Revenge of the Tidols
Titles of nobility were tools created by powerful families to keep wealth concentrated within a genetic line. The precise mathematical formula for optimal inbreeding was embodied in the descending hierarchy of rank. For a thousand or more years, wealth and genetic ambition have fed the golem of nobility, and at last the golem has broken free and is rampaging around the city.
It’s amazing to see that a man would undergo a sham adoption just to claim the title of “prince”. Stranger yet that a woman who made a living selling false appearances to others would give this imposter half her wealth and enter a loveless marriage just to be called “princess”. But utterly surreal is the woman who made a living pretending to be someone who pretended to be someone else. Through her, wealth intended for genetic lineage took a life of its own and helped motivate her bizarre quest to be adopted by the sham nobles and called “princess”. Her daughter might have been “princess”; both daugter and granddaughter of the same man; and her son a “prince”.
How senseless. Michael Jackson, as wacky as his is, had more sense than this. He simply named his son “prince”. That artist with the big guitar named himself “prince”. You can even mint yourself a URI and become King of San Francisco.
I think this was one lesson of the “pied piper” story. The young mother at first claims she’s doing it “for the child”, no doubt with ample encouragment and “moral support” from opportunistic men. But when it comes time to pay the piper and make good the bargain, she has a choice to make, between the lifestyle and the child. Outliving the original child, a new child whose presumptive father would rather be cuckolded than risk the inheritance, and friends to whom adoptive nobility is more important than genetic right of succession. The 50-year ambush becomes the 100 year ambush. Soon the children are slaves to the ambush.