#something about shiv being the one who resembles logan the most | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

grendelsmilf · 5 months

Note

did you watch succession? weirdly i feel like a similar theme was communicated with tom wambsgans except for some reason that one felt less bizarrely grotesque. maybe because it had something to say about the world itself that he was trying to break into being the source of the evil. iunno

hahahaha my icon is literally marcia roy yes i watched succession. and yeah, you’re right in the sense that tomwambs bears a structural resemblance to oliver, in the sense that he’s also from an upper middle class family who deviously yet pathetically social climbs his way into a ludicrously wealthy (new money*) family and uses a combination of sex and guile to win a position of power by letting the more obvious heirs get picked off one by one. there are of course some key differences here too, however. the most important being the fact that the position he “wins” by the end of the show is blatantly hollow, a completely illusory guise of power that even he knows is ontologically meaningless. he does not actually use wit and trickery to win this position either, but rather exploits his status within a patriarchal power structure to position himself as both dominator (of shiv) and dominated (by mattsson), powerful yet pliable enough to be granted an illusory title. it is also crucial that tom is entering a new money family, because in his mind, logan is the model of ideal masculinity, a ruthless, self-made man who used his business savvy to build an empire out of dirt. tom uses shiv as the property through which he attempts (and ultimately succeeds) to assume logan’s position, but he also is deeply aware of the precariousness of his role, and his insecurity causes him to lash out in obvious, uncouth ways (most overtly by using greg as a proxy over which to exert power to soothe his emasculated ego). tom is someone who clearly craves the kind of “fuck off wealth” logan has achieved and his children take for granted. which isn’t to say that tom was not raised in material comfort, but that he wants enough wealth to be able to abuse and exploit others with impunity. the capitalist system that enables and facilitates that interpersonal and systemic abuse is the etiological locus of tom’s whole unhinged deal, because succession understands what saltburn does not, which is that a system necessarily invites certain roles, which must be filled in certain ways. tom wants to assume the mantle of ultimate patriarch, but must ultimately settle for being some phony tech bro’s shiny virile puppet. while oliver gets his nude victory lap in the murder mansion, tom must settle for planting a sticker on greg’s forehead, must relish the quiet indignant resignation of his wife resting her hand on his. shiv goes to congratulate him. “oh, no no no.” yes he won the game, but in name only. and he lost everything that matters, including any semblance of real power.

#there’s also the obvious fact that he’s. yknow . an unlikable idiot who sucks at his job #but even if he was competent and stable it wouldn’t matter tbh #the fact that he’s an unhinged little clown is just a bonus :)#ask #anon #saltburn #….sort of?#o.tv #i love tomwambs so much. i don’t know if that’s smth I’ve communicated lately

15 notes · View notes

jeffersonhairpie · 2 years

Text

OK I’m gonna post about Roman Roy’s name because that’s where I am this Tuesday evening

Connor, Kendall and Siobhan are all either Celtic or Saxon names, in some way related to the country in which Logan spent his early years, but Romulus is latin, the language of the great conquerors who came along and took control of Great Britain (NOT Ireland. Ireland was golden). He immediately stands out from his siblings because of this. But he’s not really a conqueror, and either way the Romans are long gone from the British isles now.

Then there’s the fact that it’s never entirely clear whether his name is Romulus or Roman. Most people seem to call him Roman, with Rome as a diminutive, but Logan fairly consistently calls him Romulus and occasionally Roman. Yes Connor shortens to Con and Kendall to Ken and Siobhan to Shiv but none of them have the same measure of uncertainty surrounding their names. The uncertainty in his name is a reflection of the uncertainty in Roman’s character. He doesn’t know who he is.

Even Caroline goes Roman rather than Romulus, so if the name on his birth certificate IS Romulus it’s ancient history to most of the family (see what I did there?). I could hypothesise for a whole day about why this is - did Caroline call him Roman and Logan Romulus and it was an expression of their duelling ownership over their son? Did Roman stamp his foot one day and decide he didn’t want to be called Romulus anymore? Did he stamp his foot and demand to be called Romulus and everyone laughed at him and did the exact opposite? The possibilities are endless. But it’s also possible that Romulus is to Roman what Pinkie is to Shiv - an extra little nickname from their father. Only Shiv is the supposed ‘favourite’ so her nickname is an expression of closeness, used when she and Logan are on good footing and Logan thinks something’s wrong with Roman so ‘Romulus’ is used to chastise as much as anything else. Like giving him a stronger name might toughen him up. I don’t know and I doubt the show will ever tell us but the possibilities intrigue me so much.

Getting into the nitty gritty - Roman and Logan are close to rhyming with each other. The ‘o’ and the ‘a’ are pronounced the same in each name with the same rhythm and stresses. It’s the same core sounds bracketed by different consonants. Logan didn’t name any of his kids after himself, he never really thought he was going to produce someone who was a worthy successor to his name, but he came the closest with Roman. Only in coming so close but missing the mark, Roman came out wrong. He wants to be just like his dad and to be seen to be just like his dad, probably more than any of the other siblings, but he’s a pathetic little slime puppy where Logan is the unflinching top dog.

And finally - If Logan and Roman are approaching being the same name, it’s not a patch on Rome and Rose. Just one letter difference, same vowel sound, same number of syllables. I can’t remember if Logan ever calls him Rome but if he does it’s not frequent, and the resemblance between those two names is too striking not to be deliberate, imho. Logan nearly named his youngest son after himself, and after his sister who must never be mentioned. Roman is supposed to be the future of the Roy empire, but he’s carrying the dead weight of family trauma with him. And I know all the Roy siblings are carrying family trauma with them and that’s what the show’s about, but it’s so much more present with Roman. Roman is the one who brings up the dog cage game, who insists it was awful or traumatic for him when his brothers try to brush him off and tell him he’s remembering it wrong, Roman is the one who everyone knows has been hit by their father but they play it off as a joke. We get hints at the specifics of the family traumas that have shaped Connor, Kendall and Shiv, but Roman’s is too raw and it bubbles to the surface every now and then because he cannot keep it down. Between the physical abuse and the dog cage and the incest jokes and whatever the fuck is going on with Roman and bathrooms I think it’s fair to say that there’s something Really Very Bad in his past, bad in a different way from what his siblings have been through, and it all starts with the fact that his father looks at him and sees the worst pieces of himself, his own trauma, the trauma his family went through. And he can’t fix Roman anymore than he can fix what happened to Rose, can barely bring himself to talk about it.

Roman is a poor reflection of Logan, an uncomfortably clear reflection of Rose, a man who lacks surety in himself and ‘wrong’ in a way that no one in the show really seems to get. And this is all me musing on a name and it’s absolutely not that serious and Succession loves to pull from classical references all the time so maybe that’s all this is but also? Maybe there’s something there

#roman roy #succession #takes a bow /s #shitty text post

65 notes · View notes

shivawne · 2 years

Note

hi meg could u please elaborate on why shiv chooses to marry tom and why she marries him instead of, say, nate ty

something that i think is really important to remember when it comes to shiv as a character, as a person, is that she’s grown up with a terrible blueprint for what relationships are. she grew up surrounded by men like logan. her whole entire adolescence was spent with a backdrop of guys like the rat pack, of employees like frank and karl and jamie and hugo. she saw her brothers follow in their footsteps, hollow themselves out to fit that grotesque corporate shell, become men who ascribe to that sense of stereotypical masculinity, and i think that ultimately resulted in shiv not wanting to be with men like nate, or any man who remotely resembles her brothers or her father. who can blame her? who would want to date a man that reminded her of her childhood, and how the men she was constantly around as a kid were men she was supposed to be inferior to, just because of her gender? she dated men like that in her youth, and it was one of them that caused the major depressive episode that she had fallen into by the time she met tom.

she met tom at a bad time in her life, and he made her laugh and he made her forget about her troubles for a while, and it’s because he’s so absolutely nothing like the men that she grew up with. with him, she was able to lower her guard and talk honestly about how she felt without feeling inferior. one look at shiv throughout the show and you can see that, even post-depressive episode, the only person she really feels comfortable breaking down in front of is tom in tern haven. for a woman like shiv, who detests vulnerability and showing her emotions, that tells me that there is genuine and sincere love and trust there, even if she is scared of it too. that’s part of why she holds him at such arm’s length, why she’s cruel to him so effortlessly, why she cheats on him. she tries so hard all the time not to let him enter a space where she’s out of control, which is what would probably make him happiest, but it scares the shit out of her.

but i also think a lot about how brian cox once said that logan loves his children but is disappointed in them, and i think that’s one of the ways shiv emulates her father. i think she sees love as being something that has to be mixed with disappointment, and that definitely applies to tomshiv. shiv is wholly aware that in most (if not all) quantifiable ways, tom is Beneath Her. everyone in the show points it out, and shiv herself sees it, that she’s better than him in terms of status, intelligence, poise, and so on. she’s deeply, dangerously competitive, and so she will always be disappointed and embarrassed by him. but at the same time, if he was to change himself to the point where she wouldn’t be embarrassed and disappointed in him, she wouldn’t love him anymore. it offers up a really interesting and really aggravating paradox, because the reasons that shiv loves tom are the exact same reasons that she wants and needs him to be the very thing that she resents – a man entrenched in all things waystar royco.

sarah said in an interview once that the tomshiv relationship is like the chicken and the egg; that knowing tom loves her, makes her loves him. shiv has great difficulty understanding any kind of love that isn’t transactional, that doesn’t have strings attached. marrying a man like nate would’ve been easier, maybe, in theory; but i don’t think she would’ve ever gotten to a point where marriage was on the cards with them. it was really only with a man like tom that she would’ve truly considered it as an option.

#vambsgans #nan i love u so so much have i told u that ever in the like. 3 years of our friendship

2 notes · View notes