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Here’s a scenario.
Imagine being the leader of a nation. You are the protector of your people, tasked with defending their liberties, guarding their inalienable rights, etc.
Now after years of saber-rattling, a hostile kingdom arrives at your doorstep with a delegation that includes The Evil Queen, who can control people with her mind.
Do you,
A) Invite this psycho to the heart of your government, where she can mind-control everyone to do whatever she wants.
B) Tell her that you must conduct meetings remotely, maybe over Skype.
C) Have her assassinated immediately in any of a dozen creative ways.
D) Marry her.
Well, if you’re Kai, you do A and D. And you make these decisions unilaterally and with zero deliberation. Lesser Emperors might have consulted their top generals or their intelligence chiefs. But not Kai! He must “make this decision alone” (his words). Maybe additional facts and intel would only cloud his special brand of logic.
Anyway, that’s how Kai sells out the people of his country: at the first available opportunity. He hands them over as slaves to a mind-controlling sadist for her to do with them as she pleases without even putting up a fight.
If you are wondering why,
why would Emperor Kai (who is really good looking, btw) do such a thing? Well, according to the lore of The Lunar Chronicles, Kai does this because he is braindead. I think the technical term is shit-for-brains. Where there should be brains in his cranium, there is instead shit. But again, he’s also very attractive - keep that in mind - just not smart, since that's not a quality familiar to Meyer or any of her fans or characters.
Anyhow, another thing you might be wondering is why in a future of such flourishing scientific progress, the nations of Earth have reverted to an autocracy reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Great question! The reason is that authors like Meyer prefer to write about despotic regimes, even when it doesn’t make sense, because they think it’s easier.
Look, real governments are messy: layers of complex bureaucracy, 99.999% of decision-making delegated to agencies, regulators, clandestine organizations, keepers of institutional memory and expertise many degrees of separation from elected leaders. We’re talking FDA, FCC, BGI, FEC, FTC, FFA, CIA, DOD, NGA, FBI, etc., and I only made up a few of those! There are so many three letter agencies they have their own three letter initialism: TLA.
As you can see, writing about real governments is exhausting and requires thinking and knowing stuff, which Meyer doesn’t do. Instead, she imagines a future where all the governments of Earth are ruled by despotic kings and queens. It's simpler to write, she thinks, mistakenly.
Anyway, there’s a reason that monarchies went out of style with the rise in literacy rates. Public knowledge and education are inversely proportional to a belief in the Divine Right to Rule.
So is it possible to have a monarchy in the 21st century? Of course, and here are some examples.
China’s model of authoritarianism leans heavily into censorship, limiting the population's access to objective sources of information. Wikipedia is banned in China, of course, as are all search engines that don't censor history, philosophy, and many, many books, including those by Carl Marx. All social media companies are controlled by the CCP, and encryption is illegal. The words “Tiananmen Square” and that iconic photo below are also illegal.
The CCP utilizes various other psychological techniques, like a weird social credit system and a surreptitious form of state violence, as in they'll make dissenters disappear but always deny it.
Russia has a different strategy. They are overt about state violence! No denials here. People are encouraged to report each other to the state, and dissenters are beaten and publicly humiliated, put through a kangaroo court, and imprisoned. Whereas Chinese repression relies on ignorance, the Russian variety relies on fear.
The third model for authoritarianism in the 21st century could be
Saudi Arabia, whose mechanism of control is financial, although religion also plays a small part.
Most Saudi citizens work very little, an average of an hour or two a day, engaged in fake jobs for the government funded by oil. Actual labor is conducted by slaves. This arrangement keeps Suadis docile and dependent. The royal family doesn’t have to coerce its citizens or even lie to them: everyone knows exactly what’s happening. They are in a gilded cage of suburban blight.
To sum up, these are some of the main strategies for maintaining autocratic rule.
1. Keep the population stupid.
2. Keep the population terrified.
3. Keep the population dependent.
4. Use religion.
Now Meyer has created a fantasy realm in which all the people of earth (billions and billions of them) enjoy enough scientific understanding to have spaceships and cyborgs but not democracy.
So how does Emperor Kai maintain control? Does he rely on censorship and indoctrination to keep his citizens stupid, or does he have his secret service kidnap protestors and torture them to death? Does he simply pay people to STFU and pretend he’s an "Emperor"? Does he even take his own fake title seriously, or is the population of earth so stupid that they actually believe in the Divine Right of Kings?
Anyway, there's so much to complain about here. The "terrifying" invading Lunar army is... wait for it... wolves with no guns. They are vulnerable to bullets, but alas it never occurs to Kai or his minions to shoot at them, hence his instantaneous surrender. The way it’s described, I doubt the Lunar army could conquer Texas let alone all of earth with their gunless wolves, but whatever.