#also i feel like kendall roy with my control the narrative

[billfarrah]

@unfortunate17 and I were discussing Wille’s anxiety and how we don’t feel like Wille’s reluctance to partake in public speaking was a result of his anxiety, but rather his history of being forced to speak and say things he doesn’t mean and follow a script in order to preserve the reputation of his family and control the public’s perception of him. He was forced to follow a script three times in season 1 - the first when he had to apologize on TV for a fight he was not sorry about, when he had to read a written speech to his classmates regarding his brother who had just died, and when he was forced to lie about the video leading to the destruction of his relationship with Simon.

In my opinion Wille’s fear of public speaking in season 2 is not related to general or social anxiety - as I do not believe Wille has social anxiety at all and is not shy at all despite some people in the fandom tending to believe he is - but rather a fear of being perceived, because that is ultimately Wille’s main struggle in the series - not being with a boy, not being in love with a gay, not being queer, but being perceived by others and feeling forced to live up to a certain standard or expectation when all he wants to do is live his life truthfully and without people having opinions about the things he does.

What’s so powerful and beautifully written about the scenes with Boris is that even though Wille is made to see a therapist by his mother, the Queen, who is the one who persuaded/forced him speak out when he didn’t want to, Wille’s sessions with Boris are the first time he is told he doesn’t have to say anything if  he doesn’t want to, and the confidentiality of their sessions and Boris’ position as an unbiased professional allows him to be more honest with not only himself, but with another person without feeing like he is being judged or forced to feel or believe something he doesn’t.

We see in season 1 episode 4, when Wille goes off script and speaks from the heart about Erik, and in season 2 episode 6 when he once again goes off script, that Wille really has no issues with speaking to a crowd, but only when he feels he’s being truthful and honest and in control of the narrative. His fear of speaking in the class presentation, in my opinion, has a lot to do with how out of control of his own narrative Wille felt throughout season 2 as a result of the lie at the end of season 1 and the events of season 2 - he is perceived by his classmates now as having denied being a part of the video, as if it was something to be ashamed of, he is perceived as being interested in Felice when in reality he’s desperately in love with Simon. He just wants to exist and stay true to himself and it scares him to do it in front of an audience, and that’s what makes it so powerful when we see him slowly begin to accept how he feels about himself and the circumstances of his life through the sessions with Boris, and how that results with him re-taking control of his own narrative at the Jubilee at the end of the season, and that’s just beautiful writing.

[transmutationisms]

last ask i meant key points instead of bulletpoints lolol :/ english isnt really my first language, sorry !!! and yeah, specifically those lens. sorry if it wasn't clarifying at first

nothing to be sorry for! but yes i have thought about succession in relation to fisher's capitalist realism a lot lol.

first of all, there's fisher's point about how "all that is real melts into pr"—ie, capitalism reduces the real into appearance. waystar is kind of the exemplar of this trend insofar as it's a media company, and we see logan make this type of argument a few times: it doesn't matter what's real, it matters how things look, and he can control appearances (like when he plants tabloid stories or alters public opinion on the president).

there's also the way fisher talks about neoliberal subjectivity, which i see as applying particularly to kendall (ideologically flexible in the way that capitalism is, and driven by the logic of constant pointless self-improvement ie auto-exploitation). i've sketched out an attempt to theorise kendall's drug use in particular using deleuze's remarks on control societies and fisher's discussion of the 'debtor-addict' as the figure of such societies.

although fisher makes gestures toward uncovering a more general subjectivity under capitalism, i do think a lot of 'capitalist realism' is very specifically engaging with the british middle class, and you can see this for example in the section on 'depressive anhedonia' lol. which is not necessarily a bad thing; the book clearly has certain roots in affect theory / psychology, and it's possible for it to be saying something useful and interesting about middle-class affect without necessarily being a totalising manifesto. i would argue that marx's paris manuscripts often move into similar territory in regards to an imagined (and largely imaginary) proletarian.

but that brings me to i think the central issue with both succession and 'capitalist realism,' which is, uh, the capitalist realism of it all lol. like, the main thrust of fisher's critique here is to point out the ways in which capitalist political-economy is presented as the only viable such system. and obviously, fisher disagreed, and the book is like 80 pages long and is more about explaining what capitalist realism is than refuting it, which is fine. but it bears saying that there is a certain strain of leftist (sometimes not even leftist) thought that leans heavily into the nihilism and cynicism that some people pick up from this text.

which is not really something i want to litigate in regards to fisher in this post lol, but i do feel like it's something worth chewing on in regards to succession. in a show that is driven by character studies of murdoch pastiches, what would a leftist or liberatory ending look like? these characters and their real-world analogues are trapped in their capitalist microcosms, which are located within larger capitalist structures; if there's no escape for them, is the show inherently endorsing the idea that capitalism is inescapable and omnipotent in general?

i will show my hand here and say i think an ending where the roys 'escaped' in any way would suck, honestly. this is not because i think they 'deserve' to suffer or be punished (i don't do that kind of carceral logic) but because i think it would feel saccharine and insipid to end on a note of, like, individual liberation for this one family whilst capitalism marches on or whatever. but this doesn't necessarily mean that any ending where they're trapped is good, or compatible with liberatory leftist politics, or narratively satisfying.

ultimately i also think this gets at some other issues fisher was interested in throughout his work: like, when art is made under capitalism, that limits both the meanings intended by the creators and the meanings audiences read from it. ie, what type of genuinely liberatory art is possible if it's doubling as a commodity? i don't ask that to let succession's writers off the hook lol, and if the ending is bad and unimaginative then it's bad and unimaginative. like, i'm not going to sit here pretending otherwise. but i do also wonder what ending is possible that would not be read as somewhat cynical regarding the possibility of escape from capitalism.

anyway i don't have a developed aesthetic theory here and i also don't yet have the succession ending, so like.... i reserve judgment until then lol.

[pynkhues]

Re: the Roy kids and colleges - I think Logan would obviously want Kendall, Roman, and Shiv to attend elite universities to demonstrate their "seriousness", but we also know he has a complicated relationship with that particular strain of American culture, so I think there'd also be a lot of comments around the dinner table about "pointy-headed Harvard f*cks" or whatever when Kendall comes home wanting to show off what he's learned in his macro-economics class. In other words, the kids' relationship to a college degree/experience and the status it brings would range from "i need to do this because I'm going to take over the empire one day" (Kendall) to totally dismissive (Roman). Another thought is that none of them have any real interest in developing social lives or making real connections beyond the incredibly narrow social circles of the 1%, which would definitely affect their choice of school. ie - my headcanon is that Roman either follows Kendall to Harvard for his undergraduate studies or else attends NYU or Columbia, both elite schools that would allow him to maintain a totally separate social life from his "normo" classmates while still showing up to class very occasionally, something that's harder to do at Dartmouth (in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire where it's snowing six months out of the year) or another bucolic elite liberal arts college.

As for Shiv, I could see her choosing the West Coast as a way of putting some space between her and her brothers--Stanford, or USC for their communications school. She wouldn't need a graduate degree for a career as a political strategist, especially not if she majored in political science or communications (I feel like Logan made a call to hook her up at a PR or communications firm for her first "job", which is how she made the jump to the liberal political world).

I totally agree Connor dropped out of whatever university he started attending, and Logan probably didn't notice or care.

(x)

Oh, I loooove your point about Logan's complicated relationship with that part of American culture and how that likely trickled down to his attitude with the kids. I think you're spot on, particularly in terms of his own degree of education. I hadn't really given all that much thought to whether or not Logan himself was college educated, but I'm inclined to think he's not (I imagine he was working for Noah at the print shop from the time he was pretty young), which is an interesting beat in furthering that divide of Logan having been raised working class vs himself raising upper class children.

It makes me think about Logan's fixation on Roman not knowing the price of milk, and how much the internal company management training meant to him. There's a degree of control in that, of course, but it's an interesting shift when you consider Kendall's canonically pretty educated (likely the most educated of the siblings at least), and that narrative choice timing with Roman's ascension in Logan's eyes and the focus on Roman having something akin to Logan's gut instinct - a sort of masculinised trait - while Kendall's losing rank and temporarily(?) locked into an emasculated / feminised role as Logan's handmaid / nurse / sacrificial lamb.

I like your point about their social circles too, and how that impacted the way they engaged with college. I was least sure about Roman, and I think your theory makes a lot of sense, especially with the way he tends to dismiss things out of what I tend to interpret as a fear of rejection. He can't fail if he never tries, y'know? And I can see Roman doubling down on just passing and not bothering deeper engagement if Logan himself is dismissive or snide of college achievements or even the college environment broadly.

Your Shiv point is definitely making me rethink her path too, because while I do think she's competitive enough with Kendall and (despite herself) enjoys a fishbowl enough to do postgrad too, I think you're right that she might want both distance and to get out there faster. I think I've talked about it before, but I'm a little obsessed with Shiv's impatience, haha. I think it's a really realistic character beat for her to constantly be feeling like she has to catch-up and overtake her brothers, both as the youngest and the only girl, and I can see that making her wanting to power through college and get out into the workforce faster. Depending on what you think the age gap is between her and Kendall too (I think I tend to think it's less than most people? I do think the golden trio are supposed to be relatively close in age), she could be gunning to be out in the workforce at the same time as him to give herself and their father the illusion of them kicking off the same starting line for once.

It's such an interesting period to think about!

[bunnybevvyy]

*Major Spoilers for Succession*

I have A LOT of thoughts about the episode, Connor’s Wedding, so I wanted to talk about my initial reaction to what was happening, while also analyzing the kid’s reaction to Logan’s death, and why it was so impactful to me.

While I was watching the scene when they got the call from Tom about Logan getting chest compressions, I was just so shocked like many, many other viewers. I audibly screamed, “WHAT!? They killed him off screen????” Just so many feelings of confusion hitting me suddenly. But as the scene went on, watching the kid’s react to the news at the very same time as I am, I quickly realized how Logan’s death off screen was completely on purpose.

And they conveyed the emotions of losing a loved so accurately that it gave me a flashback of when my aunt called me to tell me that my grandma had passed away. It is a phone call all people at some point in their lives receive, and that moment was communicated so excellently. The longer the camera stayed on the Roy siblings, the more heartbroken I felt. At one point I felt entirely intrusive as the phone call with Tom just kept going. I felt like an intruder in their personal space that needed privacy, but I later realized that that was on purpose as well.

I was very uncomfortable, but that was the point. Watching Roman’s denial that his father is actually gone until he sees the body, and knowing that the actual final words his dad might’ve heard from him were words spoken with anger and defiance caused Roman to feel immense guilt, hoping there is a way to take back what he had said by protecting himself by being in denial was phenomenal.

Kendall couldn’t forgive him, but still loves his father. Kendall’s desperate attempt to take control of the situation and find solutions when there isn’t any. And because of capitalism there is no time to grieve, so he took initiative to try to shape the narrative so that the markets don’t reflect badly on Waystar.

Shiv’s final words to her father was such an emotional gut punch that grappled my heart. Her voice trembling as she told him everything will be okay and that she loves him, even though she was still angry with him. Just the obvious disbelief in her voice that this is actually happening left me so teary eyed. The fact that she was hoping that it was bad news about her mom rather than dad makes me think about the scene on her wedding where her mom told her that she wished that she never had her, and how Shiv would rather have an abusive father but at least she's the favorite, than have a mother that practically wants nothing to do with her.

Connor’s reaction to the news, while not as explosive with emotion like the other siblings, was just as impactful. With quotes like, “He never even liked me,” and “... I didn’t get the chance to make him proud of me,” made me feel so sympathetic towards him especially since it was revealed that cake is triggering for him as it reminds him of the day that his mother was forcefully admitted into a mental hospital and they gave him cake to keep him calm during that time.

The actors worked very hard on this emotionally taxing episode, and it shows. My eyes were glued to the screen both times I watched the episode, and I can go on and on about how impactful it was, but alas this post is already very long lol it was probably the best episode of a series I've ever watched that gave off season finale vibes but it was only episode 3!!!!!!!! What an emotional rollercoaster of an episode, and I can't wait to find out what happens next.