#money young royals

[raincitygirl76]

For anyone getting excited over Hillerska being shut down by the school inspectorate, hold your glee. Lundsberg Skola is the Swedish boarding school Hillerska seems to based on. After years and years of warnings and fines re bullying and hazing, Lundsbergs was shut down by the school inspectorate on August 28, 2013.

It was supposed to stay shut down for a minimum of 6 months. Instead the school hired expensive lawyers, appealed, and were allowed to reopen on September 6, 2013. So it only took 9 days before they found a loophole. One can assume Hillerska will do likewise and everybody (except the third years) will be back in class in the second half of August when the new school year starts.

At Lundsbergs, the headmaster was fired and the entire board of governors resigned after the shut down. But they soon regrouped, hired a new headmaster, appointed new alumni and parents to the board, and debuted a shiny new anti-bullying policy. Whether it actually worked is unlikely. But the parents are mostly alumni themselves. They would’ve gone through the same brutal hazings and wouldn’t think they’d be such a big deal.

Here’s the Wikipedia page, scroll down to the Controversy section for the details on the abuse and bullying that the school was turning a blind eye to. The final investigation, the one that triggered the (temporary) shutdown, was when the younger boys were burned with hot irons by older boys at an initiation. One boy was burned so badly he needed to be hospitalized. The hospital called the local police, who called the school inspectorate. Note: that boy’s parents were not the ones to notify either the police or the school inspectorate.

Also scroll down to the Alumni section for a look at all the rich, influential and famous people (including multiple Swedish royals across many generations) who went there.

[raincitygirl76]

This is fabulously interesting. I urge you to click on the cut!

Some thoughts on the hierarchy at Hillerska

A few days ago, @raincitygirl76 made a really intriguing post about how the show is about the class system (find it here!), mainly focusing on Hillerska’s impact as an employer and the types of students who go there.

That inspired me to go off on a tangent and make a separate post about the hierarchy. I’ve been using Agnes Hellström’s book about the real boarding schools (‘Att vara utan att synas: Om riksinternaten Lundsberg, Sigtuna och Grenna’, 2013) as a fanfic reference, so I’m also using that here. It was written  back when the schools were still allowed to charge for tuition, and I’m sure things have improved since then. However, much of the content is pretty consistent with what Lisa has said about doing research for YR and what we see in the show.

Disclaimer: I’m not Swedish, just a Nordic neighbour, and these are just my own impressions. If I’m wrong about something, please feel free to add on to this or correct me!

Keep reading

[drs295]

[grapehyasynth]

Wilmon- “We’re more than just roommates…”

Hope ur still taking. Prompts!

Thank you! I had an idea for this and then @enjoythesilentworld posted this about jealous roommates in denial, which inspired me! With their permission I'm placing this in that universe.

"We're more than just roommates, you know," Wille says, following Emil's gaze across the party to where Simon is giggling over the foosball table, fighting Rosh for the ball.

"Oh yeah?" Emil asks, distractedly, his beer bottle hovering near his lips, half-forgotten as he watches Simon. Wille understands, and empathizes, but that's the extent of his warm feeling towards this guy who's been flirting with Simon all night.

"Yeah. Just in case there was any confusion. Wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea." He swirls his own drink, tosses the rest of it back, sets it down sharply. "Simon's not available."

An hour later, maybe more, Simon finds him in one of the dark crowded hallways of this maze of a house.

"You have to stop telling people we're together!" Simon shouts, his hand circling Wille's wrist to draw him closer so they can hear each other over the music. His thumb presses into the meat of Wille's palm and Wille's fingers curl instinctively around it. "We're roommates."

"We're not just roommates," Wille insists stubbornly.

"It was one time--"

"Three times." They've had variations on this argument before.

"And unless you want to put your money where your mouth is, it's only going to stay one time."

That effectively shoves Wille's snarky response back down his throat. Simon's thumbnail is digging into Wille's palm, and in the dim hallway he can't tell if Simon's hooded eyes are looking down at his lips.

[raincitygirl76]

Wow. Holy shit, this analysis.

Thinking about the family dynamics of Simon/Sara and Wille/August. How Wille and August were raised in a privilege where their mistakes are trivial in the long term and apologies do not hold much importance because the people around them won't take much time to conveniently sweep them under the rug. How Sara and Simon were raised knowing that anyone who makes mistakes has to earn their apology because a single mistake can shatter all the trust in relationships in the blink of an eye. How Micke still gets hostility in return from his children because he hasn't realized how deep Simon and Sara's hurt is. How Wilhelm was eager for a reconciliation with Simon in the beginning of S2 without understanding how much Simon was hurt by his actions. How it made Wilhelm realize that he can't just show up and ask Simon to take him back because Simon will never sweep Wilhelm's mistakes under the rug and he actually needs to do the work and realize what exactly Simon wants. How Sara will probably give August a hard time to make him realize what exactly he did wrong. How Simon will probably make Sara work up and earn her apology because Sara shattered his trust by doing exactly what Simon and Sara both hate the most. Thinking about how all of their different upbringings will clash for the last time in the final chapter.

[raincitygirl76]

Interesting article from the BBC about how over the past 30 years, Sweden has seen an explosive rise in super wealthy people, and the favourable tax and monetary policies which helped bring it about.

Apparently Sweden has approximately twice as many dollar billionaires per capita as the USA. Note: that’s per capita, so total billionaires in a country divided by the total population of the country. Yes, the USA has many more billionaires, but also a MUCH bigger population.

[abustoslife]

[frogprincesnowglobe]

I would really like to be a fly on the wall for Simon finding out that the reason they tried to *take Wille out of the school by force* was because Wille threatened to *abdicate* from the whole *throne* after seeing a video of him doing *bad karaoke* with another guy.

[raincitygirl76]

Me too. Except my window is on the ground floor. I contemplated it anyway, out of sheer desperation.

I don’t think I’ve ever cringed as hard in young royals as I did when wilhelm tried to say that him going to crown prince school was “just like” rosh and her job i fully contemplated jumping out the window

[fan-of-young-royals]

One thing that has always confused me about the scene where Simon pelts Wille with the ball is: Are they playing dodgeball with one ball?

This question leads me to a few others: Is it a game that’s not dodgeball? What is the game?If it is dodgeball is it any fun with just one ball?

[shimmerluna]

really it's not that Wille needs to abdicate for him and Simon to be together, it's that he needs to check his privilege and start actually listening to Simon when it comes to things like that. Abdication isn't going to make him less of a privileged brat unless he stops viewing Simon acknowledging their huge wage gap and the downsides of the monarchy as personal attacks and actually becomes open to learning things

[changetheprophecy]

i love all the canon queer ships in media but why are they all in high school

[kingsandbastardz]

So this is a thing that’s been bouncing around in my head for awhile, but I hadn’t really had a good starting point for it because it was just a billion fragmented pieces. I kinda have to write it now, though bc I think it’s giving me mental constipation and actively preventing me from writing other things. Anyway, forgive me for being long-winded.

---

Regardless of how you see the ending – whether you think he reached enlightenment/ascended, or he died, or he lived  -- llh’s story is about escaping the narrative.

FDB meanwhile is about being a catalyst of change or transformation, whether it is for his own life or llh’s. He exists in a shifting narrative space that's difficult to define and creates narrative movement from that.

DFS… well. He's still trapped.

First, what exactly is ‘the narrative’ I’m talking about here? It’s a thought or concept, it’s alive yet also not. It’s essentially the words of a story strung together and told and retold, adjusting to the whims of the storyteller and the desires of the people hearing it. It lives and changes organically based on call, response and group consensus.

It’s a crowd of people sitting around an old man in one town, nodding along and yelling when they don’t like the direction a story is going – and then in the next town, that same story teller making adjustments so he gets more tips that evening. It’s people in other towns asking repeatedly for the same story over and over because they like that one hero and each time, the storyteller obliges them, with small details being added or falling off. It’s the collected gossip that morphs as it moves like lightning through an entire city. It’s the records found in a courts’ archives where the ink has become smeared and illegible because a scribe dropped it in a puddle and the next scribe did his best to write in the margins what he thinks it said. Probably.

It is the men at the beginning and end of MLC telling the crowd about Li Xiangyi’s great feats while dressed in white, and heroically battling evil.

This changing, amorphous thing is The Narrative. Now, see the entirety of MLC as such a story—this narrative being told by all these different voices to the audience (us).

So LLH escapes it. FDB defies it and changes it and refuses to live by it.

DFS is… he is part of it. If he ever cared about what anyone says about him, dfs has long since given up on changing the narrative. He’s learned to accept it because it literally doesn’t matter what he says or  does – ppl will always spin it to suit the needs of the story, which will then get passed around as fact. So he lives within this framework of societal expectation for the villainous. He weaponizes it to use it to his advantage. And, ultimately, he’s trapped by it.

Imagine a yin yang symbol. Imagine llh standing on one dot with dfs standing on another. Imagine the yin yang spinning as they both walk forward. They’re interlinked, never to be separated. They’re mirrors, but at the same time always moving in opposite directions of each other as the symbol spins. This is the position I image DFS being when in relation to llh.

Narratively, DFS both parallels and moves in opposite directions to llh.

Mirrored parallels, let’s go with that - Where they are the same but on opposite ends of it:

Visually dark vs light in clothing etc, even their masks are black vs silver and on opposite sides of their faces

Skills and energy-wise: both utilize pure yang energies but fast and overwhelming vs slow and steady

Positioned as great rivals/oppositional forces of equal skill

He’s just as trapped by the narrative as LXY but as the demon lord instead of the hero

Repeatedly placed on opposite sides of the screen as a visual cue

Dfs = chaos, llh = agent of order

Llh femme presenting for a very heteronormative appearing sect and storyline while dfs is extremely masculine/heteronormative appearing, but at the helm of a sect that is full of fringe elements and is potentially queer

regarding personal health - llh uses risk percentage as an excuse to not try to heal himself – meanwhile dfs will take any risk to heal himself even if it means he dies

Dfs rescued himself as a child while llh is picked up and nurtured by others

Dfs is a self-taught genius while llh is a trained genius

Dfs survives so hard he doesn’t understand what it means to want to die, llh wants to disappear so badly that he doesn’t understand what it means to desire to live

Oh right, and the thing I didn’t mention before. Not only does DFS live in the narrative. DFS is narratively bound to llh. He is not and was never independent of llh. Not due to lack of skill or for want of trying, dfs is narratively incapable of succeeding at his greatest goals without llh’s help – or ultimately fails due to llh’s actions. Either outcome, llh is involved.

He leaves the story when LLH does (disappearing into the ocean after the Donghai Battle) and returns to the narrative (leaves seclusion) the very moment FDB forces LLH to become active again and LLH starts moving to tie up loose ends.

His attempt for establishing peace was destroyed by Shan Guado and Jiao Liqiao, yes, but it ultimately fails because lxy declares war and ‘kills’ him. It takes LLH revealing himself to everyone and establishing events for things to quiet down.

Unable to reach the guanyin elixir without llh’s help

Unable to figure out the secret behind shan gudao’s death and the war between their sects without llh’s cooperation

Succeeds in finding the styx flower, not for himself, but for llh’s benefit

Unable to reach the next level of Beifeng Baiyang without help from llh and Yangzhou Man

Continuously bids for freedom and agency – but his first attempt is foiled by not being able to get rid of the mind control bug. Then during the amnesia arc, his ‘freedom’ from his enemies comes at the cost of being kept by llh as a servant. Then as soon as he was able to get rid of the mind control bug, he’s captured by jlq and his freedom/autonomy is taken away again. If the narrative was a sentient being – it’s watching him claw his way up the side of a mountain and every time he almost reaches the top, it chops his hand or fingers off to send him flying back down below. Ultimately, DFS is only able to regain physical and mental freedom when llh rescues him and choses to give him that freedom (see amnesia arc where llh tries to keep dfs as his servant/weapon).

Cure llh/save his life – ultimately stopped by llh’s actions.

Simply put – while llh exists without dfs. As far as the narrative is concerned, dfs does not exist without llh. Jinyuan Alliance is replaced completely by Shan Gudao as the bad guys in the story. (Which he was- but there is no mention of DFS or the alliance's roles - everything is attributed to lxy's heroism and return from the dead.)

So what happens post canon in a world where llh is dead? What then? We have fdb, right?

I’ve been bothered by this – and as much as I go on about how fdb is the future of the story. That he’s the inheritor of everything llh, including dfs... There is no guarantee of anything because he’s the guy that writes his own story and transforms his narrative.

We get the bit of bonding with each other in the zombie village when llh deliberately leaves them alone with each other (could this be an example of llh facilitating emotional bonds between the two?). We get fdb’s sense of betrayal later on when he thinks dfs turned on them. And then later his happiness when he realizes dfs was on their side. We get him calling dfs Lao Di. But then we have the moment at the eastern sea with the letter - where we get him running off to investigate alone until both men just happen to arrive at the beach at the same time from opposite directions. Because fate, I guess. I think dfs and fdb’s relationship is meant to be a 50/50 swing by design because we don't know the future and Fdb is ultimately the catalyst for whatever direction the story goes.

As two men who loved the same man and who tried their best but ultimately failed to keep llh alive, will he care enough about dfs to maintain ties with him or… just… walk away after saying his goodbyes --- you know, they way they often do in jainghu.

So just for speculation’s sake. Let’s say, with no additional input or relationship development. Let’s say they take the second route and go their separate ways. FDB doesn’t reach out further to DFS and DFS never tries to find fdb for a replacement fight. They never try to bridge that llh-shaped gap.

This is where we come to the third thing – Narratively, dfs’ purpose is to remind llh of the true past and to provide information or vehicles for him in his quest to address that past.

So what does that mean for dfs when LLH dies? Dfs, as a survivor, cannot physically do the same. How will he die narratively? Imo, with the way his movements mirror llh's and his role for llh, it makes sense that dfs will do what llh did - he goes back to where he was in the past. He returns to the beginning.

And from there? Maybe, DFS returns to seclusion, or a form of seclusion at least, once again in mourning. Because otherwise what else does he have left that holds meaning for him? Jinyuan Alliance? Whatever remnants remain... he never cared about it and I’d argue that at the very start of the series, he was already 1-foot out the door with retiring from leadership. Strength was freedom – he has both, so now what? Power and skill? The one person he wants to fight is gone.

DFS goes away. Days become months, become years and life continues on. New heroes and villians will rise and fall. And one day, fdb will remember he used to know a powerful guy. Whatever happened to him? And the people around him will shrug. Some may even be young enough to be like, “Who?” FDB lets it go because he’s a busy man. He’s got businesses to run, students to train, etc – can you blame him? His life is full. Eventually, he forgets he ever asked a question.

This is how the last living piece of dfs in the worlds’ consciousness dies. He fades away from memory, absentmindedly.

Maybe one day, a student or scholar will crack open a book about the history of li xiangyi and if they don't skim, they’ll come across a line or two talking about some guy that fought lxy that one time and ultimately failed to kill him. Maybe they will be motivated enough to look further into him, maybe not.  

Llh remains alive as a memory – his legacy kept alive by fdb who’s his student and his students’ students. Sigu Sect and Baichuan Court remain as pillars of society.

DFS? Who is there to remember him? Who is there to see how his story ends? Does it matter? Who is DFS without llh?

There are plants that exist without their natural pollinators or creatures that eat their fruit because they are so ancient, those creatures no longer exist. We only know what they potentially look like based on the shape of the flower/plant/tree.. They survive because they have evolutionarily figured out stopgap measures to make up for the deaths of their pollinators. But one day those measures will no longer work. Stopgaps only buy time. That plant exists as a living memory of something that used to exist and then one day it too will die.

DFS is like that remaining plant.

You know that question about whether a tree exists if no one is there to hear them fall in the woods?

Now, here is me, getting a leg cramp in the audience. I’ve always loved the antagonists, the monster-shaped beings that weren’t really monsters inside, and all the random side characters that fall off the story one after another. I’ve always bothered the hell out of everyone bc I’m the person going “So what about x? What about y? Where is z now?”

So consider this me asking – in a story where his existence is swallowed by a narrative that no longer needs him - what about dfs? Where is he now? What is he doing now?

[mikkaeus]

does this show actually rxcpect us to feel sorry for august at any point like....

shut the fuck up piece of shit i wouldve let simon go to town on him. knock his lights out baby

[eypril-eypril]

the king

when i was doing some research for a historical wilmon fanfic at the royal library’s archive last year i found a short story called the king by martin andersen-nexö from 1914. it was a story of a king who no longer held any power, but was worshipped by his people who didn’t dare to criticize him.  

“let him sit!”, the wise men of the country said. “he’s the unsound fantasies of the people, collected in one hand - it’s the cheapest option. and he is our only memory of the slavery of the past. the more he stands out, the more he brings attention to how far we’ve come.” 

the king stayed on his throne, but he wasn’t allowed to speak. the people traveled from east and west to see him, and he had to sit nicely on the throne while the people looked at him. meanwhile, the people invented a road of light that would lead talented people to success, no matter their social class. but the king’s throne cast a shadow over the road of light, which paralyzed the entire country. 

after some time, the king asked if no one was upset with him. the people didn’t dare to be mad at him, because he sat so nicely on his throne. finally, the king had had enough and his soul left his body, but his body remained sitting. once his soul was gone, nothing stopped him from sitting nicely. he sat there, deaf and blind, until humanity accidentally pushed his throne so that it fell over.  

i love this story because in my opinion, it pinpoints some of the reasons as to why i think monarchs - both the real and fictional ones - shouldn’t exist. it’s fascinating how a story published in 1914 so perfectly describes the themes of a tv show from 2021. because this could have been a fabel about wilhelm, who is forced to sit nicely on his throne as tourist attraction and a symbol of the past, which in turn harms not only the people but also wilhelm himself. and if he continues to sit nicely, his soul will eventually leave his body, because it won’t be able to stand it any longer. 

[micechicken]

I love how my unintentional excuse as to why Alestair and Idan never have to go to work is because they ran away and basically quit without notice.