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pynkhues · 9 months

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I don’t know if you’ve seen the cut lines from the S4 script yet (where Stewy references some semi-ominous sounding games he remembers from when he and Kendall were growing up like Punch-Chess and Dinners for Winners) but this kind of made me think back on the games throughline (motif?) with Logan. We get to see how insane Boar on the Floor was in real time and we’ve gotten a pretty good sense throughout the series that Logan has a penchant for framing violence through the lens of games (not dishonestly might I add – I think there’s a reasonable read of Logan whereby he himself doesn’t view his games as a means for violence at all but just as tools or in some cases, truly just games).

Recently I’ve seen some discussion that kind of lumps together games the kids played (Bitey, Dog Pound) with Logan’s games (Boar on the Floor, Dinners for Winners) and that struck me as kind of odd. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve been mentally distinguishing between the games the siblings play with each other as different from the games Logan concocts. It might just be me, but Bitey and Dog Pound read to me as within the realm of reasonable kids games (noting that a ton of kids play kind of insane games lol). I also just feel like the power structure is…different when it’s just the siblings? Does that make sense? Whereas when Logan invests games for his kids, there’s something more…uneven and off-kilter about it to me. Idk – do you think they’re all part of the same motif or that there’s some level of distinction? Maybe I just to think about it more haha – I guess this is a super long round-about way of asking: how do you view the use of games (“games”?) within the context of the show?

Oh, yeah, I totally agree that the games the kids play with each other are very different from the games that Logan concocts, anon, but I’m not surprised to hear that people consider them in the same sort of discourse. After all, the games that the kids play with each other, now that they’re all adults, are viewed through the prism of the power dynamics in the current family unit.

In other words, even games that are on paper the sort that any kid plays (Dog Pound being a good example – my five and seven year old nephews actually play a pretty similar game at the moment called Puppy and Person, although I think their game involves more patting and cuddling than Roman and Kendall’s probably did, haha), because we’re encountering it with Kendall and Roman in their late-thirties and through the lens of undealt with sibling resentments and adult competition, they can be mistaken for the same sorts of games that Logan played / still plays with the kids.

In that sense, I think the clearest point of distinction is the fact that Logan is never really a player in the games, he’s the overseer of them – the judge, jury and executioner – and we’ve seen that twice. The first time with the baseball game in the pilot, and the second, of course, with Boar on the Floor. Interestingly, the only time we’ve actually seen him participate in a game as a player was in I Went Shopping in the Thanksgiving episode back in S1, and well, we all know how that ended.

Games are integral to the show, and it’s interesting because I don’t think they have any one particular meaning. I think the writers like them as a shorthand to convey certain themes and relationship dynamics, I think they’re an efficient and compelling way to move plot forwards, and I think the writers like to use them to trojan horse the history of abuse within the Roy family, which is exactly what that new excerpt from the script of 4.04 demonstrates.

Critically though, I also think they’re significant thematically in depicting both childhood and masculinity, and I think that’s really where the distinction comes in when it comes to the games the kids play together (yes, even Dog Pound, as much as that game [and Kendall] wants to pretend to be about masculinity, I personally don't think it is at all), and the ones Logan does.

So, let’s talk about childhood.

Games are integral to childhood, there’s no getting around that. Games are what teach children social skills and curiosity, strategy and the ability to both win and to lose, which is, of course, also the skill to enjoy success and sometimes embrace failure too. One of my current jobs is in a company that does play-based theatre for children, with a special focus on traumatised children, so I could talk a lot about this and the evidence behind it, and how crucial games are in empowering children and helping them develop agency away from the family unit, but that’s kind of where this story stops, because while games should help children to grow into playful, empathetic and inquisitive adults, the Roy children do not play games with outsiders.

The Roy children have lived in a completely insular world – a playground their father has built them, as Marcia so aptly put it – and so these games don’t evolve. Instead, these games like Bitey and Dog Pound and even Kendall’s LEGO become manifestations of current anxieties, insecurities and resentments, and an encapsulation of Shiv, Roman and Kendall’s arrested development.

(Maybe interestingly, I consider Connor slightly less arrested than his little siblings, and I do think a part of that is from his parentification, but also a proxy result of effectively having been raised in those formative childhood years as an only child, especially if he was, as Alan Ruck has said, about fifteen when Kendall was born).

Of course, Logan encourages this.

Logan’s inability to face his own mortality or seal off his own legacy requires him to keep his children, well, children. He needs them under his thumb, sure, but he also, I think, needs to keep them young so that he can feel young. Needs the promise of his own future reflected in the length of their own, and his frequent infantilisation of all four of them is a part of what keeps them regressed and reading meaning into games they played and places they lived when they were too young to know any better.

Let’s talk about masculinity.

Funnily enough, I actually talked a little about this in the context of Tom and Greg back when s3 was airing here, but a few years ago, I read Anna Krien’s Night Games which is one of my favourite non-fiction books of the last decade.

The book itself is about masculinity, sport and sexual assault, in particular patterns of gang rape by teams in Australian football and cricket, but she goes a lot broader in terms of games and male intimacy, and in particular how team sports give men a sense of community which, as a result of toxic masculinity, is generally reinforced by ‘othering’ outsiders of the team / environment, whether that be players on the opposite team, perceived interlopers, women, or even members of their own team who don’t participate in the right way with the group.

I don’t know if any of the writers would’ve read Night Games (it’s an Australian sports journalism book after all, haha), but I think they do understand deeply the way masculinity operates in these circles and the ways games of any sort can be utilised as a shorthand to exert power and solidify connection. Boar on the Floor is, of course, the clearest example of this, where Logan utilises the context of the game to dig out his betrayers, and while the first round has everyone as an unwilling participant, once a smaller group of 'others' are picked in Tom, Greg and Karl, the safety of being on the right team makes everyone becomes complicit in the second round.

This is something Logan’s a master of and what he does routinely with his children in general, but also in the rules of the games Stewy talks about in the 4.04 script. Those games are about the othering of a person and the increased intimacy of the rest of the team. If Dinners for Winners has the loser acting like the help, the winners are the rest of the family celebrating their renewed bond as, well, winners.

I don’t think the kids are immune from this in their own behaviour. In fact, I think the biggest examples we see of the kids engaging in this particular type of game play is in Roman’s treatment of the child during the baseball game in the pilot (and I actually am reading the scripts [albeit very slowly, haha] at the moment and read 2.01 last night and was pretty fascinated to discover that the boy’s father is one of the landscapers at The Summer Palace), and in the sequence throwing back to Kendall’s bachelor party with the tattooing of the homeless man’s head with Kendall’s initials.

These aren’t complete games, and interestingly they don’t create the same sense of shared compliance and group intimacy in the way Logan’s games do – no one’s fully on board with Roman’s behaviour, and Roman betrays the group bond in terms of Kendall’s bachelor party by telling Gerri and trying to use it against Kendall – but I view that as more a reflection of Roman and Kendall’s failures in masculinity and authority than in anything else.

It’s that failure there though which, in many ways, further separates the games Logan plays with them to the games they play together. Roman and Kendall continue to fail to imitate their father in his particular brand of games, because Logan knows how to divide and conquer, which they simply don't.

That also though is a direct contrast to the games the kids play together, because those games, whether they be Bitey or Monopoly or even Dog Pound, those games are about shared connection. After all, Kendall wasn't the one who sent Roman away, Kendall was just playing a game with his brother, no matter what they both have inferred in it over time.

#i can't speak to the nanny game shiv and roman played either yet because i'm not up to that in the scripts #but i would say that's potentially another example of the kids playing at logan's types of games #because it involves the othering of a person i.e. the nannies #but then again it also could be a reflection of the insularity of the children?#idk!#i'll have to read it in context #thanks for the ask sorry this took a minute #hbo succession #succession meta #kendall roy #roman roy #shiv roy #logan roy #welcome to my ama

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wolfiemcwolferson · 1 year

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Reflections on Grief

When I was 13, my mom went through my email (something she learned about in her Women’s Bible Study group) and she found my emails with my “girlfriend”. I only use quotes here because we lived one hour away, saw each other a total of three times in public and neither of us identify as girl’s at this stage in our lives.

But, overnight I became her greatest fear. The devil. Someone who would ruin her other children and so it was determined that I would go away.

She called my aunt, but determined that California was too dangerous for me when I had already strayed so far from God.

She found out about one of those camps - the ones in the mountains where we hike daily and live outside and have to earn our freedom or whatever and the only thing that kept me from being put on a plane was my grandparents refusal to give my parents the money for this.

So, I went to live with them instead.

I won’t bore you with what happened from there, but I found a love and acceptance with my grandparents that allowed me to become the person I am today because they taught me what love and devotion and kindness are.

Today, I sit in my house on a Wednesday night in March and I eat ice cream from a coffee mug.

Because when I lived with my grandparents, they went to play dominos with a group of friends on Wednesday nights and I got 20 dollars to order myself a pizza and then I watched a movie and ate ice cream out of a coffee mug.

And sometimes it is not enough to hold them in my mind.

Sometimes I go and dig a tin of pipe tobacco from my sock drawer and open it up on my coffee table because it smells like love.

Sometimes I go to the store and I buy a jigsaw puzzle that I’ll never finish just to lay it across the table for two days because it was our rainy day activity.

Sometimes I hold a mug of hot tea between my hands and I remember how my grandmother looked me in the face at 14 while we sat on her back porch and told me that it didn’t matter who I was or what I did or where I went, she would love me until I was nothing more than a memory to the world. How she was the first person who ever said that to me.

Because sometimes.

Sometimes, the grief bowls me over so suddenly that I’m clutching my kitchen sink and thinking about how I wasn’t there when my grandfather died. How he called out for my grandmother in the end and how I had to watch it through FaceTime.

Sometimes I write a series of words that are so starkly my grandmother that I have to close my laptop and sit down and think about the last conversation we had before she was unconscious - about how I wanted her to die at home.

Because I was selfish and thinking about how I wanted to stand in the kitchen in 20 years and make the rice pudding she taught me to make and I could tell myself that she was peaceful in the end - and at home.

Sometimes I hear an Elvis song and I think about the bake sale she helped me with when she and I stayed up until 4 AM baking and singing and my grandfather drove 30 minutes in one direction to get us hamburgers at 1 AM because we were hungry.

And it doesn’t feel like enough to eat the ice cream or smell the pipe tobacco or play Elvis in the house when I bake or carry the name that i took from my grandfather.

But then I look across the living room to my own children who have been told from the time they took their first breath that I will be the one going to war for them and that nothing they ever do will make me love them less and I know that my grandmother’s words are living through me.

I get up at 4 AM to pack my partner a warm muffin for work and I think about the countless mornings my grandpa brought me a cup of coffee from the gas station because I like crappy burnt coffee with that overly sweet syrup that comes from that machine.

I cry sometimes when it starts to ache right under my ribs and I know that the best bits of me are the bits of them and that nothing i do will ever be completely devoid of their spirits, yet I still mourn.

Grief is an all-encompassing thing and it comes and goes at the strangest times and I am desperate for others to not feel alone in their grief.

Anyway, I say all of this because I started writing a silly little fic recently that was meant to scratch a fandom itch and it’s gotten away from me in a massive way and I am still writing it, I’m just taking it slow.

I’m being respectful of my grief and the desire to do right by the story and the characters and also to all of you who will someday read it and understand and feel what I’m saying through my words.

#tw grief #tw death #reflections on grief with Logan #this is basically me podcasting from my shower like I do in my friend's voice memo's #you're welcome

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