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raincitygirl76 · 1 year ago

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And this is the last of my posts reblogged from @skamenglishsubs . Weren’t they awesome?

Subtext and Culture, Young Royals, Season 2, Episode 6

Final episode, and we're picking up the morning right after last episode. The curtains are still closed though, good for them!

Subtext: The something Simon needs to take care of is of course the situationship with Marcus.

Subtext: Real subtle music choice there, show. This is where August decides to solve the problem of Simon going to the police in his own twisted ways.

Lost in translation: August meekly asked for some changes to the speech last episode, whereas Wilhelm just changed it without asking for permission. Here's what it says, with his changes: Hillerska 120 years Your Majesty, dear mom. And dear Hillis. It's an honour to be standing here today speaking to you - not only as Crown Prince, but as your classmate. Hillerska welcomed me during a very difficult but meaningful time in my life. (He's scratched out "Eders" at the top, which is an archaic way of saying and spelling "ers", which in turn is a special version of the plural second person possessive pronoun "er", which is only used in a formal address like this.)

Lost in translation: The second cue card has more changes: Hillerska isn't just the place where we are taught to be good citizens so that in the future we can shoulder the responsibilities that has been imposed on us. It is also a home. Hillerska became a home to me, just like it was for my dear mother, and my brother before me... and for many of you. You have become family. The school motto is "take responsibility for your legacy" "feel your responsibility for the legacy", be proud of your history, pass on the traditions to the next generation.

Cinematography: The show normally only uses these fourth wall breaks to bookend each season, but all occasions have been when Wilhelm has been making a public speech or felt observed. Here he's practising a public speech, and the show uses the fourth wall break to really bring home this point.

Culture: The show says that this scene takes place just a couple of days after the Valentine's ball, which puts us in the middle of February. But we can tell by the blooming cherry tree in the background that this scene was actually shot in mid April. This is absolutely not what February looks like in the Stockholm area in Sweden, which made me super confused about the timeline.

Subtext: It absolutely is about Wilhelm, but Marcus got it completely wrong anyway, Simon doesn't like Wilhelm because he is a prince, he likes him despite him being a prince. Oh, and it's a nice touch to separate them physically with an electric fence, to really show their distance.

Subtext: No, the person who feels like a victim here is actually Marcus. He doesn't fit in with the rich kids at the school, and now he thinks that they "stole" Simon away from him. Whatever, who cares, he has served his narrative purpose, byyyeeeeee!

Subtext: Loyalty is a huge theme in this episode, so we start this cursed subplot with a nice long opening shot of the motto of the Forest Ridge house, to remind us of how important loyalty is to the upper classes.

Subtext: Everyone tries to manipulate Wilhelm by invoking his dead brother, of course August does the same.

Subtext: So why does Alexander side with August? Wilhelm actually treated Alexander like shit, he threw him under the bus to protect Simon last season, and he feigned ignorance in the first episode of this season when Alexander came back to school, which means the Forest Ridge oath doesn't mean much to him. Alexander feels completely betrayed, because Wilhelm should have been loyal to his house brothers. August on the other hand promises him loyalty. If Alexander takes the blame, then the future king of Sweden, August, will owe him a huge personal favour, and that's just worth a lot more to him and his family than the minor inconvenience of a criminal trial. He's got money, and the full backing of the royal court, he's never gonna go to jail, jail is for poor people!

Subtext: ...like Simon, and his unemployed substance-abusing dad. Simon would not be treated gently by the justice system for dealing drugs, Wilhelm can't really intervene on his behalf, and the royal court wants Simon gone, so they won't help out either, which is why August's threat is very, very real.

Subtext: August has constantly been trying to impose upper-class values on Wilhelm, all the way since season 1, and that includes all the lies and secrets and cover-ups. He truly believes rug-sweeping is the best way of handling the situation, and can't really understand why Wilhelm won't play the game like the rest of them do.

Subtext: We know that Wilhelm's love language is touch, so August touching him is a violation that he reacts very strongly to, punching his arm away.

Culture: Clay pigeon shooting or trap shooting started evolving as a sport over 150 years ago, when upper class shooting clubs realized what a bother it was having to collect a ton of live pigeons when a gentleman simply wanted to practice hunting for a bit, so they developed cheaper clay targets instead. The birds are made out of an easily breakable hard clay, and the launcher is controlled with a foot pedal. The shotgun is loaded with birdshot, which is pretty harmless for humans at long range.

Subtext: A nice little throwback to S1E1, when August told Wilhelm that they could get away with anything, including murder.

Blink and you miss it: August glances at Sara, so Detective Felice quickly figures out that it was her before she admits it.

Blink and you miss it: Simon is actually smiling and enjoying seeing August humiliated by Wilhelm.

Subtext: Also a throwback to season 1, when Sara gave Simon shit for "always wanting to give people a second chance". Now she's doing the exact same thing, and August is ironically just as unworthy of it as Sara and Simon's dad was.

Subtext: Another theme this season has been about people protecting themselves, while claiming to protect others, so here's Sara accusing August of doing exactly that.

Lost in translation: Simon says "Snälla, jag orkar inte", which can't be directly translated, because English is missing the incredibly useful Scandinavian verb orka. It means having the physical or mental strength or stamina or energy to do something. When it's negated like here, it can range in meaning from not having enough stamina to run a long race, or not having enough strength to lift something heavy, or not being able to eat more food, or not wanting to deal with a person, or not having the energy to handle a stressful situation. If you no longer orkar something, you're done, you're finished, you're too tired, you're too weak, you've had enough.

Subtext: Again, Wilhelm's love language is touch, so he's trying to comfort Simon the only way he knows.

Culture: Kaggeholms Slott, the main shooting location for the show was built in the early 1700's, so this is some kind of detail from the earliest years of the main building.

Blink and you miss it: Simon hasn't eaten a single clementine this season because Rosh has been hogging all of them!!!

Culture: Linda's tag says "Sjuksköterska" - nurse, so she obviously works in healthcare. She's also wearing scrubs, so she must have taken off directly from work to accompany Simon to the police. Also note that being a regular nurse in Sweden is a pretty low status job because you'll just be a grunt worker at some hospital or care home, so this fits the social class of the Eriksson family.

Cinematography: I think this is the last amount of colour Simon has ever worn, signalling that he's not feeling himself, he's completely defeated.

Subtext: Damn, I got hungry just looking at this food. What's going on here is that the school is hosting the royal family and treating them to a nice private fancy dinner, and they've even got their own china monogrammed with the school logo. By the bottle we can also tell that Wilhelm is being served alcohol, it's a cider from Danish Somersby. And from the background dialogue, we also learn that both his parents went to Hillerska at the same time, where they presumably met.

Subtext: If it's so important to be able to talk about your emotions, why is your son so bad at it? It couldn't be the case that he learned to suppress his feelings instead from his parents, right?

Subtext: Oh look, it's the theme of the episode yet again! In Forest Ridge the loyalty is explicit in the house motto, and it's of course a big part of the girls' house as well.

Subtext: Well that's a big fat lie, the most obvious secret is the one Stella is harbouring, but they're all keeping lots of little secrets from each other. Good thing Sara learned to keep her mouth shut at least so as not to out Stella.

Subtext: Colour theory for the show tells us that red symbolizes the love between Wilhelm and Simon, and here Wilhelm is deciding between his love for Simon, or fulfilling his royal duty. Since he's currently facing away from the red light, and looking at Erik's old cigarette case, he's leaning towards duty.

Subtext: Colour theory is in full swing over at Simon's place as well, him and Ayub are having a late night videochat about Simon having to decide between his love for Wilhelm or his principles. However, his lava lamp turns red just as the scene ends, showing us what his final decision is.

Blink and you miss it: Sara cleaned out her room and left the Manor House, but she left behind the riding pants the other girls gave her for her birthday.

Culture: If you've read my post on royal names and titles, you know that Ludvig ought to be a prince, and ought to be styled "His Royal Highness", so I'm not sure why he's consistently being referred to as Duke Ludvig in this season. Oh, and if the reigning monarch is a king, he and his queen are styled "Your Majesties" together. But if the reigning monarch is a queen, only she is styled "Your Majesty", while her husband is styled "Your Royal Highness", because blatant sexism.

Subtext: August really thought he'd be their equal for this event, but he's always being put in place and shown he is less than.

Cinematography: Spot the character who really doesn't want to be in this photo shoot!

Subtext: Back in season 1 when August said he knew everyone's name, he wasn't joking, he actually does remember people's names!

Oh, and there's a little lost in translation here as well. August says "Tack för senast", which is a ubiquitous Scandinavian politeness phrase which means "Thanks for last time". You're supposed to use this every time you talk to someone after having gone to some event together, and especially if it was something that the other person hosted and invited you to.

Blink and you miss it: Nils and Vincent are hilariously taking the absolute piss out of August for enjoying standing in the receiving line for the jubilee.

Subtext: Easy there, Don Corleone! August simply overpaid for the horse, thinking Sara would love him for yet another material thing, but what she really wanted him to do was to change and come clean about the sex tape. The horse isn't gonna sway her from leaving him.

Cinematography: As I was taking screencaps for this post, I stumbled on this scene showing Sara leaving Hillerska, but my only question is who the hell that dude is? Why is he in the shot? Why is he there? Is he an extra who is supposed to be there, or is he a random person who was just happening to wait for the real world bus right here right now? It doesn't make any sense in universe, because every goddamn adult in the vicinity is busy with the jubilee thing. Why is this guy not attending? WHO IS HE? I NEED ANSWERS!

Subtext: Through the magic of literary analysis our couple grew closer and came to understand one another better, so Simon chose to compromise his principles out of love for Wilhelm. Oh, and there totally is another way, but it requires Wilhelm to compromise his duty...

Culture: I've already gushed about how good the costuming is on this show, because Wilhelm is wearing an impeccably tailored school uniform that fits him perfectly, while Simon is wearing an ill-fitting second hand uniform. You can tell because Wilhelm's uniform is showing the correct amount of shirt sleeve outside his jacket, between one and two centimetres, while Simon's jacket is completely covering his shirt sleeves.

Subtext: This piece of perfect poetic cinema is of course a mirror to the ending of season 1 when Wilhelm tells Simon that he loves him. This time, Simon says it back for the first time.

Cinematography: I know it's a coat room and not a closet, but close enough, and when Jan-Olof tries to hurry Wilhelm along and get him to stop talking to Simon, Wilhelm responds by literally coming out of the closetcoat room, foreshadowing the end of the episode.

Subtext: Literally as the next speaker, figuratively as the next crown prince.

Subtext: Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no! Sara hasn't talked to Simon since the shooting range scene, so she doesn't know why Simon never reported August, or that August threatened to take revenge by reporting where the drugs originally came from. I guess we need to setup some season 3 drama?

Blink and you miss it: Wilhelm appears to change his mind at the exact moment the principal says "replace".

Subtext: We've seen Wilhelm struggle all season with his duty, and not being able to put on a public persona, but in this moment it's on full blast, and a look that tells August to sit the fuck down again, because this is his job, he's not gonna be replaced any time soon.

Subtext: This is one of the lines that Wilhelm added to his speech, and it's the complete opposite of what he thought of Hillerska in the very first episode, where he saw it as some kind of punishment to have to live there for three years.

Subtext: Oh look, the tradition theme™! Let's just kick it, stab it, and drown it, while the cameras are rolling!

Cinematography: Cue the camera panning to the people experiencing said mass panic.

Subtext: The MVP of the season, Boris my man, enjoying the fruits of his labour. The unsung hero we all deserved! I bet though he's been secretly plotting the downfall of the monarchy this entire time!

Subtext: Just like this song played at the end of episode 4, showing what Wilhelm was feeling, this time it shows what Simon is feeling for Wilhelm. It's also a nice parallel to season 1, where the Revolution song was used in both episode 4 and 6.

Subtext: The lyrics are a bit on the nose like most of this season, but Simon said the he loved Wilhelm, and in return Wilhelm shows Simon that he loves him, by coming out, and not keeping their relationship a secret any longer, which was the main conflict of the entire season.

Blink and you miss it: Wilhelm is always comparing himself to his brother and trying to live up to his memory, so after making this choice, he quickly glances skywards as if to check in with him. Yeah, you're alright kid. Erik would be so very proud of you. I'm not crying, you're crying! Damn allergies! I swear, this goddamn show. 😭😭😭

Cinematography: Finally we book-end this season as well with Wilhelm breaking the fourth wall and staring at us. But this time we see a hint of a smile as he's doing it, because this time is the first time he's really in control of his life, doing what he wants, and not just doing what he's told or what he's expected to do.

#skamenglishsubs #young royals #young royals analysis #sweden #real Sweden #swedish facts #wilmon analysis #yr episode analysis #yr season 2

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bottomsonlybar · 6 months ago

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dan berating sweden/swedish people in the new dapg video

#as a swedish person i feel so seen #i am not valid you are so real dan #i do love djungelvrål though hehehe #dan and phil #dan howell #phan #dnp #dapg #danandphilgames #sweden

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coochiequeens · 2 months ago

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As modern science and better archeology methods reexamine historical sites more of women’s history will emerge

by Sarah Durn September 27, 2021

The National Museum of Stockholm's Ride of the Valkyries was painted during the Victorian period, which saw renewed interest in Vikings. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history.

In 1871 on the sleepy island of Birka, Sweden, Hjalmar Stolpe, a Swedish entomologist turned archaeologist, discovered the lavish grave of a Viking warrior. Around the seated body were the remains of two sacrificed horses, as well as a double-edged sword, a scramasax (a long, thin knife), a bow, a shield, and a spear—every weapon known to the Viking world. It was an astonishing find, especially since Viking warrior graves rarely contain more than three weapons. There was also a full set of hnefatafl, the board game often known as Viking chess, which indicates the strategic thinking and authority of a war leader. A thousand years ago, the site would’ve abutted the Warrior’s Hall, where a garrison lived to protect the bustling Viking town of Birka. The weapons, game pieces, location: Everything told scholars that the man buried in what is known as grave Bj 581 was a prominent, well-respected Viking warrior. No one was really prepared when DNA tests were conducted in 2017 and a new story began to emerge. This was a prominent warrior, all right, but the occupant of Bj 581 wasn’t a man. She was a woman.

Viking historian Nancy Marie Brown’s new book, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, explores what life might have been like for the warrior woman of Bj 581.

Using more evidence from the recent tests conducted on the remains, Brown traces her journey from Norway to the British Isles to Kiev then, finally, to Birka. Brown imagines the unnamed warrior meeting other prominent Viking women, such as Gunnhild, Mother of Kings, or Queen Olga, ruler of the Rus Vikings in Kiev. She also explores the Viking sagas and contemporary sources with a new lens.

How did you initially get interested in Vikings—and female Vikings in particular?

When I went to college, I actually wanted to study fantasy writing and, you know, learn to write like Tolkien. I learned very quickly that that was not appropriate for an English major in the 1970s, so I decided to study what Tolkien studied, and he was a professor at Oxford University, teaching Old English and Old Norse. So I started reading all of the Icelandic sagas that I could find in translation. And when I ran out of the English versions, I learned Old Norse so that I could read the rest of them.

One of the things I liked about [the sagas] the most was that they had really interesting women characters. There’s a queen in Norway who appears in about 11 sagas, Queen Gunnhild, Mother of Kings. She led armies. She devised war strategy. And then I was looking at the valkyries and the shieldmaids and thinking, you know, these are really interesting people that have always been considered to be mythological.

So when I learned in 2017 that one of the most famous Viking warrior burials turned out to be the burial of a woman, that just absolutely dazzled my imagination.

Is this the first confirmed grave of a female warrior that we have?

This is the one that has the best proof. There are one or two others that have since been DNA tested and proven to be female. But in each of these cases, it’s hard to say if the person in the grave, whether male or female, actually was a warrior, or if the object that we are interpreting as a weapon was used for hunting or for some other purpose.

In this case, it’s every Viking weapon known to history. So it’s such a clear result. And the DNA was so completely female.

When Stolpe discovered the Viking gravesite Bj 581 in 1887, he assumed the remains were of a man. That assumption was shown to be wrong 140 years later. Rapp Halour / Alamy Stock Photo

What do we know about the life of the Viking warrior woman in Bj 581?

In 2017, by testing her bones and her teeth, [scholars] could say she was between 30 and 40 years old when she died. They could also tell that she ate well all of her life. So she came from a rich family or maybe even a royal one. She was also quite tall, about 5’7”. By the minerals in her inner teeth, [scholars can determine] she may have come from southern Sweden or Norway, and also that she went west maybe as far as the British Isles before her molars finished forming. She didn’t arrive in Birka until she was 16.

We also have her weapons and a little bit of clothing that were found in the grave. And these link her to what is known as the Vikings’ East Way, which was the trade route from Sweden to the Silk Road.

We can link, through the artifacts and through the bones, that she could have traveled from as far west as Dublin to as far east as at least Kiev in the 30 to 40 years of her life.

How do we know that there were Viking warrior women?

They are mentioned many, many, many times in the literature. In most cases, they have been dismissed as mythological because, of course, we know warriors were men. But we don’t know that. That is an assumption that is based on traditional Victorian ideas that because women are mothers, they’re nurturing, they’re peacemakers, and they don’t fight.

That’s not historically true. Women have always fought. And they appear in most cultures until the 1800s, when Viking studies and archaeology pretty much started. So we sort of have this problem of bias in our earliest textbooks.

But now we have actual scientific proof of one warrior woman in the Viking Age. And as the scientists who did the study say they would be very surprised if she was the only one.

This small female Viking warrior figurine discovered in Harby, Denmark, has been interpreted as a mythological valkyrie. John Lee / National Museum of Denmark

There’s this assumption that the warrior men of myth must have been based on real people, but it’s not the same for the mythical warrior women. Why is that?

It’s just an assumption based on what people think women are like. Most of the material we have from the Middle Ages was written by men, and most of the material we have until the 1950s was written by men, and women are slowly making their way into the field of Viking scholarship. But many of them are still working under the assumptions that they were taught.

I noticed when I went back and reread some of the sagas in Icelandic that there wasn’t this clear distinction between the warrior women being mythological and the warrior men being human. When you actually look at the old Norse text, there’s a lot of words that have been translated as “men” that actually mean “people,” but it’s always been translated as “men” because it’s a warrior situation.

If you’re translating, you have to make decisions and sometimes your decisions have repercussions that you don’t expect, like writing women out of the history.

By the time Hjalmar Stolpe excavated Bj 581, he had become adept at recognizing where graves could be found in the hummocky Birka landscape. WS Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Is it possible for historians to remove all of those biases?

No, I don’t think it is. I think we all are looking through our own lenses. But we have to revisit those sources every generation to see past biases. So when you have layer after layer after layer of removing biases, you may get closer to the truth.

What most surprised you in the course of researching your book?

One of the controversies right now in Viking studies is should we really be talking about men and women at all? Maybe there were all kinds of different genders. We don’t know if there were more than two genders in the Viking age. Maybe it was a spectrum.

If you look at this one group of sagas called the Sagas of Ancient Times that are often overlooked because they have all these fabulous creatures in them, like dragons and warrior women. It’s really interesting [because] these girls grow up wanting to be warriors. They’re constantly disobeying and trying to run off and join Viking bands. But when they do run off and join the Viking band, or, in another case, become the king of a town, they insist on being called by a male name and use male pronouns.

So it was very shocking to me to go back and read it in the original and say, “Wow, all this richness was lost in the translation.”

#Nancy Marie Brown #The Real Valkyrie #Books by women #Books about women #Atlas Obscura #She Was There #Sweden #Birka #grave Bj 581 #Warrior women #Vikings’ East Way

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spacerace-blues · 14 days ago

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can we bring back the talking pillow

#hetalia #hws sweden #hws england #hws hong kong #breaking bad au #rockett decals #drawing in this style for the silhouttes was ca-razyyy real throwback

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raincitygirl76 · 2 years ago

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This is a wonderful take on Kristina. Because she didn’t emerge from the womb fully-formed as the character we know now. She gradually BECAME this fiftysomething woman who is utterly consumed by her role as figurehead to a nation. I wonder how often she heard “being a princess is a privilege, not a punishment” from her parents when she was a girl. How did the king her father reply if she ever said she hadn’t asked for this? The barely suppressed rage in her voice when Wilhelm utters the same complaint to her and she says, “No one has ever, ever asked for this!” is suggestive, just to echo @amyriadfthings

Maybe Kristina too was a neurotic, unhappy, sensitive kid who wasn’t thrilled about her career choice being decided at birth by other people. And she too threw up and had panic attacks when she was nervous. Maybe she is so insistent on Wilhelm learning to control his emotions because she sees herself in her younger son, and she knows she got over this rebellious patch and moulded herself into the metaphorical Viking warrior we know.

And how much bullshit did Kristina have to endure because she was a future Queen rather than a future king? Fun fact, the real Sweden had agnatic primogeniture from 1809 (the Napoleonic era) until 1980. Meaning daughters and granddaughters of kings had zero succession rights, unlike countries which practiced male preference primogeniture (where a princess could inherit the throne if she had no surviving brothers).

Obviously Young Royals takes place in a make believe alternate Sweden with a made-up dynasty. But I wonder if Parliament in YR-Sweden switched to male preference primogeniture when Kristina was a child, when it became obvious she would not have any younger brothers. In which case she’d have no choice but to see being first in line as an honour, rather than a burden. If they changed the law just so she could inherit, perhaps on urging from her father, the king, who desperately wanted his only child to succeed him. And if she loved her dad, she wouldn’t want to disappoint him.

And I wonder if Kristina’s name became a burden to her as well. Being named after Sweden’s last Queen in her own right, the 17th century Christina. The real Christina became Queen in 1632 at the age of 5, and had a succession of regents until she was 18. She openly refused to marry, embraced androgyny in the way she dressed, and had many poorly-concealed romantic relationships with other women.

In the 17th century people struggled to define Queen Christina. In the 21st century she would probably be considered a lesbian. She finally caused the biggest scandal of her reign in 1654 when she converted to Catholicism, abdicated the throne in favour of a male cousin, and moved to Rome.

Obviously Young Royals Kristina has far less political power than her 17th century namesake. But I doubt it’s an accident Lisa Ambjorn named her after such a transgressive example of a female Swedish monarch. Our Kristina is bound up by convention and her sacred duty to the monarchy. The real Christina abandoned her duty, just as Kristina’s son threatens to abandon his duty.

So yes, our Kristina underestimates Wilhelm, underestimates his commitment to Simon, dismisses Simon as an “unfortunate romance” Wille will grow out of once he’s no longer 16 and prone to infatuation. She compares it to her own unfortunate romance around his age, a romance she doesn’t seem to recall with fondness.

She forgets that Wilhelm attached himself like a limpet to his desk when Jan-Olof ordered Malin to physically drag him out of Hillerska, and dared Kristina to survive a public scandal. Because there WOULD have been a public scandal if a classmate of Wilhelm’s had managed to get his taxpayer-funded bodyguards on video manhandling him out of Hillerska and into a waiting car on his mother’s orders.

THAT’s why Jan-Olof got Kristina on the phone. Not because he had an epiphany, but because his and Kristina’s Plan A had spectacularly failed thanks to a skinny but determined teen. Wilhelm and Simon were on the outs in 2.02, but for all their bickering, Wille refused to be parted from Simon. And thus Kristina blinked first in her stare down with her son.

You’d think 2.02 would have taught her not to underestimate her only surviving child, but it didn’t. She assumes the things she was indoctrinated in childhood to believe are things Wilhelm believes too. And he does believe them, at first, but his belief is wallpaper-thin. It doesn’t take Boris much time at all to scrape through that layer of indoctrination and ask Wille what HE wants out of life.

Kristina’s worst decision ever = assuming just because Boris is the Hillerska school psychologist, he’ll parrot the monarchical party line about the importance of secrecy and tradition. You can work for a reactionary institution and not be a reactionary yourself.

Kristina’s second worst decision = not giving August ANY punishment for posting revenge porn of her son, a minor. I think Wilhelm would have felt a little less betrayed by his mother if he’d seen August face consequences from her. Even if they were merely social consequences.

P.S. A shoutout to the casting director,for casting Pernilla August in a small but vital role. Ms August does SO much to convey Kristina’s complexity with limited screen time.

And great tags from @opheliascamander

Sometimes you´re out grocery shopping and idly browsing the frozen veg section when you suddenly remember that the queen threw up after Erik´s death when Wille said he´s always been compared to his brother and Wille threw up when he realized he´s going to have to keep being crown prince.

And you think about similar reactions to stress of parent and child and you remember the queen told Wille to take three deep breaths when he freaked out over Simon´s date and how she sends him to therapy to control his outbursts (ugh).

And you think where did it all go wrong that she can´t ever connect with her son when she´s obviously got some experience in that department. I think we meet her so far into her own history of controlling her emotions that she´s unable and mostly unwilling to connect even when Wille is outright asking her to be his mom (gah!), because oh hey, those would be more emotions she would need to allow to break through, and those walls are staying. Maybe in her mind even for Wille´s own good, to teach him how it´s done.

And there´s certainly reasons for those walls and it´s probably part self-protection and probably people telling her from a young age she needs to have them, and probably also because she´s a woman on the throne, so people would probably insist a little extra on them. .

The most honest and raw I´ve seen her in the show is the moment she throws up.

(I usually question what she´s saying to Wille or August, no matter what warm or soft tone she´s using about what the court allegedly wants her to do, how it´s not really her, and how she actually supports Wille etc, as she´s been proven to manipulate Wille (and August in S2) into doing what she thinks is best for the institution she´s the head of. The one whose survival is always the priority, as per her own words.)

She´s shown to do royal business in what looks like pyjamas after all, the most casual and private of clothes, telling us there´s no separation, ever, that she´s always the queen. She rolls her eyes at her son after ending a phone call in which a rattled Wille sits among shards of glass negotiating with her (!), after she wanted to forcibly remove him from school. She doesn´t ever truly seem torn or conflicted, except that one time she throws up.

When her emotional core literally breaks its way out of her against her will.

No wonder she completely underestimates Wille and the depth and power for change his emotions hold after he´s finally allowed some therapy (that he could have used long ago just for growing up in that institution) and experienced actual emotional growth and healing instead of using it for control like she probably has. No wonder she and the court collectively underestimate Simon and what his love, what their love and connection mean to Wille. (Looking at you, Jan-Olof, allowing Wille a moment with Simon, you fool!) It´s simply been too long behind those impenetrable walls that she can´t even see it anymore. Until her son shows her. And you wonder if he´s even breaking through to her, or if she´s just been confirmed in her fears about his emotional unruliness and will dig in deeper inside her fortress. (Another time if feels like we see some honest emotion from her is of course in S1 when she´s visibly angry as she says that nobody ever chooses the royal life, so maybe Wille can relay Boris´ message about choosing how to live your life to her? Maybe she´s not beyond Boris´ wisdom. Anyway.)

The show shines such an unforgiving light on that institution that chokes all feelings and individual freedom out of you, especially over such a long time as with the queen, but I love love love how hopeful and defiant Wille´s journey of deliberate progress is in the face of it.

And I do hope he´ll continue therapy and never allows his own walls back up once they´re down.

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