What Do You Think About It Is About Kendall That’s It’s Like, Of Course He’s The Only One With

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.