It's not like he didn't know Shelyn was falling down on the job.

"If we're really worried about the murder opera we could explicitly say in the law that it doesn't make it legal to do actual crimes as part of your theater performance. Which would also cover the case where someone tries to use a play to get people to go commit murder or something."

"I don't think we need to specify that, merely to not specify that the theater is protected from charges of committing normal crimes."

"I've seen it more common to just place the convict as an... understudy, who is dressed up in a matching costume and only brought on stage for the death scene itself. Seeing it performed was excellent practice in concealing feelings of disgust so no one near me could detect them. But I am not, actually, truly worried, and if a few bloodthirsty votes vainly hoping this would relegalize it would be lost by explicitly banning it then it is not worth doing so."

And if they're reading the minutes of this committee they're intelligent enough to realize it won't, and no loss.

The theater is bad! News to follow... never, because they've re-instituted censorship without also re-instituting government news.

Victòria spent half the weekend expecting to be tortured to death and on some fundamental level finds the prospect of being executed by drawn-out opera performance more horrifying. If they'd just brought her out to die at the end that's — less upsetting, probably — but it still feels like it's treating executions like some sort of stupid game for rich people. Which to be fair they kind of are, sometimes, but just because this is kind of a stupid and pathetic way to feel about being executed doesn't mean she doesn't feel that way.

Oh yes it was absolutely making them entertainment for rich people. If somehow no one had been recently convicted who looked similar enough, one would be mysteriously found to have committed high treason. (Not in Kintargo. Restraint of her disgust only went so far. But the few blood opera venues noticed this and went outside the city to do it, because her power only went so far too.) That was the point. That the amusement of the high was more important than the lives of the low.

Fuck Asmodeanism.

Oh, it's not that she has any doubts that blood opera was entertainment for rich people, she just expects there's plenty of entertaining rich people you can do just by executing people the normal way with normal types of torture.

But yes, fuck Asmodeanism.

"The traditional policy practiced in most countries outside the reach of Asmodeus" that permit theater "is that an Office of the Censor, based in either the capital or with branches in every major city, has the duties of issuing licenses to each approved theatrical troupe and approving each script individually, charging fees for both to defray the costs of his position. The reason we would expect to do worse is that we have neither the men nor the money to carry this out effectively, and the chief question is if there is some innovation in the law" innovation in the law is not a dirty word in the lands of Aroden "we can design that would hope to do better."

"I don't know how to find the people, but if the money is an issue, could they just charge more to check the scripts? Or is it, like, they're already charging the most that would be fair to charge, and that's still not enough to cover the costs?"

"No, I think that can be done. A partial refund in the case of a rejection, perhaps; that would discourage turning it into licit bribery by requiring nine variations rejected before considering anything seriously, which I suspect would be the naive result. Getting the men and getting them together, to establish a shared understanding of what is permissible and then train any future additions, however, is still a cost which is harder to defray, and one which must be paid upfront. ...We might be able to prevail on the Queen's consort to allow us to import some of his censors; I've heard it said he attends the theater religiously, every week when not on campaign."

"A very insightful idea," he says, making a note of it.

Quietly, “Who do we mean by queen’s consort?”

"Emperor Cyprian of the Galtans, Her Majesty Aspexia's husband," whispers an aide to him, because Her Highness likes this one and didn't wave her off when she moved to answer him.

“Thank you.”

Enric still isn’t sure what it means to call someone’s husband a consort. Maybe just a noble word or maybe it’s something scandalous. But if Cyprian is helping with theatre… still not sure what to think, but seems helpful.

"The man who ended the chaos in Galt, and the finest general and statesman of our age," says Xavier, "though of course a ruler can only truly be judged by the grandchildren of his subjects."

Wow, by this metric Gaspodar fucking sucked.

"How much would it actually cost to pay them to agree what's allowed and train more people? More like sixty gold or more like six thousand?"

“Not sure on the number, but would it save money to find whoever was doing censorship before? They’d need to know the new laws, but already know the right way to read, and how to stop plays causing riots.”

"I would expect hundreds or thousands of crowns a year for each city, not tens of thousands, with costs that could be offset by taxing script submissions and theaters?" He looks at Laia, who might know this at all. "This is not my field of expertise." 

"I'm afraid I have no idea how much money the censors made; talking to them at all was generally the producer's job."

“If we bring in the old censors, one thing they won’t know is how to tell which plays are good and which are evil. Maybe we can bring in more Shelynites and ask for help with that part?”

"Could we find someone from the Westcrown playhouses to ask about the cost? Maybe not in time to finish writing the law today, but enough that we can get it done tomorrow?"

"I didn't track the censor's costs, but I did know the taxes paid by the theaters and their companies. I would estimate most of them made about two thousand gold a year, before the taxes, their actor's salaries, and all their other expenses. If a twentieth part of that had to go to censors, in most years, that could fund about a hundred gold of censors per troupe, which could approach a thousand a year in large cities but would stay well below that in the towns. I'd guess a dozen new plays a year per theater, give or take a doubling, and I don't know how many were rejected for each one approved but I'd expect maybe a third as many never approved with an average of two tries each before giving up, and for the successes to take something like three tries each to get their success."

"So that says that a censor - or a team of two if we follow Delegate Porras's suggestion - would see about, let me do the sums, eight scripts from the failures and thirty-six from the successes, call that forty scripts a year per company, of which they'd approve ten and return the other thirty for revisions or flat rejection. Maybe as much as eighty, or as low as twenty. And receive about a hundred gold from the troupe for that labor. That's on the very low end of the Archduke's estimate but I think one script a week for a hundred gold a year is... possible, and if two censors or teams can cover at least three companies it looks likely to be sustainable."

A hundred gold is kind of an astonishingly large amount of money. On the other hand, Delegate Ardiaca paid more than that to get the azata to talk to her, so maybe it's just that everything you might spend money on is astonishingly expensive when you're a noble or the government.