the show should have leaned more to both oswald and edward leaning into abusing substances in order to cope with their falling out. just sayin

Married couple knocks some sense into that nerd and his husband joins in

Yuppie

The Penguin in Batman #146

Admittedly I do think about this a lot

i am never gonna finish this

Thinking about how underrated Terra is again. Literally taken advantage of because he was too nice. Such a strong will he haunted his armor for years in order to protect himself and others. Said armor kicked xehanort into next Tuesday AND terra took control long enough to screw over his plan and take away his memories. Okay. King.

Ventus

finally just terra 🪐✨

So I just kept going after drawing Ven--

Thinking about that bit where Mattson's shirt rides up when he takes his hoodie off and Kendall and Roman are like 🧍🏻‍♂️🧍🏻‍♂️

And listen I know everyone's like "haha lol gay" (me too) or saying it's fanservice. I really don't think it's the latter but I've been thinking, I think it might be on purpose. I mean we're talking Roman, who we see body checking early in the series, who only picks at food. And Kendall, green smoothie king, who wakes up early to workout, and oscillates between extreme obsession with health and purposefully self destructive drug abuse. And then Mattson comes in and he's got that conventionally "perfect" bod they both want to obtain. These are two men who were once caught up in the "summer of competitive eating disorders", don't forget.

They both want to be the paragon of health in some way, they're both facing mortality with Logan's sudden banal death. And who's in front of them, basically showing off? Mattson is everything they want to be, but can't become. I think they're freaking out a little internally. And it might just be contributing to Kendall going off the deep end in the next ep with Living+ and trying to combat aging.

To summarise:

we've learnt for a fact now that tom feels the full range of human emotions towards greg and that he can't let anyone in or he'll die. so how does he express his emotions? the only way he can let himself. he wants to be a specific kind of person, a roy, and how he is feeling and what he wants to do does not fit in with how these people behave. he doesn’t do it because it’s natural. he does it because he has to. he throws insults at it and tries to wrestle it to the ground but it feels weak because his heart isn’t in it.

neither greg or tom are like the roys at their core. they weren’t raised in it. there are moments of real happiness for the two of them when they’re alone and can just be themselves. there's something different in their relationship dynamic here than the relationships the siblings have. it doesn’t feel as bittersweet because they aren’t as fundamentally broken.

tom is more guarded, of course, he’s received some emotional damage from shiv so he always says or does something to keep greg just far enough away. he’s learnt vulnerability is dangerous. every time he tries to show shiv that he loves her she makes him feel like he’s done it wrong. this season he started behaving in a way that would get through to her but that didn’t feel good to him either, didn’t save him from being fired, nothing.

shiv needed the kind of love tom gave her the same way tom needs what greg gives him. but the difference is tom is more capable of accepting love from people he cares about and wouldn’t hurt greg any deeper than a weak insult, even if he could.

tom knows what it’s like to have to beg for someone who is supposed to care about you to do something for you, so when greg asked if he could possibly save him from going to jail he says load me up without a second thought. he cares about greg’s feelings and would sacrifice something of his own for them and it’s this empathy that tom has that the roy family is lacking.

it’s not hard for tom to think to do something for another person for no reason other than it would make that person feel good. no quid pro quo. but even when tom does do something good for greg he 'can’t stand the good feeling he’s engendered' because he feels like he shouldn’t be doing nice things for no reason.

the nero and sporus scene was tom telling greg he cares about him at all and “come with me, sporus?” was the marriage proposal. greg asks what’s in it for him because that’s how greg works and tom has to say “who has ever looked out for you” instead of “i want you with me”. tom cannot let him know the depth of how he feels so he lets greg think he's using him for something and only merely tolerates him, like everyone else does.

and then, because greg still doesn’t get it, or is choosing to ignore it, tom has to yell “not samson! i want you gregging for me!" he still can’t say the real reason why. the only time he’s shown his real emotions to greg is when he’s alone in a room and greg can’t see his face through the phone.

it's not a perfect relationship. it's not supposed to be. that's why it's so compelling. it’s please don't be better than me i can't stand it but i love you. it’s i’m using you to get somewhere in the world but i’ll still look after you even when i don’t need to anymore. (villainfvcker made a great post about this.)

i’m writing this after episode eight, and if they’re going all the way with greg’s transformation into a roy family member and he betrays tom in some way, it will be another case of a succession character destroying the only real connection they have for some kind of power, and regretting it later.

if anything at all, we know tom really does love greg, and that’s a satisfying enough tomgreg endgame for me, personally.

these recent episodes in particular have been so endlessly heartbreaking and fascinating regarding not only how logan's abuse has manifested differently in each roy but also how the forms the abuse took as well as logan's motivation/emotion behind it varied so greatly from kid to kid. each kid is uniquely damaged, both because they're different individuals and also because the treatment they experienced wasn't uniform at all. i think kendall and shiv received the most similar treatment, just with variations based on their identities as Golden Boy and Woman (Derogatory) respectively -- i think logan's approach towards both of them was rooted in his desire for them to 'reach their full potential' in his eyes (which, again, probably means different things depending on what genitalia they have). connor, meanwhile, was subject to pure neglect. but despite the differences in the abuse experienced by kendall, shiv, and connor, one thing holds true for all of them: each one of them is obsessed with independence, be that through rebellion or self-sufficiency. they convince themselves they're over it, over needing dad's love, because they're their own people now, so everyone else can suck it. they're lying, of course, but they're trying to believe it so hard it's painful.

and then there's roman, whose abuse at logan's hands has had the opposite effect: it's nearly impossible for him to even conceive of himself as a real person with agency and value. while logan's 'tough love,' as he'd call it (although most psychologists would call it 'abuse'), towards ken and shiv was motivated by his desire to actually make them live up to their potential, and to increase their value by instilling (what he viewed as) 'positive qualities' into them, logan's 'tough love' for roman was motivated by his desire to beat the wrongness out of him. rather than trying to add anything positive or bring out the best in roman, logan's priority when dealing with roman was trying to get rid of (what he viewed as) the 'negative qualities' inherent within him. and when he couldn't, he sent him away to military school. ken and shiv were taught to live up to their respective potentials, connor had to teach himself how to live because no one else did it for him, but roman wasn't taught anything -- he was only taught how not to be. because while the others were lacking qualities logan desired, roman was innately, uniquely, entirely wrong. it wasn't a matter of making roman into the man logan wanted him to be so much as it was unmaking roman into something logan could look at without feeling sick. because roman is abnormal, unforgivably so. he's broken, fucked up. he's not made right. real people, normal people, don't act like this, feel like this. everyone else is a person and he isn't, so he doesn't count, not really. while logan shaped the identities of kendall, shiv, and even connor, all he did for roman was convince him that he's not enough of a person to have one, that all he is and all he'll ever be is Wrong.

(this got really long so the rest is under the cut!)

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.

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.

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".