A surprising lot of people have written in to say nice things about BLADE OF VISIONS, for which I am grateful, and and a few have even said it’s among my best books, which is very nice.<\/p>\n
I think the character of Rhamnousia Pendragon helped a great deal with that, along with the fundamental problem many people and organizations face: where do we find good leaders?<\/p>\n
As I’ve mentioned before, Rhamnousia and Zelos Pendragon were loosely based off Empress Maud and King Stephen from the English civil war of 1138 AD through 1153 AD. “Loosely based”, because Rhamnousia and Zelos are half-siblings, while Maud and Stephen were cousins. For that matter, as the BLADES OF RUIN series has gone on, Rhamnousia’s and Zelos’s respective characterizations have taken on a life of their own. (And to be fair to Maud and Stephen, unlike Rhamnousia and Zelos they did not have disguised evil sorcerers actively giving them deliberately bad advice.)<\/p>\n
For Rhamnousia, I basically thought of all the worst traits from the incompetent female managers\/leaders I’ve encountered, combined them into one character, made her both extremely intelligent and highly vindictive, and we ended up with Rhamnousia.<\/p>\n
This isn’t to say that women cannot be effective leaders. Many thousands of years ago (or so it feels) when I worked in Big Box Retail, I devised a metric that turned out to be highly effective for gauging whether a new manager, whether male or female, would be competent or not.<\/p>\n
The metric:<\/p>\n
The more boring the manager is in the first meeting, the better he or she will be at the job.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The boring ones who introduced themselves and immediately got down to business invariably were the best at their jobs. The ones who spent a lot of time talking about their feelings, their kids, their vision, or whatever, tended to be really bad. Or the ones who were really jokey, wanted to be liked, or worse, insisted that you like them.<\/p>\n A secondary metric is whether or not they were willing to get their hands dirty. Like, the best store manager I ever encountered in my Big Box Retail career helped unload trucks, stock shelves, run registers, and even cleaned the bathrooms a few times. They say one of the best guiding principles for effective leadership is to never ask someone to do something you would not be willing to do yourself, and he followed that well. Granted, he had excellent motivations for this. I believe one year the store did well enough that he got a $90,000 bonus, which was in pre-9\/11 money, which would be around $175,000 in 2026 dollars.<\/p>\n However, his level of competence was definitely the exception and absolutely not the rule.<\/p>\n One of his predecessors as Big Box Store Manager was fired and later prosecuted for a variety of excellent reasons, including giving away lots of merchandise to local restaurants in exchange for free meals and what gossip called “getting handsy” with some of the female employees in the office but what the police more accurately called “assault.” Apparently he forgot that every inch of the Big Box Store was covered in cameras. Another predecessor was a very friendly and affable man, but utterly unable to assert himself without having an emotional breakdown, and consequently let people walk all over him. He eventually quit due to the stress.<\/p>\n Based on these and many other examples I’ve encountered, I think Rhamnousia and Zelos are very realistic characters. I’m afraid that in Real Life leaders like Rhamnousia Pendragon and Zelos Pendragon are very common, and bad leaders (whether men or women) are more usual than good or even competent ones. In 2023 I knew a bunch of people who quit health care\/education not because they disliked the admittedly difficult work, but because their managers were so inept and malicious. No doubt you can think of numerous examples from your own life.<\/p>\n Anyway, Zelos Pendragon is a different mode of leadership failure than Rhamnousia. Like, he’s a much more amiable person than Rhamnousia, and much less arrogant. However, he really wants to be liked, he isn’t terribly clever, and he’s not firm in his decisions and changes his mind frequently. Despite being more likable than Rhamnousia, he is nonetheless a terrible leader, just for different reasons.<\/p>\n By contrast, Rhamnousia doesn’t want to be liked, she demands to be respected and obeyed. She is far more interested in enforcing the rights and prerogatives of her royal dignity. Admittedly these qualities are actually necessary for an effective monarch, but she has a fatal talent for alienating her allies through arrogance, and enjoys humiliating people in public. This is all the worse because she’s intelligent, which in practice means she finds better ways at shooting herself in the foot since she doesn’t have anyone to moderate her bad decisions.<\/p>\n If you’ve read the rest of my books, you know that good leadership vs bad leadership is an ongoing interest of mine. I think it’s tied into my interest in history. It’s strange how someone can be an absolutely terrible person and yet somehow be a good leader, and yet despite that very often terrible people often turn out to be terrible leaders.<\/p>\n For that matter, good people likewise fail at leadership a great deal. To get things done, you often need to crack heads together and stomp on people’s personal petty fiefdoms, or employ outright coercion to get people to act (“do this or you’re fired”) and a lot of people just don’t like doing that. There is some sort of very narrow overlap between the attributes of personal ruthlessness, ambition, and willingness to act in the greater good to become an effective leader, and it seems that combination is very rare.<\/p>\n To be fair, leadership is an unpleasant gig. If something goes wrong, it’s your fault, and if something goes right, your workers\/employees take the credit (or perhaps your superiors) and you just happened to be there for it. People constantly try to undermine you and sabotage you, and even well-meaning workers\/employees will sometimes interpret your instructions in baffling ways. The sloth, ineptitude, entitlement, and overall bungling incompetence of your subordinates will be a constant challenge and headache. This will be true in leadership positions ranging from Fortune 500 CEOs all the way to the directors of charity thrift shops. Given all that, it’s not in the least surprising that a lot of leaders default to an attitude of “screw you guys” and try to extract maximum enrichment\/advancement from the situation regardless of the damage it does.<\/p>\n But! No less an authority than Jesus Christ said that to whom much is given, much will be expected. (Luke 12:48, for the specific quote.)<\/p>\n I suppose bad leadership is not a problem that has a solution, or even a question that has an answer. It’s just one of those unsolvable aspects of human nature that one thinks about and that we have to live with.<\/p>\n But on the plus side, I can get some pretty good novel plots out of it! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n -JM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A surprising lot of people have written in to say nice things about BLADE OF VISIONS, for which I am<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blades-of-ruin"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pZ6ri-69N","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GenericFantasyQueen09232026.jpg?fit=1200%2C628&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23671"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23684,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23671\/revisions\/23684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanmoeller.com\/writer\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}