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Act 4, Scene 10
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
Back in 2007, Oliver and Colborne walk up to the Tower. As they stand in Oliver and James’s old room, Colborne asks him what their relationship was like. Oliver tells him that James was everything Oliver wanted to be and that James liked Oliver for his normality. Colborne suggests that James was “enamored” with Oliver because Oliver was so “enamored” with him. He asks if they loved each other as more than friends, to which Oliver only smiles. Privately, he thinks that he and James loved each other in a way that rendered gender irrelevant and that their relationship was an “infatuation”—but he thinks that Colborne wouldn’t understand that kind of love.
Oliver seems to dance around the crux of the matter that Colborne is getting at, describing his relationship to James using words like “enamored,” which suggests childlike fixation. Like his decision to keep aspects of his relationship with Meredith private from the other inmates, he chooses to keep his true feelings of unconditional romantic love for James inside his own heart. This scene is the first explicit confirmation that Oliver loves James beyond admiration for his roommate and best friend. He seems better able to understand the idea of love regardless of gender than he was 10 years ago.
Themes
