Before I get into it, I promise I will not hound my mother with information that she does not want nor will my resources be unprompted. I only ever talk to her about this stuff when she brings it up herself.

For a while now I have noticed my mother becoming more and more… based? As in I do not even have to say anything explicitly and she will just do it herself. For example, a few days ago when we were heading to her place (as I was housesitting for the weekend) we were talking about how scared I was to cross a particular street for my bus due to the traffic being a nightmare in my city (it is a light-less crosswalk which means cars can do whatever they want and are very impatient, thus it is very anxiety inducing). She affirmed my fears and began to talk about how if our public transit system was more efficient and better funded then the roads would be way less congested and many people wouldn’t feel the need to drive, she even brought up fifteen minute cities! All of this was done without my guidance.

She under values her own intelligence a lot, and jokes that I have to “dumb down” information for her (I do not, I just use words that she would understand) but she is absorbing what I say and is applying it without my aid. I am incredibly proud of her, but she does have a weak point: the Tsar.

While I was at her house and talking about history she brought up how she loves history too. She always had ever since I could remember, but her interest purely lies in that of royalty. She mainly watches TV shows and dramatized movies that centre on European monarchs. For the most part she feels little to no sympathy for their fates as they really had it coming, what with the extreme wealth inequality. But she told me that the one that really sticks with her is the Tsar, it was so tragic.

I made a face and she pointed it out so I just told her that what the Tsar did was worse than his own fate, and that they deserved it. I wasn’t aggressive in my tone either. She pushed back that her sympathy mostly lied with the children, I countered that most of them were already adults at the time. She responded that most of them were women and thus had no power so their deaths were pointless.

The conversation kind of ended there and we moved on to something else. This was not an argument and our tones were light. But this is something I have heard her repeat a lot and I do not know how to go about it when it comes up again. My mom is not one for reading historical books, she just doesn’t really have the time to sit and read novels, even the dramatized ones. But she likes TV shows and movies.

Are there any that can tell a more accurate story of the Tsar, something that is less documentary-like and more narrative? I do not know the names of the movies and shows she watches but I know they act like fictional media while telling a “true” story, if that makes sense. I just want something to recommend to her that will be entertaining and also enlightening. I wish the history she watched focused on the people rather than the rulers of the time, but thats where we are right now and I have to work with it.