the thing is, when wtfock did the homophobic assault plot, i personally felt like it was both highly triggering and too ambitious considering the time and limitations they had.
robbe started off with a lot of internalized homophobia: he did a lot of back-and-forth because he struggled to accept his feelings for sander, he struggled to accept what it meant for his sexuality and identity, he struggled to accept sander in his life. and so soon, the story felt punishing toward him when he had just accepted his feelings for a man, just accepted the new shape his life had taken.
i do think that if skam wants to be a reflection of the reality of being a teen within the time and place the story is set in, you can't pretend that being out and proud won't come with a certain level of risk and danger, that it won't come with bad experiences, even in a country as 'socially accepting' of lgbt+ people as belgium.
but the audience who relates to the story and characters they're watching, they deserve queer joy too. and when robbe already had so much shit to deal with in under 3 months, adding a verbally and physically violent, homophobic assault on top of it all felt like one step too far. putting the main character through that trauma so soon in his journey, forcing him to carry that with him for the rest of his life yet expecting him to bounce back so quickly because other major plot points have to take place, forcing the writers to quickly brush that event under the rug was crazy.
of course, when the writers decided to do it, they made robbe, sander and us feel blindsided, because you often don't see it coming in real life either, but you can't expect us to believe robbe was able to bounce back and heal from incredibly traumatic events that happened within weeks of each other just like that. it felt terrible to realize he had to go through the most within a story that can't afford to give the characters a realistic amount of time to digest everything. realistically, he would have needed weeks to accept his sexuality (skam has always asked a lot of suspension of disbelief timeline-wise), weeks to open his heart to sander so fully, weeks if not months to register what happened to them on that night, weeks to fully grasp what dating sander meant in relation to his bipolar disorder and months if not years of therapy to heal from everything.
now. i trust the sram writers know what they're doing. if they feel like presenting this story of growth and acceptance and love with rose-tinted glasses is not a fair representation of the croatian experience and wouldn't do lovro justice, then fair! if ivan mentioning that attack was foreshadowing, it's not just for the sake of story-telling, or to have that anxiety-inducing shadow of a threat, of danger looming over the characters, it's also to prepare us. it tells us this is the reality of these two queer men living in croatia, they know it, the croatian audience knows it and now everyone is on the same page. i trust that it won't just be a plot device to karmically put lovro and/or ivan through it, to rob them of happiness, to taint their happy ever after. they don't need a gloomy reality-check.
