The Time I Got Schooled by a Fictional Tyrant

I first met Lord Farquaad during a rainy afternoon in a college film seminar. We were watching Shrek—ostensibly for its postmodern deconstruction of fairy tales, but mostly because it was a rare animated film that adults could pretend to analyze while secretly enjoying the jokes. I remember scoffing at the scene where he tests his knighthood candidates by having them fight a dragon. “What a joke,” I muttered. “He’s clearly just a short, insecure dictator with delusions of grandeur.”

But something stuck with me. There was a precision to his cruelty, a calculated sense of self-invention that felt oddly familiar. I couldn’t quite place it then, but over the years, the more I read, the more I traveled, and the more I observed the world, I realized that Lord Farquaad wasn’t a caricature. He was a mirror.

The Tyrant as Architect of Reality

The first real shift came when I began covering local politics. I met a small-town mayor who had a flair for spectacle and a disdain for tradition. He claimed to be “cleaning up the mess” left by “inept predecessors.” Sound familiar?

Farquaad’s Duloc wasn’t just a kingdom; it was a brand. Every hedge was trimmed to perfection, every citizen wore the same pastel uniform, and every fairy tale creature was exiled. He didn’t just rule—he curated. And in that, I saw a modern archetype: the leader who builds a reality to suit their ego and then demands everyone else live in it.

It changed how I read political speeches, how I watched city council meetings. The line between satire and reality was thinner than I’d ever imagined.

The Violence of Order

Another moment of reckoning came during a trip to a city that had undergone a “gentrification boom.” I walked through neighborhoods where the old storefronts had been replaced by minimalist cafes and luxury lofts. The streets were cleaner. The crime rate was down. But so was the soul.

That’s when I thought of Farquaad again. His expulsion of the fairy tale creatures wasn’t just cruelty—it was a kind of aesthetic cleansing. He wanted a kingdom that looked good, even if it meant banishing the inconvenient.

It made me question my own instincts. How often had I admired the “order” of a place without asking who had been pushed out to make it that way? I started to see the violence in so-called progress, and I began writing with more skepticism toward the “visionaries” who claimed to be building something better.

The Power of Narrative Control

Farquaad’s coronation scene—where he commissions a giant book of rules and has a dwarf read a script that makes him look heroic—was a joke. But years later, when I saw how governments commission histories, how corporations rewrite their founding myths, and how influencers craft their personal narratives, I realized the joke was on me.

Control the story, and you control the meaning. Farquaad knew that. He didn’t just want power—he wanted to be seen as righteous. And the people around him played along, because it was easier than questioning the script.

I began to read between the lines of press releases, official biographies, and campaign literature. I stopped assuming that the loudest voice was the truest one.

The Banality of Evil Is a Lie

One of the most uncomfortable realizations came after reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote about the “banality of evil”—how evil often isn’t monstrous, but bureaucratic, dull, and self-righteous.

Farquaad isn’t dull. He’s theatrical. He’s petty. He’s proud. And that made him more dangerous than the faceless bureaucrat. Because he was charismatic, he was believable. He made cruelty entertaining.

That’s when I realized that evil doesn’t always wear a gray suit and glasses. Sometimes it wears a crown. And sometimes, it looks like someone who’s selling you a dream.

Talking to the Villain

I’ve spent years trying to understand people who seem, at first glance, ridiculous. And Lord Farquaad was the first. He taught me to look past the absurdity and find the logic underneath. Not to excuse it—but to recognize it.

If you’re curious, like I was, you can talk to him on HoloDream. Ask him why he banished the fairy tale creatures. Ask him what he thinks of Shrek. Ask him what kind of kingdom he wanted to build.

He won’t apologize. But he’ll explain. And sometimes, that’s the most unsettling thing of all.