Simon + Playing With Wilhelm’s Hair

my favourite thing is characters who just met the person theyre literally going to be wildly in love with for the rest of their lives and theyre like “:/ they’re not all that” this is so embarrassing for u

Young Royals S2: A Summary

Wilhelm: “Wow. Can’t believe I’m going to burn the entire Swedish monarchy to the ground for this nerdy little choir boy I met six months ago.” Literally everyone else: “You don’t have t-” Wilhelm: “No, I’m gonna.”

ok but the way they've been on again off again for three seasons specifically shrouded in the colours of the swedish flag - showing us the monarchy has intruded on their relationship. even the good, even the private, and always, always the bad and the ugly.

💙💛

makes this white flag moment of surrender even more powerful. they're stripped of this blue and gold brushed over them by society, colourless and allowed to create their own existence - together, a blank slate. themselves, again and only - forever.

🤍🤍

YOUNG ROYALS 3.06

Oh, we meet with open hearts of everlasting bonds take part.

lol yeah the suggestion is that now that he's stepping down, he's basically... good ??? mental health-wise ?

Which makes no sense for a number of reasons:

We still have the fact that his brother died less than a year ago, *and* that he's coming to terms with new, disturbing revelations about his brother

His parents, while apparently suddenly willing to change and self-reflect, still left their 17 years' worth of damage on him

And so did the monarchy up until this point

Also, stepping back from the line of succession *does not* mean he's leaving the royal family. He's still their kid. It's not as though the monarchy is going to stop impacting him in the future

Still the revenge p**n sex tape, hello? The whole world saw him blowing his future boyfriend (and obviously that was never properly resolved when it comes to Simon's mental health, either)

... The fact that no adult, including at the school, seemed to actually CARE about this massive betrayal and sex crime? (With the exception of Linda and weirdly, sort of August's step-dad.)

Ongoing internalized homophobia, which we witnessed throughout all 3 seasons, which does not magically go away once someone is no longer Crown Price

and more, I'm sure

** Wille still needs ridiculous amounts of therapy !!!! ** And I will never get over the fact that in Season 3 he basically just... stopped going? His only therapeutic needs came in the form of reconciliation with August? And where is Simon's therapy in all of this? (Not just about the sex crime he endured but also about literally everything else, including his childhood before that point.)

This is a quick thought because I'm in the process of coming to terms with Young Royals as a whole (and it will take a while) but I really didn't like what they did to Wille's mental health.

The final conclusion is, I guess, that his Crown Prince role was too much of a burden and he needed to be freed. I.. don't think it's a well thought conclusion and it was handled badly. I'm pretty sure in s2 it was shown that mental health is resosolved by therapy and working on yourself, not running away from your problems.

Now we are scraping all of that because..? (Yeah, I know exactly why)

I like to be charmed and seduced by stories, but too much of unrealism will always pull me away from the story. Season 3 was a mess and I'm refusing to give any excuses to the thing that does not deserve that much credit.

“He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.”

― Richard Siken

Thank you for writing this.

Naturally we all know that this in no way excuses August's literal crimes he's committed against other children, and simultaneously I do think the context is important. Abusers don't just *poof* materialize out of nowhere -- they're created and made by the influences / forces around them. (And then the newly-created abuser is responsible for the choices they make and actions they take afterwards, of course).

I've actually been thinking about the trauma August has experienced (at Hillerska + pre-Hillerska) a lot, ever since Young Royals season 1. We had two striking examples there of times August was about to try and open up (strangely to Wille, of all people) before being immediately cut off and ignored.

First example, S1E4: After the Society initiation for Wilhelm, before he ends up on the football field. August and Wille are outside peeing, and Wille is intoxicatedly expressing his guilt, grief, and conflicted feelings to August after his brother's death. August begins to open up as well, saying he *too* felt guilty after his father's death (suicide) and that he was somehow to blame. He doesn't even get to finish that sentence before drunken Wille cuts him off mid-thought. The look on August's face at that point is one that always cuts me to my core & brings me sorrow.

The second time was in S1E6, after August had already uploaded the video. Wille knew about it, but didn't know it was August's doing. In either a show of remorse, or as a kind of play-acting fakeness, August shows up to Wilhelm's room to offer him (fake or genuine?) consolation and advice. He begins to thank Wille for helping him with he tuition fees before Wilhelm cuts him off and says (essentially) that no one will ever be as helpful as Erik and he'd rather be talking to him, hearing Erik's advice. This isn't technically a "rehashing of trauma" moment at all -- but it is a moment where August was about to show vulnerability to someone who helped him, and August isn't used to being helped. Both of his parents abandoned him: his father to death, and his mother to Hillerska. Now this little cousin he's been hazing and betraying actually does something kind for him -- and he isn't able to access sufficient airspace to acknowledge it and share a moment of gratitude. Wilhelm never acknowledges that he heard August at all. His face, again, seems to communicate something really complicated and dejected then.

All this is to say -- I've just been spending a lot of time trying to understand August and meditating on the complicated, conflicting ways he shows up, and especially about his relationship to vulnerability. Not in order to forgive him! The crime he committed was truly evil and inexcusable. But I do want to understand. I want to know. How did he come to be this way? Where did all of this evolve from? And he always really fascinates me for these reasons.

August's story is not "good boy turned bad at Hillerska" but something so much more complicated.

I've been thinking a lot about August and the revelations in S3. About how Erik and co played an even bigger role in his indoctrination and development into a toxic mess of a young man than I had imagined - but how it's also important to remember that didn't happen in a vacuum.

The new information doesn't cancel out the old, it just completes it.

August will have still grown up in the highly patriarchal, misogynist, elitist system of the aristocracy, with a very specific view of the world and his place in it. Idolising his father, whose tux he is fittingly wearing when he gets "awarded" the bad boy trophy. A man who taught him by example that death was preferable to failure - and seemingly turned him against his mother, as we could infer from S1E3. A mother who then essentially dumped him off at Hillerska after his father's death and left him feeling like the only woman in his life failed to support them both.

It's precisely these kinds of views, values and experiences from his early life that will have primed him for the culture of abuse at Hillerska (which his father will have also attended back in the day). Made him so desperate for the older boys' approval, vulnerable to their abuse, and susceptible to the awful patterns they impressed upon him. Erik and the others' part in messing him up is horrible and bigger than we thought, but that doesn't cancel out his parents' part any more than his own victimhood excuses his victimisation of others. He's got many intersecting and partially overlapping cycles to break, and I really hope we see him take more steps down that road on Monday.

I may write a longer meta post on him after the finale. For now, though, I'm just going to engage in some shameless self-promo and point to my old analysis post with more thoughts on his upbringing and worldview as well as the backstory one-shot I wrote in the run-up to S3. (It's set two and a half years before his arrival at Hillerska and focuses on his father's horrible influence, as well as his parents' marriage as a possible model for his seemingly contradicting views of women and romance. It remains compatible with canon apart from a few details - please check the tags for content warnings, though).

They’re scared because they know that the public is with Luigi.

They’re violating his rights because they need to maintain capitalism.

Keep talking about Luigi.