successionarchive

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ѕuccєѕѕíσn ѕ3·є08 | 🎭

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this moment is so emblematic of where roman is right now in the series. alone, in love with himself, too faced, and IN THE CLOSET.

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ugh long lucious hair always covering my lovely pretty face

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ROMAN ROY and KARL MULLER

SUCCESSION 2.03 | 4.09

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ben affleck has seen my meme then...

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kieran culkin they could never make me hate you

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kendall: 1

roman

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SUCCESSION (2018—)

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roman: 1, 2, 3

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could you talk more about catholicism vs protestantism in succession? I think roman accidentally buying the protestant football team instead of logan’s catholic team is super interesting

yeah the hearts/hibs mixup is a great detail. so in general i think this is a really funny level of the show. like, if you're making fun of american or british billionaires the obvious choice is to make them protestant. it's like, demographically likely, and in the american context in particular protestants have all these overt ways of reconciling their faith with capitalism and the desire to accumulate wealth. like, making money is configured as a signifier of bourgeois masculinity; it means you're productive (often implying and signified thru bodily fitness specifically, even though capitalists are ofc not the ones actually performing whatever labour is generating surplus value). catholicism is more uncomfortable generally with the open pursuit of worldly wealth, which is NOT to say catholics are never wealthy or that the church lacks wealth (it emphatically does not) but just to point out that this is a contradiction in ideals that catholics often just kind of uncomfortably ignore.

this is an undercurrent with the roys generally. they're ultrawealthy but rarely seem to enjoy their wealth all that much---like, they're comfortable and cosseted but they all have weird relationships with their bodies, food, sex, etc; also, their ways of signalling wealth are chronically uncool (their clothes) or else nouveau riche tacky (logan trying to host wine tastings or whatever that pierce make fun of him for). this also plays into how america has a relatively recent history of overt anti-catholic sentiment (like, see how people talked about jfk lmao) and combined with logan's canadian-scottish identity and lack of generational wealth, it gives him that persecution complex he retained even when he was literally one of the most powerful people in the world.

more to the point, logan has, like, the absolute worst and funniest case ever of catholic man who is uncomfortable with bodies disorder. it's tolerable if you're using your body to assert dominance in some way (pissing on kendall's floor, how logan wanted roman to say he was harassing gerri with the dick pics) but yuckydisgusting if you just like, have a body that is vulnerable or god forbid perceived by others (logan's attitude toward his illness, his disgust when it becomes clear roman was actually engaged in some kind of sexual affair with gerri---who is old and a woman and therefore also has a body). this is why it breaks logan's brain to think about shiv having affairs, and why, even though he is a misogynist, including to her, he does NOT talk about her body. it's also why he's so invested in getting roman "straightened out" and why he uses accusations of homosexuality to convey how much of a flop loser he thinks kendall is. his whole deal with masculinity is that Men Do Not Have Bodies. bodies are gross and physical, what are you, some kind of sissy? like, entire essays you could write on how each of the kids fits into this schema.

anyway, the obvious points of comparison here are the pierces (east coast blue-blood protestants), tom (germanic midwestern social striver protestant), connor's mother (american, lowbrow, implied/assumed protestant), caroline (protestant english aristocrat), and mencken (implied catholic convert, which is a whole other level). again you could write essays about this on any one of these characters, but in general the protestantism on the show is funny bc it's contrasting with logan's disgust at his body yet simultaneous desire for it to be Strong And Masc (NOT GAY!). caroline and the pierces bring out his persecution complex and insecurity about being boorish; tom is able to be "striving and parochial" partly bc he doesn't have the baggage of the roys, who are like, tormented by being wealthy in a gauche way ("how to control us news media in a god honouring way").

this is all like, peripheral obviously, but it's deeply funny also. and i do genuinely think the roys make more psychological sense when you understand that they have chart-busting levels of catholic martyr syndrome (kendall), guilt (roman), and repression (logan, shiv). even connor's "i'm like if napoleon was a us president" type beat is funnier through this lens (remember that napoleon very famously restored state relations with the catholic church after the revolutionaries had severed them and tried to found a secular 'republican religion').

with the three younger sibs in particular, this is one of the ways in which they fail to understand logan; they're aware on some level that he's catholic and were probably raised with some degree of religious practice, but it's heavily implied caroline interfered with this and the kids grew up less catholic than logan wanted, which was kinda the tradeoff for him having basically sought out an aristocratic pedigree for them. so, a misunderstanding like hearts vs hibs is a throwaway joke, but also hints at this much deeper level on which logan's kids don't get him or his priorities, and are never going to be able to respond adequately to his internally contradictory, repressed and repressive catholic-military-bourgeois standards for how they should relate to their bodies and how that affects his political worldview.

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#shivy

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Succession HBO - S3E02 

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gerri + listening to kendall speak 

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#justsiblingthings<3

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