De är Gjorda av Metall: Reflections on Friendship, Love, and the Lack Thereof

“Alla människor är på låtsas. De är gjorda av metall. Men jag tycker om dig. Och det är inte på låtsas, liksom.  

All the people are fake. They’re made out of metal. But I like you, and that is not . . . it’s not fake.”

-Young Royals, Episode 4

All the people are fake.

When one laments that “everyone’s fake”, or proclaims they are "done with fake friends”, “fake” has a particular meaning that is commonly understood. Insincere, disingenuous. A cheap, flimsy facade. Maybe the person in question is two-faced, a wearer of masks, of thinly veiled disguises. Maybe they are a snake, venomous and shifty, slipping away underfoot. 

I am not the prince of Sweden, crushed by the expectations of being royalty. But I do put myself on a pedestal, hold myself to an unreachable standard. I am not concerned with legacies, but I am concerned with impacts, with how I come across. Though there are different reasons for our isolation, I am host to a similar anxiety, and a similar yearning, to know people in a way I seem incapable of. 

The fakeness I am familiar with is not the kind that follows me like an uninvited guest, it’s the kind I choose to follow in spite of myself. I know it will lead me nowhere, but I can’t help revisiting it. I retrace good moments, successful interactions, glimmers of hope. I return to those scenes and scour them for answers, only for that too to fall apart.

I don’t find people to be two-faced, I find them to lack faces altogether, at least ones I can recognize and relate to. I can never meet anyone’s eyes, and when I do, they look right through me.  

One night, a drug-induced Wilhelm flees his elitist "friends", who are only concerned with titles and wealth. He returns to the football field where he and the boy he loves once watched a friend's match together. He crashes into the chain link fence, pressing his face into the metal wires. He climbs the goalposts. He turns his face upward to meet the downpour, raindrops illuminated by the floodlights like minuscule stars. “You think you know me?” he asks the metal free-kick mannequins. “You don’t!” He cradles pieces of plastic turf in his hands, and licks them up. He calls that number he has deleted but knows by heart, and says in a whisper, “I really like you.”

To the viewer, it is disgusting to consume turf in this way. To put something you know is fake into your body. To crave satisfaction from something that will do nothing for you. 

Sometimes fakeness is not the snake in the grass. It’s the grass itself, everywhere, constantly underfoot. It’s the soil I sink my hands into, only to find that nothing I could plant would take root and I would look like an idiot for trying. But still I hunger.

I’ve gotten drunk on my surroundings before. I’ve caught my own reflection and wished, if only someone could see me like this right now. Even if it was just through a screen.

They’re made out of metal.

Fake friends are made of plastic, mass-produced in the economy of petty drama. You collect them and discard them, lamenting their poor quality. But you have to have had them first.

I am familiar with a different kind of fakeness. It runs deep and stays strong. It stays with me and only me, persistent, so ever-present that it’s practically a part of me. Less a disease plaguing the masses and more an injury affecting my own body. A metal mesh, a mess of chain mail I experience the world through, so now it is the world too that is fake, at least my world, a world of people I might be able to connect with if not for this chain-link fence built around my very nature. All I want to say is “WELCOME”, but “KEEP OUT” is all my mouth seems to know.

There are various cages imposed on Wilhelm. Reputation. Legacy. Wealth. Heteronormativity. The fakeness becomes more than a pliable inconvenience, becomes literally galvanized into something strong and cold and hard. The people around him become like armored guards to enforce it, like robots carrying out a preordained automation.   

Metal, unlike plastic, is rigidly resilient, unfeeling, and cold. It is not as easily broken, nor melted. Even those who are faceless and narrow, like the metal free-kick mannequins Wilhelm attacks in the football field, have a tendency to bounce back up.

But I like you.

In the English dub, Wilhelm’s voice hushes, acquiring the quiet urgency of a secret. Those last three words are not quite the three words typically romanticized, but each of them is rich with emphasis.

I. Admission, vulnerability, a window inside. A declaration, and a reclamation. An opening up to the elements. 

Like. A word that is often fluff, just feathery filler, but in this case it is heavy with meaning. A verb as a vessel of so much emotion. Some mysterious combination of conscious decision and natural phenomenon. 

You. Extension. The “there” in “put yourself out there”. A bridge to a shore I’ve only ever gazed upon from a very far distance.

Edvin Ryding’s delivery is a stream of alcohol pouring slowly down my throat. It intoxicates me with desire. Desire for something I’m afraid to admit. 

And that is not fake.

I want a love story like this. 

I guess I’m not afraid to admit it here, with the protective semi-anonymity. But I would rather never speak again than admit it to someone I know in real life. It’s like wanting it only reveals how incapable I am of attaining it.

I want to make the discovery that I am in love, not the decision. Sometimes it feels like I am bursting, practically overflowing with feelings to give. I just don’t have the right person.

Crushes, sure. Not like there’s anything substantial. It feels like a process of elimination. My age. Physical attraction. No personality red flags. And then it is that simple. A new face to picture when I stare out the car window. A new name to grant that little rush. A new character to populate my dreamscape.

Of course, it means I am no longer capable of being caught by surprise. It is impossible to have that rom-com moment where it was the kind, funny, quirky boy who was there all along, and you see him in a new way. I see everyone. 

But it always starts to become a construction. I get bored, I get creative. Succumb to fantasies. That is why it’s still fake, and why this hurts so acutely, because it forces me to admit that it was never remotely real. 

It’s not unrequited love. It’s unfulfilled love. Wilhelm was captivated the moment he first heard the boy he loves sing. It was infatuation-at-first sight, which I am an expert in. 

But then the stars aligned. It grew into something more, luckily, or maybe not luckily, given the turn of events, or maybe it’s just a TV show.

The only thing that excites me more than someone liking me is confessing to someone else that I like them. I would never do it. I would never make that call, because I have always been safe, always had something to lose. Beyond all the steel traps of anxiety, my mind is always spinning, and one bad interaction does a lot more damage than it should, like a wrench in delicate machinery. I am equipped with a million failsafes. But sometimes I hear that life is too short and consider what might happen if I did ever make the first move.

I used to envision it as a binary. Yes or no. Rejection or the slim, slim chance of reciprocity.

But what if they were to simply ask, Why?

I would be at a loss. I couldn’t possibly answer that. I couldn’t honestly say, that is not fake.

When something "has promise", it’s not a guarantee. It is merely a marker of potential, which is odd, because promises are usually binding. “I love you” is considered binding nowadays. But we say it all the time, in a variety of different ways.

It's all about context. Sometimes I like you can mean so much more.

And that is not fake gives it promise.