"Did you say it? 'I love you. I don't ever wanna live without you. You changed my life.' Did you say it? Make a plan. Set a goal. Work toward it. But every now and then look around. Drink it in. 'Cause this is it. It might all be gone tomorrow."
I’ve been trying to answer this for a bit now and I’m just going to cut to the most important part of my interpretation, so feel free to ask again if you want more.
Basically, I keep coming back to the No Real Person Involved narrative Succession introduced in season 2. When does the story apply NRPI and who to? The waiter and the cruise ship victims. What do they have in common? Abuse of power. The waiter’s death is swept under the rug, because Logan Roy can make it so; the cruise victims and their sexual abuse becomes meaningless in the face of a media empire.
But Roman also is told “you are not a real person”. He is told he remembers the dog cage, the defining thing of his childhood, wrong. He tends to make jokes refering to sexual abuse about himself (whereas the violent language of sex other characters use is reserved for business only), but nobody fully reacts to these comments with more than “wtf?”. The narrative essentially places Roman on the same level as the abused women on the ships; the violence from within the Roy family reaching outwards and coming back around.
The SA jokes, especially, are tricky territory, because at some point you have to make a decision whether they should be taken at face value or not. Here is the thing though, to me they all have an eerily similar theme- Telling the therapist about Connor SA-ing him? The comment about the camp counselor fucking him? The hostage situation ending in SA? The whole “if we agree on a wrong thing it’s not actually wrong” (which is seriously not something someone just comes up with, like, that thought has been there for a while)? The cut line of “trust me” “that’s what men say before they rape you”? Taking the leap from “well connected” to pedophilia? It becomes a pattern when you look at it like that.
Now, Roman says he was sent to military school after he “went weird” which might give us pause at this point, because wtf does that even mean. There is an empty space here. Yeah, maybe Logan sent Roman away because he was sent away as well and thought it might make him “stronger”. But maybe he just sent him away, because Logan always sensed something about his son that wasn’t right. And maybe, just maybe, the parallel of the cruise victims being silenced and a child being sent away to be silenced even starts here. Maybe Logan knew to sweep something under the rug before Kendall’s accident.
Oh, and military schools- one can only guess what goes on behind closed doors. You essentially have authority (even paternal) figures that can do just about anything.
Hey, really love your succession meta, I hope this is welcome in your ask box. Idk if this is something you talked about already, but there is this persuasive assumption in the general fandom space that roman was the only kid who suffered physical abuse ever that in my opinion isnt really supported in the text/subtext. The way the past abuse of all the roys is talked about, to me, always implied a wealth of countless, other traumatic experiences that are simply not talked about and may very well be physical abuse. To me it feels like it was set up this way to fire up the viewers imagination and illustrate the sheer, unspeakable magnitude of the abuse. I just cant see Logan never losing his temper and getting physical with the other sibs but I struggle to put into words why. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think Rome was the only kid facing physical abuse? Youre always so eloquent in your analysis and demonstrate a complex understanding of dv dynamics. I appreciate your work :)
Hey! Thank you for your kind words, anon, and it’s definitely welcome in my inbox!
Yeah, I’ve noticed that assumption about Roman a lot too, and it’s not one I personally agree with, although I do understand why people make it. Roman is, after all, the only one of the four children that the show explicitly depicts receiving physical abuse, and he’s the only one who really has his abuse talked about by the other children (interestingly, on both occasions Roman’s abuse is actually weaponised against other characters, not against Roman. Kendall uses it as a way to try and hurt their father in 4.02, and Shiv uses it as a way to say that Kendall deserves greater punishment from their father than he’s receiving in 2.01).
I actually would say that we’ve had pretty explicit evidence that Kendall received physical abuse too, namely in the way that Logan came at him at Connor’s ranch after Kendall’s relapse in 1.07 (especially because I’d argue Kendall was doing in that scene what Roman has done a few times now by seeking out the hit, and the reason Logan held off was less about not wanting to, and more that he punishes his children by not giving them what they want), and in Logan hitting Iverson with the tin of cranberries in 1.05. I talked about the latter in this post, but I’ve always read the blocking of Kendall behind Iverson as a way of having a flashback without having a flashback, and the way that the episode ties Kendall and Iverson’s experiences as the same I think underscores that.
(It’s hard to comment on this particular point without seeing the scripts, but Arian Moayed has said in an interview too that the script for 4.04 had Stewy say that he’d seen Logan through a shoe at Kendall which I do think is likely meant to echo what Shiv says about Logan beating Roman with a shoe in 2.01 too, but given the scene was condensed, I’ll leave it out as canonical evidence at this point).
As for Shiv and Connor, yeah, I do think there was physical abuse for both of them as well, and I think it was probably fairly common for Connor when he was very young, and probably infrequent enough for Shiv for her to push it down (honestly though, given her character, I wouldn’t even be surprised if a part of her re-wrote it in her head as a positive after the fact. Getting hit means, after all, that she’s one of the boys).
So it does beg the question of why Roman’s abuse is easier for them all to acknowledge. I have a few theories about that, but ultimately, I think it comes down to an adolescent othering of Roman by Shiv and Kendall, and all four of their relative proximity to each other in their formative years.
Alan Ruck has said that Connor’s about fifteen years older than Kendall which puts him in a unique situation growing up where I imagine there’s a lot about his childhood through to his young adulthood that the Golden Trio simply don’t know due to the age gap. They obviously know bits and pieces – what happened to Connor’s mother for instance, Logan’s temporary abandonment, and the situation with the cake – but I’d generally say that those are life events that scaffold a childhood, they don’t provide the detail of it.
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