SPOILER A Terrific Villain: Analysis of Her Majesty, Queen of Fruma

Update Because I Cross-Posted This To Reddit And Everyone Accused Me Of Being AI For Some Reason: I’M NOT A CLANKER. I JUST TYPE PROFESSIONALLY. I WORKED ON AND RESEARCHED THIS FOR A MONTH.

Throughout the Fruma storyline, the Queen of Fruma serves as the all-powerful antagonist casting a long shadow over every part of the province she oppresses. She is a classic evil dictator with good PR, who the Player and co. oppose as the underdog heroes. For most of that time, she remains an unstoppable, godlike threat on par with The-Boys-season-1 Homelander: an intelligent and powerful foe you can’t fight, only run, hide, or pray she spares. Only once the Player amasses enough power and skill are they able to damage her human form beyond repair at the end.

It’s her charisma that is her greatest political strength, though, as she uses it to sway people to her side, pacifying them with lies and propaganda of her superiority and benevolence, including the Player’s friend Tasim for most of the questline.

Despite the evil she causes, she reveals herself pretty early on as more than a one-dimensional villain, and one that’s pretty important to the greater world narrative.

So without further ado, here are several short but connected deep dives into her psyche and her narrative role.


The Queen is a deeply self-centered person

Her Majesty, the Queen of Fruma, is a deeply self-centered person. Her beef with Light and Dark's destructive war is personal in origin, not inspired by a strict ethical framework. She's just egocentric.

Which is good in that it leads to her opposing the War of the Realms due to being harmed by it. She is genuine when she says she wants to protect the world from Light and Dark's endless war; it's not just propaganda for the masses. Though she carefully curates a public image of civility, enlightenment, and benevolence, she does believe that image, in her own mental gymnastics-loving way.

…But it also leads to her trampling on the rights of others because she feels entitled to do whatever she wants with Fruma: she genocides the native Frumans and destroy their culture; she sets up an oppressive, corrupt political system that operated off the exploitation of the peasantry for centuries; she criminalizes dissent and creates a cult of personality around herself to mandate worship; she previously flooded the Auburn Forest and killed thousands of innocents just to eliminate a few rebels, and almost does it again in the present day before the Player and the Leaves in the Wind stop her.


The Queen loves Fruma…but not in any way that matters

A recent science article asked, “Does an abuser love their victim?” The answer: sometimes…but not in a meaningful way.

Likewise, the Queen constantly claims to love Fruma, and she speaks to the player, Tasim, and basically anyone who’ll lend an ear about how dear the province is to her. She’s doing a tricky bit of equivocation here, though—her definition of love is the emotion itself, not the actions associated with love. She loves Fruma like Mother Gothel loves Rapunzel in Tangled: as an object she uses to self-regulate. It was the first place she found when she escaped the Realm of War and freed herself from being trapped as Anathema, and after having no autonomy over her own space and body for so long, she became hyper-attached to the point of objectifying it and its people, claiming it as “hers”. In her mind, the province itself exists for her enjoyment. More critically, the people exist to adore and worship her, and must never step out of line with what she wants from them, rebel, or express dissent or criticism of her—she seeks total control, which she enforces through the long arm of the law and her own godlike magic.

Her excuses of loving Fruma and protecting the world from the War of the Realms also likely serve as a justification for all the horrible things she does, creating a buffer between her and feeling any empathy for those she’s hurt, which would necessitate a painful crisis of conscience and moral shame. It’s obvious bullshit to anyone who isn’t in her cult or doesn’t have their head quite as far up their own ass as her, but it’s good enough for her—no one likes feeling like a monster, after all.


Communal narcissism is one hell of a drug

The Queen has a noticeable superiority-inferiority complex: as Anathema, she tells the Player she was created “inferior” to Orphion and Saphanis by being a mere “reflection of their hatred”, expressing pain, resentment, and bitterness over this self-perception. In one dialogue tree path, she says Orphion and Saphanis would never dare intrude into the Material Plane and risk mutually assured destruction from her, as their pride wouldn’t be able to stand being mutually defeated by “something beneath them”, in her words—this belief in her own inferiority likely comes from interactions with them.

She compensates for this low self-worth with grandiosity; she throws herself into playing the role of Fruma’s beloved, enlightened god-queen and sole protector from the War of the Realms, which she’s highly insecure about despite her efforts. To that end, she demands the people of Fruma worship and praise her as their god in return, arrests and silences critics and dissenters, and destroys temples and shrines to their old gods (likely out of jealousy or fear of competition).

Even her name is a reflection of her grandiosity: instead of a regular name, she only has a form of address and a title/role (Her Majesty, Queen of Fruma).

Despite being deeply selfish, lacking in self-awareness, and having violent, sadistic tendencies under pressure, she views herself as someone uniquely virtuous, powerful, in control, and intelligent. When her identity as that role is threatened or questioned, she devalues her detractors as childish, shortsighted, and too unenlightened to know what’s good for them. She’s attached her identity to it, so being honest with herself would feel too threatening and painful for her to face.

Only in her dying moments as Anathema does she reveal the pain, vulnerability, and psychological suffering hidden under her grandiosity—I suspect a last-minute attempt to find someone, anyone, who’ll validate her pain, even if it’s her enemy.

Even then, she still doesn’t acknowledge the harm she’s caused to Fruma, and insists her way was the only way if the Player pushes her on it—this revelation is still too much for her to face, even in her last moments.


Comparing Anathema vs. Her Majesty

In human form, Her Majesty takes great pains to maintain control over herself, something Anathema disregards.

As the embodiment of the Realm of War, Anathema herself is brimming with hate and violent rage, both because she was created from the mutual hatred of Orphion and Saphanis, and because their war using her realm physically and mentally tortured her for eons.

As Anathema, her manner of speech is noticeably volatile and full of enraged outbursts—she is easily angered and emotionally unpredictable. When the Queen loses control of her regime, she begins losing control over herself and regressing back to her personality as Anathema, long before the Player even destroys her human form: the mask slips and she becomes visibly enraged and openly sadistic, delighting in the idea of torturing the Player to death before Rex intervenes.

By contrast, the Queen in her human form maintains a facade of being composed and calm at all times in order to avoid any public display of vulnerability or loss of control, which would mar her image of invincibility. Losing control of herself, even emotionally, would be regressing back to Anathema, something she wants to avoid at all costs.

Her moth form Anathema is thus aptly named, and has dual meanings: it represents everything that the Queen hates and fears regressing back to, and is anathema to how she wants to live her life. At the same time, her own mortal shell is anathema to her magical nature as a Realm Beast.


Autonomy, control, and entitlement

The Queen’s entitlement to owning and ruling Fruma is one borne of suffering. Her realm was constantly being ravaged by the War of the Realms, and she had no autonomy over her environment (which doubled as an extension of her own self, as she was its Realm Beast). What little space was her own was constantly being infested and taken over by the Corruption.

She overcompensates for this trauma with extreme, rigid, and aggressive behavior by conquering Fruma as her own, and justifies it with the idea she deserves it after suffering for so long, disregarding anyone else who gets hurt along the way.

Because her own autonomy was violated for so long, she subconsciously believes the only way she’ll have true autonomy is by controlling others before they have a chance to control her, that her needs won’t be met unless she takes what she wants and demands they be met.


Ironically, the Queen is her own worst enemy

The Queen’s downfall in the story is caused by her being unable to get out of her own way. Her aforementioned psychological dysfunctions cause her to act irrationally and needlessly antagonize huge swaths of people who otherwise would’ve supported her in her quest to stop Orphion and Saphanis from destroying the Material Plane—she is a destructive leader to her own cause.

She colonizes and oppresses an entire civilization out of entitlement, then gets all outraged and surprised-Pikachu-face when Frumans begin regularly trying to assassinate her and overthrow her regime. Even in her dying moments as Anathema, she’s unable to take accountability for all the harm she’s caused to Fruma (not to mention the amnesiac Wynn soldier conscripts) and continues spouting the same excuses in defense.

She also neglects to inform the Player—or the general population of Fruma or Wynn—of the extent of her role in holding Orphion and Saphanis back from wrecking shop in the Material Plane, right up until she lays dying as Anathema. This was critical information that could’ve established trust and enabled better inter-provincial military and political cooperation between Wynn’s leaders and her. She gloats about how shortsighted the Player is for killing her because of this, yet never properly informed them of the potential consequences of killing her beforehand.

I suspect this is out of grandiosity: she looks down on the humans and views them as incompetent, and resolves to do everything herself or through the few Sovereigns under her command. (Or maybe paranoia stemming from betrayal trauma because of what happened with Bak’al?)

Either way, lots of dysfunctional “shooting herself in the foot and getting confused when she’s in pain and has to go to the hospital”-type behavior here.


Her Majesty & Syndra: A tale of two mothers

Throughout the Fruma questline, two of the most important characters we meet are Syndra, the leader and chosen mother of the Leaves in the Wind resistance group, and Her Majesty. Both take the role of “mother”, either through found family or as a political metaphor, and Syndra serve as a foil to Her Majesty in this regard because of their contrasting approaches to "parenting".

Her Majesty: The Controlling Mother

In this narrative framing, Her Majesty is the abusive, controlling mother who demands total enmeshment with her children, and total obedience and devotion to her at their expense.

The Queen views Fruma’s citizens as “children”, (and, by extension, herself as their parent), but in a paternalistic, infantilizing way. She constantly refers to Syndra and the rebellion as disobedient, squabbling "children" having "tantrums" when they fight back against the Queen's oppression: in her worldview, they are too stupid to have their own autonomy, political or otherwise, and therefore she is entitled to control, subjugate, and even kill some of them for the citizens’ own good.

Despite her complex around being the only grown-up in a room full of children, it’s she who acts most like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum in the end: she goes mask-off, crashes out publicly, and attempts to flood the Auburn Forest AGAIN in a fit of rage, all over a handful of resistance members living in the sector. And it bites her in the ass, hard: Zhiraok defects and rescues Soosu from prison, which leads to them saving the dam from collapsing, and the Queen’s public image is tarnished to the Highlanders.

By lashing out so vindictively over the threat of losing control, she reveals herself as truly infantile in her worldview and decision-making, her “Mother knows best” mentality merely an accidental projection of her own psyche onto others.

In this allegory, she is a parent who fails to break the cycle of generational abuse: she is abused herself by her creators’ gross negligence for her wellbeing, and hates them for what they did to her. She eventually escapes their grasp, and forges a life for herself outside of what they made her into, only to repeat the cycle on her own “children” by inflicting violence and oppression on the Frumans (including Tasim, who trauma-bonds with her over hating what was done to them unwillingly despite her being responsible for his suffering in that regard.) She broke free from her abusers physically, but not psychologically, because she believes what they did to her is okay to do to others. It’s the ultimate tragedy in an abuse recovery arc: she fails and becomes just like her abusers.

Syndra: The Loving Mother

In stark contrast to the Queen of Fruma’s entitlement and egocentrism, Syndra is the loving, albeit flawed, mother who wants what’s best for her children.

Syndra considers the Leaves her found family, and treats them as adopted children—she has no biological children of her own, and no other family thanks to the Queen sabotaging her love life through a loyalty test. The Leaves treat her as their mother in return. She seeks to protect them from the Crown and give them a better life, and has their best interests at heart. Her greatest weakness was her shame, FOMO, and sense of obligation pushing her to enact her assassination plan too early with too sloppy of an execution, which inadvertently got multiple resistance fighters captured, including her own foster children. However, her motives were always noble, to the point of volunteering to sacrifice her own life for the sake of her children's futures—something the Queen of Fruma would never do.

 

The thing that stood out to me the most about Her Majesty's character is that if she had chosen a different path, you would be allies, maybe even friends. She earns sympathy, and later, pity, but ultimately her narcissism and her need to control make our conflict with her inevitable, but there's always a nagging feeling that maybe you could have worked this out if things had been different.

 

God damn this is peak.

 

Exactly! Her backstory is incredibly sympathetic, but she’s just too dangerous to risk acting on that sympathy in any way.