I love your mess

joanna robinson on the prestige tv podcast said "often when we talk about wanting them to escape people will come back and say, like, but they're horrible people, why are you rooting for them? and i'm like, i'm not rooting for them. i'm rooting for the idea that the poison doesn't have to drip through. that there is some choice you can make or some freedom you can have in all of this if you realize it in time." and i was very struck by that as a very lovely articulation of a disconnect that exists in the ways people talk not just about succession but about all kinds of fiction, and as something i certainly relate to a lot. and to be clear i don't think when she says she's rooting for that that she means that's what she thinks the show should do or that the show going elsewhere (which is where it's going) would be a flaw or a mistake. like i am not, in fact, rooting for this the way people root for sports teams (probably. i was born missing the brain cells that allow a person to root for a sports team so i am hypothesizing here). it's about, like, this is the empathic desire that this narrative (succession and also other things) stirs in me, it touches on a particular part of my own humanity that is inescapably animated by this impulse. it has nothing to do with what i think should happen artistically or how i would analyze the show morally if i wanted to (which i don't, because it's Pretend), but it's not right to say that it's separate, either - part of the pleasure of watching the show is having that part of myself activated, and part of the pleasure is also sick vertigo between that desire and the moments where i do react viscerally to the characters' monstrosity, and part of the pleasure is also the friction, increasing by the minute this particular season, between that hope and its gradual decimation onscreen. but like, yeah, i do care about my pretend children the roy sibs, because they are pretend and i don't have to weight caring about them against anything else on earth, but also because since they are pretend, the reason to care about them is because they connect me to something i have emotions about, which is, well, several things, but the one i'm thinking about in this post is the idea that maybe the poison doesn't have to drip through, or to mix sources for metaphors that there are ways to close the portal. and, like, i don't think that's where the show's going, but the places it's gone and the place it's going are only interesting to me because of the tension they create with that wish. if it weren't for that, i... would probably not find the show interesting enough to watch, and if i did i certainly wouldn't be so motherfucking obsessed with it! lmao.