#acronym pending

In lieu of any progress to show on the Acronym Pending story, have a stupid little world-building thing.

As reminder: the TDG world is set after an aversion of the apocalypse (called the Antiocalypse) caused the world of reality and belief to class together. Gods, monsters, fairies, all that jazz, without the Urban Fantasy magical veil keeping everything hidden. The released stories, the prologues describing how this all happened, are hereorhereif you prefer Wattpad.

During the decade or so after the Antiocalypse, shit got kinda scary. There were stories about all sorts of things prowling the world, inciting a panic that outshone the Satanic Panic because… well… it was real. Real demons and shit. The governments and militaries could no longer be relied on to assuage these fears. They couldn’t do shit to the monsters out there, a story for another time. And so, in 1972, people welcomed King Arthur with welcome arms.

In Somerset, England, there was a dragon. It was a small one, but still it was gobbling up livestock and poisoning creeks and whatnot. After several failed attempts by police to kill it, an unlikely savior came around. A blonde, handsome man with a full suit of ornate armor carrying a whole ass real sword came into town on a horse and said he would kill it. And he did! After this, he let the people know that he was King Arthur Pendragon. He was mortally wounded and taken to the Island of Avalon to heal and wait for the day he would take back the throne of England. Why was he showing up now? Well, after so long he had to be taught the history and parlance of the modern era by Morgan Le Fay. Arthur swept around southern England before coming to the capital. With a following of tens of thousands of English people, the monarchy begrudgingly took their leave and instated King Arthur to the throne. Even before he sat on it there were skeptics everywhere, especially among the aristocracy and Parliament. But the people of England wouldn’t have him relegated to a meaningless role in the nation. Arthur would not be a mascot. Even across the pond he was beloved by the masses; a sign of old heroes coming to save the day once more.

Despite being gone for over 1000 years, Arthur had a pretty good hang of modern English government and the global situation. Such highlights include the President of the United States meeting with King Arthur, King Arthur brokering a deal to dismantle all nuclear weapons (because of the general public association with the Tsar Bomba and the Antiocalypse tragedy), King Arthur officially supporting the Chinese Communist Government, and the EU making a round table, the largest ever, for their meetings. King Arthur’s most outspoken policy was that, to save England from the goblins and dragons lurking in the darkness, they needed to return to the old ways. Essentially he appealed to the fetishization of the past and how it used to be “in his time”. A big part of this was, apparently, English supremacy. Historians were quick to point out that Arthur was supposed to have been king before England existed, but that didn’t stop anyone. People loved it. And so that remained the bulk of his policy making and governance. Until 1978, when he was shot outside of his Royal home.

This came as a pretty big shock, as few believed that the mighty Arthur Pendragon would go down to a mere gun wielded by a random nobody. Well, an autopsy showed he was not king Arthur. Dental records matched him to some rando from Liverpool. His sword and armor were real, but he was a reporter who disappeared off the face of the Earth two years ago and seemingly decided to fake being King Arthur for power and fame. There was a bit of a tumult as the old monarchy resumed on its merry way. Namely, would the real King Arthur come back? How would we know if he was real? What would happen if he was? Thankfully, there weren’t any conspiracy theories about him being the real King Arthur, because one of the foremost conclusions about him was that the real deal would never die from a common mortal weapon. The real King Arthur would perish in a climactic battle with an adversary. Parliament set up the Arthurian Verification Protocol in case any more Arthurs showed up. And they did. Between 1980 and 2000 there were six false king Arthurs. One of which actually made it all the way to the final stage of the Protocol, until his family in Edinburgh snitched on him. After that, impersonating King Arthur was made a crime punishable by death. After that, only two sincere imposters came out, one of which was extradited to the United States and the latter given the lethal injection. When looking back on it, the most genuine of the fake Arthurs was the first. He had the benefit of there not being a precedent of impersonations, but he also did actually slay a dragon. He got a majority of his Arthurian legend right and had real armor and whatnot. Most of his follow-ups never went as hard as he did. For now England, and Wales, who’ve mostly been left out of the whole incident, have to wonder why the real Arthur hasn’t come back from Avalon.