"The Tragedy of Being Rich" Transcript

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I’ve always found it interesting that economically disenfranchised people, also known as poor people when you’re not trying to make it sound better, have a very love-hate relationship with the rich. You’d think it would be pure hate, seeing as how the rich tend to use the poor in any number of horrible ways. But there is an odd attraction to the rich set, especially the filthy rich.

When it comes to media we’re not that interested in seeing those who describe themselves as comfortable or upper middle class. Because those people, who tend to make high six to low seven figure salaries a year, know how to keep themselves hidden. They don’t flaunt their wealth in ways that stand out from anyone else in a gated suburb. Two cars, maybe? Perfect green lawn? Pool in the backyard? Nothing too extraordinary. Nothing worth making a tv show about, at least. But the filthy rich, well, they just can’t help but broadcast how much money they’ve got. Yachts, multiple houses, fancy cars, diamond engagement rings the size of the hope diamond^{[sic: Hope Diamond]}. Trips to space. When you’ve got it, flaunt it! Right?

And we poors and working class folks find that fascinating, I think. At least I do. That the richest of the rich feel so comfortable that they can’t imagine something like a, say, French Revolution happening. We wouldn’t even need to research who to take to the gallows, they literally publish their wealth on an annual basis. And I think they feel this safety because they feel us lower classes fawning over them in fictional media. Prime time soaps of the 1980s like Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest. Teen dramas like Gossip Girl. Outlandishly best selling novels like those written by Danielle Steele^{[sic: Steel]} and Kevin Kwan. We eat up the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and I think that gives them a sense of security. Because this media shows them as rich, yes, but also fallible. They’re stressed out, emotionally unstable, and unable to keep their lives together. Just like us. So this media shows us that, but for a few extra zeroes at the end of their bank balances, we’re no different, really.

But lately that addiction to watching the rich has mostly dissipated. The Real Housewives of [insert city here] are still fabulously popular, or infamous, but media about rich people isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it once was. Except for shows like Billions and Succession or movies like The Wolf of Wall Street where the rich are absolutely not good people.

But there does seem to be a caveat to that. We do still love watching media about the rich if they aren’t just rich… but royal. The Crown is a good example. But I’m not here to talk about Queen Elizabeth and what that family did to Diana. I’m here to talk about a little Netflix show called Young Royals.

Young Royals is a Netflix drama series focusing on Prince Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} of Sweden, the younger of two royal sons. After a video tape of him getting into a scuffle in a club goes viral, the Royal Family is keen to paint him as an out-of-control delinquent who needs to get shipped off to the country for boarding school. So, off to Hilerska^{[sic: Hillerska]} boarding school he goes… like it’s a prison sentence. His brother, the crown prince pulls up in a Ferrari to see him off. We, the audience, are dragged through Willhelm’s discomfort as he poses for photo ops and is greeted by the entire school staff.

It’s clear that Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} doesn’t like being on camera. He doesn’t like performing, and he doesn’t like the posturing required of the monarchy. The pomp and circumstance grates against his authenticity. The ‘royal life’ is already in opposition to who he is and how he wants to express himself in the first episode.

[mockingly] He’s not like other Royals.

The storm clouds raining on his parade part briefly when the school rolls out a… choir… for his arrival. OH THE HORRORS OF BIRTHRIGHT. And it’s love at first sight when Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} lays eyes on Simon, who, as the soloist, enchants Willhelm. And who would not be enchanted?

The majority of the show focuses around Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} and Simon, and the development of their teenage courtship. In spite of the whole… love at first sight thing — I have to say I really appreciate how earnest the show is in it’s^{[sic: its]} depiction of teenage gay boys trying to figure out how to make this whole ‘relationship’ thing work. Nothing is particularly sensationalised. Instead you have two awkward kids with hormones pouring out of their ears trying really hard not to stare at each other.

Problem: Simon is not rich. In fact, Simon is depicted as perhaps on the poor side of middle class. He and his sister are attending Hilerska^{[sic: Hillerska]} through scholarships and are not boarding at the school, but instead have to bus to and from every day. Especially with Simon, there is a heap of friction between him and the other boys at school, who come from money. And by ‘come from money’ I mean — getting together, bragging about how much land their family estates have and popping pills.

Through the duration of this first season, we see the struggles Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} and Simon face as they try to express their feelings for eachother. And at almost every turn, Willhelm feels like his Royal responsibilities prevent him and Simon from being together. Which results in, about twice per episode, Wilhelm flip-flopping back and forth on whether he wants to be with Simon. “Oh I like you,” but “oh I need you to delete my number,” but “oh hey you should spend the weekend with me.” I mean who doesn’t want to be pursued by a handsome prince, but this boy is waving heart-shaped red flags in Simon’s face like it’s valentine's day for the indecisive.

And it’s definitely clear that the show wants to use this ‘two worlds collide’ romance in order to open a discussion about wealth inequality, but there’s very little in the way of worlds colliding. Granted, it IS nice that you don’t have a rich person staring down their nose at the poor and asking: “what’s a microwave?” Though the show does go out of its way to describe SOME kind of class dynamic, at times heavy-handedly, I feel like this is more out of a sense of obligation. You have a literal love-at-first sight fairytale, a kind of queer adaptation of Cinderella. And If you want to write that in this day and age, there is going to be a question about the wealth discrepancy hanging over the plot.

But aside from the lack of fancy food, which bothers Simon’s sister Sara to no end, the poors don’t really have to face a whole lot of struggles from their economic situation. We know Simon’s family is struggling, but we don’t know to what extent. Actually, while we may see the poors struggle because they’re poor, we only really see the riches suffer… because they’re rich.

…Hear me out. As the show primarily follows Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}’s POV, we, the audience, are most empathetically drawn to his emotional development. His drama seems to arise from all of the ways that being a royal is an obstacle. With the exception of the death of his brother, his suffering is almost entirely linked to him being wealthy. The show goes to great lengths to describe how and why we should empathise, maybe even pity this literal prince, BECAUSE he’s a prince. From the very clear neglect and distance he feels from his parents, the strain of having to do things he does not want to do, struggling to keep what he wants at arms’ length because he knows he will not be allowed to have it, to being manipulated and hazed by other rich boys. Hazing is illegal for a lot of reasons, due in part to the fact that — at best — they are non consensual rituals of humiliation and establishing power structures. Or as some would say ‘boys being boys.’ And while Willhelm does not consent to this, within the first episode, it’s made very clear that he would not be in this situation if he were not wealthy.

And while the overall plot of the show is weaved together out of a number of other issues affecting the other principal characters, Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}’s emotional state is always brought to the forefront. From what I can tell, it seems as if the show is making the statement that Willhem’s stunted emotional growth is due specifically to his birthright and responsibilities as a Prince of Sweden. It is, after all, the crown that prevents him from living as he choses. It is the crown which forces him into this school. And then it is the crown that forces him into publicly denying the existence of a relationship with Simon, even after a sex tape is leaked.

If only there was a poor who could understand… an emotional support poor if you will… who could help him find a reason to sort through all of his emotional BS. Does Simon have his crap together…? I mean honestly, he has the emotional intelligence to spot red flags and put distance between him and someone he slept with so… that’s already leagues ahead of most teenagers. And me.

Simon’s conflict doesn’t really stem from his own emotional ties — he struggles with Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}’s emotions. But his role, as this is fiction crafted by authors who have intent, is to look cute and benefit from Willhelm's emotional state.

I wasn’t being flippant when I said that this was a Cinderella story, it’s just flipped almost entirely in the opposite direction. The Cinderella figure is Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}, who longs to escape his world of fabulous wealth, and you have Simon, who is the escape from that rigid and emotionally negligent world. Simon is the pauper prince charming in this version of the fairytail, not the prince himself. Wilmhelm has money, but in order for him to become a functioning human being, he needs someone to help him navigate all the emotions he’s not allowed to have.

Enter the poor person, for whom emotional intelligence is in abundance. Simon’s family life is almost a night-and-day foil to Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}. Little in the way of expendable income, but wealth in emotions, and having an open, honest line of dialogue with his mother. She loves him, cares about him, and wants him to be happy. His gayness is never an issue with her because her son’s emotions, his happiness, come first. Simon has the only thing money can’t buy — a good home. So if emotions are money, it’s Simon who is the emotionally liberated prince who needs to sweep Willhelm off HIS feet.

One may say that this is an interesting flip… But in Wealth-centric propaganda fiction, the glorification of poverty isn’t exactly new. And based on how successful it is, I can’t see it going away any time soon. We see a lot of media popping up about how hard it is to be wealthy, and especially Royal. How the responsibility of privilege weighs down so much that it crushes the individual.

This is the focus and topic of The Crown. Taking the royals and showcasing their most public moments — taking care to explain that these people WOULD be decent human beings IF ONLY they did not have so many burdens. That obligation stifles the ability to be human and begets more suffering across generations. There are a number of instances but the clearest to me is in Season 3 Episode 6, where Prince Charles is sent to a school he does not want to go to so that he can fulfil a royal obligation that his family has arranged against his wishes. Charles has to spend time with a LOWLY professor and his family. At which point the professor’s wife remarks how sad Charles makes her. How he looks at them and their child as if he’s never received so much as a pat on the head from his parents. Again, reinforcing the concept that the poor have a greater wealth of authentic life that the rich could never buy for themselves.

And this media’s message is that the Rich NEED the poor to help them sort out their crap. Look at Crazy Rich Asians, where the Young family NEEDS a poor woman to stand up to the bullying family matriarch. You have a similar setup in Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America. Or Gone With the Wind, where a fallen-from-grace plantation owner literally cannot function on a base human level without the assistance of a freed slave now-servant. Hmm. One of those things was not like the others. Or Downton Abbey which has a VERY optimistic depiction of how upper-and lower-classes interact, and is host to any range of emotional support poors who are there to step in and offer some advice you can’t buy.

In this media the problem with wealth is that the riches have forgotten to respect and value what services the poor can offer them. Keep in mind, Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}’s infatuation with Simon begins while Simon is literally singing. The wealthy falling in love with the poor because of a song, or a poem, or even natural beauty, is something media has depicted across time. On one hand, it is a message to the rich to value the poor because talent and merit is something that cannot be bought. On the other hand, it is a message to the poor to be as talented as humanly possible in the hopes of attracting a wealthy patron.

[Video goes fuzzy, like something's wrong with the VHS.]

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Media like this frames wealth as a gilded cage. And while poor people may not have financial stability, they are depicted as having a degree of freedom that is simply not accessible to the wealthy. I’ve never been wealthy, so I can’t say if the former is true, but I can say that depicting poverty as ‘freedom’ is certainly… a take.

You COULD say a non-royal poor person can kiss whoever they want without familial consequences or repercussions. But that is looking at poverty with very rose-tinted glasses.

In spite of the fact that it was a very well-crafted show with plenty of good characters and emotional realism, I did find Young Royals was a little guilty of this. If there was more content about Simon’s social standing, it didn’t make it into the final cut or it’s going to be explored in a second season. Which is happening. Yay!

And of course, carrying on this discourse framed exclusively around Swedish wage classes, we’re getting into that nasty territory of saying “well it’s not as bad as it is in America, so stop complaining.” And we’re not gonna do that here! But it does re-enforce a toxic romanticization around poverty. This rich vs. poor depiction goes out of its way to make poor viewers grateful that they’re poor. They have something that the rich will never have, and they/we ought to be grateful for it. The REAL wealth is the people you meet along the way, and so on and so forth.

This media tells us that it’s the poors’ responsibility to keep the rich grounded and honest. But one thing this media does not highlight is that their responsibilities and reputations, are themselves, privileges. Even when there’s shame associated with not quite meeting those expectations. But shame… is never something the poor can afford.

Shameless was a Showtime television series that ran for eleven seasons from 2011 to 2021. It followed the story of the Gallaghers, a family living on the south side of Chicago who, depending on their current financial situation, could range from poor to destitute. Though the main character for the first few season was inarguably, Fiona (despite what the Emmy Awards would have you believe) the main romantic draw of the show was not her on again off again relationships with multiple men, but the tense — sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking — relationship between her brother Ian, and his temperamental bossy bottom of a boyfriend, Mickey. Ian and Mickey are established as enemies early on in the series but quickly turn into lovers, because who could resist Cameron Monaghan? Their relationship is, economically, one of equals. They both come from the same economically devastated neighbourhood, they both grew up with the same crappy parental situations, and they both have sisters who deserve so much more than life is giving them.

The real tension between Ian and Mickey, early on, is much like the tension between Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} and Simon. Mickey isn’t willing to come out of the closet to be with Ian. In fact, when Mickey’s outed he’s forced into a shotgun wedding to Svetlana, a bisexual Russian sex worker. In the end though, they end up in an oddly healthy (at least for them) relationship. Married and everything.

But their gayness isn’t really where the drama comes from. It would be untenable to try toand drag out ‘Mickey doesn’t want to come out’ storylines for eleven seasons. The real drama comes from the economic situation. Because of growing up in extreme poverty, Mickey has become a criminal like his father. Not being the least bit shy when it comes to brandishing firearms or breaking into people’s houses. He does time in jail multiple times throughout the series, but never comes out any different, really. Because how could he? He’s been raised to be a certain way, and time in a state pen isn’t going to beat that out of him.

Ian, on the other hand, isn’t quite the criminal Mickey is. Nothing beyond the mischief most teenagers would get up to, for the most part. Ian just wants to get grades good enough to join the military. That’s his big dream. Which he does join, but does so illegally using his brother’s name and information. When next we see Ian he’s gone AWOL from the military and has become a tweaked out GoGo boy at a gay bar. But luckily our unlikely prince charming, Mickey, swings in and rescues him. But Ian’s acting very strange, and this erratic behaviour increases while Mickey's problems with his wife also intensify. Ian drifts in and out of manic episodes until his relationship with Mickey is fully confirmed, with Mickey outing himself at his son’s christening. The end of the manic episodes leaves Ian in bed, nearly unresponsive. It’s at this point that we discover that Ian, like his mother Monica, has Bipolar Disorder.

My mother also suffered from Bipolar Disorder so I know that with the right medication and coping mechanisms, this is a condition that can be mostly managed. But there’s a big difference between Ian and my mother. Though I also grew up poor, we lived in Canada. So my mother was able to see the specialists she needed and get the medication she needed without us going homeless. Ian, in Chicago, doesn’t have that luxury. In fact when the diagnosis is first floated, Mickey refuses to allow Ian to be helped because it would, in all likelihood, result in him being institutionalised in a state mental health institution. Which, in case you haven’t heard, aren’t the nicest places.

If Ian had the money to go see the doctors and get the meds he needed, it would be a different situation. But everything deteriorates until Ian goes on a psychological bender, his erratic behaviour increasing to the point where he agrees to do unprotected porn, and abducts a baby. Ending with him forced into a psych ward, where even Mickey agrees he needs treatment.

Though there are plenty more ups and downs for Ian and Mickey over the next few seasons, with both ending up in jail at one point, they do end up stabilised and happy in the end. But it does takes eleven seasons, a lot of heartache, law breaking, violence, and trauma to get there. But even when they do move out of the bad neighbourhood and into a nice building, they have no idea how to act in “proper society”. With the uppity middle class gays trying to be rich gays. They don’t quite fit in with the world above the poverty line. But neither do most of the people on the show, queer or not.

Fiona, Ian’s big sister and the family mother figure, hops from odd job to odd job, even cleaning out clogged sewage pipes to try and make ends meet. The spiral of just too many bad days eventually leads to her becoming an addict. Which, in turn, leads to the Gallagher family situation becoming even more precarious. Once she gets clean, she works her way up to be the manager of a diner, which growing up poor seemed like a good solid job. But she soon finds out that being a manager isn’t all that different from working a cash register. You just have a lot more responsibilities and not a lot more pay.

That’s a situation I think a lot of people have been in. Growing up, I always thought that “manager” was the top of the tops. That's the job where you have two cars and a nice house. Where your kids have a college fund, etc.. Because what’s above the manager? But then I actually started working, got myself into a managerial marketing position and realised… Oh… Managers are just employees who are expected to be the bad guy.

The people with real power, real money, are the owners. They’re the ones with the nice houses and the cars and the college funds. They don’t really teach you that in high school though. That no matter how hard you work for a company, no matter how high you climb in that company, you’ll always be under somebody else. Not so different from Young Royals where no matter what Simon does, no matter what his family does, they will always, always, be below Wilhelm. Because they cannot work their way into the aristocracy.

America doesn’t have royals, but they do have millionaires and billionaires. You can work your way into the manager position of a company, but it's near impossible to work your way into the CEO position. That glass ceiling is there, it’s just blocking something other than a crown. CEO’s are the royalty of America, basically. And like the royals of other countries, they are fabulously wealthy and yet still take state funding through tax cuts, tax rebates, and government contracts.

At least the Royals of Europe are honest about it. They just take the money, they don’t create five layers of separation so that people think they’re ‘creating jobs.’ I think that might be why Americans romanticise the royals of Europe so much. They’re not trying to convince people that they aren’t as rich as they are. Most of them aren’t pretending that they’re just like everyone else, a sad performance Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates try to pull off. REAL royals live in gilded palaces, not open concept ranch-style homes that just happen to have a tennis court, two pools, a personal movie theatre, and an underground garage with multiple Italian cars they barely know how to pump gas into.

That might even be why people were attracted to Donald Trump while he ran for president. He was rich and made no show of pretending he wasn’t. Hillary Clinton was filthy rich too, maybe even richer than Donald Trump if some of his tax returns are accurate, but she pretended to be a common person. Just a good ol’ Arkansas girl. While Trump, though the epitome of everything that had ruined their lives, didn’t really put on airs. He bragged about a gold toilet, but people liked him because he was “telling it like it is.”

And racist, they liked him because he was racist. But a lot of people were just willing to look past the racism because he was a rich who wasn’t putting on a facade. He wasn’t driving an SUV, he was driven around in town cars and limos and private jets. That romanticization of abundant apparent wealth helped him the same way it helps the royals of Europe.

It also helps, in my opinion, that many European countries have strong social safety nets that America lacks. Take for instance the depiction of what passes for impoverished between Shameless and Young Royals. Simon’s family isn’t rich by any means, but they do have a house and their mom does have a car. And whatever job she has, it's enough to keep that house paid for, keep that car paid for, and give her enough time in the day to make homemade dinner for her kids, and their friends a lot of the time. And as far as Simon’s classmates are concerned, that basically makes him dirt poor. He’s not, by any means, but… that’s how he’s seen. Looked down upon because he doesn’t live on campus.

Meanwhile on Shameless poor is, well, poor. Where it’s sometimes seven to nine people living in a house with three bedrooms, one of which seems more like a storage room. And everyone in the family, even the kids, need to pool their money to make sure they can keep the bills paid. One month on, one month off. This month we pay the power pbill, next month we pay the phone bill. Get what we can from the food bank, and make that baby formula last as long as possible. One mistake. ONE financial venture gone awry, could send the whole house of cards tumbling down. What if Debbie can't get any babysitting jobs? What if Lip cant^{[sic: can't]} get any tutoring jobs? What if Ian lost his job at the corner store? What if their mostly-absentee alcoholic father Frank finds the coffee can with the monthly funds stashed in it and decides to go on a bender? Destitution. One mistake. One oopsie daisy and the lives of the whole family could come crashing down.

While on Young Royals, when Simon demands August pay him the money he’s owed, getting even slightly aggressive, his friends look at him like he’s turned into a monster. Implying that spending time around rich people is causing Simon to absorb money-first values by osmosis. Who’s there to support the emotional support poor, when he starts to lose his passive, resolve-conflict-with-mediation values? Meanwhile on Shameless you don’t go demanding money back without a crew and at least an iron pipe.

So the two shows are very different, with very different depictions of being gay. But one thing they DO have in common is that they’re both, in their most basic forms, tragedies. Shameless is a tragedy about the poor thinking they can climb their way out of poverty, and Young Royals is a tragedy about the rich. Simon, though he may be the audience’s cypher character, is not the tragic figure. Wilhelm is. Felice is. And, to an extent, August is. Wilhelm can’t be himself. Feliece^{[sic: Felice]} is held to impossible standards by her family. And August falls from grace when his family can’t afford to pay his tuition any longer. August still has the assets that he could liquidate, but his pigheaded “legacy” thinking won’t let him.

So which is more tragic? The poor being trapped in a forever-cycle of poverty? Or the rich being... inconvenienced? Well that’s a debate for the ages.

They say a comedy is a play with a wedding in the final act, and a tragedy is a play with a wedding in the second act. And that’s probably a better rule for tragedy than whatever Hegel or Aristotle cooked up. Ah, pathos this, ethos that! Sure, fine. Go on Mary. Invent a system of logic specifically to justify why you and your rich friends can’t be bothered to empathise with plays about poor people.

And no, as much as it may make for a great cure for insomnia, we’re not going to summarise Poetics beat by beat here. And we’re also not going to talk about Hegel’s thoughts on Tragedy because, though it may be described as contrasting Aristotle’s theories, “Contrasting ideas” in philosophy basically amounts to using the word ‘necessarily’ versus ‘necessarily’ written in italic font. As far as the language of philosophy is concerned — it’s a completely different word.

Suffice to say, and this has been true for the bulk of human history, the primary focus of tragedy and drama is upon the struggles of being rich. In one way or another. This could be for any number of reasons. Most likely — the people sponsoring and attending theatre were people with money. And they would absolutely like to see themselves reflected in these characters.

But in Aristotle’s Poetics, he claims that a necessary component of tragedy is that the tragic hero must fall from grace. The thought process here is that if you’re already at the bottom — there’s nowhere else to fall. So can it really be tragic? Tragedy, to Aristotle, had the role of shaping society through a means of — and I’m paraphrasing, here — cautionary parables. For instance, maybe the world would be a better place, Mr. Oedipus, if you didn’t go around the Balkan peninsula and murder everyone who had road rage as bad as you do. [Clicks tongue.] Things like that.

As most of the ancient world existed in an openly classist system, it was more or less seen as the natural order of things for the poor to be suffering. And well… things can’t really get any more tragic if you start out suffering. Or so they thought. You did have theatrical productions which would have been called [air quotes] Domestic Tragedies, focusing on the middle or working classes. But even these were scoffed at for not having the gravitas of assassinating a demi-god. Meanwhile, what’s really going on is that philosophers were just salty because the only thing they were ‘lords’ of was the edge.

It’s not that the wealthy patrons of theatre didn’t want to know that poor peoples’ lives were hard. They knew exactly how they treated their employees. AND SOMETIMES IN HISTORY CALLING THEM ‘EMPLOYEES’ WOULD BE A VERY, VERY GENEROUS WORD. It was more that they just didn’t care. In the wealthy’s own inflated view of their self-importance, what’s a little emotional abuse to a couple servants?

As for why the wealthy favoured tragedies over feel-good stories? Scholars have written at length about why tragedy is more important, but it seems like a lot of the arguments boil down to ‘because I said so,’ or ‘because this old reclusive intellectual who was alive hundreds of years ago said so.’ This is exclusively a personal observation, but I find that intellectual-types tend to glorify dourness. Like they feel like something is more significant if its^{[sic: it's]} depressing. As if a pessimistic depiction of the world is automatically more authentic.

I think in many ways, we consider optimism to be manipulative. That it’s trying to convince you that the world is inherently good, and light-hearted. And that we lean towards the belief that real human nature is rooted in darkness. Or that optimism is a cover-up for sadness. So comedy and light-hearted media is often viewed, now and in the past, as being frivolous and unimportant. And therefore, lacking the gravitas that scholars consider ‘authentic’ enough to be important. For evidence of this, look at the Oscar nominations... every year.

Yet comedy is much broader as a theory than just fart jokes and slapstick. For example, we wouldn’t necessarily describe Charles Dickens as ‘comedic.’ HOWEVER, he did craft his stories around the working class, and often depicted a lifting of their fortunes. As with his classics: A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and Hard Times. Dickens was a fan of ‘bittersweet’ endings, and these stories, at least, involve the poors being lifted from destitution and the wealthy having learned a lesson at the expense of their social standing.

It’s comedic in the sense that it opposes tragedy. Whether this qualifies these stories as capitol-C ‘Comedy’ would probably vary from one scholar to the next. Though still, it can be said that Dickens was an author who wanted to use his platform to outline that poverty itself is a tragedy. Certainly not the only one — coming to mind is La Boheme, in which the starving artists burn their art to keep warm in the winter. You could even say that Les Miserables or the Phantom of the Opera (the novel, not the Andrew Loydd^{[sic: Lloyd]} Webber glorified theme park attraction) fit the bill, because they contain a commentary on class dynamics. Even though the central focus IS on characters of high social standing or who reach high social standing.

However, it wasn’t until much later that we began a critical discourse around poverty and tragedy in earnest. This was in 1949, with the Broadway premiere of Death of a Salesman. And though almost all of us have had to read it forin high school English class, reception was actually rather mixed upon its debut. Some critics felt that it was nothing more than a promotion of playwright Aurther^{[sic: Arthur]} Miller’s Marxist leanings. I mean, apparently giving a rat’s ass about people the government is stepping on makes you a Marxist. According to… everyone in American news media.

And maybe it was because of heated ideological debates and literal wars over political economics in the first half of the century that this play really sparked that debate. However, unlike other tragedies about middle class and lower class heroes, to whom tragic events happened, Death of a Salesman’s narrative treatsed poverty itself as the tragedy. American poverty, specifically, as it exists in a culture of greed, envy, and desperation.

Tragedy did, however, lose its popularity. As theatre became more and more populace^{[sic: populous? populist?]}, and especially as movies came to dominate popular entertainment. Audiences who hadn’t read Aristotle really weren’t that interested in sad endings. Or at least the definition of a tragedy has broadened to the point where you don’t need a bunch of rich people causing problems on purpose.

Many of the same principles of Tragedy are simply what is found in the genre of ‘Drama’ as a whole. In fact, tragic events are usually used to advance the plot and generate friction for the characters in most media. And it’s in this very roundabout way that, for the sake of argument, I’m perfectly willing to qualify both Shameless and Young Royals as tragedies.

If Aristotle can use ‘logic’ to make exceptions for things he likes, and find ways to justify them academically, then so can I! “Oh, well James, you can’t do that! Aristotle was one of the greatest minds in human history.” Yeah, only because his friends said so! You know what Aristotle didn’t know? That the mitochondria is the ‘power plant^{[sic: house]} of the cell.’ See? Smarts.

The difficulty with analysing modern media on the basis of comedy vs. tragedy is that almost universally, authors (and creators of all types of media) like to incorporate elements of both for a single work. You usually get a bit of dramatic tension in comedies, and you’re likely to get someone cracking a joke or two so that characters seem more human[abrupt cut] in a drama. Tried and true ‘the hero dies’ tragedies are very uncommon today because audiences generally don’t like investing in media to have their hearts ripped out.

But we can look at this media, and gauge the overall feelings that this media is trying to project. In either case, we, the audience, are meant to see the themes of suffering and hardship that these characters are undergoing.

Shameless absolutely fits a more Miller-esque tragic sense. And though tragic it may be, there are moments where struggles and obstacles are played for laughs. This is because it is not the individual instances of characters failing that we are meant to see as tragic, but rather their overall circumstances. The fact that, though we root for them, we know they’re doomed to fail in the end because American wealth is an institution that does not easily permit those to rise above poverty. What these characters go through is what many other American families experience. Even as the narrative devices in the show make us laugh, we realise that these are situations that real people undergo every day. And that if the show treated every tragedy as sorely as it is in real life, that would feed into the sense of inescapability that many people exist in. As the great Carrie Fisher once said: “If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true.”

And there is something to be said about appreciating the absurdity of a situation you are in, even while what little you have built of your life is collapsing around you. People who exist in poverty are no less capable of literary analysis than people of means. Spotting situations where reality is stranger than fiction may very well be what keeps a lot of us from crossing over the point of no return.

However, compare and contrast to Young Royals, where the tragedy is rooted in emotional unfulfillment. After undergoing a degree of emotional growth, Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} decides he’s gonna put his heart on the line and gets a big old—

[Meme cutaway]: Katya: “Party.”

—from his love-interest. Sure it’s not Hamlet, but for a show that is built around thea soon-to-be-crown-prince’s emotional development, this is definitely not a happy ending. And while that may have been the finale, also keep in mind that Willhelm’s older brother died, his mother cared more about optics than his emotional state during a sex-tape scandal, and that his family in general consistently betrays and micormanagesmicromanages him. We are given a very strong feeling that his life is hard. In fact, when it comes to his status, wealth, and titles, he has to be reminded by his mother that this is not a burden, it is a privilege.

And this is where an analysis of Young Royals really gets interesting. Because Young Royals can fit very nicely into that Aristotelian sense of tragedy. As the peak of dramatic tension is built around Simon’s lukewarm rejection of Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}, we can see that, throughout the plot, Willhelm has played an abundant role in earning that tragedy.

Go back to grade 9 English where we talk about athe tragic hero’s ‘turning point’ — but where your English teacher never explained why that was significant. In theatrical tragedy, the hero must do something that makes the tragedy inevitable. They have to actively make a decision that leads to bad stuff happening to them. This is absent from Miller’s sense of tragedy, as in that case, the tragic elements will occur regardless of the hero’s actions — which itself is the real tragedy: a lack of control over one's circumstances.

The real tragedy in Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}’s life is one that he does not have control over: the death of his brother. Everything else: ranging from education to boy problems are caused by his behaviour or lack of behaviour. In the case of Simon, this is abundantly clear. He spent the whole season jerking this boy around, which Simon was very forgiving of because… you’re a gay teenager in a place where you feel you don’t belong. You are naturally going to forgive a lot of crappy behaviour because someone’s paying attention to you. A nice touch of realism that I really appreciated.

But the bridge too far for Simon was Willhelm’s public denouncement of their relationship. Wilhelm was not allowed to be romantically or sexually involved with another man. And so instead of standing up for himself against his family, Willhelm baulked, and agreed to keep the love affair secret.

And from Simon’s perspective: it’s hard for something to feel like ‘love’ if the other person keeps you hidden. And I will reiterate a point from previous videos that ‘forbidden love’ is not nearly as glamorous as romance authors will have you think. That kinda stuff gets real toxic real fast, and leads to very nasty psychological developments. There’s a reason why queer folk have been fighting for an end to closets.

Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}’s turning point, as it were, was choosing the crown’s responsibilities over Simon. And while yes, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket as a teenager, it’s a bit of a kick in the balls when someone else thinks that they’re going to have the best of both worlds at your expense. Simon, as it happens, is openly gay. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit ashamed by it, nor is it something that he feels he ought to hide from anyone. I can’t imagine he would be comfortable being in the closet because his boyfriend has to be.

But as this show is framed from Willhelm’s perspective, and follows Willhelm’s development, what is that meant to signify? If Willhelm’s parents are aware that he’s gay (or bi), it does not seem as if that’s a discussion anyone’s willing to have. His mother seems ambivalent in the worst way… where she doesn’t really care except when it creates a hassle for the Crown. And then Willhelm is simply a problem that needs fixing.

And doesn’t that just suck for Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}? Seriously. His boyfriend can be openly gay, and he seems to have a greater grasp on his mental health in spite of aluded^{[sic: alluded]} childhood trauma. Simon has more freedom over who he can be friends with, more personal autonomy, and he has a say when it comes to family decisions. His mother can also stomach to look him in the eye, let alone hug him. Tallying up the score… Kinda makes you prefer the idea of being poor. Right?

Like, according to Young Royals, being poor is kinda great. Much better than being rich where everyone is trying to exploit you. Because, ah, poor Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]}. Caught in the dregs of being young, wealthy, and fabulously well-to-do. With his titles and holdings. He’s so oppressed. Which is exactly what his emotional support poor is here to help him through. Saying NO to the man.

And it’s not that I’m particularly holding this against Young Royals. Like I said, it’s not alone in the use of an emotional support poor to help a rich person screw their head on straight. And it doesn’t even need to be romantic. Look at the great personal service Timon and Pumba offered Simba.

This is a recurring theme in media where the wealthy and royal require good ol’ poverty values to sort out all of their toxic behaviour and to be more complete human beings. To reinvigorate their cold, money-obsessed lives with wholesome personal growth. Because it’s the wealthy’s feelings we should care about in this situation. Sound of Music. My Fair Lady. Gone With the Wind. Jasmine and Aladdin. Achilles and Patroclus, if you wanna get gay about it. It’s one of those fiction rules where when you SEE it, you can’t stop seeing it.

It gets really bad when you begin to dig into mythology, where our history of literature really likes to remind poor people that wealth leads to a hollow, empty life and that they should pity the rich. And do as little as possible to try and become wealthy themselves, or to revolt against the sad rich people because their lives are hard enough as it is. But poverty? That’s where the real human values are. It’s even in the bible. Thank god we have Journey Into the West, where we have a buddhist monk wandering around China with his polycule of disgraced furries.

But everyone else is a rich person in need of the underclass to help them sort out their crap. Look at Shakespeare! Scholars have remarked that the separation between some of Shakespere’s comedies and his tragedies are divided by the presence of the quote: ‘wise fool.’ A comedic character who is able to peer through social pretence and posturing, to see the real mechanics of what’s going on. He would steer the characters to the place they need to be to resolve their conflicts. In plays where there is no ‘wise fool,’ characters continue to spiral out of control and eventually kill each other.

I guess you get to a point of wealth and importance where basic human emotional functions just altogether stop. And you require the services of someone who needs to spend most of their life fighting to even eat to remind you what really matters. Like learning how to spit.

In any case, rich-framed media about the interactions of the wealthy and the poor result in a utilitarian study of what services the poor can offer the rich. Sometimes even in a literal context like The King and I, or Sound of Music. The people who benefit from this arrangement are always the wealthy. Keep in mind that Willhelm^{[sic: Wilhelm]} first falls in love with Simon — at first sight — when Simon is offering a service. His voice.

How the poors directly benefit from this is unclear, and not always consistent. First, the poor has to be the one resisting the relationship… for reasons? And there’s no real pattern about whether the poor is elevated to live lavishly, or if the rich sacrifices their wealth because ‘all you need is love.’ The direction of the plot is rooted in how the poor belong with the rich. (Or to the rich.)

And there isn’t usually enough time to describe why these people belong together. Because if the poor person doesn’t have their crap together, and if they’re poor — then they simply don’t have anything to offer. The arrangement goes: the rich offer financial stability — the poor offer emotional stability.

And there IS something obnoxious about telling people who can’t afford to pay their bills that all they need is love. For while we enter a discussion about how the rich are so stuffy in their responsibilities and reputations, and how the poors’ role is to liberate them from those confinements, we over-inflate the freedom of poverty, and omit the ways that a lack of wealth fundamentally stifles individual freedoms. The poor, in general, have to dedicate a lot of their time and energy to not being destitute. Resulting from that, are a myriad of physical and psychological health-problems. Which, either due to working too much to recover or not being able to see a specialist at all, means that these issues may not get resolved in a meaningful way. It’s unfair to expect the poor to liberate the rich when the poor cannot liberate themselves. Being ‘poor’ isn’t ‘free.’ Being poor is expensive. And being poor does not afford the freedom that wealth-obsessed fiction indicates that it does. Rent.

While many, if not most authors did not begin wealthy, many of the tropes that exist in modern fiction were developed in a time when in order to be an author, you needed to be educated. Which, before education was socialised, was something you could only get if you were wealthy… Or if like Dickens’ Pip, you had a mysteriously wealthy benefactor.

But because these authors were so disillusioned with their own lives, they snap-reacted to a ‘grass is greener’ argument. To the point where you had such and such Victorian poet musing about how a rambling, untreated mentally ill homeless manperson was living the authentic life, compared to their gilded cage. Which leads us to media like Shameless. Which instead of creating a retelling about how great it is to be poor, actually goes through — beat by beat — to create a discourse about what it’s actually like to be poor. And what people mean by ‘privileged’ when they talking about wealth.

Come to think of it, why do we obsess so much over wealthy people in media as a general rule? We love rich people being naughty! Dallas, from the 1980s. Real Housewives and reality television in general. Even as much as Game of Thrones liked to play the field when it came to the riches and the poors, the second George R.R. Martin was off payroll of that show, it shifted to being a glorification of all the ways that Rich people get to have choices and poor people die in wars.

…Sam and Gillie. Emotional support poors. …oh god. Sam and Frodo. Emotional support poor hobbits. DOES IT EVER END? I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about this. Leave some of your favourite emotional support poors in the comments below.

One could say that our obsession with wealth in media, and specifically how the riches are problematically flawed, comes from a kind of sadistic joy that these people are more messed up than we are. “Alexis Carrington-Colby pushed someone into a pool? I would never do that! WHY IS SHE RICH BUT I’M NOT?”

The media reaffirms that our lack of wealth affords us a sense of dignity and perspective. We have perspective enough not to push someone into a pool or throw a drink at someone over a perceived slight. Knowing full well… that this is not the case. I speak from experience, you’re probably just as likely to have poor people acting like that too. It’s not like all the poors are down at the bottom trying to cooperate.

In fact, especially in areas of scarcity, some poors like feeling like they’re at the top of a heap. So they can be a little bit touchy when it comes to what respect that they feel like they’re owed. A lot of poor people live under the expectation established by propaganda — that hard work begets success. And some preemptively model themselves based on what they believe ‘rich values’ to be. And place a heightened sense of importance on reputation and social standing. Specifically in the event that they may be rich one day, it would be good to have that sorted out in advance.

I want to specify that I see this as a problem with society, and not a problem with any singular piece of media. I liked Young Royals. Let’s be clear! But When you’re setting out to make a simple teenage love story that takes place in a fancy boarding school, it’s not fair to expect every piece of media to reinvent the wheel. So naturally, you are going to lean on some tropes that have persisted — apparently — since the dawn of time. Thus, even if you are making an anti-classist piece of media, you are leaning on tropes which are, in turn, rooted in classism.

These tropes treat the poor, even in media depictions where the rich appear to value poor people, as a class of people who exist to provide a service to the wealthy. And this media in turn, may highlight problems within wealth, though inevitably depicts the ‘right kind’ of wealth triumphing over the wrong kind. That there are good riches and bad riches — and what we have to do is make sure that the ‘good’ or ‘rightful’ Royals succeed in ruling.

The same is true for American media where there are ‘good’ capitalists. And the poors’ only role is to actively support and assist the good ones in defeating the bad ones. And even if the good ones fail, they still have their trust fund and now they have a romance with a once-poor person. This trope is, of course, a fantasy. Bagging a rich person who’s going to take care of you financially, while you take care of them emotionally, is more or less like winning the lottery.

But the part that frustrates me is that even while I’m condemning the use of emotional support poors in media… don’t you kinda wish it could happen to you? To get whisked away from our mundane life and find ourselves swept into the fast lane of glamour and opulence? Especially when there’s a gorgeous royal (literal or figurative) to hold our hand through it?

But there’s a problem we’re not addressing here.

[This whole section is delivered in a mocking tone of voice, with a pitying piano tune playing in the background.]

When it comes to media, in order to analyse it, we have to ask the tough questions. What is the author trying to convey about the state of the world? What is the author saying needs to change? And quite frankly, I’m surprised it took Young Royals for me to realise this. Because looking back, the writing is on the wall.

Wake up people. The messaging is obvious. They’ve been screaming out for thousands of years and we’ve been too pig-headed to listen. The REAL victims of wealth inequality… are the rich. There is a literal never-ending flow of media-material talking about how miserable the rich are specifically because they’re rich. It doesn’t end. They’ve been begging poor people to save them for so long and now they’re beginning to realise lifting up one or two poor people from obscurity to reinvigorate the rich community’s sense of perspective is not enough.

This can’t be a one-or-two person effort. Charlie Buckett here, Oliver Twist there. But here we are, with Rich people still going on about how awful it is to be wealthy and powerful and important, and living without a single care in the world except for the hollow and empty lives they lead from the burden of having so much money.

They’re actively asking us to take their money... All of us. And it’s going to take all of us. A real group effort. A communal effort. We’re the problem. Don’t you see? I see that now — it’s all so clear! It’s our obligation to roll up our sleeves and redistribute wealth ourselves. We have the emotional intelligence, the determination, and the kind of moxie you can only get from being poor. The rich are far too stifled to come out of their shells, so it’s up to us to pry open those clams and take their pearls from them. Pearls are, after all, a deposit of sand and grain. It’s just a collection of mundane things. Really, clams are better off without them. Just like the rich obviously see themselves as people who just happened to collect a bunch of mundane things and now have this uncomfortable LUMP of money that does nothing but create problems for them. They’re obviously suffering. And they’ve been trying to tell us.

It’s time for us to buck up and be as empathetic as they say we are and do them a favour by taking their money. Don’t you know… the emptier your bank account… the fuller your heart. And quite frankly, we’ve been hoarding a fortune of heart. And so when it comes to us — those with less than three months savings in our bank account — it’s time to open our hearts… and redistribute the love. Together… we can make it so no figurative or literal Royal ever has to suffer neck problems under the weight of a heavy crown ever again. Save a rich person’s life. Redistribute their wealth. Today.