#group scenes

The group scenes are a lot of fun because they give you a good idea of the dynamics running between Liam, Maxwell, Hana, Drake and the MC, outside of their romantic interactions with her. In Book 1, Hana and the MC are still getting to know the three Cordonian men, whose bond goes way back and who already have developed a comfortable equation amongst themselves.

Cronut Run

The cronut run would be especially special to a Hana shipper, because it’s the first time you see her expressing an interest in the MC that goes beyond friendship. Not only does Hana seem hopelessly attracted to the MC, she also looks extremely confused by her own reaction.

The friend group in TRR is a pretty eclectic mix of people from high society (Liam, Maxwell, Hana) and commoners (Drake, the MC), most of whom make their plans at royal events in an attempt to take a breather, explore their surroundings, or just to have some good fun. The MC tends to act as the group mom (move over, Freshman MC!), encouraging all her friends separately to open up and let themselves a little loose, but in these diamond scenes she’s seen as the glue that holds it together. Liam, in being the Crown Prince, tends to have to jump through hoops to make it for their excursions (almost injuring himself on the bushes for the cronut run, for instance), but the experience itself makes it worth his while.

Cronut Run

I personally found the MC’s dramatics over the fact that none of them have ever tasted Cronuts a little over the top 😂 but it’s a good diamond sequence nonetheless, with Maxwell breaking their on-three count in his eagerness to eat the cronuts, and two chances to spend time with each LI. The player can choose both who they want to sit next to and walk back home with, and each LI interacts with the MC in different ways. Given that Liam and the MC - by this time - could already be interacting romantically with each other by this point, it makes sense that they enjoy their company in the bakery in silence, savouring their connection. Liam’s interaction outside the shop is particularly interesting, because it is here that it dawns on him how limited his life is (to the end of claiming he lives in a “statesman’s bubble”). This could be important for his future as a king later.

Drake’s Birthday

This particular sequence is rich in Drake interactions and is pretty important to the Drake/MC friendship/relationship, given that we get a glimpse of his childhood and have the MC show him how to view his unhappy history with his birthday differently. So it does make sense that the LI interactions are limited to who you get to dance with. Liam, who doesn’t get a lot of chances to do normal, non-ballroom dancing, has a chance to just enjoy himself here. Beyond this, the group encourages him to show “moves” and he shocks them all with a backflip.

This sequence gives me the impression that if Liam and Hana had met under different circumstances, they would have made excellent friends. Both of them know how burdensome parental and societal pressure is, picked up skills they didn’t necessarily want, grapple with their fear of disappointing the people who matter to them, tell the MC that being around her makes them feel alive. Probably, if it weren’t for the competition - and both Liam and Hana’s apparant lack of interest in it - I believe they would have bonded more over their shared experiences than they have in the story.

Ruins

The ruins group interaction is different from the other two, because this is the last time all of them get to have an interaction together (considering Liam does not feature in the Truth or Dare game), and is split four ways, with the four friends exploring different ruin sites and voicing different views, and the MC acting (as I said earlier) as the glue. Drake is disarmingly irreverent about the importance of the ruins, Hana wonders at how someone one day might write her own story, Maxwell tells the MC that he saw hope for Cordonia the moment she entered their lives, and Liam speaks of the weight of history and tries to imagine what mark he will leave on it.

In my opinion, the Ruins chapter is the moment it all comes together for Liam: he realises that he cannot live without the MC, that she will make an excellent queen for Cordonia, that people will - already do - love her.

The above panel also strikes a parallel to the Statue of Liberty scene, where after seeing the statue up close, he tells the MC that he feels capable of anything.

He also asks her what kind of king she thinks he will make (also where we got our title for him - King Liam the Sexy - from 😂😂), hints at how his father’s own mortality makes him wonder how history will view their rule.

Truth or Dare

Liam is conspicuous by his absence in this scene, and I think that’s important because it highlights his changing role. As a Prince he may not have had a lot of freedom but he was able to grab hold of whatever he got. Now that he is going to be king in less than a few days, his time gets even more restricted, and he ends up concentrating on the one person he wants as queen.

However, I do think that Maxwell’s story about the carousel says a lot about how children in the nobility are brought up, and it does reflect both on Maxwell himself as a person who looks fun but is an emotional mess inside, and on Liam (as we learn later, the court and the royalty haven’t been very kind to him either). As an insight into what many of these children have to go through, it raises some very interesting points.

–

With this, we have come to the end of the Liam: Diamond Scene series for Book 1. Book 2 will, I’m sure, have a range of pretty interesting scenes that will provide a lot of background, character development and fun for our characters.

Unit 1

WANT: To know where Matt is/to find his phone.

EMOTION: Mild embarrassment at having a stranger (initially, to him) witness his kung-fu entrance but trying to play it cool; impatience

PARALLEL: In Sixth Form, me and a couple of friends skipped out of half of a Media Studies due to a "rehearsal". This "rehearsal" was a front for sword-fighting with bamboo canes in an empty Drama room. We'd done our Media work, we assumed it'd be fine. Needless to say, the amount of noise we were making from the room aroused suspicion of (typically), Media Studies teachers who were nearby. Not only was I embarrassed when we were caught, but wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. I feel as if Davis would feel the same way in this first unit.

Unit 2

WANT: To find phone and have Christina stop bothering him.

EMOTION: Nonchalance

PARALLEL: There have been many times where I have wanted to be simply left alone and focus on what I'm doing when people are trying to talk to me about something I'm really not interested in. A good example to use as a parallel should be whenever I was being nagged to do housework by my mum whenever I was playing video games during my hormonal, stroppy teenage years. Such nonchalance will adapt to this unit perfectly.

Unit 3

WANT: To subtly find out why Christina is even there in the apartment - could he have caught something off of her in Amsterdam?

EMOTION: False nonchalance in order to extract information under a 'cool' façade.

PARALLEL: A few years ago I was certain that I would be getting a new laptop for my birthday. Naturally my mum wouldn't just surrender this information willingly, so I had to employ a similarly subtle method of deducing the truth without explicitly stating that was what I was after.

Unit 4

WANT: To portray Matt as an unstable mess; to get his own back at Matt for satirising him in his play script and have Christina bear witness to it.

EMOTION: Contempt; amusement/smug indulgence at his own mockings

PARALLEL: Again during my teenage years, someone posted something nasty about me on social media. Despite not referring to me by name, it was obviously about me due to previously transpired events. However, this school bully wasn't the brightest guy and many things were wrong in his "argument". Scoffing, I responded, analysing and breaking apart his points against me, to the amusement of many, including myself.

Unit 5

WANT: To deliver the hard truth about Christina's obsession and his feelings about her - he finds her pathetic.

EMOTION: Contemptuous pity, annoyance almost to the point of amusement at how deluded he finds Christina.

This week, in my group comprising of Mark, Tasha and I, we informed Terri of our choice to perform a scene from Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter for our final assessed scene. After undergoing a few script revisions and edits wherein we determined approximately where our first units ended (as they would be mostly comprising the lesson), the main focus of the class today was for groups to get some of their scenes on their feet and to learn how to effectively rehearse a scene which comprises of multiple actors with their own separate units and parallels happening at the same time.

When our group was called up, we split the scene up into the first unit between Tasha and Mark followed by the first unit between Tasha and I. This is because in the scene we have chosen to perform we aren't all on-stage together as a three at any one time, with the scene instead progressing from dialogue between Mark's character Matt and Tasha's character Christina to a scene between Christina and my character, Davis, once Matt (Mark) has left the scene.

As such, we were led through the process: first we were instructed to deliver our lines of the unit from the script with no added emotions. Then, once this was done, we improvised the scene off-script. This was so that we would deliver the essence of the scene through what dialogue we remembered, but also would include improvisations that would therefore make the scene look more natural - an important facet for these upcoming assessed performances. After this improvised run, we then ran it again but this time with scripts. However, this is where I personally struggled. Once I had the script back in my hand, I found myself using it as a crutch more and more as the scene progressed as I had not yet learnt my lines and as such some of my line deliveries felt forced and unnatural. Hopefully once I have learnt my lines and incorporated my parallels to each of my units this will no longer be an issue as then my performance will hopefully seem as naturalistic as possible and capture the essence of the improvised version.