Queen Beneficent the Plenitudinous

As a full professor of the National Correspondence University of Incendia, I usually mentor a handful of graduate students every year. Some of them eventually leave due to disagreements with the positions I've advanced or some of the didactic techniques I've been known to use. This is just part of being a controversial academician. But through all the heated discussions, occasional fistfights, and pitched legal battles, what makes it all worth it — to me — is the rare student of mine who takes what I have to say to heart and goes on to make something beautiful out of it. I once mentored one Laura Bennett, whom I now say unabashedly is my favorite student of all the ones I've had so far. Bennett, now known by her official title, Queen Beneficent the Plenitudinous, was the daughter of the president of the Democratic Republic of Mizzin, a small country in the Iurezzan south. Her father was opposed to her studying under a misosopher, but he warmed up to the idea when she began giving him policy proposals and recommending decisive government actions that helped solidify his power base among the Mizzinic Parliament. In 986, for her senior thesis, she submitted to me the plans for, and then carried out, a military coup that had her seize power from her father and become the first Queen of the newly-established Autocratic Plenitude of Mizzin. It remains the only thesis to which I've given full marks.

Having a despot as an alumna has been interesting for the NCUI. On one hand, her brutal suppression of dissent is questionable in light of the university's honor code, and it sets a bad example, I'm told, for the other students. On the other hand, the ProjExpo 975 organizers who threw our dean out of the convention were in Mizzin when the Queen seized power, and nobody's seen them since.

There is one area where Bennett and I cannot not come to an agreement, however. She has terrible taste in shows. Whenever I visit Mizzin, we grab a few bottles of wine and watch trashy romcoms in our pajamas in the royal private theater. I can enjoy those sorts of things ironically, and I can even have a good time of it with enough wine in me. But the Queen seems to enjoy them unironically, and it just confounds me to no end. I know she's well-read, because her thesis was full of references to ancient philosophers and classic literature. Maybe it's just a generational thing?