(03-13-2017, 04:00 AM)Uther Wrote: So, the Star Wars franchise being excluded, princesses are 1. not elected, 2. not given any authority, and 3. are either princess by birth or by marriage..
Not quite correct. There are actually several different positions that in English are all called Prince/Princess.
The first is of course children/grand-children/other descendants of a monarch. Those are indeed neither elected nor do they usually have any formal authority attached to the prince/princess title.
But there are also rulers of smaller independent territories (principalities) that have the title prince/princess. One real-world example is the Prince of Monaco. Such a prince/princess does have quite a bit of authority attached to the title.
(There are also a bunch of other uses of the prince/princess title. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince for the whole silly mess.)
There are such a thing as elective monarchies, so there have been elected kings etc. throughout history I am not familiar with any elected rulers using the title prince/princess, but they could certainly exist.
On a related note: So far I do not believe we have seen anybody use any of the king/queen/prince/princess titles in Eorzea.
