#succession meta

[capyclara]

always an angel, never a god

(fallen angel alexandre cabanel x roman roy)

[toocabaret]

I’ve been having some Thoughts™️ about the weird meta paradox of gerri kellman’s sexuality. as basically The Older Woman on the executive floor she’s trying as much as is possible to blend in with her male colleagues while also not being perceived to be doing so. muted colours and understated makeup. a competent filing cabinet. her husband is dead and her daughters are nameless. she was sexual once but that’s out of sight out of mind and now it’s just the work. it must be a relief in some ways to become finally unfuckable because you’re over 40. she can finally be taken seriously, but only if she toes the line between being too female and not female enough. trying but not too hard. desirable in the past tense only. an honorary man but still in a skirt. and while the men around her can fuck their much younger assistants and get sports massages and run a sex trafficking ring on a cruise ship, she is the job and only the job and that keeps her safe. for a bit anyway.

the irony of gerri saving the company from the full legal extent of a sex scandal by dating someone from the DOJ??? like i’ll never be over it. even filing cabinets have to flatter and please and fuck when called upon. i genuinely don’t believe any of the other execs could have swung it because they’re not women. she dated laurie (generally unseen unless framed from another man’s possessive perspective) to save the men from going to jail for covering up rape allegations. the irony is delicious. and even though she did that, she’s discarded once she’s framed sexually. Dick Pic Gate was out of her control and yet when confronted with any element of gerri’s sexuality (even her PASSIVE sexuality, even after using it to save his company), logan dismisses her as weak or impractical or failing or whatever other excuse he uses to justify his disgust.

i would argue that roman’s interest in gerri is not in spite of but BECAUSE of her asexual framing. it’s a challenge that he’s never going to win which is ideal for his impotency issues; he can push and push and get the thrill out of it, out of the fucked up power dynamic, but he knows he’ll never have to actually fuck her. it’s all hypothetical: down a phone, through a door, half-joking, covered in sensible skirt suits. gerri’s deliberate lack of sexualizing is counterintuitively a turn-on for roman. and i bet the game of chicken they play is freeing for her too because the fact that she has to be professional and cannot be sensual is part of the fun of it. “roman is weird about gerri”. “it’s fucking disgusting”. not because of their family history, or their professional positions, but because she’s old. because the absence of her sexuality is enough of a presence to be off-putting. shiv patronising her about it as a power play is so weird because she’s talking to her simultaneously like a child and like an old woman, and gerri, agency-less, just has to keep reassuring her “i can cope”.

BUT it’s worse than that because it’s so meta. Because gerri is hot. her actor is attractive and like roman, many people watching find her sexless, no-nonsense framing to be titillating. me included. what if roman likes gerri not because of oedipal issues but just because she’s hot and god forbid we find a woman over 50 hot? but whether or not gerri is hot in the context of the show shouldn’t be a big deal, she should have been able to escape this by now!!! she’s in her 60s she’s a widow she’s tired stop sexualizing her!!! but don’t NOT sexualize her either because that’s problematic too and old women can be hot and old women shouldn’t have to be hot and suddenly i’m making gerri do what waystar does and exist as something sexual and non-sexual at the same time. she has a huge plotline in which she’s essentially a sex object. whether or not gerri is fuckable is talked about as much in the show with mildly-disgusted fascination as it is in the real world!!! she can’t win she’s hot she’s old she’s sexually framed she’s deliberately trying not to be she wants sex she doesn’t want sex she’s covering sex with sex and she’s telling roman to leave her alone so she can just do her damn job because she knows that this is what will bring her down!!! sex scandals historically don’t get men fired but an unsolicited dick pic knocks gerri off her podium in logan’s head forever. even now i’m talking about it at such length because i’ve given it so much thought!!! she’s the only woman in the old guard and she’s one of the most sexualized characters in succession. but only as a joke. in the abstract. never actually. because that would be weird. right?

[parasprite]

people who refer to gerri as a mommy dom/milf/roman's mommy gf ANNOY ME so bad im sorry. roman is not attracted to gerri because he has mommy issues, it's because he has DADDY ISSUES. gerri is so similar to logan and romangerri's relationship is such a clear parallel to roman and logan's relationship that roman's feelings towards his dad and his attraction towards gerri are inextricably linked. gerri acts hot and cold towards roman, likes his attention and obedience but balks when he gets too desperate, puts her corporate interests before any love that roman offers her (JUST like logan)... and it's in roman's actions too. the lines constantly blur. roman accidentally sending the dick pic to his dad instead of gerri. roman jerking off to gerri degrading him (+ he gets off on her line about his family being disappointed in him) and then later getting fixated on a video of his dad saying mean things about him. roman being reluctant to team up with his siblings to "kill" their dad, and him later being forced to fire gerri. logan calling roman a faggot for expressing love towards him, then calling roman a sicko for being interested in gerri. gerri being out of roman's reach because she's an employee, she's older, it doesn't serve her interests, he's too needy, he doesn't deserve her love; logan being out of roman's reach because he's busy, he's unaffectionate, he has a company to think about, roman's too needy, he doesn't deserve logan's love. i just don't get people who say roman has a mommy complex about gerri. gerri is nothing like caroline but she's exactly like logan. anyways

[watchfuldeer]

as part of his eulogy for logan, ewan says: “he was mean, and he made but a mean estimation of the world and he fed a certain kind of meagreness in men. perhaps he had to because he had a meagreness about him and maybe i do about me too”. he connects them via this meagreness, a metaphorical lack of something in their spirits as the brothers roy, but it can also used to mean a physical lack, thinness, which i think is relevant both to ewan’s lifelong fear of and disgust with excess, and greg’s void of hunger for everything he was ever denied.

ewan was only five when had to take on the role of his four year old brother’s parent and protector, all alone, the only protection logan had against adults who hurt them. they were physically abused by their uncle noah, and if logan was whipped with such force as a child that the scars were still visible in his 80s, then i don’t doubt that ewan had scars of his own.

if you viciously beat a child, if you deprive a child of love and comfort, if you make children kill animals as ewan and logan were made to, they will be traumatised, but they won’t express it in the same way. ewan’s response was to become strict with himself, and strict with others. in 1.05, logan accuses ewan of never eating even a blueberry without first checking it against the ledger - the same episode where ewan doesn’t let greg eat anything for a period of about 24 hours. ewan’s life is one of forced asceticism and self-denial as penance, and is characterised by a profoundly sad inability to connect emotionally with his grandson, and by inference his daughter marianne, and quite probably his wife, who has been dead for many years judging by the framing of ewan, marianne and greg as a family unit of just three from greg’s childhood onwards. the life of abstinence he leads is further entrenched by his repulsion towards logan’s excesses as a capitalist, a media tycoon, political opportunist, and as a destructive force in the natural world via those identities. ewan says there is an argument to be made that logan is worse than hitler, and he is completely and utterly serious about it.

he wears a hair shirt of his own and others’ sins. in an attempt to compensate for the meagreness he feels within and his inability to love his family as he should, he devotes himself to saviour-type social causes, especially environmentalism. ewan views himself as having stewardship over the natural world, a domain he can defend (and demand others defend) through giving up their material desires as a means to attain moral purity. but crucially, ewan’s austerity is a response to a traumatic childhood defined by poverty, abuse and neglect, and when he makes the same demands of his daughter and grandson, by forcing them to live on an artificial breadline despite having millions, he enacts poverty, abuse and neglect on them. marianne and greg profoundly resent ewan for denying them a comfortable upbringing that was always within reach. ewan has enough self-awareness to realise that he made mistakes with his own family, but he is tragically unable to grasp the enormity of the damage he inflicted.

[avatar-state-kate]

The inconsistencies within the succession title sequence (like the impossibly close ages, and being shot in film and not vhs when it’s supposedly the 80s) adds so much to the shows theme of the past- is the past real? Who constructs the past? How does our memory of the past affect us in the present?

Like the title sequence isn’t an authentic past, it’s a construction of the idea of what the Roy sibling past looked like, but we can never know the real past, even the people in it all rebuild it in there own way

We never actually see the past in succession, there are no flashbacks and any memory that is brought up is usually contradicted by someone else (think the dog pound), and yet this is a show that is very much about the past- or how the past affects us. We never see the abuse the Roy siblings suffered as children, or that Logan faced from his uncle in his own childhood but it is everywhere in the show

[brookheimer]

looking at the 'midseason trailer' and seeing roman fighting his siblings, roman shitting on gerri, roman working for fascists, roman walking proudly through ATN like logan did just two days prior... it's not surprising, but it is fucking sad.

logan's death will not free roman. instead, it will reforge the chains he's worn all his life, casting them in iron -- that's what roman deserves for thinking, for the first time in his life, that maybe he wants the chains off. that's what roman deserves for killing his father by not loving him enough, by not loving him correctly or at the right times. logan's death will not free roman at all. if anything, it will imprison him.

(as always, this got very long, so keep reading under the cut!)

this was the worst case scenario for roman. not just logan dying, but the exact way everything played out. he betrayed his siblings, he fired gerri -- for nothing. he could have been on the plane with his father in his last moments -- he refused. his last interaction with his father was leaving logan a voice message that called him a cunt -- the first time roman has ever, ever, questioned or stood up to his father, and also the last. we don't know what killed logan. we probably never will. but god if it won't feel awfully coincidental to roman: the one time he fought back against his father or even showed the slightest hint of doing so, his father died. is it likely that logan heard roman's voice memo and keeled over because he called him a cunt? no. but is it just as possible as anything else? entirely. roman might have killed his dad. roman murdered logan when he could've been on the plane with him holding his hand, if he were a good son. he didn't even tell logan he loved him. not that he needed to, it fucking oozed from his every pore and the desperate nature of that love was one of the reasons logan could never quite stand him -- but that's not the point. roman's one attempt at agency, at setting boundaries, at standing up for himself killed his fucking father.

logan dying would never have been good for roman, at least in his current state, no matter how the actual death came to pass. people often talk about abusive relationships as if the end-all-be-all fixer to abuse is independence, and it's not. independence isn't always enough to heal, especially not when it's forced upon you rather than something you choose. this is especially true for roman, i think. what roman needed was not just to gain his own independence, but to realize that independence and love are not mutually exclusive, that gaining one does not mean losing the other. logan's always hammered in roman's weakness, his wrongness; roman was never someone who deserved to be loved on his own terms. roman's never considered himself to be someone with agency and authority in his relationships -- he's been told over and over again that he isn't a real person, that there's something deeply wrong and unfixable in him, and he believes it. he's never set boundaries with his father or even his siblings because i don't think he really realizes he has the power to do that. he's simply there until people decide they no longer have use for him or want him around, and he'll always come crawling back after a kick because he doesn't realize he's not on a leash -- that he doesn't need to be on a leash. independence has been unreachable all his life, he isn't normal or real enough to be a real normal independent capable person, but if he grovels and shows his use enough, then maybe he can be loved. but his dependence and loyalty is all he's good for. independence means no love, no family, no relationships. and roman desperately wants, needs, those relationships in a way that none of the other characters do (or at least can admit to) -- he wants his father in his life, no matter what; he wants his siblings in his life, no matter what. but independence, being his own person, separating himself from logan's side means he'd lose everything else, everyone else. he's not good for anything anyways. it's not like he has other options.

...until the start of season four. that's why this is all so tragic -- more than anyone else, it seemed like roman was on the road to healing. it seemed like he was finally realizing that independence and love might not be as mutually exclusive as he's been made to think: maybe he could be independent while still having a relationship with his siblings and even his father. maybe he could have his cake and eat it too. he's realized that he's capable, that he has his own worth, and that he can be successful without living under logan's thumb -- and, more importantly, could still text him on his birthday and try to rebuild a relationship, this time outside of business. outside of "that room" in waystar royco. an actual fucking family relationship. that's what escaping the cycle would look like for roman — not complete separation, not a metaphorical killing of his father, but the ability to live alongside him, to have a life outside of him, to love his father without living for him. so simply removing logan from the equation wouldn’t help roman, not when what he needs most is to realize that self-respect is not mutually exclusive with love, that being your own person isn’t a betrayal, that family and love aren’t dependent on how low you can kneel and won’t be whisked away the moment you stand up. and for the first time in his life, it seemed like he was on track to discovering this. maybe he and the siblings could have the hundred, logan could keep going with atn, and in a few years down the line they'd all get together to talk shop and joke around and coexist -- for the first time, he had started to think of himself as enough of a real, okay person to be allowed to coexist with his family, rather than naturally subordinating himself in every interaction.

roman could’ve been his own person, could’ve escaped the cycle, could’ve started a business with his siblings and tried to heal, but now he won’t. he can’t. roman can’t become his own person now, not when his first attempt to do so is exactly what killed logan. it’s his fault. he fucked up and now there’s no dad. he gained his independence, but at what cost? love. that’s the cost. it always has been and always will be. nothing could be more detrimental to roman roy than the exact series of events that occurred in this episode, because just as he started to see a world beyond his father, logan dies -- proving once and for all that the only world beyond logan is one without him in it at all. that’s been roman’s fear all along and why he’s stuck so close to his side: roman loves and loves and loves and is terrified, terrified, of death. of loss. but in a moment of 'weakness,' roman wobbled (he tried to stand up to logan rather than just taking the kicks as he's supposed to, as he always has), and his father paid the ultimate price. there’s no more dad. there’s no reviving him.

…unless, of course, there is. unless roman can undo his error by choosing his father again, and again, and again. becoming logan is the closest roman can get to resurrecting him, after all. and besides, doesn’t he owe it to dad after killing him? after calling him a cunt, choosing not to be with him on that plane he ended up dying on? after forgetting to even say “i love you dad” before the end? roman needs to fix things. needs to make it like dad's still here. needs to make it like he didn't kill his own father by refusing him for the first time in his life. so roman will be the firebreather logan wanted -- he'll do ATN, he'll push for mencken, he'll do whatever it fucking takes to try and make things right. if it's his fault logan's no longer here, then he needs to do everything he possibly can to fulfill his dying wishes, to do what logan would've done, were he alive.

"dad can't die, he's dad." he can't ever die. he's immortal, and his immortality was solidified by the circumstances of his death -- logan will not die. he’ll live on in roman, as roman.

roman will make sure of it.

[rippedstitches]

Kendall and Roman in their daddy shoes making massive stupid decisions based on vibes just because they can, completely protected from the ramifications while every single employee (especially the women) has to play 4d fucking chess trying to figure out the actual logistics of every move they make as they constantly change ideas and disregard the actual work it takes to run a company is so fail nepobaby shit but it also shows just how much of a corporation is held up by insanely smart and talented people who are not paid enough and who are treated like absolute dirt. Idk where I’m doing w this I just thought it was an amazingly done commentary on the real life state of every single corporation ever

[successionyaoi]

The thing about Roman that makes him so specifically easy to woobify there's a certain something about him that a lot of us identify with. The kicked dog, the people pleaser who acts like he doesn't care but does, the one begging for love, the one who isn't man enough, the one with a complicated relationship to sex. It's something a lot of us, especially queer people, identify the most with out of anything on Succession. And so because we don't want to feel bad about relating to him, people only just kind of tack on the whole helping get a fascist elected thing at the end of any character analysis.

And conveniently forget all the other stuff. Like how he helped the entire way, not just election day, how he's always been casually reactionary and racist and antisemitic etc etc etc. But if you read him as queer you need to contend with the fact that actually, homonationalism is a thing, white supremacists can be queer. Even if Roman is just a reactionary and not a full blown fascist, he's fascist enough.

And this discomforts people in two ways. One, people don't like the idea they're identifying with a fascist, because what if that means they're fascist too (it doesn't), and secondly, when we realise we do in fact identify with a fascist, a lot of us don't want to contend with the fact People Like Us can support white nationalism and queerness is not a Get Out of Racism Free card.

I'm not the smartest so I don't have a big reading list on homonationalism or anything, I'm sure someone's said what I've said far more eloquently and my night meds are kicking in so I make barely any sense, and I don't know where I'm going with this but basically I think at some point you do have to sit down with your unease and go "Roman's queer coding does not absolve him of white supremacy and people like this exist in the real world".

[petersthree]

I just cannot stop thinking about “I don’t want to live in a haunted house.” These kids are free from Logan for the first time in their lives and it lasts until they step into his house and get haunted all over again. Shiv says he won’t get mad if we see him and enters the house to get cut out again. Kendall suggests therapy and then the line pulls him back to obsessing over who he was to their father. Roman wants to do everything as a trio but then says that he had the most special, closest bond with Logan. Connor gets married anyway, and then he buys the haunted house.

They joke about living in the house together but they already are, they’re all living in a haunted house and they’re looking at each other and grasping each other’s hands and saying we’re leaving now, it’s over, we’re free as they walk deeper into the haunting.

[waystarresourceco]

It occurs to me as I was recently rewatching Chiantishire that something I didn’t pay attention to the first time around is how Caroline handles discussions of the past, particularly the Logan-Caroline divorce and its aftereffects. Unlike Logan, who basically bulldozes his way through memories to reconstruct a future he can handle, Caroline’s engagement in ‘the past’ seems dependent on who she’s talking to.

Long Caroline-Shiv-Kendall post beneath the cut.

I get the sense from Chiantishire that Shiv wasn’t very aware of the details of the divorce. She didn’t really know how or why Caroline left – just that her mother wasn’t there. And in her absence, Logan’s narrative became Shiv’s truth: Caroline didn’t want her – didn’t even care enough to fight to keep her in her life. So fine. Shiv doesn’t want her either. And in Italy, she let Caroline know that.

And then something interesting happens - Caroline actually engages. She admits that she wasn’t the greatest mother in one breath and brandishes a verbal knife with another. “I may have been a bit of a spotty mother but you’ve been a shitty daughter.” It’s vicious all the way around, but it’s a kind of mutual wounding. It’s a conversation. The past is painful, but it’s open for renegotiation. Because underneath it all, there’s the heart of something still alive between the two of them.

But with Kendall...with Kendall there’s nothing left to engage in because the distance is already too great.

In the cut scene from Pre-Nuptial, we get this gem:

Here, Kendall tries to forgive Caroline for the same “abandonment” Shiv brings up in Chiantishire, but it’s met with a very different response from Caroline. Instead of an acknowledgement of being a “spotty mother,” Caroline goes on the offensive. She presses him on the double standard he’s applying to her because this is an old hurt, one that has its roots in how Kendall is always Logan’s, even when he’s privy to details that should make him think differently.

There’s an underlying implication in Caroline’s response that suggests Kendall has much more of a picture of what led to the divorce than Shiv does. As the oldest, the heir, and Logan’s sometimes confidant, Kendall would have likely had a front row seat to the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. To the moment Logan banished Caroline from her children’s lives. And while he might not have known everything, to Caroline he was capable of knowing the difference between leaving and being pushed out.

And her son’s blame? It’s not unexpected. Kendall has always been Logan’s. Was stamped with his father’s name from the moment he was born. But that doesn’t make it sting any less when her first born, the one she sees her temperament in, sides with the man forcing her out. And while I think Caroline and Kendall weren’t particularly close before the divorce, I can imagine this being the fracture that was never set. An injury that never quite healed right, unable to support the weight of a relationship from that point forward.

Sure, Caroline will coo when she sees him. But that’s because she loves all of her children – including Kendall. Because no matter what, she really does want to be in their lives. But she won’t engage with him the way she will with Shiv because there’s a world of difference between Shiv, who has the ability to one day understand her, and Kendall, who has already chosen not to. So really, what is there left to say? Kendall’s made it clear; he’s chosen to become his father’s creature, to adopt his narrative and echo his actions – and Caroline can’t stomach suffering his blame. But with Shiv? Maybe some day, if they keep at it, they’ll end up on the same page.

As a general note, these relationships are obviously super complex and have a lot more going on than just musings about the divorce so to save this from getting too long and disorganized, second and third parts on Shiv and Caroline and on Kendall and Caroline already in the works haha. Will go back and link them all together as they’re written and posted. If you made it to the end – thank you for listening to the ramblings of an insane Carolinegirl.

[romulusfuckingroy]

that interview about how kendall never actually bullied roman as a child… I don’t see it I’m sorry!!! we literally see how bad kendall treats him in the show, why are they saying that roman was only ever the bully in their relationship when it’s ten times more interesting and realistic that they both had moments of hurting the other?

I feel like they’re sort of trying to sanitize kendall’s feelings toward roman for some reason? like in the show they’re literally described as two fighting dogs, and roman is the weak one. I can’t believe they tried to spin dog pound as some harmless game they played; we literally see kendall’s face change in a sort of sick realization when connor tells him kendall enjoyed the “game” too.

and sorry… kendall literally popped roman’s stitches open????? like I know, I know, everyone on the show says “oh, that’s what roman wanted, he’s so fucked up that that’s what he needed and kendall was just giving him that”— no. I’m sorry but that’s an incredibly violent thing to do to your younger brother who’s already near tears. I will forever say that that scene was just as much about kendall’s selfishness and need for control as it was about roman’s wanting to be hurt.

like… I’m sorry to the actors and writers but kendall roy will always be the guy who watched his brother piss himself in a dog crate and told him to wipe it up with newspapers as a kid. he is also the guy who stood up to their dad when roman got hit! roman will always be the guy who picked his big brother up from his drug binges and took him to safety. and yes, he’s also the guy who humiliated kendall at his 40th birthday party!

they’re both, both! they’re both the aggressor and the victim! that’s what makes it fucking interesting!

[kencoded-kengirl]

OK IM GOING TO POST A HOT TAKE NOW!!! i think the sibs were actually perfectly capable of inheriting the company. and i think a lot of you guys give logan’s shitty rhetoric with regard to his children being unqualified, like, way more credit than it deserves.

“roman is a moron” “there is something wrong with roman” well, actually, no and no. if asgarov and matsson taught us anything it’s that roman is actually quite politically capable. also, he’s great at delegating and managing people (see jamie laird and even gerri). the second criticism also is literally just very thinly veiled homophobia, it’s genuine nonsense. it’s a reason for logan not to choose roman, not a reason why roman isn’t capable.

“kendall isn’t made for the world” or any variation of “kendall wouldn’t be good at the CEO job” is once again patently false. whenever kendall is tasked with managing waystar it is usually to great success. his alliance with stewy in lifeboats. living+. vaulter when he acquired it and when he gutted it. his friendship with naomi pierce which watered the ground for both PGN deals. there is little evidence that kendall would be fine if not great at CEO, and the fact that he’s “not a killer” is arguably a benefit and not a loss.

even something like “shiv being a woman is a minus” is just a complete lie. it is not a minus for a rich and palatable white woman to run a company like waystar. logan says this to her and then promptly spends the rest of the season begging her desperately to lend her estrogen to his cause, because PGN want a woman CEO, or because waystar is entrenched in a sexual abuse scandal! there is a solid patch of the show where roman and kendall’s favorite shot at shiv is to say that she’s only being considered because of her gender! after season 1 there is almost unanimous agreement that her womanhood is actually a plus.

it baffles me that some people take these criticisms for granted when logan is the father in the Watch These Kids Get Abused By Their Father! show. almost every “reason” he names for why his children can’t lead the company is just a tactic to belittle and hurt them. it is so fucking hurtful to label roman a freak because of his sexual preferences, just like it’s hurtful to say that kendall is incapable after he’s spent his whole life training to be capable, or to reduce siobhan to her sex. “well, the siblings are all incompetent, it never could have been them—” bullshit! the only person who told us that is the person who was determined to keep it from the second they started to want it!

[siobhanory]

this is not to discount anybody's preferences for succession but i do think shiv being the youngest (as opposed to roman) is an important piece to her character and the misogyny she faces. (ignoring obvious ties like connor calling her baby or shiv giving "puppy eyes" to manipulate big brother ken.) being constantly infantilised throughout the show does tie into her gender but there is definitely a correlation with her actually being a step behind them in the race. she is a / young / woman --- (and because of these two things) --- with no experience /. all of these things stacking on top of her make it seem IMPOSSIBLE for her to reach the top. i think a lot of people stating that because she's more responsible and terse than her brothers, she has "eldest daughter syndrome" but i think seeing these traits in her actually reflects the way she, as the youngest, is overcompensating for how she's underestimated, having always felt a need to live up to her older brothers. she's overshadowed her whole life! which forces her to grow up quicker than her brothers, especially when being pit against them. shiv being a more masculine character, constantly vying to be the big brother, in turn, ALLOWS roman to play baby brother. and roman easily slides into this role because shiv is so beyond discounted from this race.

[pynkhues]

literally sooo fascinated by logan and caroline's marriage tbh. give us all your thoughts!! (if you want ahah)

Oh, man, I could talk about them all day, haha. I kinda feel like people can sometimes rob both Caroline and Logan of any nuance, because yeah, sure, they’re often the central antagonists of the series, and their abuse and neglect of their children permeates the series, but the show’s always also been careful to show that the cycle of violence never started with Logan, and Harriet Walter’s talked in interviews too about the cycle of neglect not starting with Caroline either. They’re victims and perpetrators in the same way that Kendall, Roman and Shiv are victims and perpetrators, and the fact that neither of them were able to break that cycle is the exact sort of tragedy that's at the broken heart of this series.

It makes it really fascinating to me in that sense that Caroline and Logan found each other at all, and I think really slots into what we know about his three marriages – namely, that he marries women who are in some ways as damaged by life’s cruelties as he is. We understand that explicitly with Marcia, who pretty much says out loud that their connection has been born out of the fact that they’re both survivors, but I think it’s implied in his relationships with both Caroline and Connor’s mother too. At least Marcia and Connor’s mother became somethink like partners for a while too – Marcia was a co-conspirator with Logan for the bulk of season 1, and the RECNY Ball episode I think also showed that Connor’s mother, for at least a while, was the sort of socialite who could lubricate and work politicians alongside Logan.

We don’t really know what role Caroline played in that sense, but she’s obviously intelligent and savvy enough to have worked to secure the kids real power in the divorce, something we see her give back to Logan in 3.09. We also know that her title gave Logan the class elevation that he wanted (even if its one he also seems to bitterly resent), and that his money gave her security, and in a lot of ways, that’s a strategic match that sees them both step forwards in power together.

I was actually listening to an old episode of Vanity Fair’s Succession podcast recently where they interviewed Dame Harriet Walter, and she talks quite a lot about Caroline’s backstory.

She says that Caroline was born into a neglectful aristocratic family, an only daughter who due to the social structures of British aristocracy, wouldn’t have inherited her father’s estate as a result of her gender. Instead, his estate would’ve gone to a distant male cousin, which ties into what Connor says in 1.09 to Willa about the house being the ancestral home Caroline didn't inherit.

She was disregarded by her family but encouraged to marry rich, and she sees Caroline as having gone through a bit of a wild child phase, that she partied, used drugs, tried to escape herself. That she was probably featured frequently in the social columns ‘in disgrace’, and then married young to a rich British man who bored her. She sees Caroline as having escaped to New York on a trip, and met Logan who dazzled her. Who was the opposite of the men she’d grown up with, the men who’d cut her out of her own inheritance, and that he was exciting and creating something and married too, and that they likely left their spouses for each other. That he married for a title, but he also married her because he found her fun and funny and different from the other women of her class and station.

I actually love that backstory a lot, and in particular I think it feeds into the themes of cycles on this show, both with Shiv, but also in Caroline being cut out by her own family, and then cut out by the one she tried to make for herself, and the damage that likely caused her. It also I think really beautifully depicts this idea of legacy and succession which is so crucial to the show – that Logan can spend a childhood brutalised by a man who’d give him just enough to build an empire on and that Caroline can spend a childhood in luxurious neglect with parents who will leave her with nothing.

What that meant for their relationship - - I think they did love each other, as much as they could love anyone, and I think that vulnerability between them was something that probably allowed them as true an intimacy as they’d ever have for a while. I also think that that vulnerability and that intimacy gave them power over one another that they’d use often and likely cruelly, and that the final years of their marriage were probably torturous for both of them.

After all, at the end of the day, Logan had the wealth Caroline could marry but never inherit, and Caroline had the title Logan could marry but never inherit, and what is that if not a reminder of the poisoned soil they sprung from?

[watchfuldeer]

notes on greg and grexuality in 4.01

if you'd told me a few months ago that the first episode of the final season of succession would kick the door down to greg's thus far pretty unexplored sexuality, i would have said jesse please i'm not strong enough, but here we are. i've always seen greg as fundamentally inexperienced in friendship, romance and specifically sex. like this guy is a late bloomer, and only has experience of inexpert fumblings at best, and this episode proved that and then some. we have definitively learned that greg is not experienced enough to know what he likes; he only knows what he’s supposed to like, and has yet to explore beyond that. he's ticking off a checklist directly cribbed from what he's seen around him at waystar and associates with power and success, rather than an understanding of his own desire.

when he tells tom about his bingo bongo bango (killing him with hammers etc.) semi-public rummage, it's literally the first time, "prove it" aside, that we see greg presented as someone who both verbally expresses sexual desire and acts on it when the opportunity presents itself, indeed is eager to, whether or not it's fulfilling (and so far, i think we can say definitely not). but it's completely exaggerated for tom's benefit; greg gets off on telling tom more than the encounter itself. this is combined with a new confident physicality around tom, who spent season three practically begging to touch him, and now can't get away fast enough from the 6'7" puppy begging for his attention. if greg was feeling sexually satisfied with his conquests, such as they are, then he wouldn’t be physically plastered to tom.

this episode showed us a greg who is clearly very open to experiencing new things and eager for anyone to show him a good time, but has seemingly yet to find the right person to do it. i think we can assume that bridget (who i found really delightfully gregcoded actually lol) is the latest in a growing line of women greg has picked out on a dating app and decided he's fallen for only to quickly drop once he's deemed them dissatisfying in some way.

greg doesn't realise he’s using women as a way to get the attention he wants from tom, but tom probably does realise that he's getting the details out of greg as a sexual proxy for what he can't articulate wanting. he seems resigned to the fact he’s tied his dick to a runaway greg, and yet unable to overcome his fear of being rejected. i can see this running for a few more episodes, but something's got to give. we know tom only has it in him to repress so much at any one time, while greg is the horniest he's ever been and directing it mostly at tom. much to fucking think about.

[bbutterguns]

that stitches scene. his birthright. Kendall has always been unable to stomach violence against Roman. he flipped out at Logan in s2 even while he was in robot mode. he wouldn’t hit Roman at the party; even when they’re fighting feral for Roman’s phone in boar on the floor he doesn’t hit him. he yells at Logan for it in their last ever conversation (“everyone hit me”). but now he’s Logan and he hugs Roman until his stitches pop. and when Roman baits him (in an unfathomably cruel way to be clear) he hits him. Kendall wasn’t going to be protector anymore. he was going to be dad, and dad dismisses Shiv, forgets Connor (“i’m the eldest boy!”), and wrings beaten dog loyalty out of Roman. fuck.