You can call me Sflow. Awkward millennial from the Nordics, self-employed translator, massive geek, still an early 2000s emo kid at heart.
I came out of lurking in early 2022, for the Young Royals fandom I'd been following (and posting fic for) since July 2021. I am still here for YR, but I also blog about other stuff I'm into (e.g. Stranger Things), ace stuff, my native country’s politics, etc. I will continue to tag those posts ‘not yr’ for your convenience!
One reason I have so much love for YR is that it reignited my creative spark. I'm Sflow on ao3. Fic descriptions and links are also available on a separate master list page; they are mostly alloace Henry fics as per my headcanon of him.
My magnum opus is an S1-compliant longfic called Other people’s secrets. It's an outsider POV of Wilmon, a personal growth journey for Henry, and an ace/allo romance between him and Walter. I'm proud to say the Walty ship name was coined by my readers!
[Description post here, first chapter here, excerpts here.]
My current WIPs have been on hiatus for a while due to creative burnout and real-life stress, but they are not abandoned!
I've also written a pre-canon character study on August. It's called Årnäs, February 2016 and it explores his upbringing and parental relationships. More recently, I wrote a little Stedrika thing for an event, from Fredrika's POV which we didn't get to see in the show.
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My blog is of course safe for LGBTQIA+ people. I’m grey ace with demi tendencies; romantic orientation unlabelled/fluid since I accepted my asexuality and Realised Some Stuff about my history of attraction. Some flavour of multiromantic anyway.
Thank you for reading! 💜
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Links to a few longer pieces of YR/fandom meta under the cut.
The posts marked in purple are obsolete after S3.
About the settlement between Wille, Simon and August
About Linda's salary and the Erikssons' financial situation
Sharing my notes on Swedish nicknames
About Henry and Walter’s canon backgrounds
Stedrika thoughts
Some notes on the aristocracy in Sweden
Some thoughts on the hierarchy at Hillerska
About August’s upbringing, worldview and parents
YR S3 speculation: a layperson’s take on the criminal justice side
Team "Let Wille Be Fully Himself And Parliament Decide What's Next"
On writing niche YR fic and factors that affect the popularity of a fic
Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing
This is all correct and good but I want to add it was actually EARLIER than 1890, it was just called “monosexual” instead of asexual, and who knows what happened before that that was lost to history
From asexuals.net (link shared by op in the replies):
When we look into the history of asexuality, the first mention of it can be traced back all the way to the 1860’s. In 1869 a Hungarian doctor named Karl-Maria Kertbeny anonymously created pamphlets, against a sodomy law in Germany.
In these pamphlets he mentioned three different sexual orientations: heterosexual, homosexual and monosexual. This was also the first known public appearance of the term homosexual.
These days monosexuality means feeling romantic or sexual attraction to only one sex/gender. But when doctor Karl-Maria Kertbeny wrote about ‘monosexual’ he referred to people who only masturbate. (“sexual satisfaction only with themselves“)
Other 19th century mentions from Nothing Radical:
Richard von Krafft-Ebing writes about asexuality in his 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis (Psychopathy of Sex). In it, he uses the term anesthesia sexual to refer to people with an “absence of sexual feeling.” [---] This is likely one of the first examples of the pathologization of asexual people which continues to this day.
German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld [---] also published the pamphlet Sappho und Sokrates in 1896, which recognizes people without any sexual desire under the label “anesthesia sexual”—the same term used by Krafft-Ebing. In this work, Hirschfeld also develops a quantitative scale for describing human sexuality which rates the intensity of same-sex and opposite-sex attraction on separate axes, each from 1 to 10 [---] the first I was able to find which explicitly accounts for asexuality.
German sexologist Emma Trosse not only gave us a definition of asexuality, but was openly asexual herself. Trosse was the first woman to publish a scientific work on homosexuality in women and advocated for legal protections for sexual minorities. In her 1897 work Ein Weib? Psychologisch-biographische: Studie über eine Konträrsexuelle (A woman? Psychological-biographical study of a contrary-sexual), she gives us a definition of asexuality under the label Sinnlichkeitslosigkeit (asensuality) and says in a footnote, “Author has the courage to admit to this category.”
One of the earliest uses of the term “asexual” in literature I found comes from Otto Weininger’s misogynist diatribe Sex and Character [1907]. In it, Weininger denigrates women for sexually tempting men, asserting confidently that it is not possible for a woman to be asexual [---].
more people could identify as asexual/aromantic if they not only knew what that label is but also knew about how wide the spectrum could be. because not every ace/aro person feels the same way and even people who DO have a general idea on what it means, could still be like "yeah no i cant be possibly ace/aro because i feel/do this and that"
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
snippet of a young royals wip i’m too impatient not to share from…
Every fibre of [August’s] being aches and burns with the effort in each stroke, and it feels good to hurt like this, like the pain is somehow proof that he’s advancing, becoming better in some immeasurable but objective, intrinsic way, both at rowing and in other aspects. It’s almost as potent a motivator as self-hatred.
Can’t you see how much more I’m doing than everyone else? Can’t you see how hard I’m trying, he wants to shout. To whom, he doesn’t exactly know. The entire house of Forest Ridge? Vincent, and rest of that traitorous rowing team? Wilhelm, squandering all of his privileges, running away from his duty? It doesn’t matter; it would be a futile effort. No one would believe him, in any event - he doesn’t have the results to show for it, he knows, mind cast back to the countless selfies in his camera roll - and that sort of emotional outburst would only solidify the low opinions they already have of him.
He’s the crown prince’s backup. The pressure on his second cousin is immense; the pressure on August himself is increased tenfold. There’s no room for failure.
All requests for the gift exchange have now been made public! Check them out here if you're thinking of making a Treat.
Treats are extra gifts that anyone can make based on the above requests, whether you signed up for the exchange yourself or not. They don't need to meet the same minimum requirements as an assigned gift, and can be submitted at any time up until works are revealed on Sat 1 August.
If you're taking part in the exchange, reblog this post to let your followers know if you're open to receiving Treats!
Drabble for week 20 of the weekly drabble challenge initiated by malinowaj.
| 100 words | Prompt: Night | R: Gen | POV: August |
If there was something that August appreciated it was how silent Hillerska could be. Not during the afternoons spent in the common room, or at rowing practice, shouting orders over the cold water. Rather, that stillness when everybody had gone to their rooms, separate or in duos. With the lights-out pulling a blanket over even the slightest whisper. He had gotten good at implementing the same order he and the other third years had learnt their first months.
Hillerska always gave an otherness compared to sounds of the nights at Årnäs.
Soon he would never hear any of them again.
Young Royals Gift Exchange 2026 Sign-ups are OPEN!
Thank you to everyone who posted something for Wilmon Day! Tag us in any late submissions and we'll continue to reblog.
Moving on from Valborg to 1 May: sign-ups are now open for the YR Gift Exchange 2026!
This is a multimedia gift exchange along the same lines as a 'Secret Santa' type exchange, and you can request/offer fanfiction, fanart, images/gifs, video, podfics and fanmixes. Everyone is very welcome, from newbies to old hands! The exchange is open to all ships (or no ships), characters, ratings and themes.
Sign-ups are open from now until Saturday 16 May, 23:59 CEST (that's Stockholm time). You can edit your sign-up as many times as you like until the deadline. Assignments will be due in late July.
You can find all the dates and details at the profile page. The sign-up process is simpler than it might first look and there are instructions on the form itself. There's also an example sign-up here for anyone who would like a bit more detailed guidance.
Let us know if any questions, and please reblog and spread the word!
Would anyone like to hear the amateur sociology theory I have brewing in my head, about how the Young Royals fandom is actually 2-3 coexisting fandoms or subfandoms?
—which is actually a sort of an interesting feature of the fandom, because a lot of big fandoms I’ve been part of in the past, like Les Mis and Doctor Who, have had smaller fandoms or subfandoms inside of it. But I never thought of it as being a small fandom thing! Anyway. Time to go run for the bus.
By request of the people (according to my notes, @andyouloveme, @sflow-er, @almostlake, @margotdanslebois, @scottishgremlin, @zarogz, @exakttt, @simonsapelsin, @dayagold, @randomowlscreeching, @mydignityisinflames, @youcancallmewhatyoulike, @princess-wilhelmine) let me talk about subfandoms! I’ll start by defining what I mean when I say subfandom.
Most fans approach a canon through a particular lens. This lens can influence what about a canon they tend to center in their fanworks and analysis, how they approach filling in the gaps in canon, and what texts they see as comparable to canon.
A lens isn’t the same thing as what I’m calling a subfandom. Instead, a subfandom is the loose community that comes together when people have similar lenses for their approach to canon, and when their ideas start to influence one another. Bigger fandoms, especially ones based on expansive canons with a lot of characters or a lot of different variations on characters, naturally lend themselves to subfandoms. Les Misérables has a subfandom for Les Amis and another one for Valvert and another for Fantine. Doctor Who fans might organize themselves into fans of different eras. And so on and so forth.
It might be tempting to view subfandoms as factions of a fandom in competition with one another—especially in the case of fandoms with ship wars, where they can end up that way—but I don’t think this is the way subfandoms always play out. Subfandoms can instead be kind of… permeable? You can occupy more than one subfandom at once, and may move back and forth between them without even thinking about it too much, just as you might have different lenses you use to examine a movie, book, or TV show. But subfandoms can also be kind of invisible to a person, and you might not realize that someone else is in a different subfandom than you until you really start digging deeper re: how they interact with canon and how that’s different from you.
Young Royals fandom is small, so I didn’t expect there to be much in the way of subfandoms for the show when I first joined it. At present, after being in the fandom for half a decade now, I think I can identify three subfandoms operating within the larger Young Royals whole. Let me put them behind a readmore as I continue…
The Wilmon subfandom: This is an approach to Young Royals that centers Wilhelm and Simon’s romantic relationship, as well as Wilhelm and Simon as characters. A central tenet of this lens is that Wilhelm and Simon will be in love in any universe, so one of the features of this subfandom is that you can remove Wilhelm and Simon from their existing universe and rewrite them in any number of alternate universes. This allows for a lot of flexibility in fic writing when it comes to setting and worldbuilding, giving writers opportunities to rescue wilmon from the show’s relentless teen angst, or throw them into more grown up angst in a new situation. Members of the wilmon subfandom are most likely to see YR as in conversation with other romance stories like Heated Rivalry. In my experience, they are the most likely of the subfandoms to draw on elements in the existing body of fanfic, as well as of Omar and Edvin’s stage personas, to flesh out Wilhelm and Simon when they appear in fics, headcanons, or analysis.
The Hillerska subfandom: This is an approach to Young Royals that centers the ensemble of teenage characters and their coming of age, often as shaped by Hillerska’s boarding school environment. Hillerska subfans may enjoy some combination of Felice, Sara, August, Vincent, Nils, Stella, Fredrika, Maddie, Alexander, Walter, Henry, Rosh, Ayub, or Marcus, although not necessarily all of them at once. (Apologies to Rosh and Ayub and Marcus for putting them under the Hillerska banner, but we’re being approximate here.) Hillerska fans may also like Wilhelm and Simon but do not center them or their romance as exclsively in their fanworks or analysis. One feature of this Hillerska lens is that it gives you a variety of characters to play with so you don’t get bored; this is balanced out by a drawback where you don’t have *as* much flexibility with AUs because the character-setting interaction is part of the point. Members of the Hillerska subfandom are more likely to see YR as in conversation with other school stories and teen dramas like SKAM. They are likely to supplement canon by researching aspects of real boarding schools, or by drawing on comments from cast interviews about what such-and-such secondary character is up to when we don’t see them.
The Royal subfandom: This is an approach to Young Royals that centers Wilhelm’s experiences as a prince, as well as his relationships to his royal family members like Kristina, Erik, and August. This may also extend to Simon if they are writing a fanfic where Wilhelm and Simon are a royal couple. Someone in the Royal subfandom does not necessarily want Wilhelm to remain a prince in the future (some may, some may not) but they are probably the people most interested in how being a prince affects Wilhelm’s life, his mental health, etc. Members of this subfandom are more likely to see YR as in conversation with works of fiction featuring royal characters, such as The Crown, or the actual history of real life royals. They may use knowledge of these subjects to supplement their understanding of canon. This is the subfandom I feel like I know the least about, but it’s also one where I feel like lately I’m talking to more fans where the royalty aspects of the show are important to them. So if this is you and you want to chime in, please do!
Those are the subfandoms I’ve identified, but perhaps I’m missing one. Do you think there’s anything I missed? I kept trying to think if there was a subfandom that centered Simon more by himself, the way the Royal subfandom would center Wilhelm, but I wasn’t sure how it interacts with the fandom of Omar-the-real-life-person and if one was an extension of the other.
Of these three subfandoms, the Wilmon subfandom is the biggest, and the other two are smaller by far, and perhaps might be missed by people wandering into the fandom for the first time. Especially small are the groups who spend most of their time in the Hillerska or Royal subfandoms and don’t venture into the Wilmon one as much. That said, there are many people in the YR fandom who spend time in more than one subfandom, even if they might primarily “identify” with one subfandom’s mode of engagement. Also, much like with horoscopes, no description above is going to describe one individual perfectly. The point is observing tendencies in how a group behaves in this fandom space, how we reinforce one another’s behaviors and ideas, etc.
Which gets me back to something I brought up when I defined the concept of a subfandom: the notion of a community where individuals with similar lenses begin to influence one another. One way this comes up is in the creation of fanon—of course separate subfandoms are going to collectively adopt different brands of fanon. But I also think the subfandom you spend the most time in is going to affect how you answer certain questions, like: Is the show a romance, a coming of age drama, or a social commentary? Does it have one main character, or two main characters, or five? How much does the ensemble matter? Which characters are complex-and-capable-of-growth versus which characters are complex-but-irredeemable versus which characters have Never Done Anything Wrong In Their Lives? What is the purpose of fanfic, and how much does one value canon compliance where we get to see the characters continue navigating their existing world, versus AUs where they get to navigate new ones? What parts of season 3 were great versus which ones were terrible? How much do the actors inform our understanding of the characters?
It’s really tempting to view these questions as related to who interprets the text “correctly,” but I think it’s also important to consider how our primary subfandom influences how we answer those questions. For me, I’d say oh yes, of course the show is a coming of age drama with strong romantic themes, of course it has five main characters, of course the ensemble matters a lot to the storytelling—but of course I’d say that, I’m in the Hillerska subfandom, I’ve formed the closest friendships with people who see the show similarly. In this way fandom becomes about more than just venerating a canon. It’s also about how we interact as fans.
I’ve also reflected on how the relative sizes of the subfandoms and how they shape aspects of the fandom culture and traditions—what gets memed, what’s a symbol of the show (Simon’s fish) versus what isn’t (Vincent’s bubble tape.) Beltane as Wilmon Day, masterfully organized by our events community, has the backing of the relatively larger Wilmon subfandom. Meanwhile, even with brilliant organizers promoting it, I’m uncertain if an idea like declaring Lucia as Sara Eriksson Day is ever something that would gather a critical number of fans behind it to make it a “thing.” I suppose I shouldn’t rule it out—we’ve had things like Felice Friday take off—but even when the fandom was at its peak, it was difficult to organize people around non-wilmon events.
As the broader Young Royals fandom shrinks, I think what we’re seeing is people from different subfandoms brought more into proximity with one another, and recognizing the differences in how we perceive the show. It’s possible this will cause a shift in subfandom dynamics, or that it already has. My hope is always that we learn from one another and continue to enjoy ourselves.
