#kendall + shiv

[pynkhues]

Hey, just wanted to know your perspective on Shiv's decision. There's a huge discussion going on whether the decision was emotionally driven just to spite Kendall? Was it calculated in any sense considering her children's future or getting any power through Tom? Was she seeking Tom (the powerful man now)'s approval?

What do you think? I personally think it was multi faceted and complex and included all the things a little bit and lead her to the decision.

Would she have taken the same decision if she had no idea that it is infact Tom that Mattson's eyeing?

Hey! Oh man, it’s such a great moment and it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot. I agree with you in the sense that it was such a multi-faceted and complex choice, and one that had many trigger points both in the sense of Shiv’s reality, her sense of power and control, and the real and mangled emotional root of her place in her own family.

Do I think it was strategic? A little, but I think she was passed the point of being able to strategise in part because she was out of time, but also in part because Shiv’s impatience means she’s just not very good at it.

I think one of Shiv’s greatest strengths is also one of her biggest flaws in that she tends not to see the wood for the trees. She’s a big picture thinker, she sees the end result she wants but not the daily machinations to get her there, which we see over and over again. She’s impatient, lives life on the backfoot so is always trying to hurry, overtake, skip steps, take shortcuts to get ahead, and when she’s asked to operate in a system where she’s forced to stop and acknowledge the reality of the moment, I think she can for once see everything for exactly what it is.

Funnily enough, I feel like the telling moment in terms of Shiv in that finale isn’t actually with Kendall or Tom at all, it’s the moment Sandi says yes in the boardroom. It’s the tiniest of beats, which Sarah plays beautifully, and it carries over from Stewy telling Shiv only moments before (after Kendall offers him Chair in their father’s office) that he thinks Shiv can still sway Sandi. We don’t see the scene, and I kind of wish we had, but the outcome is felt all the same. Shiv can’t do it, she doesn’t convince Sandi, the only woman she’s on any sort of equal footing with to vote with them, which means she has no accomplice at that table, no allies, no position, no weight, only brothers who have shown just how quickly they’ll shut her out.

I think its that failure with Sandi that ultimately untethers Shiv, because with that loss comes the loss of any way forwards for Shiv at the company. She’s no longer an heiress of her father’s making or even one of Matsson’s, she’s just a little sister, staring at her big brother, at the best friend he offers Chair to as a joke in his office when she could only play ‘behind the scenes’ so it didn’t look ‘wonky’, the person she’s spent her entire life trying to catch up to and beat, and I think she meant it, what she said to Kendall after.

She can’t stomach it.

If she can’t have it, he sure as hell can’t, and at least with Tom she has some sort of in, she has something. Not an accomplice at the table, but a trap door she could sometimes scratch her way beneath, someone who might not want a relationship with her, might not be loyal, but someone who’s bound to her, if nothing else, and someone who has no use for her brothers anymore.

Shiv would rather break the toy than let Kendall have it, even if she cut her own hands in the process, and honestly, it’s one of the reasons she’s a character of all time to me. She’s a survivor in a way none of her brothers are, but she’s also petty and selfish in the way all three of them absolutely are, and to see her really do what none of them could and cut their strings in the 11th hour was so thrilling to me. She’s kept her in, but she also knows she’s out, but at least Kendall and Roman are too. At least the three of them are locked out of the house together, even if, for a moment, they’re apart.

[weirdgirlvampire]

Oh characters doomed from the start we’re really in it now

[tabsnaomi]

come back to me

[hotch-girl]

roman, tom, shiv, and kendall final scenes

SUCCESSION — 4.10 “WITH OPEN EYES”

[hacksawvelvet]

[evenlarksandkatydids]

it does not matter if you have a genuine desire to do good (kendall) or a deep capacity for love (roman) or have comparatively progressive politics and are a victim of the misogynistic environment your father created (shiv). because if your sense of self is so intrinsically tied to oppressive capitalist structures, what good are your best impulses, your love, your decency? waystar is them and they are waystar what does any kindness they possess actually matter if they are only capable of acting upon it within the framework of the fascistic, patriarchal corporation that they have no desire to escape?

[tallchld]

[cthaehart]

How bad was dad?

[brotherconstant]

SUCCESSION (2018-2023) 3x08 | Chiantishire 4x03 | Connor's Wedding 4x10 | With Open Eyes

[yilune]

caged dogs

[whackymormonfemboy]

[pynkhues]

i know succession literally just finished like three hours ago but if you could write any sort of head canons or scenarios for down the line where shiv gets out. where roman gets her out where shiv gets herself out all of it any of it please we're suffering

Okay okay okay, this resulted in like, a 27k word fic which is mostly about Shiv and Kendall being disasters, but I hope you like it! Fair warning for overdose and abortion content.

Despicable Animals. HBO Succession, 27k words. Gen fic. Post s4 finale.

-

The first thing she thinks, sliding into the cab, is that he wasn’t kidding about the horse.

Which, y’know, Shiv doesn’t know why she’s surprised by that, because Kendall wouldn’t know a joke if it stuck its finger in his eye and its dick up his ass. Kendall never grew a funny bone, never inherited Dad’s hard wit or their mother’s snide one, and it was always a point of pride for her. Always felt like it meant something that she could prize a smile from the maws of monsters while Kendall was only ever offered scorn. A gecko that thought it was king cobra. Flat toothed and soft jawed while she was the one with fangs, and she’d loved it as a girl, when she was young and stupid enough to think it meant anything.

The thought now makes her sniff, push herself back into the cracked leather seats, try to remember the instructions the woman on the phone had given her, and yeah, she thinks, Kendall’s not funny, but maybe life is, because it’s there, in the back of that shitty yellow cab at two in the morning, that she feels it move for the first time.

-

It feels like this:

A flutter, the tug of a mascara brush through lashes, the flap of a butterfly’s wings, caught between your hands. Nothing at all and everything at once, and there is someone growing inside her and she has lost everything but this. Tom’s anchor laid clean in her, dragging her across the sea floor, a tether, the old ball and chain. All she’s good for, less than she deserves, or maybe more. A womb with a view, a maker of a monster, or worse, another hurt and angry child, and she feels ill, feels violent, feels vile.

She asks the driver to pull over so she can puke her guts out into a cold Manhattan street.

Read it on ao3.

[birdmans]

props from succession (2018–2023)

[theoldkyokodied]

One wedding and three funerals

Background paintings under the cut

[succession-thoughts]

I saw this image and got super excited

and then I started laughing because it was in that moment that I realized I had officially become this

[lythefairystan]

succession au where jenny nicholson releases a 4 hour deep dive on all the problems with brightstar adventure park, which domino effects into the complete and total destruction of the roy family empire