King Rainier

Rainier wants Rainland the way he has always known it and when it is infiltrated by a daughter who is cleverer, and more rational, than he is, his world turns upside down. Unimaginative, intellectually insecure and easily irritated, he feels so undermined by Princess Raine and by her provocative and unrelenting braininess that he eventually longs to be rid of her, even though she is the last person in the kingdom to pose him a threat.

The resulting predicament finds him clinging fiercely to certain noble principles (fairies must be respected; the word of a king is sacred) while proving blind to others (it is bad form, at the very least, to long for the loss of one’s child).

Not, of course, that he wants Princess Brainy, as everyone calls her, to come to harm—or not much. He merely looks back fondly on his simpler life before she came on the scene, and he yearns for some means of removing her. Permanently. From his presence.

An opportunity arrives when Rainland is beset by a supernatural monster, which he hopes will roast her alive in mortal combat, thereby saving him the trouble of despatching her himself. When she refuses to challenge it on the grounds that it cannot be real and that he is fantasising, however, he accepts—without apparent pain—that he is royally obliged to do the job himself.

In short, Rainier is pompous, conventional, childish and self-serving—not obviously evil, but so ludicrously loyal to the traditions of fairyland in which he was brought up that his weaknesses acquire, in his eyes, the dignity of sovereign virtues.

Oddly, everyone loves him. Even more oddly, so does his daughter. Funny things, families.