#ESPECIALLY roman and kendall

[shivology]

is Roman a better person than Kendall

roman the fascist fucker who sexually harassed an employee and made someone spy on his niece and nephew and terrorized a poor kid for the fuck of it ... that roman?

[flock-of-cassowaries]

Succession hot take of the night:

Roman’s deepest wish is to be accepted even at his smallest and most pathetic; to take off the mask his upbringing and social position have compelled him to wear. That’s why he so enjoys the slime puppy treatment.

Kendall’s greatest drive, on the other hand, is to seek constant adulation from every direction, to shore up the inflated perception of himself that his dad taught him to project. He is seeking reassurance that the mask he wears is who he is.

Just to round things out:

Siobhan wants constant reassurance that she won’t just be cast aside, the way that her dad has cast her aside, and the way her mother has, and her brothers, and whoever she was on the rebound from when she met Thomas the Debatably Broad. (And the way she saw her mother cast aside by her father.)

Meanwhile, Connor is just googling Napoleon cosplay “-dynamite”

[waystarresourceco]

Kieran Culkin on Roman reverting to a child-like state when around Logan (and to an extent around Kendall). (x)

[lyinginthesnow]

Roman is like it was only natural that it happened to me, and anyway, sometimes i wanted it. everyone hit me i'm fսcking annoying. Kendall is like im not a victim — it’s just the wrong kind of love expression, after all. so instead I’ll imagine it like the trials that shaped me, and it will all have been worth it when i win. sometimes your greatest tormentor can also be your most perceptive teacher. Shiv is like i can acknowledge that it happened, but not that it matters to me or continues to affect me, because that would mean admitting i’m not above my circumstances. i want to believe i can separate myself, power through, and take control of my life. you were just... an absence. But I'm fine. Mom, it's okay. / He couldn't fit a whole woman in his head. But he did okay. You did okay, Dad. Uh, we're all here and we're doing okay.

[romancanine]

Ok so maybe i liked the idea of them Eating

[pynkhues]

Something about Roman telling Kendall that he fucked it in 3.09 diffusing the tension, and Kendall telling Roman he fucked it in 4.09 as adding to it, something about Kendall finding a type of release in failure because at least it means he tried vs Roman finding a condemnation in failure because it means he tried and it wasn't enough.

[pollenallergie]

i understand that kendall isn’t the youngest roy sibling and that he was also on drugs for like most of episode 7 (season 1), but his behavior during that episode is so incredibly youngest-sibling-coded. i have genuinely never related to him more than during the latter half of that episode.

[strawberrybyers]

i stopped watching succession in the midst of season 4 because i didn’t want it to end and now it’s been 4 months and i tell myself i need to start watching it again but am i ready to look at the roy family dynamics again and realize how they’re trapped in this cycle that they’ll never escape and how each child mirrors their father and mother regardless of trying to believe that they are nothing like them because their entire lives have been established as being the scapegoats and they want their father’s attention because he’s their father and because he’s so respected and their worth is tied to what they can make the company and so growing up has just been emulating traits of logan despite the roy children always stepping into a room believing they’re nothing like their father when really they’re bringing him everywhere they go because logan has not only planted himself within them by blood but through abuse as well. oh my god i feel sick

[filmsofspring]

kendall roy you will always be famous

[coldforestnight]

[comfycel]

these siblings gay as hell

[murdererofthumbs]

I find it fascinating that some people think that Roman’s mountain top outburst with Matsson was a fucking business strategy, that it was actually a negotiation tactic. I’m sorry, but did we watch the same scene? Not only did Matsson fuck them over by giving an offer the board absolutely won’t refuse (which shits right on the genius master plan of Kendall taking over Waystar - yet again, for what?), he also pretty clearly blew his lid off. Is revealing all the ways they planned to fuck the deal supposed to be this amazing tactic? Absolutely not. He lost it, it was a culmination of all the grief, all the anxiety, and all the anger at Matsson for dragging them up there days after their father died, and he just fucking erupted. Comparing him to Logan in that moment only matches if you think about Logan fucking losing it and making a stupid decision because he lost his tempter (like his little tantrum after PGN went to shit). I feel like in their world, you’re either an emotional wall or you lose, that’s it. No cards on the table, because you can’t manipulate someone if not only they can clearly see through you, but you also just come out with unhinged monologue, revealing everything (which I’m happy that Roman did it, he needed that catharsis, but also - not a good business move overall). Lucas was not intimidated by Roman, he was amused, he threw more money at them to solidify the deal, because he saw an emotional value ATM holds for them. That’s what the picture from Shiv was about, that was his one big fuck you. In the end of the day, it is a big dick competition.

I also saw some interesting (if only questionable) opinions on Shiv - Matsson stuff. Like yeah, I think girlie was definitely winning this episode, especially when you had her brothers as a comparison, who just stood there with dicks in their hands, looking absolutely clueless half of the time. At this point what is going on between Shiv and Matsson could be considered a mutual symbiosis; they are kind of like two parasites feeding of each other, playing each other off but to the benefit of both of them. But this cannot be long-term, we all know how things go - the closer you get to the sun, the more painful the fall is going to be. Matsson getting Shiv on his side (with quite a lot of enthusiasm on Shiv’s side, she did try to play her own angle all along), is a very easy way of getting himself an insider to the company. It’s also very easy way to take care of Kendall and Roman problem. Shiv has a motivation to stab her brothers in the back, she can sense that she is not being included, and she can very clearly see that her brothers are actually incompetent and don’t have a plan. Which means that Matsson going with “you remind me of your dad” was an extremely good move on his side. It solidified it for Shiv, it literally lifted her of the ground. Because everyone with a pair of working eyes can see that Roy siblings cling to Logan like he’s a raft, and all they want to do is either make daddy proud or be like daddy. For Shiv it’s a compliment of a highest standard to be compared to Logan, because Logan was the big boss, because in the end of the day - Logan always won. They are still playing the same old game, and I’m worrying that it’s about to bring the same results it always brought, just from a different person.

Then again, obviously this show is very highly open to interpretations and I might possibly be giving a bit too much credit to Matsson (in the end of the day he might turn up to be a complete idiot, business-wise, although I doubt it), but that was my overall read on the last episode.

[finalgirlbrainrot]

rip sigmund freud you would've loved hbo succession

[waystarresourceco]

Harriet Walter on how Caroline has influenced or realtes to each of the golden trio.

“She probably is a bit frightened by Siobhan because she’s quite like her dad and is very very smart about stuff that maybe Caroline isn’t. I don’t think she resents – I think she’s quite competitive for her affection because she admires her. I think it’s very possible for a mother to look up to her daughter if she’s not very like her, because I don’t think they are very alike.

I think If anything, funnily enough I think the one who’s most like – Caroline has flowed a bit into Kendall in that I think she has more depths than we’ve seen. A bit more inside torture than we’ve seen. And I think she’s also flowed into Roman because she’s got that glib “ha ha ha” every line is a joke defense mechanism. So I think those are the people she’s influnced or influenced by – I think Shiv is very different from her and very much her own thing and I think she’s quite scared of her really. And of course Shiv probably wants big affection too but just really doesn’t beg for it in the same way that Caroline probably never begged for it from her parents. It’s a terrible kind of poisoned challice, all that welath and power if you’re born into it.”

Excerpt from Excerpt from Still Watching: Succession Season 2 "Dundee" with Dame Harriet Walter – Sept. 29, 2019

[hyperfocusthusly]

I don’t want to watch the funeral episode. I don’t want to watch the funeral episode. I don’t want to watch the funeral episode. I don’t want to watch the funeral episode. I don’t want to watch the funeral episode. I don’t want to watch the funeral episode. I don’t wa-

[pynkhues]

Hey, really love your succession meta, I hope this is welcome in your ask box. Idk if this is something you talked about already, but there is this persuasive assumption in the general fandom space that roman was the only kid who suffered physical abuse ever that in my opinion isnt really supported in the text/subtext. The way the past abuse of all the roys is talked about, to me, always implied a wealth of countless, other traumatic experiences that are simply not talked about and may very well be physical abuse. To me it feels like it was set up this way to fire up the viewers imagination and illustrate the sheer, unspeakable magnitude of the abuse. I just cant see Logan never losing his temper and getting physical with the other sibs but I struggle to put into words why. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think Rome was the only kid facing physical abuse? Youre always so eloquent in your analysis and demonstrate a complex understanding of dv dynamics. I appreciate your work :)

Hey! Thank you for your kind words, anon, and it’s definitely welcome in my inbox!

Yeah, I’ve noticed that assumption about Roman a lot too, and it’s not one I personally agree with, although I do understand why people make it. Roman is, after all, the only one of the four children that the show explicitly depicts receiving physical abuse, and he’s the only one who really has his abuse talked about by the other children (interestingly, on both occasions Roman’s abuse is actually weaponised against other characters, not against Roman. Kendall uses it as a way to try and hurt their father in 4.02, and Shiv uses it as a way to say that Kendall deserves greater punishment from their father than he’s receiving in 2.01).

I actually would say that we’ve had pretty explicit evidence that Kendall received physical abuse too, namely in the way that Logan came at him at Connor’s ranch after Kendall’s relapse in 1.07 (especially because I’d argue Kendall was doing in that scene what Roman has done a few times now by seeking out the hit, and the reason Logan held off was less about not wanting to, and more that he punishes his children by not giving them what they want), and in Logan hitting Iverson with the tin of cranberries in 1.05. I talked about the latter in this post, but I’ve always read the blocking of Kendall behind Iverson as a way of having a flashback without having a flashback, and the way that the episode ties Kendall and Iverson’s experiences as the same I think underscores that.

(It’s hard to comment on this particular point without seeing the scripts, but Arian Moayed has said in an interview too that the script for 4.04 had Stewy say that he’d seen Logan through a shoe at Kendall which I do think is likely meant to echo what Shiv says about Logan beating Roman with a shoe in 2.01 too, but given the scene was condensed, I’ll leave it out as canonical evidence at this point).

As for Shiv and Connor, yeah, I do think there was physical abuse for both of them as well, and I think it was probably fairly common for Connor when he was very young, and probably infrequent enough for Shiv for her to push it down (honestly though, given her character, I wouldn’t even be surprised if a part of her re-wrote it in her head as a positive after the fact. Getting hit means, after all, that she’s one of the boys).

So it does beg the question of why Roman’s abuse is easier for them all to acknowledge. I have a few theories about that, but ultimately, I think it comes down to an adolescent othering of Roman by Shiv and Kendall, and all four of their relative proximity to each other in their formative years.

Alan Ruck has said that Connor’s about fifteen years older than Kendall which puts him in a unique situation growing up where I imagine there’s a lot about his childhood through to his young adulthood that the Golden Trio simply don’t know due to the age gap. They obviously know bits and pieces – what happened to Connor’s mother for instance, Logan’s temporary abandonment, and the situation with the cake – but I’d generally say that those are life events that scaffold a childhood, they don’t provide the detail of it.

The child desertion that came with Logan’s temporary abandonment too would also have been extremely formative to Connor as a character. We don’t know when this was (although I do have my own theories on that too), but it would’ve fundamentally changed any existing dynamic between Connor and Logan, and I think we see that quite clearly in the man Connor is. His people pleasing, his co-dependency, his need to control the terms of his relationships (notable in the entire context of his relationship with Willa), his fear of rejection, and his fawn response to certain situations are all symptomatic of childhood abandonment. I imagine a lot of that started after Logan’s desertion, but then likely were compounded with Logan’s re-entry into his life, and I think that grew into his sort of subservience and performed affability which was likely inherently tied to the fear of being abandoned again.

In that sense, I think there was probably less physical abuse with Connor as he got older because he learnt how to navigate their father’s temper and stopped testing it / always acquiesced out of a fear of being deserted again. If most of his physical abuse was when he was a child or a teenager, well, Kendall, Roman and Shiv hadn’t even been born, there’s already a remove for them in terms of their relation to it.

With Kendall, Roman and Shiv, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Roman being sent away to school in Delaware while Kendall and Shiv were both living with their father still and going to school in Manhattan. There’s a childhood separation there when it comes to Roman, yes, which breeds its own sort of ‘othering’, which I’ll come back to, but I do think there’s a lot of evidence in the show that depicts Kendall and Shiv as forming something between a ‘half and half’ and a ‘trauma-shield’ sibling relationship.

I’m getting a bit scientific here, so I hope you don’t mind, but a half and half sibling relationship is described as consisting of ‘the reenactment of traumatic events with their sibling due to the flawed attachments the sibling has to their caregiver. This sibling relationship is often the most violent, and is seen as a love-hate relationship with each other. This often plays out as the siblings’ relationship becomes too important as a substitute source of nurturing and threatening as a potential cause for abandonment. The siblings are confused about their psychological connection to a caregiver, and act out a push/pull relationship with each other to achieve maximum comfort from that caregiver.’

On the other hand, the trauma shield sibling relationship is when siblings ‘use each other as a shield from the abuse and interrupt the development process. They become fixated at the same developmental level and exhibit similar interpretations of their struggles despite the chronological age difference.’

The show regularly depicts Kendall and Shiv as being mirrors to one another – they are the winning dog, the rightful heir, the only real competition to one another, and now the only two to be parents and continue the lines of succession – and I think we’ve seen the effect that’s had on both their lives. They have moments of genuine intimacy and trust, they defend each other, they reach for each other when things are blowing up and become active participants in each other’s attacks on others, just as they also are the most ruthless with one another, the most violent, they weaponise each other’s weaknesses (both real and perceived) and have tried to ‘kill’ each other more than any other iteration of the siblings.

I also think that they both are in extreme denial about the abuse they received, and I think that they enable that in each other and shield each other from the realities of it which is easier to do when Connor and Roman weren’t there for it, and easier to do when they have each other to reiterate the artifice of their lives. God, one of the things that’s so great about the karaoke confrontation in 4.02 is that it kind of lays that out. Kendall and Shiv work together in that scene in a way that shuts Roman and Connor out at best and at worst uses their abuse and neglect to make a point while never saying anything about what Logan’s done to them. Shiv might bring up Logan advising Tom on the lawyers, but even that is a way around the things we’ve seen Logan do to her, and Kendall’s literally behind her the whole time. They’re in-step in their refusal to acknowledge what their father’s done to them, just as they’re in-step in forcing their brothers’ abuse out into the open to make a point.

I think this dynamic likely established itself around the time Roman was sent away to school, because I think Roman being sent away fed into Kendall and Shiv’s shared narrative that they were the prized children. It likely did have this degree of othering for Roman which emphasised his perceived weakness in the eyes of all three of the Golden Trio, and I think he likely had readjustment periods when coming home for the holidays that did see him hit more. I think those periods likely let Kendall and Shiv off the proverbial hook until he inevitably went back to school, where they could control their own abuse narratives again through their shared understanding of what the ‘story’ was.

This has gotten very long, haha, so look! This is a roundabout way of saying that I think Logan’s parenting style has been divide and conquer for as long as he’s been a parent, and that that has coloured all four of their understandings of their own abuse. The difference is that Connor and Roman were cast out, and the fact of being cast out at all means that abuse and neglect has a light shone upon it. It gets some oxygen, it gets to breathe, which makes it real. Kendall and Shiv weren’t cast out, they were kept together in their father’s house in Manhattan, and I think getting to stay behind closed doors in the dark let them hide even from Connor and Roman. It didn’t see the light, it didn’t get any air, so it was never real. I think it allowed them the ability to hide, deny or re-write their abuse, and I think they used (and still use) each other to do it.