Do you have a celebrity crush, dear reader?
A diletto you let your weary eye (and perhaps ear) feast on at the end of a long and tiring day? Someone who makes you stop in your tracks whenever they grace your TV screen? Someone who has you smile your secretive smile (that is actually just an idiot smile) and accidentally spill your wine all over the coffee table because you were blindly groping around for the remote to turn up the volume?
Is it an actor, a model, a dancer, an athlete, a singer perhaps? (I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.)
Well, if you’ve got one, then you know the basic rules of picking a celebrity crush, of course.
Namely, choose your celebrity crushes wisely!
Pick someone who looks a bit like your significant other when you squint; this way your partner will be flattered instead of jealous.
Pick someone who is so talented in their field that you get some plausible deniability out of the deal. (“I just like this celebrity for their talent.”)
If all else fails, pick someone both you and your partner can crush on together. (Obviously easier to pull off for the gays amongst my readership and a bit harder, but not entirely impossible for the straights, I suppose; after all, there’s a reason why terms like ‘man crush’ and ‘girl crush’ exist.)
And then there are, of course, the extremely rare cases among us where an especially lucky person actually manages to nab their childhood crush, cases where someone eventually marries the very guy or gal they did fancy from afar for all those years, long, long before they actually got to know them…But more about Simon in a minute.
If you’ve been following this little blog for a while, then you do, of course, know already what we are talking about at this point. We had discussed it when we first entered the House of Horrors Mirrors that is the subtext of ‘Young Royals’: Someone on this show had a massive celebrity crush on Wilhelm years before the two of them actually met and fell in love. And that someone is…Simon. There is ample evidence for this in the subtext of the show.
Far from being just a silly little crush, these particular feelings were very intense and very important to Simon, though; they were an essential, even wholesome part of his life before Wilhelm, as strange as this may sound.
We will dive deep, deep into the structure of the narrative for this one, I promise. We will see why this celebrity crush is not like our celebrity crushes (yours and mine) at all, why it’s such an important element in the show’s narrative, why this former celebrity crush might turn into a danger and a threat in season three and why Simon might even risk losing everything because of it…
Follow me under the cut if you want to know more about what a key role this crush played in shaping Simon’s emotional inner landscape and what challenges might lie ahead now that he is actually in a relationship with the very person he used to fancy from afar.