Some people just don’t give a damn about their long-term prospects, and one community’s utter disregard for basic planning feels like watching a car crash in slow motion: This Renaissance fair’s nobility-to-peasant ratio is completely unsustainable.
Who the fuck’s gonna reap the einkorn harvest? The fancy man in the silk-embroidered doublet? Get real!
You’d better enjoy the merry atmosphere at King Randall’s Faire while you can, because a damn-near 6-to-1 ratio of nobles to peasants all but guarantees this place will self-destruct its way back to the Dark Ages before you can finish your jumbo turkey leg. Any idiot could tell you that you need a robust base of agricultural labor to finance your daily jousts and juggling shows, not to mention keep everybody in mead and chewy pretzels, but the wall-to-wall nobles here don’t seem to have gotten the memo. They’d rather dick around at the Wizard’s Winery in their plumed hats and elaborate dresses than face the reality that at least 90% of them need to swap their fineries for sackcloth if they want to keep the engine of feudalism humming.
The handful of existing peasants have done yeoman’s work to keep this place alive up till now, but absent some drastic social reorganization there’s no way they can keep it up much longer. Ideally, King Randall would get his nobles in line and bust a bunch of them back down to peasant ASAP, but that oaf’s way too busy posing for selfies and officiating the Grande Corset Cleavage Contest to legitimately manage the health of his realm. One of the steampunk guys here might be able to whip up some kind of Fantabulous Mechanized Peasant in a pinch, but kicking off industrialization feels like a real cop-out for a place explicitly predicated on celebrating medieval culture. Maybe the fair could schedule a Peasant Power Theme Weekend to at least get those numbers up in the short term? That’s hardly a durable solution, though. If somebody shells out $200 on a cape, you better believe they’re going to wear it as much as they can.
How did they let it get this bad? Having more peasants than nobles is Feudalism 101!
We get that toiling in the fields and mucking out the stables isn’t exactly the most glamorous work. If somebody said, “The hell with this, I’m gonna be a wandering elven bard instead,” we would totally understand where they were coming from. But if you’re going to come out and endorse the feudal system, you can’t expect it all to be pub crawls and courtly dances. Somebody has to deal with the pigs. Most people have to deal with the pigs!
Damn, this Renaissance fair is fucked if things don’t change soon. Here’s hoping they can rectify this imbalance and flip that nobility-to-peasant ratio around before it’s too late!
