Reading, for me, is entertainment and an escape from the real world. But it can also inform and stretch the boundaries of the life I live.
It's not just fictional kings. I suspect we are all just blobs to those who run the show.
He knew objectively there had been other people around - servants and gardeners and so forth - but they figured in his life as blobs. He was at the top, and then his family, and then the priests and the nobles of course, and then there were the blobs. Damn fine blobs, of course, some of the finest blobs in the world, as loyal a collection of blobs as a king might hope to rule. But blobs, none the less.