, or at least, it did when this story had its original ending, so there’s another reason, and that reason is:
they were triplets).
And if you think it’s statistically and medically unlikely that there would be triplets, and that all three triplets would survive being born, plus surviving their first couple of years alive, you’re quite right, but given that a horde of Dragons is about to enter the picture, I think we can really throw some of the realism right out the window. At any rate, their order-of-birth was known only to the King, the Queen, and the Midwife; and as the King and Queen paid the Midwife quite a lot of money to move to another country and keep her trap shut, we weren’t about to be getting any answers out of her.
Now, I feel like audiences have a reasonable expectation of a complete story arc, but also, if you’re my audience, you recognize that, once in a while, I fire up the Grill of Inspiration so hot that it melts the plotline, and my only hope is that you enjoyed the process of getting to this point in the story, because this is the moment when a literal horde of Dragons flew into the Kingdom and, for reasons of their own, incinerated it. Which seems horrifying, but I’ll be honest with you: the triplets had basically no chance after, in the course of my researching this piece, I stumbled across someone who was ‘debunking’ the idea that humans now have longer life expectancies via modern medicine by suggesting that lifespan isn’t that much higher, it’s just that life expectancy is far greater.
I mean, this is a fairy tale. I’m allowed to lie. Maybe it wasn’t once upon a time. Maybe it was twice or thrice or ten times. I can revisit the Brothers Three; but first, I need to address this. I mean, fiction needn’t be based on fact, but once you research the facts a bit and find that someone’s trying to fictionalize them, how can you let the matter drop?
I mean, really! What is it with people leaving major important pieces out of their arguments and thinking nobody will call them on it? It’s hard to do that in fantasy; why do we think we can do that with reality? Reality is fragile enough already! Anyway, the subtext of this person’s thesis was “Stop thinking things have improved, because they haven’t,” and the response is:
balderdash. Even putting aside the (likely! and not insignificant!) improvement in lifespan due to medicine in specific, it’s important to note that life expectancy is really meaningful. I mean, the three brothers were vastly more likely to have starved to death, frozen to death (sure, they lived in a palace and were warm there, but they were always going to leave the palace to go out into the world, and we’re talking about conditions of the world in general)—or died from disease, or been killed in a war, or murdered in a world without modern mechanisms of law (imperfect! but better than the 14th century, dammit! Or 13th, or 12th, or whichever one is being approximated in the average fairytale!)—
At any rate, the three brothers could not figure out their destiny, and I promise that it matters, but it doesn’t matter here. I’ll write more about them some other time, I promise. Do stay tuned. The moral of the story is: okay, this isn’t where we hoped we’d end up, but it’s sure a lot better than many, many of the alternatives, and we ought to keep that in mind and be a little more optimistic, cautiously optimistic, guardedly optimistic, but on the whole, there are a lot of positives in the world today, and it’s important to take note of them before some kind of giant lizard disintegrates you with its breathing apparatus.
AND THEY ALL DIED A SWIFT, IF PAINFUL, DEATH, WHICH WAS FAIRLY MERCIFUL, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. THE END*.
* Please note that by “they”, I mean “the inhabitants of the Kingdom,” not the Dragons. The Dragons lived a very long time; in fact, they’re still alive today, and if you’re wondering why the wind has been so warm lately…ah, nevermind.
Written in (eternal) remembrance of Isaac Bonewits, scholar, wit, bard, storyteller, optimist, and (unlike me) not a monster.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
I put on a convention for Villains every February.
I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!
[…] I told you we’d come back to The Three Brothers. In a slightly different […]