she/her femme lesbian sam truther

Like, backing up: Roman has always been tractable to the alt-right because he can’t help but show his belly. He’s always dominated, so domination has to be inherent, it has to be right. He believes in hierarchies because he needs there to be a natural, world-ordering reason for why there’s a leash around his neck and fist in his face. It’s pathetic, sad little rich boy, and he knows it, but here we are. 

He’s no more misogynistic than Kendall, no more racist than the Pierce family, with their paternalism towards their non-white staff, but he is a troll, and likes to rile up his sister, so he flirts and flirts and flirts with talking points and dogwhistles until oops your dad doesn’t love you and here comes a demagogue and he’s a real man, like your father, not like you. 

Mencken, for his part, is cold and intelligent and charismatic and knows a tool when he sees one. Succession is a show about royalty, it plays in archetypes, and Mencken is a good one. He’s wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. He reads Aquinas and scares the left, but centrists will swallow their pride to work with him. He’s not Donald Trump, he’s not gross. He’s masculine, virile, has a gleam in his eye and curses with precision. The first thing we learn about him is that he can read people. Remember this?

Roman’s greatest enemy is himself. He’s clocked right out of the gate. 

So Mencken looks at Roman with his coquettish mannerisms and his obvious preening eating disorder and his big bleeding heart and his attack dog instincts and thinks that this guy is useful. He’s malleable, he’s summonable, he’s got a servile nature. Yeah he’s probably a fag, but as far as Mencken is concerned, that’s a plus. No backbone in Those People, but when they hate themselves, you can sic them on just about anyone. 

Fascism hates the appearance of weakness, but it depends on weakness, it depends on people who, for whatever reason, find assurance in hierarchies. 

But then the election happens, and Roman and Mencken are publicly linked. Roman isn’t just Mencken’s guy on the inside anymore, cloistered within a board room, he’s out in public. And the first day, the very first day, that they’re allies in front of the world, Roman breaks down and sobs at his father’s funeral. 

Kendall wipes his tears in full view of the audience, Shiv cries but pushes through with her voice wavering. Mencken doesn’t mind that. He cozies up to Kendall and is willing to treat with Shiv. Because they kept it together. They handled it. They were tough. Kendall the crown prince with his peans to Our Great God Capital and Shiv the knife, who will not be seen as weak. 

But Roman mewls and keens and covers his face and apologizes and comes apart so completely that someone in the audience films it. 

(Who can blame them, Roman is such an asshole to so many people, watching him go to pieces must have felt delicious.)

And Mencken is just....disgusted. In the mind of the archetypal demagogue, that kind of emotion, that kind of raw and pitiful helplessness, isn’t just weak, it’s womanly. Like, it’s not a mistake that later in the episode Roman’s crying is compared to the sound of a suffering female pig.

@bestwlwmonster

Early on patterns of physical violence and isolation techniques, after s3 emotional abuse gets worse, forced detox, then s8 on the physical abuse gets more restrained by the targetted emotional abuse gets worse, guilt tripping gaslighting, stalking and changing numbers in phones, and like it just gets worse and worse he's yelling and blaming and completely controlling Sam at every second and continues gaslighting him when he can as well.

It's like hard to give 1 example of "this continuous over years of horrifying treatment of abuse patterns" but I would just watch some of the show put together instead of in isolation. I'd honestly hope it'd be apparent since it's very blatant?