![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/309f7d49879829617dc4704ae4a190cf2f-sydney-sweeney-jacob-elordi.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) doesn\u2019t want $50,000 worth of wedding florals to prove that her marriage to Nate (Jacob Elordi) is pure; she wants it to prove that they\u2019re not poor.
\n Photo-Illustration: Eddy Chen\/HBO\n <\/p>\n
Need more? Sign up for\u00a0Euphoria Club<\/strong><\/a>, a newsletter overanalyzing season three of Sam Levinson\u2019s HBO fever dream, for\u00a0subscribers only<\/a>.<\/p>\n Spoilers follow for the third season of Euphoria through the third episode, \u201cThe Ballad of Paladin.\u201d<\/p>\n When Cassie asks her ex-best friend Maddy \u201cWho am I?\u201d in the second episode<\/a> of this season of Euphoria<\/a>, it\u2019s played for a laugh. But Sydney Sweeney delivers the line with such genuine curiosity that the question falls onto us and lingers like so much iridescent body glitter. Who is Cassie these days? She\u2019s a Gen-Zer who has direct experience with how the internet can commodify and weaponize sex but somehow didn\u2019t know anything about OnlyFans. She\u2019s an adult complaining to her fianc\u00e9 that they haven\u2019t renovated various rooms in their hideous nouveau-riche mansion and insisting that $50,000 isn\u2019t an exorbitant cost for wedding florals, but she has no grasp of their actual finances. Rue might miss high school, but Cassie\u2019s the member of this sorta-friends group who seems to have regressed the most since then, clinging to heteronormative gender rules as if they\u2019re the only things she\u2019s ever learned. So far in Euphoria\u2019s third season<\/a>, she\u2019s a cipher, a character defined more by her garish costumes \u2014 sexy dog, sexy baby, sexy American flag \u2014 than by any sense of what\u2019s actually going on internally, behind what Nate calls that \u201cpretty face.\u201d<\/p>\n In third episode \u201cThe Ballad of Paladin,\u201d Cassie is still this show\u2019s avatar of all-cleavage sexiness, her breasts overflowing out of her wedding corset as she walks underneath multiple arches of pink roses and down an aisle lined by vases similarly stuffed with flowers. Her physical voluptuousness echoes the vivaciousness of the blooms, and their hues of pastel pink and cream evoke demure femininity under the gaze of her soon-to-be husband. But the idea that Cassie is acquiescing to anything is an illusion: \u201cMy moment is walking down that aisle, surrounded by my friends, family, and $50,000 worth of flowers,\u201d Cassie told Nate as they fought about the wedding\u2019s rising costs.\u00a0As she usually does, Cassie got what she wanted, and we finally get some clarity about who she is now: a woman who doesn\u2019t actually want $50,000 to spend on flowers. What she actually wants is the ability to throw away the money on flowers and call that waste happiness; she wants a gaudy wedding not to prove that her marriage to Nate is pure but that they\u2019re not poor.<\/p>\n This season of Euphoria persistently laces characters\u2019 carnal desires with capitalist complications. Rue asks Jules to come to Nate and Cassie\u2019s wedding not as a straightforward date but as a business arrangement; Zendaya gives Rue a joking tone when she says she\u2019s Jules\u2019s \u201csugar daddy\u201d now, but Rue still tucks cash into Jules\u2019s bra. Cal learns about Cassie\u2019s foray into OnlyFans from another member of his Sex and Love Addicts group, but when he asks Nate about it, he seems less concerned that his son\u2019s relationship with Cassie is in trouble than he is that this online launch means Nate is ruining the construction business Cal built from the ground up. Every relationship is either a transaction, an investment, or both; when Maddy learns Cassie and Nate are engaged, she looks at Cassie\u2019s gigantic diamond ring and thinks about how \u201cthat dumb bitch waited years \u2026 just to clear her conscience\u201d and receive a material reward for her morally questionable choices. And when Cassie justifies her OnlyFans work to her neighbor Heather, she quickly abandons her initial description of it<\/a> as something that helps men feel cared for in favor of economic terms of \u201csupply and demand.\u201d Cassie isn\u2019t doing this because she actually cares about making lonely guys feel like she\u2019s paying attention to them. She\u2019s doing this because she\u2019s looking for a direction in which to point herself, and upward mobility is the only thing people in her \u201cright-wing suburban bubble\u201d care about, or respect.<\/p>\n All of these disparate moments come together in a stomach-churningly voyeuristic fashion during Cassie and Nate\u2019s first dance as a married couple in \u201cThe Ballad of Paladin.\u201d Their wedding is already a horror show. Cassie\u2019s mother, Suze, slipped into a stream-of-consciousness rant about Cassie\u2019s awful and absentee father while walking her down the aisle. Maddy looked brokenhearted as Nate\u2019s mother blathered on racistly about how before Cassie, Nate dated \u201ca girl that isn\u2019t right.\u201d Naz, Nate\u2019s partner in his failing plan to open a retirement community, crashes the wedding to demand the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Nate owes him. After Naz reveals the truth about Nate\u2019s debt, Cassie\u2019s rigor-mortis smile and gushing tears as she insists to sister Lexi, speaking directly into the camera, that she\u2019s happy because \u201cof course, it\u2019s my wedding day,\u201d is the first moment of her fa\u00e7ade crumbling, and her choreographed dance with Nate shatters it completely.<\/p>\n As Nate insists that she \u201csmile, smile\u201d and explains that they\u2019ll have to \u201cdownsize\u201d to pay Naz, Cassie reacts with all the hyperbole of a girl who, since puberty, has been reassured implicitly and explicitly that her body will get her everything she wants. Because here she is, squeezed into a minidress and grinding on Nate in front of all their friends and family, and for what? Is his \u201cTrust me, I love you\u201d actually enough? As Nate pantomimes reeling Cassie toward him like a hooked fish, she starts acting like one \u2014 flailing around and gasping for air before she cries out, \u201cI don\u2019t want to be poor!\u201d Cassie wiggles her body in an erotic pantomime as she legitimately weeps at the realization that this wedding might be her defining, and final, moment as a rich person, and it\u2019s a moment that finally clicks Cassie\u2019s whole deal into focus. Her terror at being knocked down the class pyramid motivates both her enmity toward Nate (\u201cYou\u2019re not a man. Men provide,\u201d she snarls at him after their dance), and her woe-is-me sobbing as Naz\u2019s enforcer attacks Nate in their home. (\u201cThis is my wedding night \u2026 This is so unfair,\u201d she cries while Nate\u2019s getting the shit beaten out of him in the background.) After Naz and his guy leave, Cassie\u2019s presumably less concerned about Nate\u2019s cutoff toe than she is about what Nate\u2019s failings mean for their bank account.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re to believe Nate, one of the primary reasons his company is in such staggering debt is because the construction of the assisted-living facility is being held up by the growth of an endangered native flower, the white fritillary, on their proposed site. (In an appearance on Fallon<\/a>, Elordi referenced the flower as a \u201cgood phrase \u2026 for my season.\u201d) White lilies have alternately symbolized purity, desire, and decay for hundreds of years<\/a>, and their role in potentially ruining Nate and Cassie\u2019s futures reflects how Euphoria has long used flowers to color in this pair\u2019s relationship. Back in season two<\/a>, floral wallpaper lines the bathroom from which Cassie, secretly dating Nate behind Maddy\u2019s back, calls to tell him, \u201cI\u2019m not a good person. I don\u2019t like what we\u2019re doing,\u201d and in that episode\u2019s final moments<\/a>, hundreds of roses, a gift from Nate, line Cassie\u2019s vanity as she weeps over the tumult of their affair. Cassie is emotionally overwhelmed but still, she feels chosen by him and his gift of all these flowers, and the little smile playing over her face reflects that feeling of specialness. Now, with the wedding florals \u2014 so similar to that season-two image in color palette, volume, and association with Nate \u2014 Cassie wants to be able to buy them for herself with money people give her for looking the way she does.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t know how much power you have,\u201d Nate told her in that episode, but years later, Cassie understands. Cassie\u2019s obsession with gaining the approval of men, and the financial way in which men demonstrate that approval, feels like the most multifaceted thing about her. It\u2019s frustrating that Euphoria is applying versions of this framing to Jules, Maddy, and Rue, too, like the only way it knows how to give female characters interiority is through adjacency to sex work. But for Cassie, her OnlyFans turn and wailing exclamation that she refuses to be poor are the long-gestating payoff to incremental character development that blossoms into a bouquet of significance in \u201cThe Ballad of Paladin.\u201d For Cassie love is now secondary to abundance, and, as crassly greedy as her character has become, at least it\u2019s a kind of growth.<\/p>\n Sign up for Euphoria Club<\/p>\n A newsletter overanalyzing season three of Sam Levinson\u2019s HBO fever dream, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n