Young Royals and its fannish mentor texts
One thing about Young Royals is that I’m almost the same age as the creator. Based on what she’s alluded to in her interviews, we existed in some of the same fandom spaces in our late teens and early 20s. I don’t think we ever crossed paths—and if we did, how would I know? The internet was a more anonymous place back then. But anyhow, we were both in the fandom for a certain commercially successful book series about a boy wizard, which I will not name because I don’t want the algorithm to think I support its author. From what it sounds like, Lisa and I were likely both hanging out on the “slash” side of that fandom with a lot of m/m ships.
The thing about that boy wizard fandom in the early 00s specifically is that it had a specific vibe with specific conversations and criticisms of the books going on. At that time the entire book series wasn’t out yet, and the movies were just in the process of coming out. Merchandise started coming out right away, but was mostly geared toward kids and teens at the oldest. Supplemental canon barely existed and the author was not on social media because no one was. And on various online forums and especially Livejournal, fans critically discussed the books’ character arcs, plots, and themes. No one knew the exact shape of what the whole story would look like, and no one fully expected the author to take a fully regressive turn later, although some of the signs were already there. And fans did criticize what wasn’t working for them about the books, while holding out hope that certain things about the status quo would change by the end of the series.
In my memory, fans were pretty creative about how they approached the world of these books. (There was a lot of drama too, to be fair.) People imagined what it would look like for villain characters to get better and hero characters to get worse. They imagined adult futures for all the children all kinds of backstory for seemingly more minor characters. And they definitely wrote stories where canonically straight characters were queer, since the books themselves were, well, pretty relentlessly cishet.
I start with all this preface to say that, knowing what kinds of conversations and fanfic were going on in the early 00s wizard boy fandom, I can see that fandom’s influence (not so much the canon’s influence) on Young Royals and Lisa Ambjörn. Someone who grew up writing m/m slash fanfic, in an environment where people’s hopes for eventual representation were dashed and then shattered further when the author’s more queerphobic beliefs became harder and harder to ignore, would probably feel driven to include canonically queer characters in their writing. The kind of information we get about secondary character Hillerska students, and the way most of them have a bit of moral nuance going on, feels like the kinds of backstories (and ships) fans imagined for minor students at the wizarding school. And if you were someone who criticized the system in the books where children are sorted into color coded “houses” and a lot of their path is carved out by magical “lineage” then I can see how you move from that to writing about IRL royalty and nobility and also just the boxes society puts us in. I remember many fans (myself included) being upset that the wizard boy books end with a nuclear family reset and the problem-creating house system at the school not being abolished. I don’t actually know how Lisa felt about that, but I can see how someone—someone becoming a writer in an environment where people are talking about that—might be interested in one day creating a story that ends with a prince deciding to leave the throne.
And to further clarify: I don’t actually know how much Lisa’s fanfiction writing years influenced her in this regard. I’m really only making guesses, and she has thousands of other influences I’m sure. Perhaps I can, at least, talk about myself, and why the show as it is speaks to the part me that had those questions and concerns about the wizard boy books. My early 00s fandom past, to some extent, also guided how I approached a lot of YR. I think it’s part of what drew me to the school setting and the varied cast of characters. I also attempted to pay more attention to female characters than I did in my teens and I feel like YR definitely rewarded me on that front!
I want to be even more clear that I don’t think Young Royals is actually fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, and that there’s a one to one correspondence between wizard boy characters and Young Royals characters. There’s nothing that maps so precisely or exactly like that. So no, I am not making that claim.
Finally, I think some of the best things about the show are some of the best because they feel like a fanfic. But I think that some of the show’s flaws are things that feel like a fanfic, as well. I don’t have a coherent post about that yet, and some of that is subjective (I don’t think people can agree on the show’s flaws and its virtues enough for that) so I don’t know if I’ll ever post about that idea.
Anyway, this YR = influenced in part by fandom criticism of the wizard boy books theory is all just a working theory. I’d be curious for those of you who are about my age range and spent time in similar early 00s fandom spaces—Livejournal veterans especially!—if you see what I see. Feel free to add your thoughts or reblog around so this post can get more eyeballs. Genuinely curious what people’s ideas are!
