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pynkhues · 1 year

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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

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langernameohnebedeutung · 9 months

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Hey, I wanted to say I really love your takes on Borderlands, particularly with Nisha and her relationship with Jack. I wanted to get your thoughts on that particular line in the DLC where Jack said it's always me doing all the work and she goes I've said that before. I've noticed some fans tend to take that joke seriously and I thought of it as a light-hearted joke between those two. What are your thoughts?

hmm...I feel like there are several layers to this? Or at least, from what we know and don't know about their relationship, there are different possible interpretations of it.

(Like, I wrote one Nisha/Jack fic where this definitely was the case ...but in fairness that was also right after Jack got the vault-symbol punched in his face so-)

I think one very simple layer of this is that Nisha just very consistently likes to poke fun at Jack. We see a lot of that in Borderlands 2. Which is really an aspect of her personality - she likes to make jabs at other people. So yeah, obviously if he says something like that and she has a good comeback, she's not going to let that slide.

And on a deeper level of that: I think it's important to keep in mind that Jack and Nisha are both very dangerous people with extreme trust issues. Who somehow try to make a relationship work. And on the one hand, it makes sense that these two would get on like a house on fire. But on the other hand, it's kind of an undertaking that relies on a LOT of mutual understanding and trust. For that relationship to work, these two people, who are in the eyes of everyone else (except maybe Wilhelm who doesn't care) a duo of sadistic hypocrites, need to find a way to integrate each other into their very self-centred worldview. Their entire modus operandi is to apply rules to others that they don't apply to themselves - or to one another. And I think their banter is (on a subconscious level) one way of confirming "hey, things are good, we're having fun, I'm happy in this relationship, I still care about you" without ever being forced to be deep about this.

This is something that we also get a lot with Nisha: When Nisha says mean stuff about people, there is often a wide difference in quality. It makes a huge difference whether you are her friend that she wants to poke fun at, some idiot NPC that she considers below her notice, someone she just happens to dislike for her own reasons (like Moxxi in the beginning of TPS) or someone she has a sincere vendetta against (like Lilith and Moxxi at the end of TPS). What really sets all of these apart is the tone and the way in which she says those rude things. And whether she makes threats. That's why Nisha engaging in friendly banter with Jack is a pretty important aspect of their communication.

Another aspect I think is that Nisha and Jack are very performative people. Like, one of them puts up golden statues, and the other one larps as a western Sheriff. And while I think there are slightly different reasons for this (I think Jack buys more into his image or at least...depends more on it to feel good about his more monstrous side. While Nisha's more chill side seems a lot more authentic and more "two parts of the same coin" rather than "mask"), I also think that their relationship and especially THEIR ability to get along and THEIR ability to take criticism from one another and THEIR ability to understand each other's...pretty impenetrable moral code is something that they can have a lot of fun with. Because now they can project out at the world: "See how perfectly we reasonable we are? We are sure getting along. We don't understand why you all insist on not simply getting with the very evident and not-at-all-murderouly-hypocritical programme."

Now, I think the big question for a lot of people in the fandom is: How much (does it?) reflect on their actual sex life.

And ...without much contex about their actual relationship, I think there are several interpretations are possible:

Nisha literally just says it to be funny. As in, she just thought it was a funny moment to say that line. Like a "yo mama" joke.

The joke is that Nisha said it before in a different context that the Vault Hunters know about. e.g. the fact that Jack rarely accompanies them to their mission.

Or it is indeed a comment on their sex life. The thing is, I feel like the insinuation has always been that their sex life is pretty damn good. I think there is even a confirmation of that from Anthony Burch himself but I cannot be bothered to look for it - really, my reasoning is that Nisha is presented as a very sexual person and these two are often presented as very much on the same wavelength sexually. Quite frankly, I don't think Nisha would stay if she was genuinely unhappy with their sex life. A possible interpretation I do see is that they are both Nisha very canonically, Jack frequently implied, switches. So I think if we were to take the comment at face value and assume that a) she really "said that before and b) it was about sex - I would interpret it as "she has been playing the dominant part a lot lately"

#I could swear it said somewhere that Jack and Nisha actually have the best sex life in Borderlands but I'm not sure where #and the waybach machine for Anthony Burch's Ask FM is very sporadic (his own account is restricted without an account fml)#and I'm not even sure that a) he said that and b) he said it there #Nisha Kadam #Handsome Jack #Borderlands #fandom #this reminds me of that reddit AMA where someone asked why Jack's glove is missing some fingers #and his response was: Ask Nisha #and then a lot of people were like: oh yeah he means that she taught him that this is more useful for shooting with a revolver :)

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ablednt · 11 days

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Granted I have the overall geographical and cultural knowledge of a 4th grader but from what I can tell the nuclear family model really does seem to be a white colonial invention

Different cultures have different approaches but I mainly hear about either large family units where multiple generations support each other and raise their children and grandchildren together or an "it takes a village" approach where children are raised somewhat communally

And I can't really speak on it much or claim that these families were free of abuse or that children aren't often an oppressed group basically everywhere I know of but the way ownership of your children is so engrained into white society is so bizarre

Like once you notice it you can't unnotice it even the most loving well meaning parents don't know what to do about it because everyone is so isolated from their own families and their own communities so you wind up with 1-2 parents who have full legal ownership of their child and are raised in a culture where you don't have personhood until you're 18 and all attempts at self actualization before them are seen as clueless rebellion. Like our culture is so divorced from the concept that a parent is someone who is helping mentor and care for their child so they can thrive as a fellow human being and it's actually so alarming

And ik this problem isn't unique to white and colonized people but it's honestly really soothing to hear about how other cultures approach and view parenting and community as a whole and to internalize it doesn't have to be this way

#like i was reading a book by Sabaa Tahir who's Pakistani #and the perspective on parenthood portrayed in it so healing #like when Salahuddin mentions that his mom taught him not to thank his parents growing up #''Ama taught me that saying thank you to your own parents is unnecessary. Akin to thanking your lungs for breathing. The times I tried #she looked at me like I’d rejected Saturday-morning paratha.''#and like obviously the idea isn't that your kids should be ungrateful im assuming that it's their behavior and overall respect thats thanks #but as someone who was raised thanking everyone for everything especially my parents no matter what it really stood out bc even little stuff #like that can make a huge difference yk? since I can remember white adults particularly my parents taught me i was a burden #and that their taking care of me was an act of kindness rather than a responsibility and I don't think it's some big conspiracy to make kids #feel horrible but it's not really teaching gratitude it's just teaching guilt #thats just one example tho #I also am at the extreme end of white cultural isolation (neither of my parents are close to their families we've never lived near them and #they specifically isolate us from everyone so the difference is a lot more drastic for me than it probably is a lot of other people #but when i hear ppl being close to their neighbors or anyone that lives near them i go a little insane with longing tbh #like what is that like? to grow up in an environment where your world is more than just your parents approval?#where there's some kind of insulation between you and all of your parents problems bc there is no one else #this was not a ramble with any kind of conclusion tho akehrjdhr #and once again I am absolutely not saying that child abuse is uniquely white bc. el em ey oh thats not how any of this works #it's just that white cultures view on children is sickening

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clonerightsagenda · 9 months

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This is well-trodden ground but when it comes to the debate about how much Maxwell cared about Hera, I think it's relevant that in "Memoria" - the most dramatic expression of how much she cares and how far she's willing to go to help - she's about to override Hera's desires and delete memories without her consent until they realize what Pryce did. She wasn't actually giving Hera a choice, even after Hera was very clear that she'd rather die.

My take on this is that Maxwell is not attached to very many people, but she does consider AI people and finds them, in general, more preferable to humans. However, she is perfectly willing to betray and kill people - human or non-human - if that's what her job requires. Betraying Hera doesn't mean she never thought of her as a person; it's an indication of how she's willing to treat people.

Double however, though, I don't think Maxwell sees it as a betrayal. The SI5 are arrogant. Maxwell is no exception. ("It's very complicated; you wouldn't understand it." "I never cut the wrong wire.") She's the doctor, and the doctor knows best. Deleting Hera's memories to save her from getting replaced by a dummy is for her own good. Taking control of her and planning to wipe all her memories after the mutiny instead of just killing her is also for her own good! Some people have to be dragged kicking and screaming toward improvement. I believe Maxwell would see her actions at the end of season 3 as proof of her valuing AIs, rather than as evidence she doesn't when the chips are down. And I think it is, in a twisted way. She wasn't nearly as concerned about any of the humans' fates.

Ironically out of the SI5, I think Maxwell might be the least viscerally disturbed by the restraining bolts and Pryce and Cutter's plan to 'perfect' humanity, although she'd be annoyed by getting bolted herself. Perhaps it is for the best she died before season 4 and never experienced the temptation.

#though an ideological battle between the wonder twins where suddenly JACOBI has the moral high ground would be interesting #even if his distaste was mostly driven by 'ew icky' and 'bad things happened to me personally'#Maxwell after getting bolted: (dril voice) issuing correction on a previous post of mine regarding pryce and cutter.#you do not under any circumstances 'gotta hand it to them'#perpetual perpetual ladies night #imo maxwell would turn on kepler even faster than jacobi bc I don't think she had any emotional attachment to him #but would be MORE intrigued by pryce and cutter's endgame plans #however she's so deliberately an enigma that even the creators had trouble pinning her during ama responses so ymmv #wolf 359

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reikaniichan · 9 months

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may I see your fursona? bc snow leopards are usually pretty cute imo

ama! she's very round and plush-like. she has normal snow leopard colors and is a whole 4 feet talll (lol)

she was pretty much made on a whim tbh /shrug

#ama sona #fursona #snow leopard #digital art #ask response #random stuff #reikan art #reikanocs

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genericpuff · 4 months

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Why is the art so unappealing in lore Olympus now Persephone looks like a highlighter and maybe it’s just me but the proportions like the fingers in arms are soul over the place I don’t think they used to be this bad. Am I just looking at it with nostalgia or am I crazy ?

Honestly, nostalgia does play a huge part in it, even to this day there are times I look back on old S1 panels and go-

Actually here's a great example that literally just happened yesterday in the ULO Discord that nearly had me on the floor LOL This is from Episode 70:

Like I didn't even believe that that was real until I was told what episode it was from and I was just. Astounded and flabbergasted. The over-shading of the blanket that just makes it look like a really bad edit. Insane.

And yeah, there are a lot of old panels that hit different now that the rose-colored glasses have been removed, crushed, and thrown into the trash compactor.

I think that's why it makes it all the more amusing when people come into my inbox and ask me "wait, why did you like LO to begin with?? It's always been ugly as shit, I think you're just romanticizing it" because like... there's something to be said about art and subjectivity, even if something is ugly to one person doesn't mean it isn't beautiful to someone else. It's why I try not to be too mean towards the fans of this comic for still enjoying it, because while I definitely have strong opinions about how "LO has gotten worse" and what kind of following Rachel has cultivated (cough cough), there are also just as equally valid arguments that LO has never begin good to begin with that I can't necessarily disagree with now that I'm looking back on it with a more critical eye.

That said, there's tons of media that I enjoy that is objectively awful. Like y'all, you don't need to take my opinions about a dumb pink x blue fantasy romance comic seriously, I like Starfox Adventures-

Like yeah it's a badly made rushed piece of shit that was developed right on the ass end of Rare's glory days and was really an original IP (Dinosaur Planet) that got Frankenstein'd into a Starfox game so it could "sell better" for Nintendo, but I don't give a fuck, I love Starfox Adventures and some day I wanna be in the top 10 speedrunner leaderboards for it, which I know doesn't mean much because no one is speedrunning Starfox, but I do and no one can take that away from me dammit-

Anyways. Lore Olympus has, in many regards, always had "bad art". But "bad art" can and should still be enjoyed by those who find joy in it.

And in LO's case, the world it existed in when it launched was a lot smaller than it is now - more specifically, the world of Webtoons. We can look back and see how 'bad' LO looks and reads now because there are genuinely way better comics surrounding it. It was unique and refreshing and experimental back then... now it's just "that stupid blue and pink comic for horny teenagers".

In most cases I would consider that "cringing in hindsight" feeling a good thing because normally it means something has grown and that it seeming "bad" in hindsight would mean that it's outgrown itself and moved onto bigger things. But LO has the more unique problem of "its current stuff is shit and it's making us want the old stuff more, even if the old stuff wasn't good either". In that regard, LO is closer to being like Harry Potter. Remember when The Cursed Child came out at the height of Rowling being exposed for being a TERF and even people who liked Harry Potter didn't like The Cursed Child because it was just objectively worse overall (with or without Rowling's bullshit attached)? It made a lot of people go back and re-read / rewatch Harry Potter with a more objective lens and go "wait a minute guys, I think we only adored these books so much because we were 12 when we read them". Often times it's the good memories we have surrounding certain things that make us have the opinion about them that we do.

Of course, LO is definitely not as politically weaponized as Harry Potter is, so that's where that comparison ends. But my point is that LO is definitely in a situation where it's been riding off the same privileges it had back in 2018 - having an 'experimental' art style while also utilizing tropes and characters that were VERY popular at the time (remember that 2017-18 was when Tumblr was at its height of H x P "Hades was a chill accountant guy who wore socks and sandals and didn't cheat on his wife like Zeus did" fantasizing) - and thinks that those same tricks and tropes will still work today.

Because of this, the art in LO really, really hasn't aged well, even the stuff that we look back on fondly. But I think it's the panels that we specifically think of when remembering "old LO" - the ones that stuck in our memories the most - that are the ones that make us miss or just not care about the panels that don't look good (the panels that make people question why we ever liked it to begin with).

We liked it because of how it made us feel to look at panels like these-

Those genuinely wonderful panels that we think back on the most don't exist separately from the bad panels, they exist in spite of them. Even if we can look back on panels like these and pick out problems in the lineart or the proportions or the color travelling outside of the lines, that can't and shouldn't change how those panels made us feel at some point or another. And that's why when people ask me "why were you even into LO in the first place" I don't have any one answer, because I can't fully explain how something made me feel to justify why it's good to someone who can see from the outside - without rose-colored glasses - that it evidently isn't. It's very much a "you had to be there" type of thing.

Unfortunately, nowadays even the 'best' LO panels in S3 still don't come close to what the S1 panels accomplished - because for many of us, the rose-colored glasses are gone, we can't appreciate the good among the bad because we know now how bad it truly is and so the good just feels like wasted attempts at trying to recreate something it can no longer be. It "came back wrong" so to speak.

LO came back just regular. But our journey to resurrecting it changed us to such a degree that even its closest intimacies are now foreign to us. Sorry dude.

This is still probably one of my favorite panels out of the entirety of S3 for being as close to "old LO" as I've seen since S2, and even it feels like a mistake, an accident, how could a panel like this exist in S3 when so much of it is a dumpster fire? It's like a flower growing in the ruins of an apocalyptic wasteland.

But wasn't that always the case? Isn't that 'always' what LO has been, since the very beginning? A poorly cobbled together mess of writing and panels that, every now and then, manages to leave an impression that makes you feel something? Did we ever truly know LO? Or have we just been relying entirely on an idea of it that we've built up in our heads that when it does do exactly what it's evidently always done (even if not made apparent until looking back on it in hindsight) we think it "came back wrong"?

#anyways sorry that was a way deeper response than it oughta have been #welcome to the AMA roulette game of “ask puff a simple question which they may or may not respond to with an introspective essay"#lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #antiloreolympus #ask me anything #ama #anon ama #anon ask me anything

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