Festen As Inspiration For Succession Makes Total Sense And I've Heard So Much Said About Succession's

Good times

remember when we had succession and the next day you'd have to get up and go to work like you hadn't just experienced all 5 stages of grief simultaneously the night prior

The effects of Tom & Shiv's relationship on the main plot

On a rewatch, I found it really crazy how much this dysfunctional relationship––which initially seemed to be nothing more than a b-plot about infidelity and a reversal of traditional marriage dynamics––has sneakily grown into the primary driver of events in the plot. And it started way before the S3 betrayal.

Many cite the beach scene from the S2 finale as one of the most emotionally cathartic scenes in the show. And I totally agree––its fire. BUT, I also think its larger story repercussions are often overlooked; especially how it basically caused the entire S3 civil war plot. Lets just run down the cause and effect:

1. When Tom finally stands up for himself, Shiv is sent into a bit of a guilt-spiral, confronted with just how awful she's been to him. She is reminded how much she NEEDS him, and that she has been taking his support for granted

2. The two main candidates for the sacrifice are Tom and Kendall. Logan says as much when he consults Shiv, and basically asks her to choose between them. If Tom hadn't shared his feelings with her MOMENTS before, she likely would have continued the objective/heartless mindset she showed towards him earlier in the episode. But, because her mistreatment of him is in the forefront of her mind, she decides to protect Tom. This could be read as a change of heart, but i think it's more accurate to say that she does it to make herself feel better; to mend her cognitive dissonance and affirm to herself that she IS a good person after all.

3. Her decision to protect Tom also serves as the final nail in the coffin for her succession aspirations. Logan says that this is the type of decision that she would need to be making if she were to replace him, and the way she frames it as "I cant choose" but also "please not Tom, for me" signifies a shift in the once-equal dynamic between her and Logan. He follows her wishes because he loves her/she's his favorite, and not because he respects her strategic opinions. I think this moment feeds into his complete lack of respect for her in S3.

4. Of course, Shiv's protection of Tom is what puts Kendall under the axe. I think it's clear that Kendall had no intention of going civil-war-mode before Logan deemed him as the sacrifice, and made the NRPI comment about the boy. Neither of these things would have happened without Tom dumping his emotions on Shiv

5. The beach confrontation is also what gives Tom more independence going into S3, tipping the relationship in his favor for a while until it's completely turned on its head in Italy.

I just think it's so cool that the seeds of an entire season's worth of story are sewn in one little scene of emotional confrontation. The Tom/Shiv dynamic has been just as impactful as the one between Logan and Kendall imo, and it's really exciting that the story has such unexpected engines of conflict––and that they all weave around each other in such beautiful ways.

Best show ever guys :,)

somehow, amazingly, i have hacked the impulse that makes me mindlessly scroll on my phone. it's not gone but i've paired it with a conscious thought process that goes like, "what's my goal here? i'm looking for entertainment, for information, for something that makes me feel more optimistic and interested in the world i live in..."

and because that kicks in between apps, too, i'm not doomscrolling as much. i'm intentionally seeking out posts or videos or whatever that actually mean something to me. when i'm not satisfied i walk away or pick up a book instead. most subtle yet impactful change i've gone through in years

i did not intentionally set out to change this. i've just been working on my mindset in general. hey, turns out having a good therapist again helps

Johnathan Glazer, Oscar winning Director of The Zone of Interest, a movie depicting the wickedness of apathy during the Holocaust:

“Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at it's worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether they be the victims of October 7th or the ongoing attack on Gaza. All the victims of this dehumanisation. How do we resist? Alexandria, the girl who glows in the film as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance.”

shout out to everyone who participated in the january-february mass depressive episode

ORC FACT

got your stupid ass. this is a gnome post. give me all the fucking berries right now

Raspberry Gummies

We arrived during the opener’s last song: lopsided indie rock. The backyard venue was buzzing with people I had never met, save for an oasis of familiarity near the middle which Tessa and I latched onto like a life raft—–rescued by smiling faces and friendliness. Eva, Aidan, Emily, Emilie… usual candied dynamics in a fun-sized portion.

We soon decided to both have another gummy––Are you feeling anything yet?

The sun slid steadily towards the earth­­––warm pink light clipping the top of the house––while an ambient glow trickled through the not-quite-blossoming branches of the Sakura tree to blanket us all in spring. A lull in the performance lineup left space for socialization. I finally learned the name of a person who I’d seen three times before on campus (all coincidences, and two of which was them complimenting me on my sweater), which I now know to be Sonia. I congregated with the band who was my reason for coming in the first place: Aidan, Micah, Isaac, Josh––when are you playing? will there be time? are you excited?

By the time the next band started I was feeling comfortable, things were a bit funnier than usual but otherwise I knew where I was. I was struck by the quality of the music; it was as if a professional rock and roll band had stumbled in from the alley in a drunken stupor, and had decided that the only way they would feel at home was by terraforming the unknown environment through the purity of their sound. The singer and lead guitar fancied themselves comedians, pausing between songs to tell stories and laugh at the crowd. One of the tracks featured a slow building lead-in to the chorus, where the singer led everyone to crouch down in a hushed conspiracy of anticipation; and all the while the drummer kept the beat pumping with a head-splitting veracity. The release into frenzy with everyone jumping up in unison was just as electrifying as you’d imagine. I realized during those bridges that drummers are the most moving musicians to watch; no other shows the life-and-death drama of their craft more clearly­––in every moment the body battles its physical limits with the lifeblood of the song on the line. There is something fatally attractive about it. It was near the end of their set when nighttime established itself over the yard, and it was under this cover of darkness that the gummies sprang their revenge.

Whenever I’m too high I tend to freak out, desperately grasping for continuity with every moment bringing a fresh wave of disorientation. I look at the person beside me singing along with the band, I search in my mind for what I should be doing, I try to copy them. I notice how the muscles of my face are being held, I am too aware of how air is hitting my arm right now. I swallow. It feels weird––my adam’s apple moving with its own agency. Someone catches my eye to the left, a guy around my height, wearing a denim jacket. His hair looks like mine did before I cut it, he nods coolly to the beat. The sporadic flashes of light illuminate his profile so I can see some of his face, and a numb horror washes over me as I realize that he is me. I feel foolish for having thought I was here as a person––no, I am a floating observer, a dreamy film camera here to capture my life from a few months ago. The more I look at myself the clearer this becomes. How strange it is to see yourself as others do––have I always looked that rigid? I’ve usually despised looking at myself in pictures, and while the hatred remained in person at first, it is starting to subside. Seeing myself in motion adds an element of sympathy that I could see people getting used to; a mouse face that announces its self-consciousness through animacy. I wonder what is so special about myself to get a filmic adaptation, but I make sure to frame the shot elegantly nonetheless. My trance begins to intensify, a dolly-zoom spinning sparks of parallax across my vision, when suddenly a hand grabs my shoulder and I whip around to see Tessa with an alarmed look on her face.

She said “what’s going on?” through wholesome giggles, and I immediately fell back into the evening as I previously knew it (back to past tense––thank god!). I told her that I saw another version of myself over there, and about my momentary freakout, and she laughs and I laugh, restorative light-headedness. She questioned me on it further, so I point him out to her, and he still looks exactly like me, but she says she can’t see him (wait wait, back again?). I’m quite a bit taller than her so she can’t see over the people between us and him, I lean over to give her room, and he turns away just as she looks at him. She says she can’t tell: it’s too dark.

We stood there gob-smacked and slack-jawed for a while, talking about how we couldn’t believe how high we were, before giving up on listening to the music and shuffling over to Kat––when did she get here? She was standing with Eva and Emily; we communicated our dismay to them and were met with amusement. Suddenly, in a non sequitur of consciousness, I found myself surprisingly deep into a conversation with Maggie about how her hair was shorter than it was last year, and I did my best to say what a normal human would in that situation. Returning to the druggy solidarity of Tessa and the others, we found enjoyment in saying the things we were thinking and marveling at how ridiculous they sounded out loud. Someone tells me to look down and before I know why or how, my vision becomes nothing but purplish white––an ocean of rods and cones crying out in pain. I exclaim and press my palms into my eyelids, the purple edges of the ocean start to recede and I finally realize that it was a camera flash: someone had taken a group photo from below of us all looking down. I can only imagine how goofy I must have looked. I open my eyes to find Tessa equally pained, waving her hands in front of her eyes––ohmygod ohmygod, and once again we are spurned into inescapable breathless laughter.

I noticed at some point that the bands had switched, now an alternative indie group whose name has slipped my mind. The camera flashes continued their assault on my retinas, but once I got used to them I found the beauty in their spectacle. Along with each one came my own personal snapshot from the moment of the light, a Polaroid negative printed in blue and green over my eyes. A figure with outstretched hands, a paintbrush hair-flip, Josh’s smiling face; a chemical slideshow of jubilation viewable by me and me alone. I felt a rush of gratitude for the magic of my sensory experience, that the illusory system produces beauty even when it is momentarily broken.

The light behind the band was steadily cycling through all the colors of the rainbow, and Tessa and I became transfixed by a pressing scientific discovery. We noticed that the leaves of the tree in the distance became more sharply detailed when the light was near the red end of the spectrum, and murkier on the blue end. I stared at those branches for way too long, riding the marry-go-round of visible light, running my imagination along the tactile crimson buds and stirring the indigo soup. It had been who-knows-how-long before I noticed the music building in the background, keyboard arpeggios dancing higher and higher, tickling my ears. I turned to Tessa to say “wait this sounds amazing!” and she nodded her head enthusiastically—Right?? The singer with dyed-red hair stepped away from the microphone to focus on their guitar solo, singing with metal rather than breath. Closing my eyes, I could feel the physical presence of the music, a rainbow orb spinning above the yard. Everything reaching crescendo, fierce melodies piercing my soul, I felt a white-hot ball of euphoria rising out of my spinal cord, before it was sling-shotted by the resolving note into my skull where it bounced around inside for longer than I thought possible. Vegas bulbs igniting with every supercharged pinball bounce, I made a noise halfway between a laugh and a scream, and I had to steady my dizziness against the tree, a floaty high made from the overwhelming distillation of the music and the people and the life into my brain. I told Tessa I couldn’t believe how good I felt at that moment, that I had no idea such a feeling was possible. And the best part about it was that the gummies weren’t what gave me that high; sure they might have helped a bit, but I had a confidence within me that it was produced by my environment, and the inconceivable effect it has on me when I’m able to truly appreciate it.

This is not to say the experience wasn’t scary. Early on, the host of the party grabbed the microphone and said his neighbors had called the cops for a noise complaint, which did wonders for my paranoia. From that moment on, any passing flashlight or unexpected movement was a SWAT team with guns drawn. Also, I would frequently fall back into my retrograde amnesia–whereamIohgod mindset, a sinkhole of unreality that came and went unceremoniously. All I had to do to trigger it was look across the yard at myself, unable to suppress my curiosity in this past version of me. Tessa later called my experience ego death, which seemed right. It certainly felt like dying––like this was my last opportunity to kiss my earthly body goodbye before pledging allegiance to the great nothing. There was so much I wanted to say to myself. And yet––like an estranged father on the run, I was condemned to make silent amends from a distance… observing my creation in all his damaged solitude through a one-way mirror, unable to salvage our relationship with words––I love you; I know you; I’m sorry. I made sure to keep my distance from him; it was hard to picture us interacting without one of us trying to kill the other. Tessa did well to diffuse my situation, repeating that the guy didn’t actually look like me at all, and approaching random friends to ask “are you nate? are you nate?” in a demonstration of my ridiculousness. She was right: when I eventually got close to him the effect vanished. But nothing could convince me that this wasn’t just another malevolent trick by whichever god was responsible for our meeting. There is strange part of me that refuses to recover from the existential test of that experience; some arcane allure to the idea that I am not the only version of myself in the world. Maybe it’s because it makes me feel less alone. It’s comforting to believe that there’s other ‘me’s bumbling around out there, making the same mistakes for the same non-reasons, who could join in on a collective shrug at our own expense. But then I remember that all of us––you and me––already have that in each other; all we need to do is cross the unknowable gulf that lies between us and have a chat on the dancefloor.

I was beginning to come down when Aidan’s band started their set. I had seen them play maybe eight times before, and this was up to their standard level of magnificence––no amount of complication could change my love and appreciation for them. To be in such close proximity to a creation so enlivening is enough to make me feel like the luckiest person in the world. They generate a sacred space at all their performances, one in which you can go bananas with your closest friends and give in to the insanity calling your name. Not only is it amazing to know a band so closely, but each of their concerts have been a gift—free of charge. They’re really out here making us all happy one weekend at a time, out of the kindness of their hearts and the strength of their art. The whole project has been oddly validating, as if it confirms the quality of our community. Part of me feels that the creation of something great from our friend-group was an inevitability; like a chemical process in which colliding enough interesting atoms together is bound to produce something beautiful––social alchemy.

By the time they finished, it was nearing eleven o’clock. Some people began to head for the alleyway exit, others shuffled forward in a congregation of thanks––this was when we’d ask for pictures and autographs if we weren’t already friends. After hugging everyone and doing my best to convey my appreciation, I noticed how fried my brain felt and decided it was time for me to leave as well. Of course, it only made sense to leave with Tessa––my comrade in the terrifying experience. I am endlessly thankful that she was there to keep me sane. As we were crossing the wooden threshold out of the yard, I couldn’t help but throw a glance back at myself, secretly hoping he was looking at me too. I saw him gazing up at the stars with a little smile on his face, breathing in the evening while it lasted. The smile was contagious, and I turned back contentedly to Tessa, ready to skip off into the darkness.

Nate

"I would kill for you. I would die for you" would you take a break for me? Would you sit down and rest? For a day, a week, a year? Would you let others take care of your needs for me? Would you let yourself be held for me? By me?