#yr analysis

The show is about many things, but to me ultimately all the main characters' arcs explore the questions: What do we owe to ourselves? What do we owe to the people around us (especially those we love, but also others with whom we're connected/implicated)?

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

simon spends a good majority of s2 feeling angry and hurt because wille doesn't have the courage to stand against his mother or the court. he doesn't have the courage to tell his true real feelings to the public. he's too much of a coward to FIGHT for them and simon is MAD and ANGRY and gets even angrier and more confused when he notices wille moving on and letting go and that's when the panic fully sets in. then wille lets him know that it was actually august who did all of this to them and simon is like..... oh!.... you betrayed me because..... you're prioritising protecting the person who ruined our relationship (WHO RUINED MY LIFE!!!!!!)

If you use headphones you can hear Simon sniffing Wilhelm's neck. I cried okay?

From everything we've seen, Wille has not been shown unconditional love. In the times when Wille felt he has disappointed his family, he never got assurance that they still loved him. In fact, they've left him to be alone. Love is not a separate thing that stays constant no matter the surrounding events. To Wille, they are always connected. So when the next closest person in Wille's life got hurt because of Wille / Wille's circumstances and he decided to leave, even though it's completely different situations, the loneliness that Wille felt was still the same. So Wille fell back on the only understanding of love that he had.

In S2, Simon makes it very clear that the reason he can't be with Wille is because he's hurt and doesn't feel he can trust him, but Wille still comes to the conclusion that Simon just doesn't love him anymore.

In S3, Simon ends things because of Wille's situation. And even though Wille tells Felice that he understands Simon, he ultimately defaults to what he knows. Someone in his life is hurt because of him and he's been left alone. Which means that person's love will also go away.

That's why the last thing Wille says to his parents is so important. He knows he's disappointed them again. And he knows they're not going to reassure him that they still love him. So he's going to do what they never did for him. He's pulling away from the monarchy, but not his family. His love for them is unconditional.

One thing about Young Royals is that I’m almost the same age as the creator. Based on what she’s alluded to in her interviews, we existed in some of the same fandom spaces in our late teens and early 20s. I don’t think we ever crossed paths—and if we did, how would I know? The internet was a more anonymous place back then. But anyhow, we were both in the fandom for a certain commercially successful book series about a boy wizard, which I will not name because I don’t want the algorithm to think I support its author. From what it sounds like, Lisa and I were likely both hanging out on the “slash” side of that fandom with a lot of m/m ships.

The thing about that boy wizard fandom in the early 00s specifically is that it had a specific vibe with specific conversations and criticisms of the books going on. At that time the entire book series wasn’t out yet, and the movies were just in the process of coming out. Merchandise started coming out right away, but was mostly geared toward kids and teens at the oldest. Supplemental canon barely existed and the author was not on social media because no one was. And on various online forums and especially Livejournal, fans critically discussed the books’ character arcs, plots, and themes. No one knew the exact shape of what the whole story would look like, and no one fully expected the author to take a fully regressive turn later, although some of the signs were already there. And fans did criticize what wasn’t working for them about the books, while holding out hope that certain things about the status quo would change by the end of the series.

In my memory, fans were pretty creative about how they approached the world of these books. (There was a lot of drama too, to be fair.) People imagined what it would look like for villain characters to get better and hero characters to get worse. They imagined adult futures for all the children all kinds of backstory for seemingly more minor characters. And they definitely wrote stories where canonically straight characters were queer, since the books themselves were, well, pretty relentlessly cishet.

I start with all this preface to say that, knowing what kinds of conversations and fanfic were going on in the early 00s wizard boy fandom, I can see that fandom’s influence (not so much the canon’s influence) on Young Royals and Lisa Ambjörn. Someone who grew up writing m/m slash fanfic, in an environment where people’s hopes for eventual representation were dashed and then shattered further when the author’s more queerphobic beliefs became harder and harder to ignore, would probably feel driven to include canonically queer characters in their writing. The kind of information we get about secondary character Hillerska students, and the way most of them have a bit of moral nuance going on, feels like the kinds of backstories (and ships) fans imagined for minor students at the wizarding school. And if you were someone who criticized the system in the books where children are sorted into color coded “houses” and a lot of their path is carved out by magical “lineage” then I can see how you move from that to writing about IRL royalty and nobility and also just the boxes society puts us in. I remember many fans (myself included) being upset that the wizard boy books end with a nuclear family reset and the problem-creating house system at the school not being abolished. I don’t actually know how Lisa felt about that, but I can see how someone—someone becoming a writer in an environment where people are talking about that—might be interested in one day creating a story that ends with a prince deciding to leave the throne.

And to further clarify: I don’t actually know how much Lisa’s fanfiction writing years influenced her in this regard. I’m really only making guesses, and she has thousands of other influences I’m sure. Perhaps I can, at least, talk about myself, and why the show as it is speaks to the part me that had those questions and concerns about the wizard boy books. My early 00s fandom past, to some extent, also guided how I approached a lot of YR. I think it’s part of what drew me to the school setting and the varied cast of characters. I also attempted to pay more attention to female characters than I did in my teens and I feel like YR definitely rewarded me on that front!

I want to be even more clear that I don’t think Young Royals is actually fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, and that there’s a one to one correspondence between wizard boy characters and Young Royals characters. There’s nothing that maps so precisely or exactly like that. So no, I am not making that claim.

Finally, I think some of the best things about the show are some of the best because they feel like a fanfic. But I think that some of the show’s flaws are things that feel like a fanfic, as well. I don’t have a coherent post about that yet, and some of that is subjective (I don’t think people can agree on the show’s flaws and its virtues enough for that) so I don’t know if I’ll ever post about that idea.