Been Catching Up On Your Thoughts And I Agree. Making Them Break Up So Late In The Season Made No Sense,

One example of how we are primed to empathize with Wille is that when Simon stands his ground and doesn’t accept the terms the monarchy puts on him. Wille lies to him, lies to the whole world basically throwing Simon under the bus regarding the leaked sex tape. And then wants Simon back to unconditionally love him on Willes terms. But a lot of people still only empathize with Wille and claim Simon is selfish when he is the one standing up for himself and against the monarchy first. The one actually standing up to the system. Wille says “I can be free” showing he can get out of the system but not questioning the system. Finally he stands up for Simon and himself, questioning the traditions within the system but please give Simon a better arc so we can sympathize and understand the ones outside the system better. Get his points of view and consequences for him. If Simon would have agreed to the terms of the system, Wille would not have learned and not questioned them. Simon is also a hero in this story.

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i think it's fair to say that at this point people who still support israel don't care what they do. they literally don't care. israel could commit whatever war crimes it wants and people will still support it

Simon wearing the pants with the chain when Wille visited his home for the first time and then wearing them again when visiting Wille’s home for the first time.

White MAGA is massively unqualified.

From insta

we as a fandom do not acknowledge Simon’s trauma nearly enough and it pisses me off, especially given how much attention Wilhelm’s gets. And don’t get me wrong obviously it should and it’s super important, and yes the show does focus more on Wilhelm’s trauma and mental health issues more than it does Simon, BUT!!!!!! it was really damn interesting how so many of y’all started hating on Simon in s2 without even considering that he’s been traumatised by his drug and alcohol addicted dad who probably used to promise again and again that he would get better and then go back on it. AND OH IDK maybe that triggered something in him when wilhelm immediately went back on his promise not to say anything abt the video. Sara explicitly says it when she says that Simon has given their dad multiple chances and their dad always betrayed them. Don’t ever let me catch y’all ignoring the complexity of Simon’s character.

Young Royals: things that make me wonder

How much does Nils know about Wilhelm's promise to Simon re the video, and Simon's feelings about that promise being broken? Is he just guessing here about that being the source of tension between them? For that matter, how much does the rest of Hillerska know about it?

They would all have seen Wille's public statement and known he was lying, and would no doubt all consider this the appropriate action. They would also notice that Wille and Simon aren't behaving like a couple, although they do see them interact (they sit together in class several times, the rowing team see them run off together and talk together at training, etc).

But it's not till this scene that Wille admits to Nils that he told Simon he wouldn't make the statement, and that's why Simon is upset. So it seems that before being told that, Nils, and presumably the rest of Hillerska, assumes that Simon's pissed off because Wille didn't admit to being in the video, rather than that Simon is reacting to a betrayal of trust. Which adds another level of betrayal on top of the original one, because it's Simon's refusal to play the game, and not Wille's betrayal of him, that they see as the real problem.

My reheated s3 take is that August not getting a scene to apologize to Simon and Wilhelm not getting a scene to build a relationship with Sara (beyond exchanging one line) are letdowns in a way that feel deeply interrelated to me.

To be clear: my intention is not to draw a false equivalence between the harm August does to Simon in releasing the video, and Wilhelm’s failure to build a relationship with his boyfriend’s sibling. Instead, I’m struck by how the show tells us that Wilhelm/Simon and Sara/August are both important, formative first loves. The writers also emphasize Sara and Simon’s bond, especially in terms of how they need one another to navigate Micke’s abandonment of them, and likewise stress the need for Wilhelm and August to grieve Erik’s death together. Therefore, it makes sense to close the loop on the Wilhelm-Sara and August-Simon undercurrents running through the series, especially when Simon and August’s conflicts drove a lot of season one and Sara and Wilhelm’s arcs were so paralleled early on.

Maybe I’m biased? As much as I enjoy characters who will move mountains for their love interests, I fall ten times harder for a character who will engage significantly with a third character who means a lot to their love interest. Jane Austen rocks this trope, honestly. I wish we’d seen it play out a little more in Young Royals.

TANGENT: This trope certainly guided heliza and I’s writing when we started Heart and Homeland. In our fic Wilhelm deliberately tries to make sure he learns things about Sara and wins her over because he cares for Simon so much, and he ends up forming a queerplatonic bond with Sara in the process. I’m so invested in their relationship, honestly! Meanwhile, August’s near-reform followed by a dramatic fall from grace (into villainy, even, because I do write a decent villain August if I say so myself) hinges on a vow he makes to Sara—one where he’ll patch things up with Simon—that he later breaks. And much earlier in the story, August does save Simon’s life while Simon’s in the process of saving Wilhelm’s, something that Sara witnesses and remembers.

Anyway, not everything needs to be like my fic. I know I’m being a little ridiculous here. Cough END TANGENT.

At the same time, it was truly surprising to me that the writers of YRS3 didn’t pull on those Sara-Wilhelm or August-Simon threads more. Especially since the creators are on record as saying they assumed the audience would assume that August would apologize to Simon and attempt to repair his harm someday. And based on Sara’s reaction to Wilhelm in the car, I guess we’re also supposed to assume they’ll be friendly and develop a deeper bond someday.

Sometimes it feels like there was meant to be more on the August-Simon and Sara-Wilhelm fronts though. There’s little hints here and there in earlier seasons. Wilhelm being a former rider when Sara loves horses. The fact that the production team cut a line from Wilhelm to Sara in the s2 field scene (the only line that they’d really exchanged thus far) as if they were saving their interaction for something big in s3. The time when August defends Simon against Vincent after the whole rowing team drama. The fact that August has a father with addiction issues in common with the Eriksson siblings. Like. Were there storylines or sequences of dialogue that got cut? What’s the behind the scenes story there?

I specifically wanted to talk about this as an issue of the choices the writers made, rather than an issue of what good or evil innately lurks in a character’s heart. Again, the writers assumed the audience would know that August has become the kind of person who will apologize to Simon and repair the harm he did. Malte talks about August’s growth in interviews—not overstating it, but being honest about how the character’s changed. And I can see plenty writing choices that support that idea of August’s growth! I think there’s a lot that fanwriters can play with and expand upon! Yet those writing choices are undermined by the writers’ choice to not close the loop on August and Simon’s earlier conflicts, and differentiate those as separate from August and Wilhelm’s conflicts. I personally tend to see this as a reflection of the writers’ failure-to-communicate rather than a reflection of the eternal evil of August’s corrupted soul or whatever, and approach my fanfic accordingly. Yet I still see some analyses argue that he’s “canonically” a villain and… it just doesn’t quite mesh with what I’m seeing from the show.

Meanwhile, maybe it’s just me who has this arbitrary goalpost that Wilhelm should have had more meaningful interaction with Sara beyond the one line they exchange and her car being his getaway. But it still feels like their s3 interaction was meant to be more significant? Sara is the beloved-then-estranged sibling of the guy Wilhelm is in love with, she is the cried-over-and-missed other best friend of Wilhelm’s best friend, she is the girl who turned Wilhelm’s jerkass playboy cousin into a puddle of vulnerable enamored goo. She is Fröken Ramirez’s favorite Lucia FFS! (Okay the last one was me being silly, but you know.) If I were Wilhelm, I might be more curious about Sara, especially after she returns to school again and is ostracized by the school population at large. And maybe Wilhelm isn’t meant to be curious about Sara, but that still feels like a thread that got dropped given how it felt like Sara and Wilhelm were deliberately kept apart in earlier seasons. (Has anyone asked the writers about this? Does anyone know the official response? I’m dying to know, now.)

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a “fuck the writers! fuck season 3 forever!” post because I genuinely did like some of the character arcs and some of the choices and I should probably rewatch season 3 over my upcoming time-away-from-work so I can post about that. But the dropped threads re: Sara-Wilhelm and Simon-August are what I ended up thinking about this morning. I really cared about how those relationships were gonna play out.

There’s a whole other post I could make about Felice but that’s for another day. Perhaps after a rewatch!

The beauty of cinematography in YR s1