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All right, we’re back! Hello, comrades. we are going to watch Young Royals season one episode two this morning. I’m getting a little ahead because it’s the weekend and I know my weeks get a little chaotic.

I decided last night that when I do this, my goal is not to sound intellectual or put together. I spent a lot of my time doing that on previous social media and it was just putting a lot of pressure on myself. Now I’m just gonna kind of lean into my first impressions and where my emotions are taking me and all my weird little rambling tangents. I think there’s value in me seeing that and reading it and recognizing it as part of my experience of watching the show. Who knows, maybe they’ll be some fanfic ideas in there? Or, I don’t know maybe I’ll just be funny. (Maybe I’m not funny.) But you will get more of a sense of what it’s like for me in the moment as I’m watching. Though, obviously this transcript is still edited for clarity.

Also, we’re in episode two now. Horror movie night happens in this episode. The first kiss between Wilhelm and Simon happens in this episode. Sara and August also talk for the first time. Yes I will have thoughts. I am the weird girl who has plushies of sargust, alright?

So I am just going to hit play and we’ll see where this takes us.

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That’s all for now. I hope everyone is having a good weekend so far!

Current Mood: awake

Hello comrades! I am dictating to my phone right now in a minute I am going to open up Netflix and start my rewatch of Young Royals S1E1. I don’t anticipate pausing much so I’m just going to dictate to my phone incoherently. That way you know you get the most spontaneous, the most emotive, and frankly, the most autistic interpretation. So thank you for coming along for the ride and I will talk to you when I post this on dreamwidth. Hej då!

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See you next time for S1E2!

Current Mood: cheerful

When I was thirteen years old, I got adopted by the anime kids at my school. They started me out not on Ranma 1/2 or Sailor Moon, as was common in the 1990s, or even Fushigi Yugi, which still less common but still something that happened if you were in a friends circle particularly gifted in fansubs. Instead, I sat down one day on my living room floor (my parents weren’t home yet) and began watching a loaned VHS copy of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Watching that opening sequence felt like getting away with something. I took in the fairy tale imagery and the colorful spinning roses, recognizing the word “revolution” in an otherwise Japanese theme song, and suddenly realized… I was watching a show about girls in love with one another. My friends and I may not have called Utena and Anthy “lesbians” out loud when we discussed the show (and we didn’t even have the word sapphic in our vocabulary at that point) but somehow I knew, in my gut, that this was their love story. I had a vague sense of my own queer identity that I felt too scared to voice at the time, but watching Utena let me feel it, at least.

Since that first day with Utena so long ago, it has become one of my forever fandoms and remains highly influential to me in my creative life. It was the first piece of fiction I remember that introduced me to Audre Lorde’s idea that you could not dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Most of the books and cartoons I grew up with offered female protagonists, but claimed that giving a girl pants and/or a weapon and making her “not like the other girls” was enough to make her empowered. Utena was the first time I remember a story that questioned that idea while still asserting that Utena’s gender non-conformity was right for her. In addition, Utena was one of the first works that helped me appreciate weirdness and surrealism, and led me to believe that heavy themes are absolutely worth tackling in the fiction I write.

Flash forward to 2021 when I first watched Young Royals, a Swedish teen drama I did not expect to take over my life. You can pitch Young Royals to someone by stating the plot points—boy meets prince, they fall in love, monarchy is now in jeopardy—but that won’t tell you everything about the careful way the show comments on adolescence, privilege, the class system, gender, neurotype, and so many other relevant topics. YR is written and acted intelligently, and it gives its audience a lot of room to think. As I fell deeply in love with the world of YR, I kept thinking to myself, wow, this show reminds me of Utena. I knew my love of Utena was feeding into my love of YR, and helping me to interpret what I saw onscreen.

So without blathering on too much longer, I thought I’d break down some of the similarities and differences between the two shows, which will hopefully make the case as to why every fan who can should watch both:

Similarities

Both shows use school settings as a commentary on society at large. YR primarily takes place within the insular boarding school world of Hillerska, and all the action of Utena all occurs within the sprawling (but stifling) campus of Ohtori Academy. I love educational settings as a microcosm! Each school has a hierarchy accentuated by class and gender, wherein certain students are elevated and others are put down. While adults are more present onscreen in YR, the presence of the adult world is still felt in both fictional worlds and puts additional pressure on the teenage characters to behave in certain ways.
Both have incredibly complex characters. I would elaborate here but it would just be a long list of me gushing about absolutely every character on both shows and what makes them unique. Instead, let me just say this—there are so many characters in both shows who lean into messy decision making. And yet you understand where each character comes from, and the more their backstory unfolds, the more compelling they become.
Both shows dive into gender roles, feminine and masculine, and how they can be used to constrict us. Utena is about more than a girl who fights with a sword and calls herself a prince, and Young Royals is about more than a boy who expresses tender feelings. Each show examines the negative impact of patriarchy on people of all genders, showing how girls are often held to impossible madonna/whore standards while boys are often socialized into behaviors involving sexual aggression and violence. Both shows make the case that it is worth fighting back against these currents in our societies.
Both do not ignore sex and sexuality as a part of adolescence. And both shows get misinterpreted and have been criticized (unfairly) because of it. YR is slightly more likely, in my opinion, to show teens having positive sexual experiences alongside more negative and neutral ones. But I also feel like that might be related to the time periods in which they were written.
Both deal with themes of abuse within families. Many of the characters in both shows have dealt with abuse, which then impacts how they move through their relationships at school. In YR, for instance,we know for sure that the Eriksson siblings have grown up in an abusive home, and that this affects how Sara and Simon move through life. Utena, as a series, is fairly open about confronting CSA and incest as forms of abuse, which is something YR doesn’t do as much. However, I don’t get the sense that YR is ignoring these realities, just choosing not to focus on them in their more limited episode time.
Both (as of now) suggest that contests and false choices perpetuate systems of oppression. Who is worthy of being engaged to the Rose Bride? Should Wilhelm or August get the throne? Get too caught up in that debate and you’re prevented from asking whether the monarchy or the dueling system should exist in the first place. You’re also distracted from the physical toll and threats our heroic characters have to endure as they attempt to reform or challenge these systems. Utena tries to put herself on top of the dueling system to protect Anthy, the Rose Bride, and let her be a normal girl, but that system is ultimately intent on destroying them both to keep patriarchy going. Wilhelm and Simon could theoretically become king and prince consort, but what toll would that take on their relationship or their plans for the future? Now admittedly, YR still has a season 3, so we don’t know what the status of Wilhelm being king is, and whether he’ll choose to leave it behind. But the show has frequently called attention to the challenges of reforming the monarchy from within and how it stays entrenched by its old traditions. I’m willing to revise my thoughts here depending on the show plays out!
Both play on the idea that fairy tales are darker at their core. Want to fall in love with a prince, or be a prince? There’s a cost to that. Both shows play with the idea of the prince as a persona and then proceed to deconstruct that persona. Both Utena and Wilhelm end up as princes in a moment of deep traumatic grief, even though Utena becomes a “prince” by choice and Wilhelm becomes one by birth. Yet the prince role and the power that comes with it is not what gives them the opportunity to heal from that grief. At times they are both compelled to “rescue” those they love, but the narrative cautions them about how that act of “rescue” can involve seizing power within a corrupt system and having that backfire.
Both have an epic queer love story at their heart. I mean, come on. Utena and Anthy? Wilhelm and Simon? Both worth sobbing into one’s hands over. And both of these pairings emphasize choosing what is true and authentic over what is fake, and walking away from the people and systems that would harm us.

Differences

YR is has a main mlm couple, Utena has a main wlw couple. Admittedly, both of them engage with queerness beyond the love story between their primary power couples. I bring this up mostly because people carry different assumptions about mlm shows vs wlw ones, and this may need to be unpacked in a future meta.
Utena is surreal, YR is realistic. The shows have completely different ways of delivering their message. Every episode of Utena is interrupted by a theatre troop of moralizing shadow puppet girls, offering metaphor-laden commentary. You’re likely to see episodes where characters switch bodies or someone turns into a cow. Young Royals, meanwhile, has the texture of real life. The teenage characters have acne, and their rooms are cluttered. Characters re-wear favorite items of clothing and put ketchup on their spaghetti. Both of these approaches pack an emotional punch—YR because the world feels lived in, Utena because it’s like something you’ve dreamed and just woken up from—but they look so different in practice that it’s easy to miss everything Utena and YR have in common.
Utena handles triggering material differently than YR does. This is probably because it was an animated show created in the mid 1990s whereas YR is a Netflix series written now. Standards were/are different for what you do and don’t show onscreen. For this reason, I can absolutely respect someone’s decision not to engage with either show, based on how each show engages with various triggers. One show of the two might be too much for some people and that’s fine.
The shows come from different cultural contexts, presented to an international audience who might not grasp the nuances of each without additional explanation. Obviously, Sweden and Japan are different countries with different social codes. A Swedish production and a Japanese production are going to address different cultural values and questions of the moment. So obviously when you get into the details, there’s some important differences between the works for that reason alone.
They have seemingly different fanbases? Seemingly. But I feel like there’s room for nuance here, and I think they have more in common at first glance than you’d think. (Disclaimer: I do not believe either of the stereotypes I’m going to discuss, I’m just trying to tease something out.) The stereotype of Utena fans is that we are mean pretentious art school symbolism junkies, and the stereotype of YR fans is that we are… I’m not sure. Milquetoast uwu tenderqueers who just wanna see cute boys in love? These stereotypes in turn affect people’s perceptions of the shows in question, and deeply unfairly, too. But, look. As an Utena fan, my heart has so often melted over the love Utena and Anthy have for one another, complicated and painful as it may be at times. I absolutely ship it. And as a YR fan, I have absolutely engaged in my pretentious art school side, because the are miles and miles of symbolism and complex writing for people to chew on. Those curtains are blue and they are also meaningful. I really do think we have more in common than we don’t.

Anyway… remember when I talked about false choices, like Wilhelm vs August, or who gets to be engaged to the Rose Bride? Utena versus Young Royals is a false choice of its own.

The internet is inevitably going to turn this into a Flint vs Stede battle, because the internet was a mistake. I hope I have proven by now that Utena and YR fans should watch one another’s shows together, and discuss them, and then plot the revolution together. The word “revolution” shows up in key songs for both shows, anyway. Maybe we should take it as a message.

Oh no. It has come to my attention that someone has put Utena and Young Royals against one another in a poll and people think they are polar (poll-ar?) opposites who should fight. Do they not see that such combat itself is a tool of the patriarchy?

The world is NOT READY for the story of how my unhinged love of Utena as a middle schooler actually laid the groundwork for my love of Young Royals. Young Royals and Utena are not enemies. Utena is the butch (gruff, yet comforting) art teacher with pink hair and Young Royals is the newly out high school student who is always eating lunch in her art room and asking her what it was like to live in New York before gentrification.

THEY ARE SUPPORTING ONE ANOTHER IN THIS BLEAK WORLD. Do not hurt them by making them a false choice.

Some media I have engaged with over the past fortnight:

Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford, with art by Jeffrey Boston Weatherford. This is YA nonfiction in verse about the author researching her family’s history, especially in regards to the legacy of slavery. This was a meaningful read, especially since Weatherford’s family lived in the area roughly where I grew up. While I learned about slavery in school generally, I didn’t always learn about the specifics of what it was like in my region of the country, or the stories of specific people, which made slavery seem very distant and unconnected to the present day. This book counteracts the narrative of slavery as faceless suffering, and does so meaningfully.
Most Ardently: A Pride and Prejudice Remix. This was a YA rewrite of Pride and Prejudice where a trans Bennet brother named Oliver is in the Elizabeth role. Unfortunately, it didn’t end up being my thing. It may well be someone else’s thing! I appreciate that the author did work to look into the queer history of the regency era, and reconstruct it where possible. At the same time, the characterization of a lot of the secondary characters could have used more dimensionality, and the plot just sort of… did a lot of things at the end. Oh, and there were myths about stays, Bridgerton-style. I will always comment on the myths about stays.
Chevalier (2022). A biopic about black composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The best kind of biopic, that focuses on a specific moment in the character’s life and tells a story about it. In short, THAT MOVIE SLAPPED. I haven’t talked about it much on this blog yet, but I can be a big revolutionary history nerd, and most French Revolution movies unfortunately leave me cold because they just don’t understand how radical the event was, or don’t work to portray it intersectionally. But this! Joseph was incredible and an artist on an arc. Joseph’s mother Nanon was EVEN MORE INCREDIBLE. Marie-Joséphine was tragic and her husband did not give a fuck how unsubtle he was being with those cannons. Madame de Genlis must have an amazing AO3 page. Philippe Égalité was running some sort of mutual aid society and his hipster last name was thrown in there LIKE THE MOST DELIGHTFUL EASTER EGG. (Also an Easter egg: when they mentioned Brissot and Paine.) And Marie-Antoinette? Wow did I enjoy her portrayal in this film. Like she was absolutely an antagonist, and they did not infantilize her or make sad apologia for her. She was fully aware of her own power and would use it to have a little fun, but ultimately she was using her power to keep her power, and did not care how racist it made her. But as Nanon says—we always have the choice to fight. 100/100 fuck the monarchy vibes, would watch again.

What have you been watching/reading/enjoying? Any thoughts on what I should check out next?

Anyway, in order to reclaim what I love about YR, I might do a slow-paced rewatch of seasons 1 and 2 in the lead up to season 3. It may well be time! And this time I will be able to watch it alongside my Sara and August plush dolls.

Since this blog is in part about me reclaiming my love of a show (particularly one I feel like I lost to discourse, a little bit) then I might as well use this space to do rewatching in a new way.

Am I like… way too charitable in my reading of Sara Eriksson when I say I don’t think she was intentionally threatening to out Stella in 2.6? And I don’t see that as something she’d do? I can see how Stella would feel unsettled by Sara’s comment about being honest about feelings, but I also don’t see that as being part of Sara’s agenda in that scene or elsewhere in the show.

Still, there are fans who take it as a given that Sara would happily do something like that at the drop of a hat. I know Sara’s my fave and for other people she’s the opposite of that. But I think I have a pretty solid reading on Sara’s character, too. I’m not saying it’s impossible she’d do something to out Stella. YR as a show does like to show us the moments where characters betray their own values, and how they end up grappling with that, but an important part of that narrative is also showing what leads up to that moment, and explaining things without excusing them.

On the other other hand, I feel like Stella’s in-the-closet plot is firmly in Stella’s hands now, and Sara has parted ways with it when she left Hillerska with her rolling suitcase. So much of Sara’s arc has been about who to tell what and when, and when things should and shouldn’t remain secret to keep people safe. She’s reported some kind of crime to law enforcement at the end of season 2, and possibly put the school under public scrutiny in the process (based on the promo for season 3.) I feel like that’s raised the stakes and taken her truth-telling arc outside the realm of like… what goes on in her (ex) school friend group. This is not to say that Stella’s feelings for Fredrika aren’t thematically important still, but, speaking in terms of plot mechanics, the stedrika arc and the Sara arc are no longer as braided together as they were in season 2.

Takes like ”Sara would totally do this evil, anti-queer thing because she’s inherently bad and selfish” make me feel like someone is trying to convince me that the grass is purple.

It’s not been like. The best mental health weekend, so far. But we’re working on it. We’re typing this from a bench at our farmer’s market. I know sun and fresh air isn’t a cure for everyone, but for me it makes things less worse, and right now it is actually making things less worse to be outside.

I have a sesame bagel and some cream cheese, and some mint green tea, and some radish sticks, and a pear tart for a treat. I’ll probably eat those in just a bit and that will be lunch. I got some other food, including a big sweet potato that I’m going to dice up and roast with black beans and corn, and also some kale I may steam, and some scallions to chop. Those are going to become a rice bowl for dinner. I plan to put servings of brown rice into freezer bags so I have them on hand. There is also red pepper hummus (perhaps I can dip the radish sticks in this) and vegan lemon cake which I may try to split with the roommate later.

Lately I have observed a pattern where I’m holding it together during the week when there’s not much time to have fun and falling apart more by the weekends so it’s harder to replenish my sense of joy. I wonder if this has something to do with masking. I am getting a DBT workbook for neurodivergent people in the mail today and maybe it can tell me more.

I think I am doing the practical things right now, and using my skills. And they’re helping a bit. It’s good to keep a record of that so I know what works.

I couldn’t figure out how to say this perfectly, so I’ll try to say it imperfectly. In a way, I feel like it was hard even finding the words to say this, because I was in an environment where I had to talk about Wilmon a certain way, to the point where I almost stopped talking about them at all. And now I feel a little rusty about how I talk about them. Maybe this is more of a venting post in the first place.

Here’s what I want to say: I wish the parts of fandom I’d tried to participate in at first had been more willing to lean into the uncomfortable parts of the Wilmon relationship.

To clarify, I don’t mean I think they have a toxic or abusive relationship. (Although, sometimes it even exhausts me that I have to make this disclaimer. Every relationship has struggles, both everyday ones and longer term ones.) Simon and Wilhelm are good together, and I can see them staying together for the rest of their lives, or having the kind of young love relationship they look back on fondly as adults even if they aren’t still together.

At the same time, there’s… stuff there, that they have to deal with. There’s the part where Wilhelm and his family represent an enduring system of privilege, and that system has made everything more difficult for Simon and his family. Outside the monarchy, there’s Simon growing up in an abusive home, with a parent who struggles with addiction. There’s Wilhelm’s sudden, traumatic loss of his brother and the crushing grief that comes with it. These issues are lifelong, and while I know that Simon and Wille will lend one another strength and lean on one another, they cannot be one another’s entire support system as they grapple with all these things. This is something the show itself highlights when they have Wilhelm visit Boris. Therapy, man. It’s good for all your romances!

Beyond the family situations, there’s the sides of the characters that are perhaps less than 100% perfect or pure. The Simon who goes behind his sister’s back to visit his estranged dad and hides bills for math tutoring from his mother. The Wilhelm who glances at Simon’s texts and leads Felice on a bit at the beginning of season 2. I love these little twists in their characterization, and I like seeing them explained and contextualized by the weird Hillerska hierarchy, but I don’t like seeing Wilhelm and Simon smoothed over or sanded down too much until they are poor little kanelbullar who did nothing wrong. Dare I say, I like seeing when Wilhelm and Simon’s decisions backfire on them. Wilhelm throwing Alexander under the bus and Alexander getting corrupted? Yes, brilliant, would watch again.

To zoom out a little, I’m really drawn to romance plots where magnetically strong interpersonal chemistry (the internal) clashes with weird and often uncomfortable sociological structures (the external.) To be fair, I think that’s… most romance plots, because in order to have plot, you have to have some sort of clash of ideas or circumstances, and the characters usually have to learn something new about themself along the way. But when a writer can get that feedback loop going, like Lisa can, it will absolutely have me hooked.

I also want to emphasize here that the weird/uncomfortable or bits of a romance are something I take as much joy in reading or viewing as are the sweeter bits of a romance. I feel like too often we talk about the “overcoming obstacles/making decisions based on hamartia/dealing with the weird Relationship Sociology Of Ot All” part of a story as if it’s a currency, or the price of admission we pay to see characters hold hands or kiss or be sweet. Maybe this is reinforced by the times when we talk about characters “earning their happy endings.” And like, yeah, it’s bad when there’s a third act breakup in a romance novel just because that’s supposed to happen. And yes, sometimes certain ways of writing relationships hit our personal squicks or traumas, and it’s time for us personally to bow out. Not every ‘ship is for everyone. There are certainly things I don’t ship.

But… why can’t we acknowledge that like… when a story is well-written, and when a breakup or a fight or a character having doubts about their relationship feels motivated by all the internal external stuff an author lays the groundwork for… why can’t we acknowledge that there’s pleasure in watching those things transpire, at least for some readers/viewers? Or in some situations, there’s at least some kind of catharsis. Perhaps pleasure is too strong a word. But also maybe not! It’s certainly pleasurable for me!

It feels like the last decade or so of fandom discourse has lent itself to the idea that fictional relationships can either be Perfect Pure Tender Amazing With Great Communication And Sex, or OMG Toxic, and if something isn’t one it’s the other. Strict binaries, y’all! And if you ‘ship a wholesome ship, you’re supposed to enjoy their wholesomeness specifically and lament every time bad things happen to them, and if you ‘ship a toxic one, you’re supposed to be constantly alluding to its toxicity just so people are aware you’re aware. And like, who has the time to constantly be issuing disclaimers about their Known Toxic Ships?

I’m off topic. Let me bring it back to YR. At some point in season three, Wilhelm and Simon are going to be at the palace. And maybe they’ll make out in Wilhelm’s massive historic bedroom like they made out in Simon’s teeny-tiny one. But maybe it won’t be romantic and idealized. Maybe it will be weird and uncomfortable, because they’re aware of the oceanic gap in their wealth and privilege, and everything they’re up against. Maybe Wilhelm’s colonizer ancestors are watching them from portraits on the wall the whole time. Maybe it will be weird and uncomfortable and funny, or maybe it won’t be. Maybe in another episode Simon will fight with Rosh and Ayub because they’ll feel like he’s forgotten his true self now that he’s hanging out with Wille more often, and because Simon has to present himself a certain way to the press. Maybe Wilhelm will make a grandiose romantic gesture at some point (like the time he ordered Felice poke but ten times over, and for Simon this time) and it will go too far. I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just throwing ideas around.

I wrote sargust even before season 2 (a lot of it unpublished on AO3) just trying to figure out how it would go, because instinctually I knew August was going to fall in love with Sara. And in one fic, I had August thinking this: He loves the few times they’ve shown one another childhood memories, like rough unfinished rocks, and the way they found beauty in the roughness without trying to polish everything over into meaningless crystal platitudes. And while I saw that sentence as something that had meaning in the context of sargust, I also want to apply it to how I think about Wilmon. The people in fandom who could go on this journey with me, who would talk to me about this stuff and explore the ups and downs of the love story, are my favorite people in fandom (I hope they know who they are, if they’re reading this) and they’re what I miss about being on the other site.

What I’m saying is, maybe certain things will happen between Simon and Wilhelm in season 3, and there won’t be a way to make them idealized and romantic at all. And maybe that will still fucking slap, narratively speaking.

Rocks don’t need to be perfect to be interesting.

Biggest! Field Trip! Of! The! Year!

Herding teenagers through situations where they have to talk to powerful adults about their research! Some of the adults holding positions these teenagers very much disagree with!

All that followed by therapy and my important travel-related errands with

heliza24!

AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF WE ARE MENSTRUATING.

I’m actually good, I just feel like it’s funny how much is going on.

Having a date on Valentine’s Day is valid for other people, but the Aromantic Mood Du Jour is hanging out with the bestie, eating salad from the local sandwich place and leftover faculty meeting cupcakes, and roasting a documentary on the Sears Roebuck catalogue from the 1990s.

Do you want to talk old school mail order catalogues because I am here for it.

A quick post before I hop on the bus to work: one thing I’m really looking forward to about Dreamwidth is getting a chance to reconnect with my love of Wilmon before season 3 airs! I do enjoy them quite a bit; I don’t think it’s possible to enjoy YR without enjoying the lead couple. The way

heliza24 writes them in our fic brings me joy, and whenever she sends me new sections with them I’m always leaving her screams comments.

I always felt a little bit self-conscious on the other site, though. There’s so much wilmon content it can feel like you’re drinking from a firehose, and a lot of the popular interpretations of the characters and the relationship dynamic are not ones I necessarily share, or represent what I like most about them. I’m always a little surprised when I go back to the show and remember what I was drawn to about Wilmon in the first place. I also want to be clear that a lot of people are perfectly sweet and I’ve had some great discussions about wilmon one on one, but I also recognize that reblogging and other tumblr mechanics can make it harder to have the sort of conversations about them I’m interested in having on main.

(And sometimes stuff that’s a little more offensive to me gets amplified and that… I never know how to handle that, quite.)

Anyway, I’m glad I’m here, and it’s nice how things feel a little different so far. Now to begin the day!

Current Mood: hopeful

So 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.

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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.

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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.

Note: this meta was originally posted to tumblr in January of 2024 and can also be found at this link. I still stand by most of these opinions but reserve my right to change my mind at any time.

I’m actually really interested in what kinds of delicious narrative tension Young Royals 3 is going to play with when it comes to the Wilhelm/Simon relationship not just being something that happens openly but something that is public. As in, a relationship that has a public presence and meaning, that is going to be consumed by the public in some way and evaluated under public scrutiny. As in something that the palace may attempt to curate and spin a certain way for the public eye.

In my mind, being “public” is different than just being “recognized” or just being “together” in a way that the people around you can see. In a show that’s a little more “slice of life” like Heartstopper (hate to use this as the contrast example but it was the first thing that comes to mind) there’s a lot of emotional stakes to Nick and Charlie calling one another boyfriends, and then being boyfriends in front of their friends and family. And generally it’s positive when they can take these steps of being more recognized by the people around them, because it allows for a lot more emotional honesty, self-expression, and self-acceptance. It’s also historically significant, given the way that queer couples in previous periods of history have at times been forced to live in the shadows.

For Wilhelm and Simon there’s emotional stakes to being recognized as a couple, especially as they try to reclaim agency for themselves in the wake of being violently outed. Yet Wilhelm’s position as crown prince means there’s going to be political stakes as well, and for that reason they can’t be recognized without also being public. And it feels very much like this emotional threads and these political threads are in conflict. Whether they like it or not, Wilhelm and Simon are symbols. I do wonder if Kristina and some of her associates at the palace will choose to openly support Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship, but also express a lot of opinions about how that relationship gets styled and posed in photo ops. The monarchy could want Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship to be a sign of their progressiveness, showing that they can adapt to the times while still remaining one of Sweden’s constants. But I admit I would absolutely devour a storyline where this is called out for the calculating PR move that it is, and not just written off as a message about cozy acceptance.

I also think it’s interesting how this idea of the public image of relationships applies to other characters in the show. Public scrutiny is something we think of affecting queer relationships a lot, but it impacts other types of relationships as well. So let’s go into the girls’ arcs for a little bit…

Felice is constantly under scrutiny for how people perceive her relationships to Wilhelm and August, and she is consistently negatively impacted by social expectations around female gender roles. People gossip about her being a gold digger when Wilhelm kisses her, for instance, despite Wilhelm initiating. Alternately, I think a lot about the shift between Felice and August’s initial hookup in 1.3, where Felice is in a bad place emotionally but at least has some agency in her anger and rage, and some of Felice and August’s early public appearances, such as when the headmistress expresses approval of them together and says August looks happier. There’s subtext here about Hillerska being the place where high status boys and girls meet one another to eventually marry, and about women managing the emotions of the men they’re in relationships with. And, what does August yell at Felice for? For not holding his grief for him when he’s sad about Erik, of course, and holding emotional space for Wilhelm instead. He expects her to be managing his emotions. This is not just August’s general toxic douchery (although there is that) but like, what adults and public expectations have socialized into him from birth. Now, Felice and August’s relationship was never going to be functional to begin with and it’s pretty damn dysfunctional in private, but that public pressure to behave according to certain roles made things even worse between them. It trapped Felice, too, because of the expectations that she act like a Good Society Wife to whoever she’s in a relationship with and not challenge him. That’s why Felice’s public instagram blast is so important. It’s not just a fun moment, but one where she stops playing the Nice Girl and says openly how fed up she is.

Meanwhile, in season 2, Sara and August’s relationship doesn’t have quite the same kind of dysfunction. But I’m really struck by the anxiety and fear that hits Sara during the scene in 2.4, when she overhears August’s phone call to the palace and the plans for the next ten years of his life. When Sara and August fight at the ball, we can see how worried she is about the idea of her relationship with August being under the PR microscope. Not just because she’s in a relationship with the guy who exposed her brother and was pretty shitty to her best friend (although, there is very much that) but because of the nature of public scrutiny in general. Sara is already looking ahead to the endless slog of press conferences and curated social media feeds, and she knows August wouldn’t be able to protect her from that because he is the reason she’d be getting that attention in the first place. Wilhelm wasn’t able to protect Simon, after all. She’s also got her eye on how the threat of attention is affecting August, making note of how he’s turned to unprescribed ADHD medication to stay on his feet. I think it’s incredibly smart of Young Royals have the canonically autistic and ADHD character be so aware of the psychic toll it takes to present a public persona, and to recoil from that horror when it’s offered to her by the person she most desires. (I also think that’s exactly why an AU fic where Sara ends up in that public princess-consort-to-be role would be so damn interesting. I don’t think we’ve seen that kind of story with an explicitly AuDHD character and I would honestly just be fascinated.)

To bring this back around to Wilmon… I do not want to ignore the historical significance of a queer prince having a recognized queer relationship, and I do think that is something that can come with moments of joy and happiness that I will enjoy as an audience member. At the same time, I think given what this show has chosen to say about relationships serving a public function, especially in ways that reinforce the class system, I am practically salivating to see what kind of commentary we will get about how this relationship gets packaged for the public. What kind of PDA is acceptable to the press? What terms are Simon and Wilhelm allowed to use to refer to one another in interviews? What kinds of places are they allowed to be seen together? What hobbies can they pursue? What colors is a queer prince allowed to wear? Is the pink sweater Wilhelm’s sign of rebellion, or was it imposed on him by stylists because they thought it made him approachable and quirky and accepted by his parents, and Wilhelm found himself liking it in spite of the imposition? Does Simon feel he can reclaim a sense of his own image, or does he feel like he’s being curated into something he’s not? What if Simon’s ideas for his future conflict with those of the palace’s? What then? How do they find their real relationship with one another when the people around them are always attempting to craft one?

I also wonder what our role will be as audience. We have been watching Simon and Wilhelm’s story for three seasons now. Will the show challenge some of our assumptions about true love and authenticity? Will it call us out for our voyeurism? To what extent are we complicit with the public scrutiny that governs the lives of Hillerska students and the upper classes? I am so curious to find out what season 3 has to say about us, even if it takes the form of criticism we aren’t expecting.

Things I accomplished:

Created this Dreamwidth.
Met with my book club.
Ate Ukrainian food for the first time. Honey cake <3
Did a scary thing and started taking my blood pressure again with the help of my roommate bestie. It’s gotten better for the moment.
Met my Sunday grading goals.
Uploaded so many project documents to my course management site.
Went to the farmer’s market.
Took a walk.
Worked on fanfic.
Mashed up some chickpea salad for rice cake sandwiches and batch-cooked buckwheat in my pressure cooker for later in the week.
Checked in with my dad on his birthday.
Started reading the March book for my book club. I don’t like it very much right now but I’m learning from it.

Things I hope to do in the coming days:

Roast some beets, red onions, and garlic. Then, shave some Brussels sprouts. Serve all of those with the buckwheat.
Batch cook another whole grain so I can freeze it for the future. Brown rice? Kamut?
Continue the habit of taking my blood pressure so it isn’t so scary.
Get more fanfic written.
Meet my grading and planning goals again without ruminating too much.
Survive my upcoming big field trip.

The trailer for Young Royals season 3 dropped on Wednesday. A lot of people have thoughts, and of course that includes myself. I was feeling nervous posting them on my tumblr, but I think I’d like to try posting them here (where I can’t expect as many eyes or replies) so I can push past the weird shame I was feeling last week about… *checks notes* …publicly having fandom opinions?

*whispers* this is why you are working on your health and wellness, Blue!!!

These are not my complete thoughts about the trailer, but I did want to talk about some moments with Kristina and August. I will put them behind a cut for people who want to avoid trailer spoilers (along with one spoiler for an already posted Heart and Homeland chapter.)

( Read more... )

Those are my fandom thoughts for the day! I don’t know if any of my trusted tumblr circle are here reading this but I’m okay with people leaving comments if they wish.

I may also post a brief list with some non-fandom bullet points later. Today is a day I feel accomplished about, and there are things to be proud of.

Current Mood: stressed

Note: this meta was originally posted to tumblr in March of 2023 and can also be found at this link. I still stand by most of these opinions but reserve my right to change my mind at any time.

Do you ever just have… conversations with yourself at 2 am?

Me: Wow. August did some bad shit. I want him to get therapy and help, but I also want him to face some kinda legal punishment.

Also me: Oh, self. You don’t trust cops or judges or prisons. The legal system would be way harsher on Simon about the drugs. Doesn’t that give you anxiety?

A third me, thousands of words in and possessed by a hyperfocus demon: Well fuck. We might be doing a meta about it. It’s okay, this can just be building blocks for our graduate school thesis on YA literature. Ahaha it’s fine.

The following meta looks at philosophies of justice, both retributive and restorative, as they appear in the worldbuilding Young Royals. This is a monster of a meta, like ~6500 words long, so be aware of that going in. Content note for discussion of all the usual crime topics in YR, as well as the injustices present in real world legal systems.

( Read more... )

It’s truly weird to know how to begin one of these blogs again, because typing the first entry just feels like getting old muscle memory back. I suddenly got flooded with all these old memories of creating RP blogs and doing a “test post” with song lyrics or some other in-character in-jokes. Remember when?

Looking at the interface here, it’s easy to forget that the internet looked this way once, and that the pace of everything felt a little bit slower. And I think that’s why I’m here. I’ve been trying to get back into blogging about my fandoms and fanfic-writing life, but the way everything is dominated nowadays by constant flashy visuals and instant hot takes can be emotionally overwhelming. Now, don’t get me wrong, I remember how the livejournal era had its own dramas. I don’t want to cloud my brain with nostalgia. But I also know I want a place that lets me slow down and better filter my experience while also continuing to do the geeky deep dives I love.

So… we’re here I guess. Hello, Dreamwidth? Do I introduce myself? I can try.

Blue isn’t my real name, but it’s what I’ll be using in public entries. I’m a late 30s human from the east coast of the US, and I’m asexual aromantic with a side of like… poly-flavored relationship anarchy I guess. I have always been passionate about reading, writing, and storytelling, particularly coming of age stories, and I’m in an MFA program for writing kid and teen lit. While I have had many fandoms over the course of my life, the current one is the Swedish television series Young Royals. (I fully expect season 3 to wreck my life in a good way.) Over the past two years I have been co-writing a very long historical AU fic called Heart and Homeland and I’m rather proud of what we’ve done. Outside of YR, I also like AMC’s Interview with the Vampire, countless books, multiple historical eras, figuring out how to cook different types of whole grains in my instant pot, and doing tarot readings. Among other things.

Here are some filters I anticipate setting up if I can keep this blog going for more than a hot minute:

Personal life and health: I expect I’ll talk about my life on this blog from time to time, but the most personal details will be filtered. I’ve had some recent struggles around health I’ve been trying to figure out, and I’ve also been recently diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and unspecified anxiety. Among other things. I’m coming to terms with thinking of myself as disabled and I may need a place to unpack all that.
Education and career: I’m a middle school teacher in my day job. I have a lot of thoughts about that, and about education as a system in general. Some of those thoughts are occasionally a rant.
Fandom dynamics: I have been in fandoms long enough that the sociology of them is interesting to me, and I like discussing that.
Sargust brainrot: Wilhelm and Simon, the golden couple of Young Royals, are very dear to me. Unexpectedly, however, it is the relationship between Simon’s sister Sara and Wilhelm’s absolute crap second cousin August—sargust, as the kids say—that sunk its rusting iron claws in me and refused to let go. Sara and August are complex individuals who do both good and bad things, and I will mostly be measured about them on main, but may need a space where I can be a little bit feral about them to a group of close, understanding friends. That may change depending on the events of the third season, who knows.

Other filter ideas may emerge later. Like, it’s possible I’ll end up doing something on my tarot practice or my MFA Creative thesis or similar. I may do a politics filter because I can get political. But for now we are just thinking we might try having a dreamwidth.

One final thought: Pretty wild to think I had undiagnosed autism all through my teen years and early 20s, which definitely included mild alexithymia as part of the package, and yet I almost always had something to put in the little “current mood” blank. Was I just making it up based on the bouncing gray kittens? Yes. Yes I was.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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Page Summary

Young Royals Rewatch: S1E2 (unhinged phone dictation edition)
Young Royals Rewatch: S1E1 (unhinged phone dictation edition)
But is being a prince really such a good idea? Utena and Young Royals as companion texts
take my revolution / let’s start a revolution
Media Updates, February 2024
Slow-paced rewatch?
sara sara
(no subject)
Let Wilmon be weird!!! The musical on ice
This is how much is going on
Happy day to all
Anticipation and Hopes: Wilmon edition
Cinderella vs Ableism: the trials a hypothetical Princess Sara
Off the cuff thoughts on the difference between being public and being recognized
Weekend bullet points
Select YRS3 Trailer Thoughts
Philosophies of Justice and Narrative Catharsis in Young Royals
greetings?

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(sometimes) sadness

let’s start a revolution

Recent Entries

Young Royals Rewatch: S1E2 (unhinged phone dictation edition)

Young Royals Rewatch: S1E1 (unhinged phone dictation edition)

But is being a prince really such a good idea? Utena and Young Royals as companion texts

take my revolution / let’s start a revolution

Media Updates, February 2024

Slow-paced rewatch?

sara sara

(no subject)

Let Wilmon be weird!!! The musical on ice

This is how much is going on

Happy day to all

Anticipation and Hopes: Wilmon edition

Cinderella vs Ableism: the trials a hypothetical Princess Sara

Off the cuff thoughts on the difference between being public and being recognized

Weekend bullet points

Select YRS3 Trailer Thoughts

Philosophies of Justice and Narrative Catharsis in Young Royals

greetings?