Your Fault: London and Our Collective Obsession With Forbidden Love
After the success of the Spanish Culpa Mía films, based on Mercedes Ron's bestselling novels, it came as absolutely no surprise that the English adaptation My Fault: London quickly found its own audience, and now, the sequel Your Fault: London is here and has left the internet divided.
Is it a sequel that was worth the wait, or just another shiny excuse to romanticise toxic relationships?
The film follows Noah and Nick as they try to enjoy life as a couple while attempting to hide the fact that they're step-siblings. Their relationship remains a secret from their parents and more or less everyone around them, raising the same question that followed the first film: is the forbidden nature of their romance the thing that could break them apart, or the very thing keeping them together?
As lead actress Asha Banks put it, "People kind of want to see what shouldn't happen. It's a tale as old as time." She isn't wrong. Whether it's forbidden love, enemies-to-lovers or a painfully drawn-out love triangle, audiences love relationships that come with the taboo. The bigger the moral dilemma, the better the binge.
Streaming platforms have noticed and caught up too. This summer's trend of book-to-screen adaptations has literally been promoted as the summer of yearning. Longing has become a genre in itself. It's no longer enough for two people to simply fall in love, they now have to be either emotionally unavailable, socially unacceptable or related by marriage.
The appeal is obvious. Viewers spend the entire film caught between "they absolutely should not be doing this" and "okay weird... but what happens next?" The tension becomes the story.
Unfortunately, that's where Your Fault: London begins to lose its potential. While the first film felt chaotic in a way that was almost entertaining, the sequel spends most of its time debating the same conversation: when should or shouldn’t Noah and Nick finally go public? Because really, is there ever a good time to hard-launch your boyfriend when he's also your stepbrother? Besides that, we're seeing an increase of the jealousy, dishonesty, emotional manipulation and relationship drama that makes your failed situationships seem half as bad.
The thing about BookTok romances is that they almost never survive outside fiction. Nobody actually wants the lying Formula One wannabe with anger issues, or to choose between two brothers over family dinner. The appeal disappears the second you imagine having to explain the situation to anyone, let alone your therapist.
So why do these stories keep working?
Maybe it's because fiction gives us permission to want the things we'd never tolerate in real life. These stories aren't what we think of as couple goals, they’re playgrounds. They tap into the same part of our brains that once stayed up late to devour fanfiction, where the more impossible the romance, the better the plot.
Your Fault: London doesn't reinvent the formula, and it certainly doesn't fix its toxic tendencies. But perhaps that's beside the point. Sometimes we don't watch these films because they‘re aspirational. We watch because they're messy, dramatic and impossible to look away from.
With this release only being one of the many adaptations upcoming, one thing's for sure: the summer of yearning is far from over.
by Julia Petersen
Photo: Instagram / @ashaabanks
