#WOWZWERS that took an hour lol.

[guillory-street-gossip]

@queenarsinoethepoisoner you’ve unleaded the floodgates LETS GOOOOO.

Now usually for an analysis post I would pull direct quotes but I don’t have the books with me rn so we’re going vibes and memory only. Spoilers for both The Shadow Game and Succession to follow.

The Augustines and the Roys, though running very different types of businesses, have similar familiar hierarchical structures. Obviously the Roys’ “family-owned” business is muddled by the board where the Augustines’ only outside influence is like the omertas and other employees with considerably less power, but the core of the business remains the same.

Starting with Shiv oh my GOD what a character. Her journey is ultimately very tragic imo with her relegated to the wife/mother spot that she tried so hard to avoid. One of the traits of hers I really want to hone in on is the way she uses or discards feminism for her own advantage. This explanation has been done to DEATH but that’s because it’s FASCINATING!! She plays the “feminist girlboss” to get ahead, but in practice, she’s trying to get ahead in a company that only harms marginalized groups!! During the Cruises debacle she fully goes out to silence a whistleblower and at the same time uses empowering language and telling her that people will call her a whore. It’s CRAZY the cognitive dissonance makes me fucking SICK!!!!! Also like. When she gets married she keeps her last name, and yeah, she can construe it as a feminist thing, but we all know it’s so she can keep feeding off her family’s reputation. And ALSO like the fucked up thing?? She is a victim of the misogyny she’s enabling! Every single man in her family walks all over her and treats her like shit!! She’s never her own woman, she slides neatly from “daddy’s little girl” into “subservient wife” in the finale and what if I cried and sobbed huh. Ok moving on it’s Vianca time!!

This woman. Ok. If shiv is bad Vianca is EVIL. She’s first introduced as head of a crime family, and one of her first actions onscreen is the literal enslavement of Enne. As the books go on and she’s faced with her estranged son, Harrison, she reveals to Enne more and more about how she views her position as not only a woman, but also as mother and wife. Harrison’s senatorial campaign really breaks her and causes her to reveal a LOT of herself to Enne, resulting in very ironic scenes where she vents about her frustrations being sidelined by men in her family and being treated shittily by the media due to misogyny and ageism (all of which are very justifiable complaints!!). In these scenes, she positions Enne as a sort of “girl’s girl” or sometimes even a kind of therapist, failing to recognize the inherently predatory power dynamic between them. Enne isn’t here because she can sympathize with Vianca’s plight, even though she does feel for her struggles. No, Enne is here because she has absolutely no choice, and Vianca refuses to acknowledge that. I think this is why Levi and Enne’s “betrayal” at the end of book 2 caused Vianca to call for what would become Jac’s murder. Enne went against “girl code” and Levi betrayed the surrogate son role he was forced into (I do NOT have the time to get into that but my god Vianca and Levi and Harrison is a whole different analysis.)

I got a little sidetracked but I do also want to touch on the book 1 poisoning scene, which is one of the most messed up things Vianca does in maybe the entire series (yes, worse than Jac). I assume anyone reading this has read the books, but if you’re unfamiliar, warning for pedophilia.

In this scene, Vianca dolls up the 5-foot-nothing, 17-year-old Enne, aiming to make her look about 13-14, and sends her to Luckluster Casino. The owner of Luckluster, Sedric Torren, is one of the Vianca’s greatest political and financial enemies. He is also a known pedophile. Vianca functionally uses Enne as human bait for him, telling Enne to poison him when his guard is down. Both Vianca and Enne mentally twist this plot into something positive. After all, they’re incapacitating a societal menace who has hurt countless people. But the fact remains that this is, at its core, a political move, and Vianca is putting an innocent and vulnerable woman in harm’s way to get what she wants. It’s messed up!! It is very messed up!!

ANYWAYS. With that out of the way I think I can really draw some parallels. In my mind, Pre-campaign Vianca is kind of Shiv’s “good ending.” No other family to be beholden to, no media attention, no men to fight against, and the ability to exploit all the workers she wants with no repercussions. Shiv ends the series preparing to have a child she doesn’t want with a husband she doesn’t love, a husband who has ultimately has all the power she once held and then lost. She is resentful, understandably, and as she grows older, if Tom dies, maybe, if her son leaves her, if her family fades away one by one, she will be in Vianca’s same position.

The Cruises Whistleblower and the poisoning scene both reveal similar things about their respective characters. Both can dress anything up in feminist, empowering language, but fundamentally they are self-serving snd don’t really care for the women that they champion. Hypocrisy is really the word of the day here.

And both characters struggle against misogyny in their own day to day lives!! From their families, from the media, hell, sometimes even from themselves and from a social and political landscape that THEY are actively shaping!!

Shiv and Vianca are the “girlboss” archetype taken to a logical extreme and inevitable end. They are horrible, horrible people. At the same time they are victims. How do you reconcile that? You know?? It’s a fascinating position, as both the victim and the perpetrator of cyclical abuse, specifically focused on women in power.

I watched a video essay last night on a phenomenon of sanitized, palatable white gays (it’s called the Rise and Fall of the Buzzfeed Gay by Queen Cole Francis, im having trouble linking it). The essay had a really interesting segment on 2010s girlboss culture and the weird intersection of feminism and capitalism that sort of ended in disaster. Both characters are, to some extent, a response to that culture. There are no ethical CEOs. Your victimhood does not make you less of a persecutor. And your power does not make you less of a victim.

It has come to my attention that vianca is actually kind of a shiv Roy figure if you think about it… may elaborate if anyone is interested 😈