#i've been thinking about this for a while but especially since 4.02 with the way kendall and shiv worked together against logan

[pynkhues]

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.

The child desertion that came with Logan’s temporary abandonment too would also have been extremely formative to Connor as a character. We don’t know when this was (although I do have my own theories on that too), but it would’ve fundamentally changed any existing dynamic between Connor and Logan, and I think we see that quite clearly in the man Connor is. His people pleasing, his co-dependency, his need to control the terms of his relationships (notable in the entire context of his relationship with Willa), his fear of rejection, and his fawn response to certain situations are all symptomatic of childhood abandonment. I imagine a lot of that started after Logan’s desertion, but then likely were compounded with Logan’s re-entry into his life, and I think that grew into his sort of subservience and performed affability which was likely inherently tied to the fear of being abandoned again.

In that sense, I think there was probably less physical abuse with Connor as he got older because he learnt how to navigate their father’s temper and stopped testing it / always acquiesced out of a fear of being deserted again. If most of his physical abuse was when he was a child or a teenager, well, Kendall, Roman and Shiv hadn’t even been born, there’s already a remove for them in terms of their relation to it.

With Kendall, Roman and Shiv, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Roman being sent away to school in Delaware while Kendall and Shiv were both living with their father still and going to school in Manhattan. There’s a childhood separation there when it comes to Roman, yes, which breeds its own sort of ‘othering’, which I’ll come back to, but I do think there’s a lot of evidence in the show that depicts Kendall and Shiv as forming something between a ‘half and half’ and a ‘trauma-shield’ sibling relationship.

I’m getting a bit scientific here, so I hope you don’t mind, but a half and half sibling relationship is described as consisting of ‘the reenactment of traumatic events with their sibling due to the flawed attachments the sibling has to their caregiver. This sibling relationship is often the most violent, and is seen as a love-hate relationship with each other. This often plays out as the siblings’ relationship becomes too important as a substitute source of nurturing and threatening as a potential cause for abandonment. The siblings are confused about their psychological connection to a caregiver, and act out a push/pull relationship with each other to achieve maximum comfort from that caregiver.’

On the other hand, the trauma shield sibling relationship is when siblings ‘use each other as a shield from the abuse and interrupt the development process. They become fixated at the same developmental level and exhibit similar interpretations of their struggles despite the chronological age difference.’

The show regularly depicts Kendall and Shiv as being mirrors to one another – they are the winning dog, the rightful heir, the only real competition to one another, and now the only two to be parents and continue the lines of succession – and I think we’ve seen the effect that’s had on both their lives. They have moments of genuine intimacy and trust, they defend each other, they reach for each other when things are blowing up and become active participants in each other’s attacks on others, just as they also are the most ruthless with one another, the most violent, they weaponise each other’s weaknesses (both real and perceived) and have tried to ‘kill’ each other more than any other iteration of the siblings.

I also think that they both are in extreme denial about the abuse they received, and I think that they enable that in each other and shield each other from the realities of it which is easier to do when Connor and Roman weren’t there for it, and easier to do when they have each other to reiterate the artifice of their lives. God, one of the things that’s so great about the karaoke confrontation in 4.02 is that it kind of lays that out. Kendall and Shiv work together in that scene in a way that shuts Roman and Connor out at best and at worst uses their abuse and neglect to make a point while never saying anything about what Logan’s done to them. Shiv might bring up Logan advising Tom on the lawyers, but even that is a way around the things we’ve seen Logan do to her, and Kendall’s literally behind her the whole time. They’re in-step in their refusal to acknowledge what their father’s done to them, just as they’re in-step in forcing their brothers’ abuse out into the open to make a point.

I think this dynamic likely established itself around the time Roman was sent away to school, because I think Roman being sent away fed into Kendall and Shiv’s shared narrative that they were the prized children. It likely did have this degree of othering for Roman which emphasised his perceived weakness in the eyes of all three of the Golden Trio, and I think he likely had readjustment periods when coming home for the holidays that did see him hit more. I think those periods likely let Kendall and Shiv off the proverbial hook until he inevitably went back to school, where they could control their own abuse narratives again through their shared understanding of what the ‘story’ was.

This has gotten very long, haha, so look! This is a roundabout way of saying that I think Logan’s parenting style has been divide and conquer for as long as he’s been a parent, and that that has coloured all four of their understandings of their own abuse. The difference is that Connor and Roman were cast out, and the fact of being cast out at all means that abuse and neglect has a light shone upon it. It gets some oxygen, it gets to breathe, which makes it real. Kendall and Shiv weren’t cast out, they were kept together in their father’s house in Manhattan, and I think getting to stay behind closed doors in the dark let them hide even from Connor and Roman. It didn’t see the light, it didn’t get any air, so it was never real. I think it allowed them the ability to hide, deny or re-write their abuse, and I think they used (and still use) each other to do it.

#this is so long anon i am very sorry #i've been thinking about this for a while but especially since 4.02 with the way kendall and shiv worked together against logan #it was Very Interesting #i've done quite a bit of trauma response training recently + have worked a lot in child safety over the last six years so i think i do watc #the show with a particular eye #hbo succession #roman roy #kendall roy #shiv roy #connor roy #logan roy #succession meta #cw abuse #welcome to my ama