pick up a commoner boyfriend

feature in a sex tape

out himself to the whole world

threaten murder

get the entire place closed down

abdicate

Thinking about what Wille said in this scene of S3E6.

“It’s embedded in the walls here.”

Because he’s absolutely right.

As we know, Hillerska had been getting complaints for the past 10 years. And several alumni have also shared their own horrific stories about the hazing and initiation ceremonies after Wille’s jubilee speech. Hillerska has been in hot water for a very long time, and now, there’s no hiding it anymore.

Wille isn’t to blame for the school’s closure. Neither is Felice. And neither are the other students interviewed by the School Inspectorate.

They were just the canaries in the coal mine— the ones who drew attention to the problems that are practically embedded in the school’s walls

The pain and trauma from the school’s hazing culture, the lingering humiliation of the initiation ceremonies, the cliques, the lies, the secrets, the peer pressure, the family pressure, the elitism, the discrimination against students who are different— it has been there for a very long time. I mean, Felice’s dad said that he was the only Black student at Hillerska during his time at the school, and he was called the N-word by both classmates and teachers.

All of these issues are so deeply ingrained in the school environment that the current students didn’t even see anything wrong with pressuring someone to strip and show his genitals during their sit-in protest— as if they’d forgotten that they were trying to keep the school open by proving that nothing like that was happening.

They may have seen these things as fun traditions, but these traditions do not point to a healthy or safe school environment.

Hillerska was already rotting from within— and it’s been rotting for a very long time. It was only a matter of time before enough people began noticing it and speaking out about it

Wille was the harbinger. The alumni’s stories were wake-up calls that were delaying the inevitable. And though we may not know what some of the other students said in their interviews with the inspectors, I do think that some of them aired out a lot of complaints— enough to raise serious questions about Hillerska’s future.

And Felice’s testimony was definitely the final nail in the coffin

Took these pics at the YR overnight stay at Kaggeholm for @zee-has-commitment-issues ànd their chess fic Dead Draw. 🥰. You can see “Hillerska” in the distance.

The results of this poll about whether or not you’d want to attend Hillerska have been revolving around in my head over the past few days. I flippantly voted yes (spoiled Swedish teens feel like a piece of cake compared to reality at the moment) but in practice generally agree with many of the reasons stated in the no column. So, if you did vote no and say why, know that I agree with you. This isn’t a post to argue against you or anything, this is just an extended wondering about something else.

At the same time, I noticed that we heard a lot from the nos and not as much from the yeses in response to this poll. In complete earnest, I wish we could have heard more from the yeses. (If you did vote yes and want to message me about your ideas one on one, I’d love to hear from you and I promise I don’t bite.) I’m curious to know if some of the same things about Hillerska-as-a-setting appealed to you as did me when I first started watching the show. Because it’s an engaging enough setting that I, you know, do own the Hillerska hoodie and all.

On one hand:

I do want to acknowledge how, in creating Hillerska, the writers drew on harrowing stories of real boarding schools—class hierarchy, insular social mores, outdated traditions, secrets, horrific acts of hazing. The writers researched all of this, interviewing former students, and incorporated that into Young Royals to increase the sense of realism and play to the show’s class commentary.

On the other hand:

I also started thinking about how the show leans into boarding schools as a literary device. In youth-centered fiction, boarding schools are a kind of liminal setting that facilitates independence from adults and a higher level of agency for teenage protagonists. These teens are called to make decisions and sort out conflicts amongst themselves. There’s this idea of, who can you become without your family looking over your shoulder? In what ways do you feel pressured to be like them, or to break away from them? And all the gothic architecture and uniforms and secrets and traditions are easy for writers to convey through a lens of romanticism.

And… Young Royals does not fully reject that romanticism. Indeed, it embraces it often. It uses the romantic boarding school angle to market the show and grab our attention—for example, see all the promo material where the characters are in their uniforms getting photographed for student picture day and such. The creative team offers us the romanticism of boarding school the same way they offer us the romanticism of intense first loves between princes and commoners.

I actually think Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship and Hillerska-the-liminal-space as a setting are very much intertwined. Hillerska is a catalyst for Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship; if Wilhelm fell in love with Simon in a club or on a train, and not in the school chapel where Simon is singing a solo in defiance of posh students who heckle him, their story would be completely different. I can’t (personally) imagine Wilhelm and Simon’s story without the beats of school parties in the Palace, or their hugs-in-white-nightgowns on Lucia night, or their stupid grins at one another during rowing practices, or their stolen kiss at the Valentine’s ball. The school provides a lot of obstacles to their relationship but it also facilitates these iconic moments of connection between the two of them, and I feel like in the first two seasons at least that’s supposed to matter.

And maybe, stick with me here, but I don’t… think it’s like, wrong, or hypocritical or whatever, that YR leans into romanticism and realism re: Hillerska at the same time? I actually think it’s pretty common in school-focused stories to put these two modes of storytelling in dialogue with one another? The romantic (in the literary sense, not the conventional) elements of a boarding school story are there to honor the tempestuous emotions of the teenage characters in their coming of age, as they bump up against adult pressures and the first hints of the “realistic” adult world. (I’m thinking about like, Dead Poet’s Society, and A Separate Peace, and A Great and Terrible Beauty as other examples of this. They all make social commentary through their setting but they also immerse you in it and sweep you up into it.)

I know Hillerska doesn’t survive the series and Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship does, and I’ve heard that after season 3 there were some things said in interviews and some extremely mixed messages about the setting at times. But also like… look. For all the later stumbles with the writing, I’m a slut for setting and a slut for setting as a way to reveal character arcs and facilitate relationships and Hillerska is a setting that captivated me from the beginning and it’s a lot of what made Young Royals what it was.

No I would not want to attend the school in real life as a real life human. Yes I would love to spend more time there in fiction because that is how fiction works, you get to explore settings you wouldn’t want to explore in real life. Go ahead and accuse me of being at the devil’s sacrament because didn’t we all meet at the devil’s sacrament?