glad i muted the knight post because there are so many tags that i want to argue with, which would not be productive for me to argue with, and which it's better for me not to be seeing continually

for example: "it's exactly the same as cops". no. it's similar, but it's not exactly the same, and for us as a modern audience as opposed to the contemporary audience, it's wildly different because it's not a part of our society any more (and i was mostly talking about it all from the pov of modern textual reception). it will be more similar to how the police might be perceived in 600 years if the institution has disappeared but i still think there would be differences in terms of scale, aspirational aspects of storytelling, number of people likely to regularly interact with that institution, and the specific nuances of nobility and class that we've got going on with knights

(the person who suggested it might be similar to secret agents i think was closer to the mark. theoretically you MIGHT run into a secret agent and it MIGHT upend your life and you MIGHT get fucked over by the violence they enable but for the most part you're not that likely to cross paths with them unless you belong to a particular class of people (other types of gov agent, certain brands of criminal, person married to secret agent, etc) and the absence of the everyday reality for most people means they belong much more to the realm of "cool fictionalised thing that is sexy to make films about" despite theoretically existing and being a tool of the government. but even there, there are some key differences)