“are you also having regrets about signing up for this?”

Sometimes netflix and people reach too much trying to find similarities between heartstopper and young royals, like…Is jock, golden retriever Wille in the room with us ? be so for real 😭😭😭😭

That whole post was actually insulting im so serious 😭 like how do they fundamentally misunderstand Young Royals so deeply. “Simon had to be a secret bc Wilhelm is struggling with his sexuality” uh.. ??? Actually that’s not what happened but okay

first sight🍃

Wilhelm and his frog

one thing about nick nelson is that boy is gonna be googling something

always an informed king, spent hours reading articles on homosexuality and will spend hours reading articles on eating disorders, if hes anything its super informed on everything pertaining to him or his loved ones

Nick Nelson is just like me. I google everything. I have 100+ tans open. No question will remain unanswered when google exists. If my friend has a problem I will google it.

A few days ago I posted my silly little theory:

"So at the end of season 1 Wilhelm says 'I love you' and then at the end of season 2 Simon says 'I love you' which leads to my theory that at the end of season 3, they'll both say it and we'll have a wonderful happy ending because I refuse to entertain anything else"

BUT then I was left thinking about it some more and wanted to add to it. Both times 'I love you' was said it was whispered into the other's ear. So not only do I think season three will end with both of them saying it but they'll also be looking at each other, it feels like that will be the final wall coming down.

(It's also possible I could be reading too much into it, I just love looking at patterns and parallels)

thinking about fans forcing kit to out himself and then Alice writing scene after scene after scene of people telling nick he doesn’t owe it to anyone to tell them he’s bisexual 😭😭😭😭😭😭

It annoys me when people complain about “all the characters in Heartstopper are queer hurghhh” because… no they’re not. The cishets are just in the background. We see cis straight couples everywhere in Heartstopper, they’re just not main characters. The only (canonically) cishet person we really follow narratively is Tao, but cishets are everywhere in the series. They’re just not the focus. Besides, all the queers conglomerating (by accident and on purpose) is extremely realistic… as any queer person can tell you.

Heartstopper centers queerness, which people find strange because they’re used to media that centers cisheteronormativity. The series just orbits around queerness. But it most definitely does not erase cishets- they’re simply not the focus. Like queerness is in every other series.

charlie is in his safe place. he’s in nick’s bedroom. - alice oseman

heartstopper is so funny to me bc it’s like almost all young up-and-coming teen actors and then just. academy award winner olivia colman is there to have four lines a season

watching heartstopper s2 is just (giggles) (exits netflix to do some deep breathing exercises) (paces around the room) (exits netflix to do some deep breathing exercises) (screams into pillow) (yearns) (exits netflix to do some deep breathing exercises) (giggles) (giggles) (exits netflix to do some—)

sarah nelson being a charlie spring lovebot

Queerness and power in YR / why the best comparison is Normal People and not Heartstopper

It’s a big week for Heartstopper - Young Royals comparisons and i’m not on here to throw any shade on Heartstopper. I haven’t even watched all of S2 yet and i know i love it! But thanks to the absolutely stunning, spell-binding work of fiction called the Normal People AU, i’m more and more convinced that Heartstopper and YR have …. not really that much to do with each other — aside from being tremendously good stories, amazing performances, stellar cinematography and direction etc.

Lisa Ambjorn and the team behind YR have been frequently heard saying that they didn’t want to make a show about homosexuality, where the queerness of the relationship between W&S was “the problem” that drove the plot. Heartstopper, on the other hand, is very much a story driven by the tensions and joys of budding queer and non-conforming relationships, sexualities, and identities. But does that really mean YR isn’t about queerness? I think it’s still about queerness, but with a framing that has kind of been lost from view in the post-AIDS crisis / post-gay marriage era.

I didn’t really appreciate this until I thought through the intense parallels with Normal People - as the author of Obviously has so powerfully drawn out. Normal People is about power; and if you’ll forgive me the short-cut, once upon a time, queerness (in modern global North society) was also about power. In NP, the anchoring drama, and the elemental wound, that both Marianne and Connell face rests in power structures that oppress them - in Marianne’s case, the emotional and physical abuse in her family, in Connell’s case, the abuse that capitalism inflicts on him and his family as the working class. They both seek to become who they are in spite of this power structure - while at the same always being molded by it. There is not so much a core identity to either character that seeks to ‘set itself free’ or ‘reveal itself’ by overcoming power but rather a character who comes into fuller awareness of themselves while being shaped by their contexts. For example, in that scene by the fountain in Italy, where Marianne/Wille acknowledge they have never had to think about money, and Connell/Simon says winning the scholarship has changed his life so that there are things he no longer thinks about - and then between them, they bring to the surface that Marianne/Wilhelm’s mother has been paying Simon/Connell’s mother dirt wages for years, and Marianne says out loud how she knows that there is this basic harm in the way they came to know each other - a wound that is not of their doing, but from their class positions, and yet could never be forgotten as part of their story and part of who they became as a couple. The scene is not - we can run away from all this or i see the ‘real you’ behind all this - but, we can love each other and be who we are and yet still be where we come from, with the consequent constraints on our worldview and possibilities for action. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances listing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Basically i think that in YR, Lisa is giving us back a much more Marxist / power relational form of queerness - where queerness is refracted through and emergent from material conditions, as opposed to being purely about declaring identities [“i was born this way”] and thus essential truths or essential desires, but about the ebb and flow between people, where that ebb and flow is mediated by the power structures in which we cannot help but experience our lives. For Wille, the power structure is obvious: the Crown. But it’s there for everyone. For Sara and Simon, it’s three-fold: the power dynamics around class and race, and the power dynamics from an abusive household / childhood trauma. For the other characters, too, it is not far away. August’s struggles are with his family’s expectations, and with a drug addiction and eating disorder that speak to the pressures of hegemonic cis-het masculinity. For Felice, she deals with racial bias and the pressure to be the perfect image of a woman her (thin, white) mother wants. It’s true for all the students at the school - the scene on parents’ weekend as all these parents swarm in is utterly stifling, as every student feels the structure they are meant to conform to. BTW it’s a subplot, but YR seems also to be saying that capitalism and class structure harm even the rich. People - everyone - experience their gender and sexual identities through and in between all that power - it’s necessarily shaped by it.

To me, this is the root of what is so intoxicatingly liberating about Young Royals (and by extension, Obviously) - that i just don’t feel watching HS, or even reading the canon NP - of the possibility of emancipation. It comes about not principally through outward facing revolt, though there is some of that, but catalyzed by a kind of relational self-growth: the characters grow into themselves as a result of their relations with others. It’s not at all about Wille walking this road alone - despite what Simon says he must do in S1/E6. It’s actually about the characters growing together, in a kind of solidarity against the power structures they rebel against. After all, it is Simon’s confession in the cloakroom, and then the look he gives Wille from the choir stand when August is about to give the speech, that compels Wille to his feet to claim his power, on his terms.

It’s a profoundly ‘class consciousness’ form of identity formation and self-actualization - like they become who they are through their struggle in concert with others. It feels utterly foreign and refreshing to me, because it’s just not the dominant discourse for queerness in popular culture, and it helpfully puts the power struggle back into queerness - it recenters the feeling of community, of joint struggle, of solidarity, and yes, of resistance.

This is how it is. This is how i feel.

Simon and Wilhelm | YOUNG ROYALS

Alex and Henry | RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE

Wilhelm: Caffeine no longer keeps me awake while I study, so instead I have Simon periodically sending me texts saying ‘We need to talk’.

Wilhelm: It gives me the right amount of adrenaline and fear I need to keep on going.

Peyton Sawyer | 1x03