Supernatural Elite

Don't challenge the king's authority, or he'll squish you.

The ruling class are monstrous/supernatural. The literal Blue Bloods, if you will.

This is nominally about supernatural creatures who have their own upper class (who are very likely to be more powerful than the lower-class supernaturals), but it can include characters who happen to be both supernatural and upper-class, characters who are supernatural because they're upper-class, or characters who are upper-class because they're supernatural. Due to the proud tradition of Asskicking Leads to Leadership and Rank Scales with Asskicking, all four possibilities are likely to be true. Their lower-class subjects can be supernatural, "normal", or a mix of the two.

Can overlap with God-Emperor, if the claim of the monarch's godhood is genuine; and Hive Queen, if her control over the Hive Mind is supernatural in nature (e.g. via a Psychic Link).

In some ways, the martial skills of feudal aristocracies (who were often the only skilled fighters at the time) could be compared to the supernatural skills of these elites. There's probably some element of Social Darwinism at work here.

Some ancient cultures believed this to be Truth in Television (or at least the subjects were supposed to believe that), e.g. concerning the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Subtropes include:

• Celestial Paragons and Archangels
• Demon Lords and Archdevils
• Faerie Court
• The Ghost King
• The Magocracy
• Monster Lord
• The Necrocracy
• Royalty Superpower
• Top God
• Vampire Monarch

Vampires Are Rich is a Sister Trope (if not a subtrope). See also Super Supremacist, who believes their supernatural powers give them the right to rule over Muggles, and may be striving to create something like this.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Although everyone, except Asta, in Black Clover is a mage, nobles usually have much higher magical power than commoners and peasants and use that as justification for their superiority.
• Bleach:
  • All residents of Seireitei (lit: "The Court of Pure Souls") count as this. It's where all the privileged souls reside in the afterlife. That includes government officials, shinigami, nobles, vassals, peacekeeping forces, and others. Every other soul either resides in Rukongai (lit: "Wandering Soul City") or suffers a Fate Worse than Death elsewhere.
  • Quincies are split into Echt and Gemischt depending on purity of blood line. However, Uryuu Ishida's social status is murky because he is the Gemischt son of a high-ranking Echt father and a Gemischt Ninja Maid. Made worse upon introduction to Quincy society, where he is immediately Kicked Upstairs to become Unexpected Successor to The Emperor.
• In The Twelve Kingdoms, the elites are immortal, can speak any language, and the kings and queens are so strong that killing demons is child's play to them.

Comic Books

• In A Distant Soil, The Ageless Human Alien Ovanan are ruled by the Hierarchy and the heads of the noble Houses, who have greater Psychic Powers than lower-ranked Ovanan. Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration was the eminently ladylike Sere casually mowing down Seren's household guards, despite their possession of guns as well as psychic powers. She was only stopped by Kovar, who as the Prince of House Teramis was sufficiently powerful to withstand her psionic attacks long enough to hold a sword to her throat. In theory the Avatar is higher still, but the Hierarchy has long since learned to control them.
• The Ogre Gods: Zigzagged. On the one hand, the giants are perfectly able to crush humans like flies and frequently do so, and in their days of conquest could easily destroy armies. However, nowadays they're content to live in their castle, with human chancellors doing the ruling for them. They aren't even divine: An ancestor of theirs (the biggest and longest-lived) believed himself a god and that a god should eat man flesh, but he died all the same.
• In The Royals: Masters of War, every royal and noble house is shown to be made up of superpowered people. It's also mentioned however that even in the United States, the closest Americans and other Muggle democracies and dictatorships have to a landed, aristocratic gentry have some abilities, though nowhere near as powerful as actual royalty.

Film

• Star Wars:
  • The Empire is led by the Sith, wielders of the dark side of the Force who possess powers that are magical in everything but name. The ability to wield the Force is innate - an average person cannot be trained in it. It's a pretty small elite, since there are only ever two Sith Lords at the same time, a Master (Sidious) and an Apprentice (Vader).
  • The Republic (both old and new) and the Rebel Alliance likewise have the Jedi, wielders of the light side of the Force. The Jedi serve rather than lead the Republic, but they act as diplomats and elite warriors, having the authority to negotiate peace over a trade dispute and even replacing the regular army by the time the prequels start.
• The Brotherhood from Perfect Creature is an all-male vampire theocratic elite who are nominally sworn to serve and teach mankind as their protectors, but in practice they run the government and enact laws, namely banning any genetic research that could turn humans against them.

Literature

• The main setup of All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault is that, in 1982, the supernatural forces of the Dark revealed themselves to the world by offering to convert anyone to a Darkling for 10 million dollars. Although initially dismissed as a hoax, it wasn't long before curious elites took up the offer to discover that it was indeed genuine. Fast forward 35 years, and pretty much all of society's wealthiest and most powerful people are vampires, werewolves, demons, and other supernatural beings. Being Dark is treated as the ultimate status symbol of wealth and power, and those who've taken it act accordingly.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Only nobles have easy access to the means to handle the Pent-Up Power Peril that manifests as the Devouring to which children born with magic are prone, and a child's mana level depends mostly on its mother's. Commoners who do get mana usually die of the Devouring before age seven. This results in magic use remaining something only found in nobles. There is a way to survive for non-nobles, but it boils down to pledging to become a noble's slave in exchange for an excess mana absorbing item. Before the arrangement gets actually made and if the noble changes their mind, the alternative is to pay a lot of money for a defective or broken mana absorbing item that only works once, overall making the option available only for people who already have a lot of money and connections to nobles.
• The Beginning After the End: The continent of Alacrya is ruled over by the Vritra, a clan of Asuras exiled from Epheotus and the main villainous faction in the story. Being a clan of Evilutionary Biologists, they have interbred with and experimented on the inhabitants of the continent for so long that one's Vritra bloodedness is deeply ingrained in the Alacryan social hierarchy with families being referred to as bloods rather than houses. Those identified to have the blood of the Vritra are taken to be fostered by a highblood if not already part of one, and a telltale sign of such is the presence of the same Horns of Villainy that the true Vritra possess (to the point that "Vritra's horns" is a common swear in the Alacryan lexicon).
• In Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series the Comyn are seen as this. The mythical origin is that they have divine ancestry. But in reality they are Half-Human Hybrid descendants of humans and a race of Space Elves with Psychic Powers.
• The Red and White Courts of vampires in The Dresden Files both appear to operate on an aristocracy-based system, particularly the Red, and the two Faerie Courts have monarchies and nobles.
• This appears in the Deryni works, and King Kelson Haldane in particular holds that his arcane powers, which he distinguishes from those of Deryni in general, are a manifestation of divine favour, signifying his right to rule. He says as much during an archiepiscopal tribunal investigating Duncan McLain's marriage:
  "Deryni are not the only ones to have this power, Bishop Arilan....We Haldanes can tell when a man is lying. It is a power of our sacred kingship."
• The Psi Lords of Takis in the Wild Cards series have built up this mystique around themselves, although in practice they are really just products of a Super Breeding Program to produce ever-greater telepathic powers.
• All European royals and nobles in Neil Gaiman's short story A Study in Emerald (an Intercontinuity Crossover between Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos) have green blood because they're all either Eldritch Abominations or the half-human progeny of Eldritch Abominations.
  She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge, huger than I had imagined possible, and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us, without moving.
• Some of the Great Houses in A Song of Ice and Fire have inheritable supernatural powers. House Targaryen has the power to control dragons and some form of resistance to heat, House Stark has warging (the power of moving one's consciousness to the body of an animal, usually a wolf). Both also have various forms of prophetic powers.
• This is an important belief in the Mel'in Empire of Diamond Sword, Wooden Sword. It is believed that only scions of human aristocracy can have magical powers and talents. This belief is false, but the magocracy stamps out any evidence to the contrary by hunting down and executing magically gifted commoners.
• Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte has a similar setting as My Next Life as a Villainess, and its case of this trope is more complete that the other work: even the supposedly Mage Born of Muggles turns out to be a Heroic Royal Bastard.
• The ability to use magic in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! is almost exclusively found among the upper class. While it's not unheard of for a commoner to be able to do so, it's so insanely rare (frequency of discovering one is about one person per decade) that most people just end up assuming that the person's mother must have slept with a nobleman.
• Red Queen: The Silvers are silver-blooded humans who have superpowers and rule over the Reds, who are ordinary red-blooded humans. The royalty, nobility, and middle class are occupied by Silvers, while Reds work as servants, cannon fodders in wars, or in menial jobs. The conflict is started when some Reds, including the protagonist, start exhibiting superpowers, causing the Silvers no end of problems as this means the Reds now have a fighting chance against them.

Live-Action TV

• In Grimm:
  • Nick is a Grimm, a supernatural cop tasked with policing the monsters. This allows him to see past their human facade and grants him super strength, hearing, and reflexes.
  • Adelind and later Juliette are hexenbiest, a super powerful form of witches. Juliette is considered stronger because she was made not born.
  • Hybrids are generally considered stronger, although it's never explained why
    • Diana, the daughter of a zauberbiest and a hexenbiest, is extremely powerful, manifesting reality-warping powers that frighten even seasoned practitioners.
    • Kelly, the son of a hexenbiest and a grimm, has not manifested powers by the end of the series, as he is still a baby, but it is heavily implied that his zauberbiest (male equivalent of a hexenbiest) side will make him an even more effective Grimm than his dad, Nick.
    • Sean Renard is an exception, half zauberbiest and half royal. He seems to only have a weak form of shape-shifting and a reasonable amount of strength given that he's almost six and a half feet tall. It is never fully explained if the royals are simply privileged humans, which would explain his weak manifestation of powers, or are a special kind of wessen.
• Supernatural:
  • The alphas, who are also the first of their kinds.
  • Lilith, the first demon created by Lucifer.
  • The princes of hell, who were the first generation of demons created after Lillith. Originally intended to be generals of Lucifer's hell army before Lucifer was caged.
  • The knights of hell, were the first demons created from the souls of fallen humans. Includes Cain, the father of murder.
  • The king of hell. A seeming contradiction that this would rank lower than princes and knights, but with Lucifer unable to take the throne, the King of hell is a contested position held by Crowley for the majority of the series. However, Crowley is an ascended crossroads demon, powerful, but still many rungs below the power levels of princes and knights.
  • Special kids are human children who were tainted with demon blood as babies. This granted them supernatural powers such as telekinesis, super strength, mind control and other powers. This group includes, deuteragonist Sam Winchester who is often referred to by demons in early seasons as the Boy-king.
  • Antichrist Jesse Turner, is the offspring of a demon and a virgin woman. He has reality-warping powers and is supposed to aid Lucifer in the war against heaven.
    • Season 13 is set to deal with Jack, a nephilim, who is the half-human son of Lucifer, himself.
  • Archangels, the first four angels created by God. Includes Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.
• In True Blood, the vampires operate on a feudal system. A Vampire King/Queen claims a territory and appoints sheriffs to administer it for him/her. Usually the most powerful and/or oldest vampire becomes the monarch, however, the position can be reached if a vampire is politically connected with the Authority who seem to be a governing council above the monarchies.
• The Vampire Diaries has the Originals, who seem to be the original vampire family. They're the strongest vampires around and can compel lesser vampires to do their bidding. They cannot be killed with standard anti-vampire methods. They're mostly unknown among younger vampires since the Original Klaus hunted down the rest of his family and put them into a suspended state.
• In the Doctor Who serial State of Decay, the Three Who Rule are vampires, feeding off the peasants whom they rule.
• Angel: in the rushed series finale Angel et al. go up against the Circle of the Black Thorn, who are supernatural rulers/elite.

Tabletop Games

• In Exalted, the Scarlet Dynasty, the ruling class of the Realm is composed largely of the Terrestrial Exalted.
  • Hell is also organised into a hierarchy of serfs, citizens and Unquestionable.
• Warhammer Fantasy's many supernatural creatures provide a number of examples:
  • The Nehekharan undead, an entire kingdom of resurrected egyptian-styled humans, were governed by kings, an aristocracy and a priesthood in life, which has translated into a hierarchy of undead types in death thanks to the various degrees of mummification and preservation each class enjoyed. The rulers of the Nehekharan tomb-cities are the Tomb Kings and Tomb Princes - who became fully-fledged mummies. Their royal guards, chief architects and highest courtiers were only partially mummified, so became less powerful and less independent wights. The common folk did not receive any kind of mummification, and so were resurrected as near-mindless animated skeletons. The priesthood, being scholars of death and necromancy, never died and persisted as liches.
  • Warhammer's Daemons of Chaos are organised along hierarchical lines, with Greater Daemons and Daemon Princes ruling over Lesser Daemons (the most important of which are known as Heralds and Champions), who in turn have dominion over daemonic beasts and daemonic mounts. Each of the four Gods of Chaos has its own parallel hierarchy of daemons along these lines. The lowest of the low are the Furies, with no divine patron, who are little better than scavengers and looked down upon by the rest of daemonkind.
  • The Vampire Counts of Sylvania maintain a vampire aristocracy ruling over a human peasantry.
  • The Treemen, Branchwraiths, Branch Nymphs, Dryads and Spites of the Loren Forest seem to have their own hierarchy.
  • The Celestial Empire of Grand Cathay is ruled over by the Dragon Emperor, the Moon Empress, and their five children. Due to their ancient nature, the five Dragon siblings have sired many progeny throughout the ages. These Dragon-blooded frequently rise to positions of power, as their Dragon Ancestry not only gives them great prestige but also grants them formidable magical prowess. Lesser Dragon-blooded are known to ride the winged Longma into battle.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The original leaders of the Empire of Man, i.e. the God-Emperor and the Primarchs, his clone-sons. Although none of them are close to his level of power (and intentionally so), almost all of them have some Psyker-abilities. This proved to be a VERY bad idea in hindsight, since Psykers are more vulnerable to The Dark Side. The elite split in two camps with one half defecting to the demonic Chaos Gods.
  • The Tau as a whole aren't supernatural, but every Tau displays unwavering obedience to the Ethereal caste (Imperial xenobiologists suspect some kind of pheromone is involved). However, the whole point of the Greater Good is that everyone works together: Ethereals lead, but they defer to the specialists of the Fire (warfare), Water (diplomacy), Air (piloting), and Earth (engineering) castes as needed.
• The main feature of the Birthright campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. All the rulers in the realm are 'scions', who have inherited some supernatural powers. (The first scions received the powers when the gods of the realm perished in battle.) It's a variation on the "divine right of kings"; an unpowered ruler couldn't hope to get the trust of the populace.
• Bloodpunk is another Dungeons & Dragons setting. The known of world of Tolia is dominated by two rival city-states. The gothic city Kranath is ruled by a Vampire Monarch and other vampire nobility with an iron fist. Art-deco Cyherested is ostensibly more democratic but the bureaucracy is rigged so that sorcerers control the government and all major industry. Both of them require their citizens to pay a "blood tax'' to power the setting's Magitek.

Video Games

• The maesters of Final Fantasy X are mostly unsent souls who simply aren't interested in giving away their power, even after their deaths.
• In Darkstalkers, the house of Aensland is the ruling family for all of Makai.
• Nippon Ichi games have this to varying degrees in their games. Laharl is a prince, generally respected within his castle. Zetta, who has to regain the kingdom he accidentally destroyed, earns varying levels of respect and obedience from his vassals. He gets none from the vegetables, who thought they were an autonomous collective.
• In the obscure PS2-game Kagero: Deception 2, humans are basically second-class to a nobility consisting of 'Timenoids' - blue-skinned immortals. As the player, you are initially a slave to the Timenoids, but eventually, you must decide whether to help them brutally suppress an emerging human uprising, help La Résistance destroy the Timenoid elite, or just kill them all.

Visual Novels

• In Tsukihime, the True Ancestors don't exactly have a proper hierarchy, but the highest-ranking of the True Ancestors are the ones closest to manifesting the Crimson Moon — Arcueid and Altrouge Brunestud are considered the princesses of the True Ancestors.

Webcomics

• How the magical people work in the Buildingverse. There are their Kings and Queens (according to Roommates they either inherit or win these titles through blood) and various lesser beings they rule. These courts seem to be also thematic thanks to a mix of the rulers being Fisher Kings and their lands Fisher Kingdoms.
• This seems to be the case for the world that Tara and Andrea came from in El Goonish Shive. When they meet Nanase, they immediately assume she's royalty... because of the strength of her magic. Specifically, her faerie doll spell.
  • It's later explained that the name is derived from the fact that their aura is shaped like a crown, and that only very powerful auras are capable of that. There are at least three known royals on Earth's side: Nanase, Mr. Verres, and Rhoda. Grace, as a seyunolu, is considered "pseudo-royalty".
• The Youreimoto clan seem to be this in Erma. Erma's grandfather seems to be the lord of their town, as well as head of their clan. Their home is the largest in town, and they have over a dozen servants working for them as well.
• Cities and towns in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures tend to be ruled over by creatures due to their greater physical and magical abilities compared to beings. In good cases, they defend their cities from rivals and otherwise act as royalty or public officials. In bad cases, they run their protectorates as glorified game reserves or soul factories.

Western Animation

• Princesses Luna and Celestia in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, who are the Alicorn rulers of equestria and Physical Goddesses. The rest of the population is composed of simple pegasi, unicorns and Earth Ponies, and while Word of Faust says that the three races can mate with each other, it's obvious that a pegasus and a unicorn won't produce an Alicorn (also, the princesses look more like normal horses than ponies).
  • And most of the aristocracy of Equestria appears to consist of unicorns, though not all. This traces back to the days before the foundation of Equestria, in which the three tribes of pony (unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi) lived in a mutual dependency not unlike the tiers of Medieval European society. Earth ponies (peasants) grew crops, the Spartan-style pegasi (the military) controlled the weather. Having the most crucial magic, literally controlling night and day, the unicorns appointed themselves nobility and, presumably, clergy of sorts.

Real Life

• French kings were believed to be able to cure scrofula (a disfiguring skin disease) by laying their hands on the afflicted person.

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