Spot on!!! May I add that there were moments when the king had epiphanies about his son. Especially when he realized that Lawrence never once visited his mother when she was captured and his sister when she first realized that she was sick and pregnant. The king was disgusted, but I was like “that’s the monster you raised
It’s such a common thing in fantasy stories. The father, especially if he’s the king, spends zero time raising or bonding with their kid(s), models a crappy relationship with their mom, and basically leaves them to their own devices, and then gets shocked, disappointed, and outraged when the kid is ineffective or has character flaws.
Just because you found a woman attractive enough to sleep with one or more times does not mean she is well suited to single handedly raise and nurture your child into a functional adult and ruler.
What makes this king different is that he never intervenes when his lovers or children behave poorly, but he does use those outbursts to his own advantage. He ignored and enabled his lover’s aggressive, violent, and psychotic actions because it gave him excuses to use her as a smokescreen to attack potential enemies and consolidate his power.
But it never occurred to him that such a person might have a significant negative influence on his growing son, because he really never gave much thought to either one of them beyond his own interests.
By the time Lawrence’s callous behavior started spilling out onto his mother and sister, it was to late to intervene in any effective way.
I can’t help but compare this slightly to the game of thrones… I did not watch the whole series because it was a bit too much on the mind
Too many plot it got lost
This is such a political game and it rolls that people play are just too much at times it interesting to see how this plays out
The King is too obsessed with power, to the degree that it’s destroying his country. Honestly the king is a shitty, yet interesting character. He obsessively clings to power even as his actions continuously destabilize the ruling forces of his country, thus ensuring that he will still have to keep fighting. He feels threatened by both Lawrence and Cedric and constantly tries to play them off one another, always dangling the prize of the crown prince title.
Lawrence has never been an ideal prince, but he is useful to his father. The king never raised him or taught him how to be a person or a ruler. Lawrence’s mother wasn’t a paragon of virtue, so it’s not exactly shocking that he would grow up with character flaws. The king was always more interested in using his child’s behavior than correcting it, and then when he grew up into an opportunistic adult capable of seizing power, he felt threatened.
He named Lawrence as Crown Prince, but then he needed a counterbalance to hamper him and essentially used Cedric, whose family he has exploited and discarded before, as a rival. Then when Lawrence screwed up, was politically harmed by his mother’s actions, and demonstrated poor/threatening character, he pivoted to Cedric.
Even with Cedric, who is generally honorable, who married his stepdaughter, who is a father to a child blessed by god as a Crown prince, he still can’t let go of his paranoia. He tries to bring back Lawrence, who he now knows to be power hungry and duplicitous.
He sees the position of successor as a lever to be pulled to manipulate potential usurpers, but can’t tolerate the idea of an actual successor to hand off power to.