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Act 1, Scene 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
The group runs down to the lake to celebrate. Meredith tries to convince everyone to skinny-dip with her, to no avail. They sit down, and Alexander rolls a joint and passes it around. Richard comments that he thinks it’s going to be a good school year, which the others mock him for—after all, he got the part that he’d hoped for. The group’s conversation turns to their parents’ reactions to their acceptances at Dellecher.
Meredith’s attempts to “seduce” people into skinny-dipping with her look playful and fun in this moment, but they subtly foreshadow the loneliness and desperation that will drive her actions later in the novel.
Themes
Oliver’s father had been unimpressed with the idea of “art school,” and it took weeks to convince him to let Oliver attend. Alexander is out of touch with his mother and never met his father, so he attends the school on scholarship. James’s father—a poetry professor at the University of California, Berkeley—is uninterested in his son’s theatre major. Meredith’s family is wealthy and distant. Filippa doesn’t share anything about her family. Richard and Wren’s parents, successful actors and directors in London, are the only parents of the bunch who were excited to see their children at Dellecher. After Richard says this, Alexander shoves him playfully into the water. Later, the group goes back to the Castle, Oliver trailing behind.
The fourth-years come from a variety of different backgrounds, all of which silently influence the ways that they relate to each other. Some of them have it a lot easier than others. Richard’s background of wealth, privilege, and connection, for instance, puts his smugness and confidence into an even less flattering light: he’s both powerful and entitled. Meanwhile, people like Oliver and Alexander must be on more unstable ground at a school as competitive as Dellecher; it’s a completely new world to them, and they have a lot to lose if they fail.
Themes
