Okay, not exactly "random," but...I admit that it's a pretty weird choice. Only strangely enough I don't have very many characters of any note whose names start with R.
He's also a weird choice in that most people would not put the Trojan War as during the reign of Ramses II, but I do. Or rather, I did for the Atalanta and Ariadne books, which then bled over into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, albeit only slightly. (He sends troops to aid the Trojans in year...seven or eight I think, though he's only identified as "Ramses" so it could be Ramses III, who's more in the time frame typically associated with the Trojan War. In any case, it's a one-time event with minimal repercussions no matter what you do...unless the feud between Odysseus and Palamedes is still going on at the time...) There are reasons for my placing the date of the Trojan War when I did, and as I'm trying to be more relaxed about these posts now, I'm just going to quote what I had to say on the subject in the timeline section available at the end of the interactive version of Scions of Troy:
So, there’s a lot to say here, and much of it could be spoilers for later books in the series, meaning I can’t say a lot of what I would ideally want to. There is a “traditional” date for the Trojan War: 1184 BCE. This would have the war either beginning or ending (depending on whether you see that as the start date or finish date!) less than a decade before the Bronze Age Collapse.
I couldn’t use that for obvious reasons! Even more so than the “having the girls travel through what would be their equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is not what I wanted” reason, there’s also the fact that the myths firmly establish that a good deal of time passes between the fall of Troy and the fall of the other citadels. (Though the ancient texts are not consistent about just how much time, to be honest. And of course they had them all fall to Dorian invaders when most of them seem to have fallen more to earthquakes than to warfare.)
My original drafts had assumed "about 1250" for the fall of Troy, but that meant that the girls were going to arrive in one of the locations for the later books at a time of great upheaval, and I preferred to avoid that. So I shifted things around a little more, and put the start of the Trojan War at around 1267 BCE...which is about the same time that the Hittite Empire was going through upheavals as Hattusili III was overthrowing his nephew, Mursili III. Meaning that the Hittites would have been much too busy to send aid to Troy! I was so pleased by that coincidence that I decided that, as far as my personal headcanon is concerned, that simply was the date of the Trojan War. (The deposed Mursili III fled to Egypt, btw, and the political wrangling and threats of war as Hattusili III demanded he be returned lasted for nine years, thus handily both proving that the Hittites had too much else on their minds and that Ramses would have been unlikely to get involved.)
Even better than the upheaval among the Hittites was the earthquake that struck around Mycenae in about 1250. This earthquake forced the rebuilding of the citadel walls and was when the grave circles famously looted excavated by Schliemann were brought inside the walls. Which made for a perfect time for, say, Orestes to carry out his act of vengeance for his father's murder. And more importantly made an excellent opportunity for Korythos to oust Aineias as the post-war king of Troy.
In other words, I ended up with a time that fits the larger picture of the war's place in the Late Bronze Age world really well (aside from making the Dorian invasion take place several decades before the Bronze Age Collapse 😰), so I was extremely pleased with it.
Corollary to all this, because Ramses II had an incredibly long reign (1279-1213 BCE), that means he's still seated on the Egyptian throne when Atalanta and Ariadne first escape slavery around 1239 BCE. And that means if I wanted them to visit Egypt--and of course I wanted them to visit Egypt!--then he's the man in charge when they get there.
And when they get there is in book five, so it'll be a while before it's been rewritten...and it's probably going to change a lot in the rewrite. (Partially because I didn't put in as much research as I should have at the time. 😅)
That's not the only reason, but I'm going to talk about that after I address how I characterized Ramses in the original draft. (Which will probably not change too much in the final draft...) Obviously, it's a tricky thing, trying to write fiction involving a real historical personage. Even more so considering that the ancient Egyptians did not keep the kind of records that tell us much about what their rulers were actually like as people.
