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august 17, 2021
1:00 a.m.
paradise hotel
[grant] you can have first dibs on trying. my family on all sides and in all countries have been too successful at matching people.
[henry] time to humble them?
[grant] besides, mama ong didn't get a chance with you. you figured it out a decade ago!
[henry] two decades ago if you count the time soobin and i crossed paths in vacation bible school and she kind of sort of ruined my watercolor painting of jesus.
[grant] isn't that crazy? the same girl you, uhhh, almost punched in a church is the same woman you fell in love with at a college cheese club meeting?
[henry] the enemies to lovers trope lives on.
[grant] you're basically a fanfiction. enemies to lovers plus soulmates because neither of you ever dated anyone else.
[grant] man, the universe is so weird. seven plus billion people on earth and you guys run into each other twice.
[henry] the first time was a total fluke, too. how were we at the same VBS when we didn't go to the same church or live in the same town? oh, and we didn't recognize each other from our first encounter until years into our adult relationship.
[insook] her family seems to have forgotten the incident, too. permanently, though.
[insook] which is good because i defended you when i shouldn't have and things got ugly.
[henry] you defended me?! mom, i threatened to punched someone. in a church. over nothing worth that level of aggression.
[insook] oh, not for that. that's unforgivable. you knew that. i punished you. but i defended you when soobin's mom insulted you. now don't worry - she likes you these days!
[insook] still, a parenting tip: you can never reason with a parent in an unreasonable state.
[henry] i could have gone without knowing that. i'm not going to bother asking what she said about me. i find her intimidating. she's like if your mom wasn't evil, grant.
[grant] you know, that's extremely hard to imagine. i'll just assume you mean rich and strict.
[insook] that would be about right. but she is nice! oh, look at the time. i have to go now, i'm sorry. i have book club soon!
[henry] that's fine! have fun. i'll call you back tomorrow.
[insook] of course. you two have fun as well! yes, have fun, sleep well, make sure you eat, and mind your health, grant.
[insook] by the way, i'm glad you're still best friends.
[henry] couldn't have it any other way. this guy's pretty cool.
[grant] i literally adore you.
[insook] i'm not surprised–just happy. a good friend is one of the only things in life that can be forever.
[insook] now don't forget to call me again! i love you kids.
[henry] i would never forget. love you.
[grant] i love you, too, mama ong! bye bye bye.
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Goretober III: Hematemesis (Written By Nemesis)
This one funny to me haha Castys so miserable he super loves the @coyotehusk goretober
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Ingredients: chocolate, emeto (blood!), poison, gore, noncon touching that is a little bit more intimate than normal but still unsexy
Today’s restraint of choice was a metal collar around his neck that was chained to the floor, and Castys wasn’t really a fan. Sure, it gave him more freedom of movement than the table or dangling on a hook, but it didn’t really matter when Kuro could pin all of his limbs down and still have her hands free, which was super unfair. And the chain attached to his collar was long enough to allow him to sit up, but he couldn’t stand at all, which he supposed was better than being forced to stand and not able to sit, but still.
Right now, though, Kuro was sitting across from him, holding out what appeared to be a piece of chocolate. “Here, Castys. You deserve a little treat for being a good boy so far.”
“You know I’m, like, way older than you, right?”
“You’d be surprised,” she laughed. And hey, maybe she was pretty old, too, considering that he didn’t even know what exactly she even was.
He kind of wanted to refuse the chocolate on principle, but he was also not one to turn down a little treat, especially if it was candy. Warily, he took it, watching Kuro as he put it in his mouth, but she just watched him right back, unreadable as ever. The chocolate was good, and it’d been a long time since he’d had something sweet, or any food at all, really, so he tried to savor it, but the longer he kept it in his mouth, the more he started to taste something…odd.
He was a fucking idiot this wasn’t just chocolate of course it was laced with something-But as soon as he tried to spit it out, Kuro pounced on him, pinning his wrists next to his head, her hand covering his mouth. “Swallow, Castys. You deserve it, remember?” Castys tried to squirm free and spit what was left of the chocolate in her face, but Kuro didn’t budge, so he was forced to chew the rest of the chocolate and swallow, since it would just melt in his mouth if he kept it there. “There you go,” Kuro said, stroking his face and causing him to flinch, which of course just made her laugh. It was always so funny to everyone how much Castys hated being touched!
Finally, she got off of him, allowing Castys to sit up and scoot as far away from her as his short chain would allow. “What the fuck was in that?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” Castys sighed in annoyance and crossed his arms, waiting for whatever stupid drug or poison she’d fed him to take effect. He felt fine at the moment, maybe a little chest pain, but…okay, it was starting to get worse. As time went on, the pain only got sharper, and he started to get nauseous, which wasn’t really unexpected but still not fun.
Soon enough he really, really had to puke, but Kuro was still sitting there, just staring at him, and he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. However, his stomach didn’t give a shit about Kuro, forcing him to lurch forward on his hands and knees and vomit. It sounded more…solid than he was expecting, like there were little bits of something in it, but it was hard to tell by looking at the dark puddle between his hands.
Having a Suspicion, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and…yep, that was blood. “What’d you do to me?” he groaned, feeling even worse now that he’d thrown up, like the worst heartburn ever combined with an awful stomachache.
“It’s a special poison that sort of…destroys your stomach lining,” Kuro said lightly. “So your stomach acid is digesting you from the inside right now. I want to see if it’ll get fixed when you die.”
“It won’t.” Castys gave up and laid down on the cold stone floor, already feeling nauseous again. Well, this sucked ass. The acid was gonna eat through him no matter how many times he died until it…ran out? Did acid run out? Probably. Didn’t matter right now, he was gonna puke again, and he was barely able to get upright before even more blood spewed out of his mouth, splattering all over his arms and hands.
Kuro laughed and picked up a little red chunk of something. “Ooh, I think this is part of your stomach. Looks like little pieces of you are coming up now instead of just blood clots.” Castys didn’t have the energy to reply, just lying curled up on his side as he coughed blood out of his nose and mouth, waiting for the next delivery of corroded bits from inside himself as the world spun out of focus.
He could hardly tell when he’d died or come back to life, the pain never really went away despite him having a stomach lining again since the rogue acid was no longer in his stomach. At some point Kuro tackled him so she could wrench his shirt up and look at the fun shade of purple his stomach area had turned, poking at it with interest. He’d stopped puking now and was just stuck lying there and groaning as his insides turned into soup.
It would stop eventually.
Right?
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So I know you’ve discussed this a little before and not sure if you’ve seen this (or care that much lol) but recently Jesse Armstrong confirmed that Logan treated all the boys the same when it comes to physical abuse. Link here to the clip if interested [just remove the parentheses https://twitter(.)com/princekendalll/status/1696683862976336042?s=20]. This aligns with my own read of the show too which is nice but if you listen to the clip Jesse further clarifies that the reason it (the physical abuse) stays with Roman in the present is because he feels like a victim or like he was bullied whereas Kendall and Connor have found a way to like…slot this into their worldview, I guess. I found this interesting because I tend to read Roman as having something of a victim complex but I also think this brings up a few other interesting ideas I’d love to hear your views on if interested.
If we think of Roman as understanding himself to be a victim or bullied within the family unit, do you think Roman is aware that his brothers have had similar experiences with Logan’s physical abuse, or does he think of himself that way because he think’s he’s had a unique experience? Further, how do you think Connor and Kendall were able to move past it. I tend to read Kendall as just…not thinking he was abused. But Connor’s the one that I find kind of fascinating in this context because his past is kind of a black box – narratively we have no one to give us little nuggets of his childhood the way the Trio are able to recount childhood stories of each other to shed light for the audience.
Thank you so much for sending that, anon! I hadn't seen it / heard it, and as someone who's always felt Logan was physical with all of the kids, but especially the boys, it's pretty vindicating.
Which is - - y'know, a weird thing to say about a topic like this ,I guess, but it's always nice to think your read of something is what was intended.
I'm pretty fascinated by victim complexes in general. This is a bit of a personal aside, but I'm really close with my uncle, who's my mum's baby brother, and he's bright and funny and has lived such an interesting life, but he's definitely got a victim complex. For him, he knows it, and he's trying to work through it, and it probably comes from a not dissimilar place to Roman now that I think about it - my uncle never felt like he was enough of a man to his father, and when his father died when he was just 17, he joined the army reserves to 'prove' himself, which went.
Not Well.
That kind of snowballed into a very complex relationship with his own masculinity, especially as my uncle was pretty heavily engaged in counter culture and queer and punk scenes in his twenties after being in the reserves only to get into rural journalism which - - y'know. Certainly didn't help his sense of being targeted and bullied, particularly as the organisational culture in rural newspapers as he was coming up were aggressive to say the least.
My point though is that his sense of victimisation is really tied pretty deeply to his sense of not feeling like enough of a man, which was a sentiment established by his father, reinforced by the army and further abused in male-dominated rural towns that he was reporting in.
While Roman, of course, doesn't have the latter, it's an interesting thing to think about in the sense of the first two with Roman clearly feeling his masculinity under threat by his father, and there is an argument to be made about that being reinforced by St. Andrews, but funnily enough, I kind of feel the opposite about that particular point.
Probably because I disagree with St. Andrews being a military school at all.
So let's talk about St. Andrew's
It's pretty widely accepted, I think, that when the show named St. Andrew's they were referring to the St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Tennessee, in no small part because there were no other St. Andrew's it feels like it could've been. This is a wealthy school (in fact their school fees, with boarding, are almost exactly the same as Buckley without boarding where Kendall canonically went), and the show's attention to details like this feels too deliberate.
And I think it works in no small part because St. Andrew's had stopped being a military school in 1971, about a decade before Roman could've been born (in my timeline I will one day post, haha, probably when nobody will even want it, I think we can pretty cleanly put Kendall as being born in 1979/1980, so Roman at the earliest would be born in '81). It was also during the 1970s, long before Roman would've gone, that St. Andrew's became co-ed.
Of course, this is an area ripe for speculation, but I think it rings true of the show for the kids to treat St Andrew's like it was a military school when that was a fragment of a past (and not even technically a part of St. Andrew's past - it had merged with the Sewanee School, which was the military school). What St. Andrew's became was not the school that Roman actually went to, but a symbol of this sense of being victimised and ostracised. Cast out, in a punishing system, which - - looking at this particular school, while bougie is also co-ed, outdoorsy, freer than Buckley, but that doesn't matter.
Roman's not fixated on the conditions of it, he's fixated on the othering of it. He sees Kendall and presumably Shiv too going to school near Logan (although I doubt Logan was there all that much) in Manhattan, while he's out in the midwest. I kinda think you could argue he played up the military history of the school to perform a strength and masculinity for his brothers and sister he felt he lacked, which could also be a part of why the narrative stuck.
But yes, that's not your question, haha.
Do I think he's aware that his brothers have experienced similar abuse? Yeah, actually, but I think it probably has its ebbs and flows and takes on different meanings depending on the moment or the circumstances, right?
An Aside
So my best friend's grandmother's was in an extremely violent and abusive marriage (I promise this is relevant), and every now and then, he would hit their two daughters too. He died young and unexpectedly, when the girls were still teenagers, a blessing to everyone, but the elder of the two girls - my bf's aunt - has developed a very complex and sometimes hostile relationship with her sister and their mother.
She feels their mother should've protected them better, that she should've left their father years before he died, and she deeply resents her sister for forgiving their mother so easily.
That's warped over the years - both daughters are in their 50s now, their mother close to 80, they're genuinely all pretty close - but it's gotten to the point where the elder daughter feels she was The Most Abused.
I know them all pretty well - me and my bf have known each other for almost 16 years - I've vacationed with them, gotten drunk with them, been involved in multiple weddings, not just my bf's but other members of her family's too.
One night, I was chatting to her mum after she and her sister had had a fight at a party - my best friend and her brothers had gone inside looking after their grandmother - and she just said her sister couldn't move past it. That they all knew what their mother experienced was unimaginable, that he hit them every now and then, but what he did to their mother was so much worse, and that she just didn't see what the point was with holding onto any of that pain when they can just push forwards.
More than that, when you can move on.
My bf's mum became a neonatal nurse, and she thinks she can see it sometimes. Men like her father, absent usually from delivery and controlling or too physical in the ward after, and she feels it too. The way she can throw lifelines to women who are ready for them, or just let women who aren't know where the lighthouses are. It's not a perfect system, but she loves her job, and this part of it - - I think she finds it healing too.
My bf's aunt was a receptionist to a guy who works high up in a bank, and she married him.
She hasn't worked since they had kids 25 years ago.
But back to your question
I think one of the interesting things about the show is that it's showed Roman as typically fairly directionless. He's out of the company at the start of the series, and doesn't seem to have any other thing he's driving towards. Shiv has politics, Kendall has the company, but even Connor has Austerlitz and his water planning before he jumps on his presidential campaign.
I do think a lack of purpose probably can become a bit of a feedback loop psychologically which has caused him to stew in resentment and has probably rationalised his abuse as 'worse', because if it wasn't, then why's he the fuck up? Even just of the Golden Trio.
Probably helped by - as you mention - Kendall's unwillingness to acknowledge it, and the fact that none of them take Connor seriously.
With Kendall and Connor - - yeah, I think Kendall is, in many ways, a caged animal constantly trying to claw his way out of his own head. I think he distracts himself with projects, or people, or drugs, and leans into the whatever, it happened, hey, but right now... of his own circumstances. He knows what happened to him, but he can never talk about it, not to a friend at a funeral or to his own father on his death bed. Kendall's stutter exists I think in his own thinking too, a record scratch that lets him start the song where he has to instead of where he wants or needs to.
He's not quite disassociated, but he's not quite connected either.
And with Connor - - gosh.
I mean, it's interesting to talk about him in this sort of context, because as you said, his history is so much more of a black box. I do think him having a period of absence from Logan plays into his acceptance of it. More and more, I tend to think that the three years he talks about in 3.09 was before Kendall was born, and so I think he's stepping back into formal 'Roy' life at 15 with a lot of complexity that shapes his experience very differently.
Not only is there that tangible anxiety of being rejected again if you don't fall in line, but there's also these new and complicated feelings of being replaced / in competition with a new child (always fascinated that Connor so rarely expresses that in the series, but whenever he does it's with Kendall), but also I think naturally feeling immediately doting and protective of this scrap of family offered to you after a period without.
I think in that context that Connor probably long ago reconciled himself with the fact that if he wanted his father in his life, that was what it was going to be like, and that he was prepared to be the failure if it kept him out of the bloodsport between their father and his siblings. I think he does occasionally wish for a higher position, and wonder what it could've been if Dad had ever thought of him in that context, but I also think he, at some point, made the choice that none of the rest of them have been able to make, which is that he can always go home.
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