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Aug. 23rd, 2022 07:54 amSo at the beginning of this month I was at Barnes and Noble and couldn’t resist buying Alice Oseman’s Radio Silence. I wanted to buy the book because I love it and I want to be able to regularly visit the characters, but today I just realized I can also go through it trying to find the cameo appearances from her other characters, which mostly flew over my head when I read it the first time.
So, we have:
-Nick and Charlie from Heartstopper/Solitaire, towards the beginning when Frances is at the pub getting ready to go to a party with her schoolmates. They say hello to Aled, and it’s mentioned that Charlie was head boy at the boy’s grammar school for the previous year (something that will be worked in Heartstopper eventually, I imagine?). Charlie later gets a reference when Daniel is explaining to Frances about his relationship with Aled. He mentions that there was a boy at school the year above him who had come out, who was one of Aled’s friends, and he admired him for that. This is the only cameo I picked up on the first time I read the book.
-Next, although it’s not a proper cameo, Frances mentions that she was able to get into the club where she she meets Aled near the beginning by using her friend Raine’s older sister Rita’s ID. Rita appeared in Solitaire as an actual character, but I can’t remember much about her, tbh.
-Next, Frances meets a girl at the party at the pub held to celebrate the students who are going to university, the party where she and Aled have a public falling-out. She talks to the girl, who says that she “went to the grammars” (both the girl’s and boy’s schools, on account of the girl’s school having burned down), that she is currently at university and hating it, and that an old friend of hers used to hate coming to the pub and would tell her that eventually, she’d hate it too. She says her friend was “cool” and that she was “right this whole time.” This is Becky, Tori’s best friend from Solitaire, and I only figured it out because she’s described as having purple hair (!). Her friend who she mentions must be Tori, then.
-After that, it took me FOREVER to find the next cameo because I had completely forgotten the context, but then I realized there was a whole chapter named after him. He actually gets the most “screen time” out of all the cameos, so to speak. The chapter is called “Winter Olympian,” and in it, Frances and Daniel have a conversation backstage while a Winter Olympian, who used to go to the boy’s school and was invited back to talk about his success, is giving a speech to the Academy. Backstage, Raine interrogates him, and while he’s talking, Frances notes that he keeps undermining the point of his speech by saying that he felt alienated at school and that lives shouldn’t be laid out by school grades. Well… that’s Michael, Tori’s friend from Solitaire, and no WONDER he would say that. I’m so happy to learn that his passion for figure skating took him to the Olympics! Tori must be so proud of him…
-Finally, there’s a cameo from Tori herself at the very end of the book, where Aled and Frances are doing a live performance of Universe City. This one got to me the most, because when Tori converses with Frances, after explaining that she recognized her from a party they’d both gone to and asking how the Academy is, she says “God, school nearly killed me. So glad it’s over.” Yes, school did indeed almost literally kill Tori :/ There’s not much to go on from her cameo, but I hope she ended up in a better place.
Now that I’ve (sort of) re-read it, I have to say again: poor Aled lost all his friends from Heartstopper and that makes me so sad! It’s pretty inconsistent that he and Daniel were apparently best friends for years, and yet Daniel’s not a part of Charlie’s main friend group- then again, Aled is very private and maybe he felt like it was better to keep those two friendships separate, I dunno. But it’s still so sad that he ended up cutting everyone off when he went to university. If the Paris Squad had known what he was going through, they would have joined Frances, Daniel, Carys, and Raine when they went to visit him at university, I just know it.
Also, while I still hope to have a relationship like Frances and Aled’s someday, sometimes I really feel like I missed the boat when I was in high school. I always wanted something like this:
“We played video games or board games or watched YouTube videos or films or TV shows, we baked cakes and biscuits and ordered takeaway. We could only do stuff at his house when his mum wasn’t in, so we were at my house most of the time. He’d sit through me screaming along to Moulin Rouge! and I’d sit through him reciting every line from Back to the Future. I tried to learn the guitar using his guitar but gave up because I was shit. He helped me paint a nighttime cityscape mural on my bedroom wall. We watched four seasons of The Office. We sat in each other’s rooms with our laptops on our legs; he kept falling asleep at random times of the day; I kept persuading him that Just Dance sessions were a good idea; we discovered that we were both very passionate about Monopoly.”
Instead, I had friendships like this way too often:
“I feel bad! Frances is so innocent! I feel like we’re corrupting you by dragging you to clubs and making you drink.”
“She deserves a night off studying, though!”
“I want to see drunk Frances.”
“D’you think she’ll be a crier?”
“No, I think she’ll be a funny drunk. I think she’s got some secret personality we don’t know about.”
Honestly, I hated reading that part. Fuck those girls. I’m glad Frances found some friends to hang out with eventually who didn’t treat her like that. Anyway… I hope I didn’t really miss the boat and I can still have a friendship like the one detailed above. I don’t know if I ever will, but I hope so.
So, we have:
-Nick and Charlie from Heartstopper/Solitaire, towards the beginning when Frances is at the pub getting ready to go to a party with her schoolmates. They say hello to Aled, and it’s mentioned that Charlie was head boy at the boy’s grammar school for the previous year (something that will be worked in Heartstopper eventually, I imagine?). Charlie later gets a reference when Daniel is explaining to Frances about his relationship with Aled. He mentions that there was a boy at school the year above him who had come out, who was one of Aled’s friends, and he admired him for that. This is the only cameo I picked up on the first time I read the book.
-Next, although it’s not a proper cameo, Frances mentions that she was able to get into the club where she she meets Aled near the beginning by using her friend Raine’s older sister Rita’s ID. Rita appeared in Solitaire as an actual character, but I can’t remember much about her, tbh.
-Next, Frances meets a girl at the party at the pub held to celebrate the students who are going to university, the party where she and Aled have a public falling-out. She talks to the girl, who says that she “went to the grammars” (both the girl’s and boy’s schools, on account of the girl’s school having burned down), that she is currently at university and hating it, and that an old friend of hers used to hate coming to the pub and would tell her that eventually, she’d hate it too. She says her friend was “cool” and that she was “right this whole time.” This is Becky, Tori’s best friend from Solitaire, and I only figured it out because she’s described as having purple hair (!). Her friend who she mentions must be Tori, then.
-After that, it took me FOREVER to find the next cameo because I had completely forgotten the context, but then I realized there was a whole chapter named after him. He actually gets the most “screen time” out of all the cameos, so to speak. The chapter is called “Winter Olympian,” and in it, Frances and Daniel have a conversation backstage while a Winter Olympian, who used to go to the boy’s school and was invited back to talk about his success, is giving a speech to the Academy. Backstage, Raine interrogates him, and while he’s talking, Frances notes that he keeps undermining the point of his speech by saying that he felt alienated at school and that lives shouldn’t be laid out by school grades. Well… that’s Michael, Tori’s friend from Solitaire, and no WONDER he would say that. I’m so happy to learn that his passion for figure skating took him to the Olympics! Tori must be so proud of him…
-Finally, there’s a cameo from Tori herself at the very end of the book, where Aled and Frances are doing a live performance of Universe City. This one got to me the most, because when Tori converses with Frances, after explaining that she recognized her from a party they’d both gone to and asking how the Academy is, she says “God, school nearly killed me. So glad it’s over.” Yes, school did indeed almost literally kill Tori :/ There’s not much to go on from her cameo, but I hope she ended up in a better place.
Now that I’ve (sort of) re-read it, I have to say again: poor Aled lost all his friends from Heartstopper and that makes me so sad! It’s pretty inconsistent that he and Daniel were apparently best friends for years, and yet Daniel’s not a part of Charlie’s main friend group- then again, Aled is very private and maybe he felt like it was better to keep those two friendships separate, I dunno. But it’s still so sad that he ended up cutting everyone off when he went to university. If the Paris Squad had known what he was going through, they would have joined Frances, Daniel, Carys, and Raine when they went to visit him at university, I just know it.
Also, while I still hope to have a relationship like Frances and Aled’s someday, sometimes I really feel like I missed the boat when I was in high school. I always wanted something like this:
“We played video games or board games or watched YouTube videos or films or TV shows, we baked cakes and biscuits and ordered takeaway. We could only do stuff at his house when his mum wasn’t in, so we were at my house most of the time. He’d sit through me screaming along to Moulin Rouge! and I’d sit through him reciting every line from Back to the Future. I tried to learn the guitar using his guitar but gave up because I was shit. He helped me paint a nighttime cityscape mural on my bedroom wall. We watched four seasons of The Office. We sat in each other’s rooms with our laptops on our legs; he kept falling asleep at random times of the day; I kept persuading him that Just Dance sessions were a good idea; we discovered that we were both very passionate about Monopoly.”
Instead, I had friendships like this way too often:
“I feel bad! Frances is so innocent! I feel like we’re corrupting you by dragging you to clubs and making you drink.”
“She deserves a night off studying, though!”
“I want to see drunk Frances.”
“D’you think she’ll be a crier?”
“No, I think she’ll be a funny drunk. I think she’s got some secret personality we don’t know about.”
Honestly, I hated reading that part. Fuck those girls. I’m glad Frances found some friends to hang out with eventually who didn’t treat her like that. Anyway… I hope I didn’t really miss the boat and I can still have a friendship like the one detailed above. I don’t know if I ever will, but I hope so.
