Okay Something I’ve Been Thinking A Lot About With The Ending Scene Is How The Old Guard At Waystar

heres a picture that i really like check it out

Nothing gives me chills like this

What do you think about it is about Kendall that’s it’s like, of course he’s the only one with a real friend?

It's lowkey one of my favourite choices on the show, anon, just because I think it's so revealing in more ways than one. Like, it makes sense, not just because of who Kendall is, but also who his siblings are, and the different ways they navigate their way through the world.

Interestingly, I think Connor and Shiv actually have the clearest boundary (or hurdle, depending on how you look at it) when it comes to fostering friendships, and while I think those things are different, I think they're both steeped in these factors of them as characters that shape their experiences of adulthood.

I think Connor's stems from an extremely disrupted childhood between his mother's mental health, her institutionalisation, his father's absence and reappearance, and then his being pushed into a parentified role to the golden trio at a formative age (canon explicitly tells us that too! Camping trips, fishing trips, fulfilling the father duties at Shiv's wedding before Logan decides to show up!) when he should've been away at college building his own relationships, in order to feel he had any sort of place in his family.

Similarly, I think Shiv has been soaked in hatred for her own gender since she's been born. Her relationship with her mother is strained and seems to have been weaponised by her father, she likely went to an all girls school (Spence, I imagine, which is basically the all girls equivalent of Buckley, the all boys school we know Kendall went to) and her own misogyny hampered any genuine friendship attempts. I think Shiv probably had frenemies, but nothing deeply meaningful, because vulnerability and emotional honesty is something she can't allow herself if she wants to survive in a male-dominated household festering in a male-dominated industry. I think male friendships were off the table in that sense too because Shiv seems to have always sought power in whatever way she could, and the two things she has to exert power are her name and her sexuality and at least her sexuality is hers.

I think Roman's a little harder to put a pin in in that sense, because I think he's a little bit of both of them, and a whole lot his own thing. I think he's experienced a part of Connor's disrupted childhood by having been shipped away to school and for his physical abuse, and I think he's experienced a part of Shiv's self-loathing for a part of his identity he can't face up to, but I also think Roman on paper should have friends. Roman's funny and insightful and (most of the time) the right sort of mean, and he's no more self-defensive than the rest of them, but I think the reason comes down to the biggest difference between him and Kendall:

Roman can be honest without being vulnerable, whereas Kendall can be vulnerable without being honest.

Roman as a character isn't actually particularly duplicitous. He can absolutely be an asshole, but he doesn't play to what people want in the way that both Kendall and Shiv (and even to an extent, Connor) do. His moments of vulnerability though are rare, often private, often, still, fleeting and guarded, while his moments of honesty are more frequent, yet often just ugly and naked and there. He fronts to it, and takes it, and usually tells the other person to take it too, which is what he did with Gerri and Tabitha and even Lawrence way back at the start of the series.

Kendall's not an honest person, but he is someone who's inherently vulnerable, and I think it pulls people to him, despite themselves. We've seen it in real time with Naomi and even Greg, and retrospectively with Rava, Stewy and Frank. He can break, he can curl in a lap or bury a head in a shoulder while still telling half truths or nothing at all. God, probably one of the best examples is in 2.04 when he pulls Shiv into a hug while talking around what she actually wants to hear.

Kendall lets people mop up the blood while he either tries to hide, ignore or justify the wound, and I think that vulnerability lets people feel a degree of intimacy with him and protectiveness of him that becomes muddied as they discover that Kendall is inherently a dishonest person and an addict, as it seems most characters in this show have learnt the hard way. After all, discovering that he's not told you a whole truth doesn't erase the memory of the weight of his head against your shoulder.

Is the music from Kendall’s point of view?

So I’ve had a thought. Throughout the show, I noticed that whenever it’s talked about that Kendall would inherit, these moments are underscored with music that is often absent during the equivalent scenes with the other siblings. The most obvious example of this is in Dundee, when Rhea is trying to court each of them individually by telling them they ‘have what it takes’––with Shiv and Roman this kinda falls flat, but when she says to Kendall that “it’s you, it’s always been you”, there are these dreamy piano chords which inherently lend more weight to the idea. Initially, this seems to be a foreshadowing device meant to signal that Kendall WILL one day be the successor. Similarly, more dramatic chords are played when kendall talks to Frank about his name being on the piece of paper in Logan’s office. And later in Season 4 the new composition Allegro Bellicoso––which is initially played during Logan’s terrifying ATN speech––becomes paired with Kendall during scenes when he starts to behave more like his father (blackmailing Hugo, assembling cronies after the funeral). This again feels like the show is trying to foreshadow the whole tragic ‘kendall winning but only after he becomes the thing that he hates’ ending which we are meant to expect. 

HOWEVER, knowing how the show ends, and the cruelty of the fact that kendall becomes the thing he hates (and loses all of his loved ones + what was left of his soul) but STILL doesn’t inherit.. these musical motifs start to take on a different meaning. Rather than being a meta-narrative device which we look back on and say Ah! they told us the ending all along!, these moments seem more like a reflection of Kendall’s interiority––his belief that he IS the chosen one, that he CAN become his father––than a confirmation that such things could ever be true in reality. Then I started thinking about how many of the score’s most pronounced appearances in the show come when kendall is experiencing some emotionally significant event: the press conference, the near suicide in the pool, the final walk with Colin...and I realized, is Nicholas Britell’s music basically just from Kendall’s point of view?

‘course I’ll admit I might be generalizing a bit here, because there are strong compositions with other characters (particularly Shiv). But at the very least, this has made me very curious about how they went about scoring the show, and the discussions they must have had about perspective; and who’s emotions they chose to reflect in the music. 

People are people are people

Welp, methinks thats enough internet for today

- me after watching a deepfake of myself being tortured for 6 hours

a good dog stays in its place

"Mysterious Skin" Scott Heim // 1X08 Prague // Introduction "The Odyssey" Emily Wilson // S3? lol // Things I Can't Tell My Therapist "Conversations Over Sanguinaccio Dolce" I.B. Vyache // What Can You Do? Ruth Stone // // 4X10 With Open Eyes // Where to begin? Sue Zhao

Ice patterns. Värmland, Sweden (April 17, 2017).

Look, the only way out of this is to build a movement capable of stopping our politicians from funding genocide (through strikes, direct action, etc). This is currently possible. But here’s the important thing: it will not remain possible if trump is elected. the dude has openly said that he will “root out the communists, marxists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. He’s talked about killing his political enemies. It’s not so much a question of choosing between evils as it is ‘do we want to give ourselves some more time to change things, or are we going to lay down and let the fascists take over because the current leader of our imperialist nation is imperialist’. The only ppl who have a leg to stand on in refusing to vote Biden are the ones who’ve gone to jail for conscientious objection, or self-immolated on the capitol steps. The rest of us have an obligation to keep extending the window of hope. A full-on fascist United States is not something the world can recover from

in which "lesser evil" is code for "evil that is less relevant to me" or "evil that is easier for me to ignore"

it does not matter if you have a genuine desire to do good (kendall) or a deep capacity for love (roman) or have comparatively progressive politics and are a victim of the misogynistic environment your father created (shiv). because if your sense of self is so intrinsically tied to oppressive capitalist structures, what good are your best impulses, your love, your decency? waystar is them and they are waystar what does any kindness they possess actually matter if they are only capable of acting upon it within the framework of the fascistic, patriarchal corporation that they have no desire to escape?