#kendallroy

i just spend so much time thinking about how sickening succession is as a body of work. beginning a tv show and it instantly giving you bags and bags worth of sympathy for a character who you have known for 20 minutes when you are pulled into his strong and developing turmoil— the distraught, child-like look in his eyes when his father rips away years upon years of work and yells at him and tells him that he is simply not good enough is enough to somehow transport you into that characters shoes. the absurd situation and the sudden moment in time where succession begins— and yet, you are watching a man in a hurricane and feeling as if you have walked through the entire storm with your hands intertwined. kendall roy, i didn’t see your childhood but i know how it felt. i know how you were manipulated by your father into a delusion where you believed you could never achieve anything else but this job. i know how he promised the crown to you in the candy kitchen when you were seven. i know that you feel like you are a cog built to fit only one machine— and maybe you are, you inherited your fathers force and maliciousness and you were fundamentally a vessel built to keep logan’s persona present on earth after his death. and you cant escape that. you can’t escape, even when your friends are offering to buy you out of the company, even when you are finally standing up to your father, even when he dies. the spirit of a perpetual longing to hone as much power as possible leaves your dad’s dead body and enters yours. the drive to change is traded out with a true horror. a terrifying determination to win, a force you’ve never unlocked which will be the ticket to your downfall; an anger that sounds just like your fathers, a presence which always lurked in your childhood home when you’d make a mistake. an urge to lie, an instinct to gaslight—what was the point of resenting him to just become him? you didnt always have that in you, there was a kendall who you’ll think about as the sun sets on a cold day in battery park who would stand up to his father over a dinner table in italy and tell him to his face that he is evil in a desperation to change. you’ll wake up with a headache, gifted to you with the realisation that your dad may have died last week but to you he has been dead since you were a child. he has been a spirit floating around your house and nothing more for a very long time; but the knowing that the shell all of his evil was a resident in is gone now— and the anticipation of “will i get this job?” the thing that has been what your entire life has orbited around, the thing which has been in reach since before you even fully developed— the consciousness of this will fill you with a deep sadness you will never recover from