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The Borgias political AU + ...Eddings?
Apr. 24th, 2024 12:37 pmUntil I posted about the resuscitation of Voyager 1, my activity bar over on Tumblr was split pretty evenly between responses to a P&P post that had been reblogged by a BNF and various people who are extremely into The Borgias discovering my back catalogue. Before the P&P post reblog, the activity bar was ... like, 90% Borgias reblogs and likes. And good for them, it's still my favorite TV show ever!
In any case, this is probably why I included my brief quasi-epistolary modern US American politics Borgias AU from 2016 in my random list of fics in this post. I did re-read it before finishing that post and had fun immersing myself in all the little details that went into the AU. I'd originally hoped to write more of it, but writing a US politics AU was ... a more difficult prospect after Trump's election and I never did. Still, there's quite a bit that I'd already nailed down and forgotten later.
I did remember that one element of the basic premise is that this version of the Borgia family is not (recently) from Valencia or Italy. Rodrigo is the son of immigrants to the US from Ecuador and rose against adversity to wealth and political power. After serving as a capable Speaker of the House, Rodrigo beats the Republican presidential nominee "Julius Rove" (Giuliano della Rovere) and in the same election cycle, Rodrigo's seat in the House is won by his young nephew César (Cesare, of course). And I remembered that the story was primarily told via excerpts from news headlines and clippings (in fact it's entirely told that way because I never wrote the rest).
Other details I didn't remember:
I should add that David and Leigh Eddings are high-octane problematic figures in SF/F. The Belgariad especially includes a lot of misogyny and racism, and is, let's say, politically ambiguous in general. Moreover, it became well-known after David and Leigh Eddings's deaths that decades earlier, he and Leigh had adopted two children, abused the son, and the children were taken away by the state. The Eddingses separately served a year in prison for the abuse at a time when this was rarely punished at all. The knowledge of this makes all subsequent re-reads feel very surreal, given the prominence in the novels of weird yet idealized kids who turn out to be literal gods. (The linked post also discusses reading the Eddings books, especially the Belgariad-centered ones, in light of this.)
I had personally been very invested in the Eddingses' novels as a teenager/young adult; they were formative experiences for me as a fantasy fan and I have strong feelings about basically every aspect of all of them up to and including The Redemption of Althalus. I kept my collection of Eddings books after finding out what they'd done, since they were dead anyway at that point, but it feels weird to talk about them without mentioning the level of baggage around them. Apparently David was an alcoholic (extremely unsurprising), Leigh was generally violent, and he considered divorce, but never went through with it. Eventually several strokes left her unable to write or speak, though David continued to credit her as co-author, and he himself had increasingly severe dementia and required constant care in his last years while still writing. They had become extremely wealthy and left their millions to medical research and need-based scholarships at Reed College, his alma mater. So the legacy is a LOT and, as I said, it feels odd to talk about their work without acknowledging it.
In any case, this is probably why I included my brief quasi-epistolary modern US American politics Borgias AU from 2016 in my random list of fics in this post. I did re-read it before finishing that post and had fun immersing myself in all the little details that went into the AU. I'd originally hoped to write more of it, but writing a US politics AU was ... a more difficult prospect after Trump's election and I never did. Still, there's quite a bit that I'd already nailed down and forgotten later.
I did remember that one element of the basic premise is that this version of the Borgia family is not (recently) from Valencia or Italy. Rodrigo is the son of immigrants to the US from Ecuador and rose against adversity to wealth and political power. After serving as a capable Speaker of the House, Rodrigo beats the Republican presidential nominee "Julius Rove" (Giuliano della Rovere) and in the same election cycle, Rodrigo's seat in the House is won by his young nephew César (Cesare, of course). And I remembered that the story was primarily told via excerpts from news headlines and clippings (in fact it's entirely told that way because I never wrote the rest).
Other details I didn't remember:
- These Borgias are Californians! West Coast, best coast. :D
- Rodrigo's first VP is Katharine Powers (Caterina Sforza). In the fic, this relationship had yet to go horribly awry, but I had plans for a later disaster.
- I had a brief aside about Rove delaying a formal concession to Rodrigo. Although the fic was posted in July of 2016, you didn't need foresight to imagine that being a RL concern later, though I certainly didn't anticipate the form it would take in 2021.
- Vanozza is Rodrigo's ex-wife, Vanessa Gautier, a Canadian actress from Montréal who raised not only their children but the orphaned César as well. I seem to vaguely recall that she was a fairly minor public figure at the time of their divorce, years before the election, known mainly for a well-regarded performance as Empress Theodora in Byzantium, a made-up film that is very different from the actual Byzantium film directed by Neil Jordan (creator of The Borgias; I am pretty sure this was a convoluted shout-out that amused me at the time). Vanessa's very PR-savvy daughter Lucrecia jokes that her first public appearance was in Byzantium (Vanessa was pregnant with her at the time; I'm sure this was a reference to Carrie Fisher's jokes about her "performance" in Tammy, when Debbie Reynolds was pregnant with her).
- Since then, Vanessa has worked her way into more consistently prominent roles and is now a very well-known movie star in her own right, especially following her role in a massively successful HBO epic fantasy TV series that is this universe's version of Game of Thrones, but based instead on David and Leigh Eddings' Elenium and Tamuli novels (Vanessa plays Sephrenia but brings a bit of Lena Headey-as-Cersei energy to the role).
- I still kind of love this element (with a very major reservation discussed below) of a bizarro world hit fantasy series based on a completely different book series being embedded into an AU about the Borgias navigating US politics as a Democratic political dynasty along the lines of the Kennedys, but obviously dealing with a very different world and other pressures like, uh, racism.
- There's also a reference to Lucrezia's rivalry with Sancia d'Aragona in the show; Lucrecia's first actual public appearance was not political but rather, at a big entertainment event with Vanessa. Lucrecia managed to upstage the new superstar Sasha Darby.
- There's a reference to a photograph of Lucrecia with César at a political event, in which she is of course wearing Valentino (this still amuses me).
I should add that David and Leigh Eddings are high-octane problematic figures in SF/F. The Belgariad especially includes a lot of misogyny and racism, and is, let's say, politically ambiguous in general. Moreover, it became well-known after David and Leigh Eddings's deaths that decades earlier, he and Leigh had adopted two children, abused the son, and the children were taken away by the state. The Eddingses separately served a year in prison for the abuse at a time when this was rarely punished at all. The knowledge of this makes all subsequent re-reads feel very surreal, given the prominence in the novels of weird yet idealized kids who turn out to be literal gods. (The linked post also discusses reading the Eddings books, especially the Belgariad-centered ones, in light of this.)
I had personally been very invested in the Eddingses' novels as a teenager/young adult; they were formative experiences for me as a fantasy fan and I have strong feelings about basically every aspect of all of them up to and including The Redemption of Althalus. I kept my collection of Eddings books after finding out what they'd done, since they were dead anyway at that point, but it feels weird to talk about them without mentioning the level of baggage around them. Apparently David was an alcoholic (extremely unsurprising), Leigh was generally violent, and he considered divorce, but never went through with it. Eventually several strokes left her unable to write or speak, though David continued to credit her as co-author, and he himself had increasingly severe dementia and required constant care in his last years while still writing. They had become extremely wealthy and left their millions to medical research and need-based scholarships at Reed College, his alma mater. So the legacy is a LOT and, as I said, it feels odd to talk about their work without acknowledging it.
