it's the swedish sadness

Please please please(!) don't watch it only focused on Wille's pov simply because you were interested in watching Edvin. I can't bare to have more new people watching the show and end up hating on Simon because they can't relate to his pov just because of their bias towards Wille 😭 (and on another note-Omar as Simon deserves the recognition on his own as well)

Instead of getting a steady monthly or yearly check like actors in the US often do, Nordic actors get paid based on results.

Netflix keeps a running tally of how many people worldwide actually finish watching the show. When the total number of viewers hits a certain big number (like 10 million views), a bundle of bonus money is unlocked. If old fans re-watch the show or new fans discover it years later, it pushes that tally higher. If that extra push makes the show pass another big milestone, the actors get another lump-sum bonus check.

If the show gets popular again but doesn't quite hit the next official milestone, Netflix still calculates exactly how many extra views they got and pays the actors a smaller, partial bonus for that extra traffic. The payouts are also scaled, so Edvin and Omar would get a higher percentage since they were leads/principals compared to supporting cast.

my unruly ass:

However. No offence to OP, but I feel like we should first refresh our memory of the examples listed:

August did not feel entitled to Felice's body but her hand in marriage (as he tells Erik). This is because she's a popular highborn girl from one of Sweden's richest families, and he's a popular highborn boy from a family deep in debt. She is the one who initiates the sexual side of their relationship, and if we look at their highly uncomfortable sex scene, he doesn't look particularly into it either. He's misogynist and a terrible lover to her, for sure, but the relationship is not based on him using her for her body.

August did not scapegoat Alexander. That was Wille. If Wille hadn't done it, August wouldn't have been able to persuade Alexander to agree to "take the blame" in S2. August did treat Alexander as an errand boy and make him carry the Society's drugs, though.

August did not assume Simon had drugs and couldn't say no. He assumed Simon had easier access to alcohol on account of living outside the school. He first tried to buy drugs off Sara, because he knew she had them, and when Simon forbade it, offered to buy them through him instead. There was no coercion in either case, he simply refused to pay afterwards.

August was not affectionate with Sara from the start. He called her a freak and used her to pre-emptively get even with Felice in case she cheated on him with Wille. He only became affectionate with her after she pursued him when he was at his lowest in S2.

I think one pivotal question we should be asking is whether the writers did any kind of sensitivity read or considered how adapting some of their characters to the ethnicities of their diverse cast would also make racism relevant to their storylines. One example is Simon's drug dealing plot, which was likely meant to just be about classism when the character's ethnicity was unspecified (we know Malte also auditioned for Simon). But when they cast Omar and made Simon POC, they don't seem to have realised that viewers might also connect the drug plot to harmful racial stereotypes. Or Alexander's treatment - in S3, it's revealed that Erik treated August much the same way, but in casting Xiao-Long Zhao as Alex, they had already added the element of a white kid oppressing an Asian kid.

And yes, because August starts the show as the epitome of all these privileges, those additions do also impact his characterisation. They even seemed to understand that when they wrote him that line about rowing as a great equaliser, but they never called back to that. Unless we count Vincent being blatantly racist towards Marwan in S3 and August weakly trying to call him out, but that almost implies that racism was one of the things Vincent took away from August with the prefect position and rowing captaincy, so...

I guess my follow up questions to OP are who is the “we” and what does it mean to address this. Is the “we” Young Royals fandom in general? YR fandom on tumblr? People in YR fandom who specifically like to write about and think about August, or have him as one of our favorite characters? And are we talking about addressing racism in analysis posts? In fanfic? In any sort of fandom-oriented post?

As far as analysis goes, one of the reasons I appreciate @sflow-er’s response is that it’s a solid example of good faith analysis. They bring in specific details from the text and consider them from their cultural context. They also examine the text from both the Watsonian and Doylist angles, which makes sense given that the YR creative team’s approach to race transitioned from a more colorblind approach in season 1 to a more race-conscious approach in season 3. @sflow-er’s approach to analysis is something I’ve always admired about them; they’ve pushed back on my own posts when I lean a little more vibes than what actually happens onscreen or when my Anglo-American bias clouds my reading of the characters, and I know I’ve learned from those moments.

When it comes to fanfic, I really don’t know what the best approach is and honestly it varies depending on the individual writer or reader. I think a lot of fans prefer not to write fics about August at all—that was true when I first de-lurked in fandom, and it’s still true now, and I support people who take that approach even if I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum myself and sometimes wish I had more compatriots. Perhaps the people who would be most critical of August are not interested in writing him in the first place.

But for those of us who do wanna write August, how do we address the racist, classist, and misogynistic flaws that @sflow-er details above, especially when we’re writing him in the future or an AU? Is this something that should be addressed in the fic’s tags or the author’s notes, or the text of the fic itself? If the latter, can these be woven in as lines of exposition, or does it require more substantial paragraphs or chapters? I feel like every author has a different answer here. I used to tell myself I was only allowed to write a Sara And August Get Back Together In The Future Fic unless I wrote X number of fics where August Makes Amends first, and the arbitrary value of X kept going up and I kept beating myself up more for wanting future!saraugust in fic at all (I don’t really even want it in canon, I just think fic is where I get to play with these kinds of ideas) until finally I asked myself who I was writing for and started writing for myself. I could already envision a future version of August who’d started to unlearn his old views and make specific amends to the people he’d harmed, one who is still in the process of growing and changing, and I could write him so that he was convincing to me and maybe he’d be convincing to a few other people too. I have had to come to terms with the idea that I will never convince everyone. And that’s ok! There’s plenty of people in this fandom who have different, less optimistic visions for August’s future, and I am unconvinced by them in turn.

I also want to express an unpopular opinion of my own that may be tangential to OP’s point, but there are times where I think we in YR fandom have trained ourselves to make too many disclaimers about our fanworks and analysis. I believe this instinct comes from a good place and a lot of us being empathetic people who are drawn in by the show’s empathetic approach to its characters. I also want to assert that it is a good practice in any fandom to warn for common triggers on one’s fics, like direct depictions of abuse or violence or self-harming behaviors. But periodically I see YR fans expressing sentiments along the lines of “I find Linda sympathetic here even though she’s an imperfect parent and I don’t approve of that” and “I’m going to reblog this stedrika gifset because they’re cute here, even if I don’t excuse them being privileged mean girls” and… honestly it’s an exhausting way for us to be living when we’re fans of the Dysfunctional Parents And Spoiled Private School Kids With Problems Show. We can enjoy these complex characters without constantly undermining what we find appealing or interesting about them. We can do that because I think most of us do that with Wilhelm, who is not without flaws of his own that could potentially be dealbreakers for us if we met him as a real person in real life.

The cascading effect is that I feel like I’ve had more than one private conversation with a fellow fan where they’re worried about whether they’re writing a fic that’s too offensive, or too angsty, or too negative toward Erik, or too open about the relationship issues Wilhelm and Simon still need to work on, or whatever else feels like it goes against the fandom grain. I’ve also talked recently to people who’ve been in the fandom a while and have mostly written one kind of fic about one or two of the characters, who now are curious about branching out into new kinds of stories and maybe some new characters and pairings as well. And I can imagine that in an environment like the one described above, YR fandom can be a really tough space to take those brand new storytelling risks. The amount of pushback I’ve heard about people getting even for wilmon fic with canon typical levels of angst is a little shocking sometimes. And I do think the fandom is disadvantaged by a lack of fic that focuses on the experiences of characters of color like Felice and Nils… and an environment where writers are afraid to take risks only exacerbates that.