![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluedalahorseSo there was the question on the other site about whether August and Sara would actually be allowed to date Sara if he were in line for the throne, and what kinds of barriers they could potentially face as a couple. I’ve actually had a lot of thoughts about this (as it happens: no one is shocked) and here might be as good a place as any to write them down.
I’m going to start by sharing some thoughts I had for a fic I will likely never have time to co-write. I’ll put them behind a cut since the fic thoughts themselves aren’t strictly necessarily, but they are illustrative of some of what I’ll talk about afterward.
Some context: Heliza and I have this fanfic universe in our heads that we call Sprucewood AU, and we probably won’t end up writing it because Heart and Homeland is such a momentous thing we’re working on and we’ll probably need to clear the board for non-YR projects once it’s done. Sprucewood is essentially a canon divergence AU that takes off in episode 1.4, and what happens is that on the night of the Society party, Simon isn’t texting Sara back so Sara sneaks off to Hillerska in the middle of the night to look for him. She runs into August, who’s still kinda high and vulnerable after the party and his conversation with Wilhelm, and through just a series of small Occurrences (August tripping over her and skinning his knee, them needing to break into somewhere to fetch a bandage, whatever) they end up having an Actual Conversation. August never ends up at the window to make the video and Simon and Wilhelm are never violently outed.
So next… August’s arc gets pushed in a different direction because suddenly he and Sara are starting to have conversations in secret and are, weirdly, actually bonding. And it’s good for him actually. Simon and Wilhelm’s relationship spins off in an entirely different direction too, and they eventually part ways over the Alexander-takes-the-fall-for-the-drugs thing. Not to worry—they’ll be reunited in young adulthood because we love a second chance romance! (Simon and Wilhelm end up back together, in a poly triad with Felice actually, which may be our most controversial idea. This AU—so much lighter and softer than Heart and Homeland but also so much more controversial.)
Anyway, scroll over to the part on the timeline where… maybe we’re in the summer after August has graduated? Something like that. In my head he and his mom and stepdad and whatever are invited to another upper class family’s kräftskiva (unless an upper class family wouldn’t host a kräftskiva, in which case, substitute whatever rich people in Sweden actually do in the late summer.) August has brought Sara along as his plus one, and it’s generally a nice evening for Sara. She gets to wear a nice dress and does a bit more listening than talking. She doesn’t love everyone she meets but she doesn’t offend anyone either.
Except… over the course of the evening it sort of comes out that Sara has autism and ADHD—maybe she’s brought it up in conversation, or maybe someone’s parent heard from their kid at Hillerska that Sara’s neurodivergent and it just goes around the table and people know. And no one’s overtly awful about it, maybe there’s a few statements like I would never have guessed or it sounds like you do well in school. The statements are even meant, perhaps, as compliments, but Sara feels the microaggression behind them (even if she doesn’t have the words for it yet) and probably August isn’t even aware that she feels that yet. At some point someone compliments Sara on her manners and there’s just the slightest sprinkling of surprise in how they say it, and that’s about class and neurotype, whether or not it means to be.
Later in the evening August is alone with his mother (things are still tense between them after 1.3 parents weekend, but events in this canon divergent timeline mean that they’re trying) and Louise brings up Sara’s autism and/or adhd and repeats what other people were saying about I never would have guessed. The conversation continues on for a few beats and eventually Louise segues into a question about whether this is something children have because their parents pass it on. At which point August catches on to the subtext of what Louise thinking about, and presses her on it, and anyway it turns out his mother has just been casually googling the statistics of how hereditary autism and adhd are, and well now, time for an argument. Because it’s fucking weird for your mom to Google that! Louise is just kind of framing her points as like well you’ve brought Sara to meet us a few times now and I know you like her but you’re still young, I think you should just be aware of these things before you get too serious with her. Maybe that’s what triggers a sort of stubborn anger in August about how he is, quite serious about Sara. There are Big Feelings. Meanwhile has anyone checked on Sara lately?
About 6-7 years later in our fic… well, against all odds, and against various adults in August’s life trying to nudge him toward someone else, Sara and August have made it as a couple and they seem to be doing okay. Wilhelm has sort of gone on a Bisexual Journey in the intervening years and pulled away from the monarchy, so they’re about to put August in place to take the throne (I will remind you there is no video in this universe) and are setting up him and Sara to be the new royal couple. But there’s lots of questions from advisors about whether Sara will be “up to the challenge” of handling all those new duties, or whether they can coach her on how to interact socially so she doesn’t “alienate” people so much. The royal press team eventually decides to publish the fact that Sara is AuDHD (Sara consents to it) but they try to spin it as an ~inspiring~ story that Sara’s growing more uncomfortable all the time. And living up to what’s expected of her is wearing her thin to the point where she wants to run away from it all. Then some tabloid starts a rumor that she’s “faking” her autism for sympathy points or just to get out of things, and well… yeah. That’s sort of ends up being the inciting incident for the whole fic really (at least for her character arc) and everything above that is just backstory.
The short version of what I wrote behind the cut: On the surface, Sara might seem like she’s advancing her social class the “approved” way, by dating/marrying someone of a higher social class and adopting the manners and mores. As time goes on, however, she would likely face increasing amounts of ableism. In her case, this would especially manifest in people questioning whether she is “fit” for royal duties or to be the mother of royal children. While this may not often take the form of over hostility, it could take the form of lots of soft power and microaggressions that wear her down and make her life hell.
In terms of Sara playing the role of queen or princess, she would be doing a demanding, public-facing job takes up a lot of time and mental energy. For an autistic person, this is going to involve a lot of masking, and too much masking leads to chronic stress, burnout, health complications, and trauma. If Sara shows more of her autistic traits during an event or ceremony, she’s likely to be criticized for it by the press or by people who surround her. These critics might not understand that they are responding Sara’s autistic traits. It might just be as simple as them saying “she’s so cold and unfriendly—she never made eye contact with me once” or “I don’t know if she really needed to tell us that much about her horses at a state dinner” when Sara is infodumping. Regardless of the intention, these statements are still ableism, and they’ll likely have an impact on Sara’s interactions with people. We also see examples of canon where people laugh at or find something “off” about Sara when she follows the rules too strictly, so I can imagine a lot of that.
I’m going to talk about motherhood next, which involves talk about eugenics and its impact on disabled people. I’ll put this behind a cut.
Then there’s the question of having children, which Sara would be expected to do if she were queen. I don’t mean to approach this from the reproductive rights angle again, but it’s hard to ignore. The thing about it is that the upper classes in Young Royals are very concerned with reproduction, to the point where we see the younger generation internalizing it in unhealthy ways. We see the society boys chanting about being first born sons and Felice telling Maddie about whose kids get to be princes and princesses. Wilhelm’s mother casually says things to him like “when you have children.” And a lot of times this isn’t someone saying “rich kids, go make babies!” in a very obvious way. There’s just a lot of soft power and subtext and implication about the important of having kids.
So it’s easy to just see this in the context of centuries old noble traditions and inheritance laws and whatever else. But there are more recent movements we need to take into account here, one of the key ones here being the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement started in the late 19th century and died down in its most overt manifestations after WW2, but is still something that continues to influence people in the present day. We often think about eugenics in the context of the genocides of different ethnic groups—in the Nordic coutnries eugenics was weaponized against the Sami—but eugenic practices are also frequently used to target disabled people and their reproductive rights. Sweden even had compulsory sterilization laws that played a role in this. It’s possible that had Sara been born a century earlier, she could have been targeted by these laws.
While these laws were repealed in 1975, the ableist mindsets that led to them are still around and hiding in plain sight if you know where to look. People tend to infantilize autistic people or downplay their sexualities. They also fearmonger about autistic children (something that the anti-vaccine movement benefits from) and insist that we need to find a “cure” for autism and portray autism as somehow monstrous. Assuming some alternate universe where Sara and August actually manage to have a Cinderella story (unlikely given the video, but you know, just spinning my wheels here) of course this would affect her and how she is treated.
Ultimately neither Simon nor Sara are going to be understood as ideal partners for a monarch-to-be. Both of them will be impacted as working class children of an immigrant mother and abusive father who struggles with addiction. At the same time, Simon is impacted by homophobia while Sara is impacted by ableism, and those two prejudices operate differently. People lash out at Simon because he doesn’t fit in, and because he tries to advance the “wrong” way. Because he and Wilhelm are both men, they visibly call attention to the way they disrupt of a system of inheritance. Sara, however, provokes people’s anxiety and ableist disgust because at first she could seem to blend in, but would also be seen as a little bit “off.” Members of the palace, and most of Sweden, never fully trust her because they’d always see her as unempathetic, or socially inept, or childish, or other things that autistic people are often perceived as, and they’d tear her down in the process. Moreover, the notion that she could say, marry into the royal family, give birth to the heir to the throne, and potentially that child would be autistic… people would be awful about that. And I’m just gonna point loudly at Autism Speaks and the anti-vax movement regarding the why and how.
This is not meant to show ableism is worse than homophobia or vice versa. I only wanted to point out that Sara and Simon both have prejudices they’re dealing with, and this is why it’s interesting to look at the siblings’ stories side by side. I kind of wonder to what extent these subtexts will be teased out in season 3, and what we’ll have to figure out for ourselves as a fandom.
I’m going to start by sharing some thoughts I had for a fic I will likely never have time to co-write. I’ll put them behind a cut since the fic thoughts themselves aren’t strictly necessarily, but they are illustrative of some of what I’ll talk about afterward.
Some context: Heliza and I have this fanfic universe in our heads that we call Sprucewood AU, and we probably won’t end up writing it because Heart and Homeland is such a momentous thing we’re working on and we’ll probably need to clear the board for non-YR projects once it’s done. Sprucewood is essentially a canon divergence AU that takes off in episode 1.4, and what happens is that on the night of the Society party, Simon isn’t texting Sara back so Sara sneaks off to Hillerska in the middle of the night to look for him. She runs into August, who’s still kinda high and vulnerable after the party and his conversation with Wilhelm, and through just a series of small Occurrences (August tripping over her and skinning his knee, them needing to break into somewhere to fetch a bandage, whatever) they end up having an Actual Conversation. August never ends up at the window to make the video and Simon and Wilhelm are never violently outed.
So next… August’s arc gets pushed in a different direction because suddenly he and Sara are starting to have conversations in secret and are, weirdly, actually bonding. And it’s good for him actually. Simon and Wilhelm’s relationship spins off in an entirely different direction too, and they eventually part ways over the Alexander-takes-the-fall-for-the-drugs thing. Not to worry—they’ll be reunited in young adulthood because we love a second chance romance! (Simon and Wilhelm end up back together, in a poly triad with Felice actually, which may be our most controversial idea. This AU—so much lighter and softer than Heart and Homeland but also so much more controversial.)
Anyway, scroll over to the part on the timeline where… maybe we’re in the summer after August has graduated? Something like that. In my head he and his mom and stepdad and whatever are invited to another upper class family’s kräftskiva (unless an upper class family wouldn’t host a kräftskiva, in which case, substitute whatever rich people in Sweden actually do in the late summer.) August has brought Sara along as his plus one, and it’s generally a nice evening for Sara. She gets to wear a nice dress and does a bit more listening than talking. She doesn’t love everyone she meets but she doesn’t offend anyone either.
Except… over the course of the evening it sort of comes out that Sara has autism and ADHD—maybe she’s brought it up in conversation, or maybe someone’s parent heard from their kid at Hillerska that Sara’s neurodivergent and it just goes around the table and people know. And no one’s overtly awful about it, maybe there’s a few statements like I would never have guessed or it sounds like you do well in school. The statements are even meant, perhaps, as compliments, but Sara feels the microaggression behind them (even if she doesn’t have the words for it yet) and probably August isn’t even aware that she feels that yet. At some point someone compliments Sara on her manners and there’s just the slightest sprinkling of surprise in how they say it, and that’s about class and neurotype, whether or not it means to be.
Later in the evening August is alone with his mother (things are still tense between them after 1.3 parents weekend, but events in this canon divergent timeline mean that they’re trying) and Louise brings up Sara’s autism and/or adhd and repeats what other people were saying about I never would have guessed. The conversation continues on for a few beats and eventually Louise segues into a question about whether this is something children have because their parents pass it on. At which point August catches on to the subtext of what Louise thinking about, and presses her on it, and anyway it turns out his mother has just been casually googling the statistics of how hereditary autism and adhd are, and well now, time for an argument. Because it’s fucking weird for your mom to Google that! Louise is just kind of framing her points as like well you’ve brought Sara to meet us a few times now and I know you like her but you’re still young, I think you should just be aware of these things before you get too serious with her. Maybe that’s what triggers a sort of stubborn anger in August about how he is, quite serious about Sara. There are Big Feelings. Meanwhile has anyone checked on Sara lately?
About 6-7 years later in our fic… well, against all odds, and against various adults in August’s life trying to nudge him toward someone else, Sara and August have made it as a couple and they seem to be doing okay. Wilhelm has sort of gone on a Bisexual Journey in the intervening years and pulled away from the monarchy, so they’re about to put August in place to take the throne (I will remind you there is no video in this universe) and are setting up him and Sara to be the new royal couple. But there’s lots of questions from advisors about whether Sara will be “up to the challenge” of handling all those new duties, or whether they can coach her on how to interact socially so she doesn’t “alienate” people so much. The royal press team eventually decides to publish the fact that Sara is AuDHD (Sara consents to it) but they try to spin it as an ~inspiring~ story that Sara’s growing more uncomfortable all the time. And living up to what’s expected of her is wearing her thin to the point where she wants to run away from it all. Then some tabloid starts a rumor that she’s “faking” her autism for sympathy points or just to get out of things, and well… yeah. That’s sort of ends up being the inciting incident for the whole fic really (at least for her character arc) and everything above that is just backstory.
The short version of what I wrote behind the cut: On the surface, Sara might seem like she’s advancing her social class the “approved” way, by dating/marrying someone of a higher social class and adopting the manners and mores. As time goes on, however, she would likely face increasing amounts of ableism. In her case, this would especially manifest in people questioning whether she is “fit” for royal duties or to be the mother of royal children. While this may not often take the form of over hostility, it could take the form of lots of soft power and microaggressions that wear her down and make her life hell.
In terms of Sara playing the role of queen or princess, she would be doing a demanding, public-facing job takes up a lot of time and mental energy. For an autistic person, this is going to involve a lot of masking, and too much masking leads to chronic stress, burnout, health complications, and trauma. If Sara shows more of her autistic traits during an event or ceremony, she’s likely to be criticized for it by the press or by people who surround her. These critics might not understand that they are responding Sara’s autistic traits. It might just be as simple as them saying “she’s so cold and unfriendly—she never made eye contact with me once” or “I don’t know if she really needed to tell us that much about her horses at a state dinner” when Sara is infodumping. Regardless of the intention, these statements are still ableism, and they’ll likely have an impact on Sara’s interactions with people. We also see examples of canon where people laugh at or find something “off” about Sara when she follows the rules too strictly, so I can imagine a lot of that.
I’m going to talk about motherhood next, which involves talk about eugenics and its impact on disabled people. I’ll put this behind a cut.
Then there’s the question of having children, which Sara would be expected to do if she were queen. I don’t mean to approach this from the reproductive rights angle again, but it’s hard to ignore. The thing about it is that the upper classes in Young Royals are very concerned with reproduction, to the point where we see the younger generation internalizing it in unhealthy ways. We see the society boys chanting about being first born sons and Felice telling Maddie about whose kids get to be princes and princesses. Wilhelm’s mother casually says things to him like “when you have children.” And a lot of times this isn’t someone saying “rich kids, go make babies!” in a very obvious way. There’s just a lot of soft power and subtext and implication about the important of having kids.
So it’s easy to just see this in the context of centuries old noble traditions and inheritance laws and whatever else. But there are more recent movements we need to take into account here, one of the key ones here being the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement started in the late 19th century and died down in its most overt manifestations after WW2, but is still something that continues to influence people in the present day. We often think about eugenics in the context of the genocides of different ethnic groups—in the Nordic coutnries eugenics was weaponized against the Sami—but eugenic practices are also frequently used to target disabled people and their reproductive rights. Sweden even had compulsory sterilization laws that played a role in this. It’s possible that had Sara been born a century earlier, she could have been targeted by these laws.
While these laws were repealed in 1975, the ableist mindsets that led to them are still around and hiding in plain sight if you know where to look. People tend to infantilize autistic people or downplay their sexualities. They also fearmonger about autistic children (something that the anti-vaccine movement benefits from) and insist that we need to find a “cure” for autism and portray autism as somehow monstrous. Assuming some alternate universe where Sara and August actually manage to have a Cinderella story (unlikely given the video, but you know, just spinning my wheels here) of course this would affect her and how she is treated.
Ultimately neither Simon nor Sara are going to be understood as ideal partners for a monarch-to-be. Both of them will be impacted as working class children of an immigrant mother and abusive father who struggles with addiction. At the same time, Simon is impacted by homophobia while Sara is impacted by ableism, and those two prejudices operate differently. People lash out at Simon because he doesn’t fit in, and because he tries to advance the “wrong” way. Because he and Wilhelm are both men, they visibly call attention to the way they disrupt of a system of inheritance. Sara, however, provokes people’s anxiety and ableist disgust because at first she could seem to blend in, but would also be seen as a little bit “off.” Members of the palace, and most of Sweden, never fully trust her because they’d always see her as unempathetic, or socially inept, or childish, or other things that autistic people are often perceived as, and they’d tear her down in the process. Moreover, the notion that she could say, marry into the royal family, give birth to the heir to the throne, and potentially that child would be autistic… people would be awful about that. And I’m just gonna point loudly at Autism Speaks and the anti-vax movement regarding the why and how.
This is not meant to show ableism is worse than homophobia or vice versa. I only wanted to point out that Sara and Simon both have prejudices they’re dealing with, and this is why it’s interesting to look at the siblings’ stories side by side. I kind of wonder to what extent these subtexts will be teased out in season 3, and what we’ll have to figure out for ourselves as a fandom.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 10:49 pm (UTC)It really grinds my gears that fandom often acts like Sara is so privileged compared to Simon, and they never stop to examine that she has another dimension of marginalization that Simon doesn't have.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, but it makes me think about how ableism is often the root of all kinds of discrimination/hate (or perhaps the justification for it): homophobia and racism etc are based on the body being "wrong" just like ableism. And ableism is often used as a weapon to further marginalize other groups. Like society ignoring HIV/AIDS for so long, effectively disabling and further othering gay people. Maybe I'm saying that I wish there was more connections/solidarity made in fandom between characters with different marginalizations. Like wouldn't it be interesting if we could talk about Sara and Simon bonding over this feeling of otherness instead of just dismissing Sara. (so ironic that they're so ableist they can't even recognize and discuss ableism in media... anyway).
no subject
Date: 2024-02-14 02:44 am (UTC)I really like your point about ableism being the root of other kinds of hate, and that there’s so much room to explore Sara and Simon coming to bond over a feeling of otherness, both in canon and in fanfiction. I think their class status is obvious to them as something they have in common—but they have different feelings about their social class and how to fit in at Hillerska, so it’s going to lead to more conflict than bonding. On the other hand… I don’t know if Sara and Simon have had real, honest conversations about sexual orientation and disability yet onscreen, and this could create potential for them to open up to one another in a new way. Potentially a more grown up way.
I think part of the issue with how fandom can approach Sara’s AuDHD is that it is almost always brought up in the context of “does this excuse Sara (seemingly) choosing August over her brother in season 2?” Which, to make an understatement, is one of the more unpopular things she does, so people are always going to answer with no. (And, you know, fair. I get why that’s a dealbreaker for people. I don’t think her neurodivergences “justify” what she does but I find her decisions interesting and so I’m going to like her anyway! I personally don’t need to morally approve of a character in order for them to be my blorbo but I understand that other people do.) That conversation then becomes the lens through which most people are viewing other ways Sara’s neurodivergence shapes her experience, and sort of primes people to not see her marginalization as “that bad” somehow.
This is, in part, why I’m so fascinated by a universe where sargust happens but August never does the video and actually starts to climb out of his toxic cycle. What new aspects of Sara’s story could that highlight, that don’t get overshadowed by their interaction in 1.6?
Another thing that shapes the fandom conversation IMO is that… phew. This is one I don’t think people want to hear, but I’ll say it anyway. I think that some fans get caught up in the idea of Simon as ~heroic~ for “looking after” Sara. The Heroically Burdened And Unappreciated Family Member Who Cares For Their Disabled Person is an ableist trope, and I assume that Young Royals is trying to subvert that trope. Sara pushes back against Simon trying to take care of her—she doesn’t feel at home when she’s at home, and she feels like a burden—and Simon is the way he is because of a family history of abuse, trauma, and parentification. Things as they currently stand aren’t actually working out for either sibling. But also… the Beleaguered Caregiver is so strong a trope that I think some folks (many folks?) miss the subversion of it.
I think we can acknowledge that Simon loves his sister and she did hurt him quite a lot. But I wish it were easier to talk about the part where she isn’t asking him to care for her and doesn’t want to be a burden for him, and that drove her to take some pretty drastic actions.
If I could wave a magic wand and make people better at spotting ableist media tropes, I would!
Also I really like your points about the intersection of queerness and disability in HIV/AIDS. It’d be interesting to see a well-researched YR AU set in the 1980s…
no subject
Date: 2024-02-14 05:13 am (UTC)It’s really silly to only discuss Sara’s AUdhd in relation to August when it’s so well written throughout the series. It comes up first and most strongly (I would argue!) in her relationship with Felice! And plays an huge role in the whole Manor House dynamic. obviously it shapes her relationship with all the other characters, not just August. Fandom is missing out by not looking at all of Sara. But you know this 😄
no subject
Date: 2024-02-15 01:00 am (UTC)There’s an interesting push-pull with Sara and Felice that I think sometimes gets glossed over in terms of talking about how strong their friendship is. And they do have a strong friendship, but the fault lines are so interesting. Felice idealizes Sara as inherently authentic and true to herself, while ultimately Sara is trying to figure out who she is as much as any teenager.
I also think you can focus on the part where Felice tries to socially mentor Sara and help her fit in, and what that actually is like. We get a few glimpses of it in the show but it’s the kind of thing that can be developed more in fic. I kinda want to think of how Felice’s mom could haunt these scenes. In the moments where Felice is mentoring Sara and perhaps experiences frustration with her, does Felice find herself snapping out some social rules her mother once recited to her, and feel weird once she realizes that she’s done that? Or could Felice be trying to heal herself by mentoring Sara socially in a way her mom never did for her?
And then, there’s the Manor House girls, and you and I have talked about the microaggressions there. It’s not that the relationships between girls in YR are better because the girls don’t fight—it bugs me sometimes when I see people claim this. It’s that the tensions are realistic and ever-shifting, and sometimes exacerbated by the part where girls don’t always speak up about what’s bothering them, or know how to talk about it.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-15 01:05 am (UTC)