One Thing The Analysts Back In 2012 Were Right About Is That They’d Stop Calling It “Obamacare”

if there’s something season 3 did perfectly was Simon’s character, I love how his care for social issues was fully explored, and the fact that he tries to show wille several times the actual power of his privilege is so important and this scene is the perfect example of that!

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!

Anybody else sad and angry about the treatment of Wilhelm and Simon as characters and wilmon as a relationship in s3 and how much they were done dirty?

How Wille was such a shitty friend towards Felice and a shitty bf towards Simon, deliberately ignoring both of their troubling predicament and feelings about Sara in pursuit of his own happiness and was never there for them and put his own issues behind for once, no, it was always Simon and Felice who had to swallow down their own feelings and support him even when they weren't feeling good and he never even seemed to notice or care.

I hate how Wille was painted as extra selfish and self-centered this season and unaware of his privileges and not once truly acknowledging and recognising that and his own faults and taking responsibility for his actions. Or being interested in speaking up and inspiring change and not wanting to hold up the status quo. And stopped going to therapy and working on his anxiety and other problems. I hate how he regressed from S2 and any of his growth and parts of his character were ignored for the message they wanted to convey. I love him to bits but S3 Wille is not my Wille. Honestly it's character assassination and it makes me furious.

And there being such an emphasis on the negative and the narrative making Simon suffer so much and be so miserable for most of the season. It sucks. Also Simon reacting the way he did to online hate, him being uncharacteristically naive and clueless and putting so much weight on what people say on the internet about him. I understand it's something that affects you and they're both teenagers who don't always behave rationally and their situation is a lot to handle but I still expected from Simon to understand their circumstances better because I think of him as clever and smarter than to be against having a private insta and responding to trolls.

I want to put a huge disclaimer that this is not me hating on the characters! I love them both and that's why this behavior is so upsetting to me. I'm not so much judging them, I'm more judging the writer's decisions for these character developments.

If you have to twist your characters like that to make your plot work and bring across your message then maybe that plot is not working...

And how wilmon was never allowed to have good communication and growth but only had fanservicey makeout moments in between the fighting and always talked past each other and were not truly able to be there for each other and work with each other as a united front and have meaningful conversations about their lives and get to know each other better, which is all we wanted from s3. But instead they were torn apart and their relationship made worse and worse, only succeeding on proving how incompatible they are and what a terrible couple they actually make.

And no, it was not necessary to do all these things. I absolutely refuse to accept the argument that this is all the crown's fault and that's the excuse for Wille's behavior and they could've never been happy and Simon has to give himself up and lose himself. No. That is a choice. The writers decided this is the only way they can bring their message across and get to the outcome they wanted. I'm not saying there shouldn't be any conflict but we could've had problems and drama that built off of what has been established in s1 and s2, showcasing the growth they both went through and find a way for them to work it out and be genuinely happy boyfriends in the season. The writers just didn't want that.

It truly makes me upset that I can't even enjoy their "happy"/makeout scenes because they are only enjoyable out of context but I can't appreciate them for real because it doesn't actually feel earned and they were only little reprieves in midst the miscommunication and Wille and Simon were not really in a good place for almost all of it.

And now I'm supposed to be happy for them and believe that everything is fixed and better in the future without them having given me any indication about it in the show? Ignoring facts that will always be true for them. Being in the public eye. Having to deal with hate comments. Wilhelm always being a part of the royal family. That allegedly they don't have to deal with any of that in the future anymore?

They specifically made this arc and made their gap and differences so wide and severe in s3 to tell me they are not capable of working through and handling these things together that will realistically always be a part of their relationship no matter what but I'm supposed to be rooting for them?

Like any of their mistreatment is justified and worth it for the "happy" ending they got and makes it all okay. It is not, they were done dirty and they (and we) deserved better.

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Then vs now:

Gif by @youngroyalscentral

The important stuff hasn't changed :)

This sums up the difference between Heartstopper and Young Royals perfectly: The first time Wille and Simon share a bed, they have epic sex. The first time Charlie and Nick share a bed, they have a pillow fight.

I WANT TO BE WITH YOU, SIMON. | YOUNG ROYALS 3.06

I never noticed this before -- at the end of Wille's first Society meeting when they're putting away their drugs, he grabs some and sneakily tucks them away into his jacket pocket. This can't have been just a throw-away thing. I imagine it will have some significance later on? What do you think?

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now