I am overdue for a season 2 rewatch, so this may be missing some important lines or details, but I think I saw it a little bit differently. Not positively. But differently.
As we all know, August is very privileged. Privilege operates in a number of ways. Sometimes people assert their privileges in a very active, aggressive way, but sometimes privilege is also about what one doesn’t see or understand as important to someone without that privilege. It can be very difficult for a person to realize how privileged they are because of those blind spots. We often see August enact the first, more aggressive form of privilege, so it can be easy to miss when he’s more passive in his ignorance. Passive ignorance can be just as harmful as active, aggressive forms of claiming one’s privilege, even if the intent behind it is different.
In my mind, August inviting Sara to the dance is a mixture of passive and aggressive behaviors at once.
I don’t think August is necessarily thinking of this as a cold blooded chess move against Simon-Felice-Wille for a few reasons. Or at least, not in the same kind of way. First of all, one of the sources of conflict between him and Sara in this episode is that he doesn’t, actually, fully understand how it reflects on her to be seen with him. Sara, who overhears August’s entire call with Jan-Olof and who gets let in on the information that August could become king one day, isn’t just thinking about what it would be like to be seen with August at school, when he’s someone who betrayed people she loves. She’s also thinking about what it would be like to be dating him long term, in the public eye, where the tabloids have Opinions about her and are looking at her every move. She knows Simon went through absolute hell with the media when the video was leaked. She remembers the journalist at the house hounding her family and invading their privacy, and she remembers how Wilhelm had a PR team that made it easy for him to deny being in the video.
And August like… doesn’t get that or see her point of view there? He’s offended that she’d feel that way, because he’s never thought about what it’s like to be Simon in that situation (and also, he's chosen to ignore what inklings he does get of how hard it was for Simon, this is something Sara calls him out on in 1.6) and he can’t imagine what it would like to be Sara. When he says “I’m not Wilhelm” in their fight, it’s telling. I think part of what he’s saying there is, oh, well of course, unlike Wilhelm, I’d protect you from the media circus and the attention. Which, he’s underestimating how strongly Sara feels about being in the spotlight, and he’s underestimating how much she already knows about already having her family be in the spotlight. He’s also failing to fully grapple with the role he played in creating that situation in the first place.
Sara’s desire to avoid being public, weirdly enough, is something August seems to understand a little better when he and Sara make up from their fight in 2.5. In future scenes we see him taking care to explain how she can get out of his room without being seen, and we see the way he stays quiet about their relationship when Wilhelm holds him at gunpoint. It’s clear to me that August sees this as a temporary state of being rather than their relationship staying secret forever, given the way he asks whether Sara would choose him or Felice, and the line about being king and queen and so on. But he lets Sara be the one to reveal their secret. (Not that it matters at that point, because he’s blackmailed Simon and everything is well and truly fucked at this point.)
This is not to say that August’s inviting Sara to the dance is entirely free of subtle, aggressive competition with Wilhelm, either. That’s definitely there! Of course there’s an element of aggressive public heterosexuality at play here—social dances in Western culture have long been about public displays of heterosexuality, and August has just identified himself as heterosexual in his phone call with Jan-Olof—but I don’t know if it’s the one that August is most conscious of and aggressive about when it comes to competition with Wilhelm.
Instead, I think what August might be trying to compete with Wilhelm on here is in appearing mature and committed and grown up in a relationship, which is something August has tried (unsuccessfully) to pull off since season one. He talks about Felice in marriage terms (and talks about catching her in a pretty misogynistic way) only to have Erik to shoot him down and say he sleeps around too much to pull that off. And then in season 2, a lot of the visual coding and subtext suggest that August is, at least subconsciously if not consciously, thinking about Sara in a marriage kind of way. He asks her to the dance right after a detailed conversation about his future, and then he waits for her with candles and champagne, and he really hasn’t given up thinking about her that way even when they come back together after they fight. I think we’re a bit culturally predisposed (thanks to amatonormativity and a bias toward monogamy) to read this as a sign of maturity initially, but it’s actually quite immature. August is moving fast and he assumes Sara’s onboard with his fairytale future plans when she’s never told him she is. I mean. Yikes? There’s other additions to this post that get into the ways he’s controlling her, and I recommend reading them.
August also invites Sara to the dance right around the time that the rumors about Felice and Wilhelm’s aborted makeout session are rippling through the school, and everyone's like, damn, Wilhelm had his sex tape scandal and now this??? That prince sure is getting around. As audience members who live in Wilhelm's head because he's the protagonist, we know how in love he still is with Simon. But to Hillerska at large, Wilhelm is probably just sowing his wild oats like his older brother told him to. (Side note: it’s interesting how Erik just kind of assumes that both August and Wilhelm will embrace promiscuity, while in fact both August and Wilhelm show tendencies to uhaul as fast as a soft butch in a 1990s lesbian indie movie, and yes, that’s a Better Than Chocolate reference for all the queer Olds.) With the rumors going around about Wilhelm and Felice, Wilhelm is probably not seen as serious about his relationships, but rather as someone who’s hopping around. Felice is seen as maybe a more appropriate choice for him long-term, in the eyes of the singing Forest Ridge boys, but right now she’s just the latest conquest and they’re going to celebrate him for conquering a girl this time. (And I do sort of wonder if the largely two-faced student body of Hillerska thinks of Felice as appropriate future queen material after all—she’s popular and widely-liked and eight guys have asked her out, but the way some of the extras gossip about her being a “gold-digger” who “only dates blue-bloods” I don’t actually think they’d want her as Wilhelm’s long-term girlfriend/future wife. They’d get vicious. I hate this school, your honor.)
Anyway. August, of course, has more insight into Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship than the average Hillerska student, but I still don’t know if he sees the depth of their love the way we do as the audience. Or, perhaps he does see it, on some level, but he chooses to look away, because it’s emotionally easier for him to buy into the narrative of Wilhelm as a volatile, party prince player who isn’t serious about the future king gig. If he buys into that version of Wilhelm, then it’s easier for August to view his leaking the video as a failure of discretion and secrecy, rather than him severely traumatizing a young couple in love by exposing them to the world. It’s also easier for August to think of himself as better for the king role this way. In August’s mind, Wilhelm isn’t serious or discreet. He’s just fucking around and taking his prince role for granted. This allows August to think of himself as better, and he enlists Sara in that delusion by asking her to the dance.
As for Felice and Simon… it sounds weird, but I don’t know if August is thinking of them much in this situation at all, beyond Felice being tied to Wilhelm now by everyone’s gossip. Compared to the first season, where August is constantly and aggressively in Simon and Felice’s business, we see him pull back a bit from them in the first half of season two, because he’s pulled back (and shut out of) his Hillerska social life more generally. This stands out to me because the moment August learns that Felice was the one who told Wilhelm about the video, I expected August to lash out at Felice right away, and pretty vehemently. But he doesn’t. He also has that odd little scene where he tells off Vincent for yelling at Simon in 2.3. Which is not to say he’s behaving perfectly to them, either, or truly making amends, because he hasn’t truly acknowledged the full harm he’s done to them either and offered to own it. August’s heterosexual and upper class privilege allows him to generally ignore how his actions harm Simon, and his male and white privilege allows him to generally ignore how how he harms Felice. He can laugh along with the Forest Ridge guys over Wille’s conquests because, whatever, that’s how we do things at Hillerska, you know? But I do think he sort of… backs away from Simon and Felice personally, a bit, in the first half of the second season, only to come after them more deliberately and with more intent to destroy them in the last two episodes. I think that’s what makes the moment where August is ready to blackmail Simon even more of a twist of the knife for the audience—it’s not just that this is more and more of the same August fuckery, it’s that this is the same August fuckery reasserting itself worse after a brief moment of reprieve.
Long story short I think that August sees Wilhelm as his primary rival in 2.4, whereas Felice and Simon are just collateral damage in that rivalry. And I do think there's an element of here's me doing something that you can't, but it's as much about showing himself to be mature and committed and thinking about his future in a way he doesn't think Wilhelm is. (And it's also about the heterosexuality, in that case, because the general public is more likely to view heterosexual relationships as more permanent and mature—this is something other folks have talked about but I forget who specifically—and anyway I do think August is mostly picking up on that heterosexual bias part more unconsciously, but is still using it to further his social power, if that makes sense.) I’m also thinking that his audience here isn’t even 100% Wilhelm or even Hillerska. August also wants word to get back to the palace and the royal court that, look, he’s dating a very nice girl, and he’s going to stay with her. Not even Erik fully pulled that off.
Of course, I could be missing an important scene here. Feel free to correct me if I missed a Simon or Felice interaction in 2.4 that could be telling. It’s been a while since my last season 2 watch.
Sorry for the long post here. I just have a lot of thoughts! To me, I think part of August’s nuance lies not just in his backstory but in how he thinks about his motives and decisions—how he chooses to frame his choices, and what external factors (or other people!) he tends to ignore or downplay in the process in order to justify those choices, sometimes after the fact when his decisions are made rashly or impulsively. He doesn’t think of himself as a cackling villain in Wille’s story, he thinks of himself as a hero of his own story. (A struggling Byronic hero with the usual falls from grace and consuming vices, but you know.) As Lisa tells us, August’s actions always make sense to August. This is the number one thing I keep in mind when writing August in a fanfic scene, whether I’m writing a scene from his point of view or from someone else’s. It just makes him feel a lot more real, I find, and it especially helps me make his dialogue more authentic. At least, by my own standards. Whatever, I’m proud of my writing. I have no artful conclusion here so I’m just going to hit post and hope for the best!
