It’s just a fact of life that the main character gets certain perks in life that other (more deserving people) don’t get.
The MC can often speak directly with people many tiers above their station (diamond rankers, kings, gods – i.e. He Who Fights with Monsters). The MC gets the girl that everyone wants and who no one can get (i.e. He Who Fights with Monsters and Battle Mage Farmer). The MC gets accepted to the best school he shouldn’t be qualified to join (i.e. Warformed: Stormweaver).
There’s an endless supply of perks the MC gets that other people don’t. And that’s why books are written about them, I guess.
But one particular peeve I have is when people are placed in (automatic) positions of unelected power.
I get that an MC usually establishes the first town (i.e. Noobtown). Sometimes the town is even named after them. But these places then become fiefdoms. Fiefdoms seems to be the only governing structure in fantasy LitRPG books.
The people being ruled NEVER question who rules them. The people being ruled never seem to want any say in their government. There’s never democracy, never elections. No matter how bad a leader the MC is (and most are very bad), nobody ever even tries to overthrow them. At most, he delegates his power to a second in command for the day-to-day operations.
The MC never shows any interest in how things are developing, usually.
In Natural Laws Apocalypse, the MC and his friends take over a school when the apocalypse hits. The school becomes a safe zone, free from monsters. From that moment, the one MC is in charge of everything. He decides what buildings need to be built, he assigns all of the tasks, he sets the taxes. Eventually, he puts his mother in charge of operations and his father in charge of security.
His friends moan a bit about being excluded from decisions, and he agrees to talk with them about it, but nobody ever disagrees with him so he’s just being polite by informing them of his decisions in advance. And once it’s decided that he should check with them first, he rarely ever is shown doing it. He expands the safe zone in whichever direction he sees fit, and builds large structures (like a papermill) on a whim because his mother mentions running low on paper.
Never once does anyone ask “Heyyyyy, wait a second, why are YOU in charge?” There’s never a talk of an election. People don’t (or rarely) express disagreement with the MC leader. People just accept being subjugated. One guy refuses to do work (laziness), and gets kicked out of town to survive on his own. He probably dies.
The MC just seems unqualified to be the leader except for the fact that he was part of the party of kids that killed all the monsters inside the school.
In The System Apocalypse, the MC is forced to sit in city council meetings but is bored out of his mind. He can’t sit still. There’s no reason for him to be involved in city politics except he seems to be in a romantic personal relationship with a key city leader (human) and the main alien controlling the city (Elf). He slept his way to his role in power.
In Defiance of the Fall, Zac got lucky when he was coming into the world for the first time, giving him a one month head start on everyone else. But his town, Port Atwood (named after him even), eventually became an island nation. Apparently it’s grown to over 80,000 inhabitants. Zac Atwood is never there. Has no knowledge of the people, or how it runs, or who lives there. He sneaks into town to go inside his personal residence and sneaks out again so that no one will bother him. Yet they just accept him as their leader? Why? Why do people so readily accept an absentee Lord? How does the town (nation state) even RUN when the only leader doesn’t even have a council or anything to run it? It’s just chaos? And chaos self-organizes efficiently?
The Primal Hunter might be the one exception that I will accept. Jake establishes the safe zone in the beginning and people come live there for their own personal safety. He’s the most powerful being on the planet. He becomes the leader of Earth eventually and is currently fighting to be the master of the 92nd Universe. I guess he’s the strongest? So in this case, no being would dare try to take over his town. He smartly delegates day-to-day management to a capable woman (Miranda!) and we occasionally see that she has assistants and councilors and people assisting her managing a planet. There are clans, and factions, and delegations, and planetary communication systems. And Jake isn’t involved in any of it. He sometimes is invited to come in, look scary and say nothing. I accept this as a valid way to run a planet.
Maybe I don’t want books filled with political drama. But this idea of one guy being an absentee Lord while having no functioning political system operating below him (and also no opposition to this) seems flawed. Or the opposite, where nothing gets done unless the MC does it, also flawed.
I want to see alternate power structures form in the absence of good leadership (gangs, like the slums of Rio), private compounds that don’t recognize the world leader, or rebels trying to fight back against central control (like Star Wars).
