Royal Blue Zip
Perpetuo Carlson
Royal blue is a deep and vivid shade of blue. It is said to have been created by a consortium of mills in Rode, Somerset, which won a competition to make a robe for Queen Charlotte, consort of King George III. In winning the prize, a business in the village invented the dye and received a certificate to sell it under that name.[3]
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "royal blue" as "a deep vivid blue",[4] while the Cambridge English Dictionary defined it as "a strong, bright blue colour",[5] and the Collins English Dictionary defines it as "a deep blue colour".[6] US dictionaries give it as further towards purple, e.g. "a deep, vivid reddish or purplish blue" (Webster's New World College Dictionary)[7] or "a vivid purplish blue" (Merriam-Webster).[8]
By the 1950s, many people[who?] began to think of royal blue as a brighter color, and it is this brighter color that was chosen as the web color "royal blue" (the web colors when they were formulated in 1987 were originally known as the X11 colors). The World Wide Web Consortium designated the keyword "royalblue" to be this much brighter color, rather than the traditional darker version of royal blue.
I had the literal exact opposite feeling about the political AU of this world. It was exactly what I needed right now. The worldbuilding worked so well for me and the author note was spot on for me, this was escapist and trauma soothing for me. The email server part worked really well for me as well.
The third person present POV definitely bugged me a lot at first (it read like a magazine, which after looking into Casey Mcquiston makes sense), but I eventually got used to it. I also had some trouble with the prince of England thing as well as calling Henry the Prince of Wales when very obviously as a second son this would not be the title. I just figured that in this AU things were a little different in English history as well as our own.
Personally I was frustrated by the last third of the book in which it transforms from a romantic comedy to an endless escapist fantasy (that clearly worked for some people!). All of the bad guys were SO BAD, and all of the good guys were SO GOOD. It was really dull for me.
Great review, Aarya! I really wanted to love this one and while I did love a lot about it, the spoiler plot choice toward the end really wrecked my enjoyment. (This really needs to stop being a thing in queer lit.) I had been able to overlook a lot of the political inaccuracies up to that point but then they became glaring.
After reading a lot of positive stuff about this book I read it last week and I had the exact same thoughts!!
I ended up skimming the second half. Would have loved it if it was just the romance in a more-different political setting.
All that said, I really did enjoy most of it, and there were parts and passages that just made my jaw drop for how well they were written. Especially the letters. Wow, those were just AMAZING. But still.
However I do agree the final part was the weakest as we ended up veering into twirly mustachioed tie the damsel to the railway tracks villain territory and it felt out of place with the rest of the book!
A good AU British royal family is in Rachel Hawkins ROYALS (reissued as PRINCE CHARMING). She is a history nerd and hilarious human. Podcast interview with her -were-all-unlikeable-heroines-now-an-interview-with-rachel-hawkins/
We are independent media, and we depend on support from our community. Your support for the work we do here means that we can help you find more books to love.Some of the easiest ways to support us are free, and all of them are easy!If you ever want suggestions of ways to support us, visit our support page.
Step 1. Sweep the lash-building brush from the root to tip of lashes. For a more intense blue color, start with lash primer before applying mascara.
Step 2. Continue building volume until the desired lash look is achieved.
Step 3. Do not let mascara dry in between coats.
Step 4. Easily remove mascara with Maybelline Expert Eyes 100% Oil-Free Eye Makeup Remover.
\u201CAlright, well thank you for your time,\u201D I tell writer/director Matthew Lopez as we wrap up our interview. \u201CNow I have a question for you,\u201D he asks. \u201CWhy didn\u2019t you want to see the movie?\u201D He was referencing an Instagram story of mine from a week ago when someone DM\u2019d asking if I\u2019d be covering Red, White & Royal Blue, the Amazon Studios film adaptation of author Casey McQuiston\u2019s New York Times bestselling romance novel. \u201CNo, sorry,\u201D I flippantly responded, subsequently posting the interaction to my story. A week later, like Wendy Williams before me, I ate crow.
I suppose I was worried we were going to have another \u201Cexclusively gay moment\u201D on our hands with this one. For context: In 2017, Bill Condon, the director of the frightful live action Beauty & The Beast remake, teased an \u201Cexclusively gay moment\u201D in an interview with Attitude ahead of the film. That moment ended up being a blink-and-you\u2019ll-miss-it shot of a queer-coded but not out character, Le Fou, line dancing with his boss and ostensible crush, the deeply heterosexual Gaston. So why the comparison? I started seeing headlines like: \u201CExclusive: Red, White & Royal Blue accurately depicts \u2018how men have sex with each other\u2019\u201D; \u201CRed, White & Royal Blue director explains important gay sex scene\u201D; and the most recent entry: \u201CWhy Those Red, White & Royal Blue Sex Scenes Matter.\u201D
What I will dive into is the accurate depiction part of the conversation, because they did, in fact, nail it \u2014 and not in a Lily emerging from Brady\u2019s room the morning after they allegedly had sex on And Just Like That\u2026 type of fornication. We got a preamble; a who\u2019s gonna do what conversation. It might seem arbitrary, but these are actual discussions that play out, albeit often relegated to \u201Cu top or bottom?\u201D messages on Grindr.
The music kicks in as Alex realizes his lover was a former passed-around party bottom who can teach him a thing or two about how to fuck. With the Eiffel Tower in the backdrop of their hotel, suit jackets come off, ties unknot; lots of chuckling, hands beginning to graze as they explore each other\u2019s bodies before the panting begins. They fall back on the bed and before you know it, Henry\u2019s hand is slipping down Alex\u2019s back, helping guide his hips. With Alex\u2019s key dangling back and forth like a pendulum (he wears his old house key around his neck as a reminder of where he came from before his mother became the President), Henry exhales slowly and gives an ever-so-slight nod to Alex, which I read as him indicating that Houston, we have penetration. (\\\"I do question whether or not if it had been a man and a woman, if we'd still have gotten an R rating,\u201D Lopez told People earlier this month.)
Okay, but enough about the sex (for now). I have yet to even describe this film! Taylor Zakhar Perez (of Minx and The Kissing Booth fame) plays Alex Claremont\u2013Diaz, a First Son of the United States who falls for Henry Fox, the (fictional) Prince of Wales, played by Nicholas Galitzine. They start off as thorns in each other\u2019s sides, then find friendship and finally, romance. Will they? Won\u2019t they? They will! But it\u2019s not an easy journey toward accepting one another \u2014 or in Henry\u2019s case, accepting himself. It\u2019s sometimes hard for a jaded-skewing brain like mine to accept something so sweet without wanting to implant complications or \u201Cyeah, but\u2026\u201D, but this movie found a way to surpass (or at least quell) those impulses.
Overwhelmed, Henry jumps in the water and floats \u00E0 la Tanya in the Season 2 finale of The White Lotus (albeit, in this instance, he\u2019s not dead). I bring this up less to highlight the plot and more to highlight the way this film delivers a visual language. \u201CI remember when we found that composition on that day and I was like, \u2018Oh this is my Luca Guadagnino moment,\u2019\u201D Lopez recounts. Is it heavy-handed at times? Absolutely, but knowingly so. I found that, in a way, that allowed me to coast easily into the acceptance phase.
What makes this movie worthy of six dedicated IG grid posts (so far)? Well, to start, this movie absolutely surpassed my paltry \u2014 albeit uninformed \u2014 expectations that had me believing an oft-repeated gay Twitter sentiment of: \u201CIt's so bad. I want to watch it again and again!\u201D Richard Lawson\u2019s Vanity Fair review called it a \u201Chigh gloss soap, done up in the garish hues and stagey patter of toss-off Hallmark holiday junk,\u201D adding: \u201CI can\u2019t wait to watch it a hundred more times.\u201D That's the general consensus I\u2019ve seen, which feels akin to the response to AJLT in ostensibly equating it to a car crash; you can\u2019t look away! One tweet I saw read: \u201CSo is Red, White & Royal Blue good or is it \u2018gay people deserve bad movies too\u2019 good?\u201D, which is honestly a valid question in the wake of films like Bros which brought about such a metric. Critics have been mixed. \u201CI heard from a friend that the movie seemed to \u2018exist to be made fun of on The Other Two,\u2019\u201D Jackson Henry noted in his review for Vulture.
That was my perception of the film at first glance. Now, going back to Lopez\u2019s question: Why didn\u2019t I want to see the movie? \u201CI gotta ding the marketing here,\u201D I tell him. Here\u2019s the main poster:
This poster made me think we\u2019d be adding another entry in the canon of Heartstopper, Young Royals and other recent media that center around the sweet, saccharine, sappy nature of young love through the prism of queerness. I thought there would be a hand-holding montage or a teary-eyed coming out. This movie, instead, gave us jokes about the Prince\u2019s \u201Croyal hardness\u201D after the two slip away for a make-out sesh at a political event, a smash cut from a blow job shot to the Washington monument and a scene where Uma Thurman (!) playing the President (!!) with a Texas drawl (!!!) tells her son, who has just come out to her as bisexual, that they can talk about getting him on Truvada and getting him the HPV vaccine \u201Cif [he\u2019s] bottoming.\u201D
c80f0f1006