In real life, I am strange. Awkward. Hard to know. Going for drinks after class with the other grad students is like enduring an obstacle course of potential social faux pas. My solution is to get drunk fast–vodka sodas on an empty stomach. This past March, I was pink in the face, the world soft and blurry around me, when a classmate said to our table Oh, Megan’s famous on Twitter.
An overstatement. I never shut up about the HBO show Succession, which has earned me 13k followers, a small number compared to truly famous people, and an interest so specific that I am well and truly ensconced in the world of Kendall Roy tweeting. Still — I found myself, hazy and tired, unable to say anything other than Not famous. But god. They sure like me better there. She’s the best of me.
meg succession text posts is a tiny sliver of Megan. She’s smarter, faster, cooler, funnier. More able to be vulnerable, perhaps because her face doesn’t show. Most importantly: my strangeness is not strange on succtwt. It is the common tongue–the people I follow and who follow me are all fluent.
Succession at its bare bones tracks the Roy dynasty, a loosely fictionalized take on the Murdoch family. Patriarch Logan’s health is dwindling, and his children–Kendall, Roman, and Shiv–fight amongst themselves for his place as CEO of the family’s company, Waystar Royco. Longtime employees of the company and outsiders looking to knock Logan off the top vye for power alongside the siblings.
Does this sound like the type of show your dad would enjoy? Maybe a finance bro you fucked once who talked your ear off about Bitcoin? I’m sure some of those people do enjoy Succession, but they do not make up the population of succtwt. They don’t speak the language.
Most of the people I know and love on succtwt are young women and/or young queer people. Many of them enjoy the skeleton of Succession–that question of Who will win? and the characters’ self-serving attempts to be the answer–but the juicy fat of the show is more interesting. Logan is deeply abusive, both physically and psychologically; he controls, hurts, and devastates his children well into adulthood, with the ever-forgotten eldest son (first pancake) Connor still suffering in his fifties.
Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, who share the same mother and are much more serious contenders for eventual successor, orbit Logan like sad, lonely planets, desperate for their moment in the sun. Kendall, his father’s “number one boy” (sometimes true, sometimes a tactic, sometimes both), is my favorite sibling and succtwt’s outlet for both heartbreaking and hilarious content. He’s inspired countless edits, from Mitski to Nicki Minaj to Hannah Montana. Kendall Roy Whispers are their own genre of meme. The thirst tweets about both Kendall and Jeremy Strong, his actor, are enough to make even seasoned fanfiction readers say Jesus Christ, I thought this was a classy party.
Roman is the funniest sibling, and while many love him for his antics (“submissive and breedable gay little monkey”) others are more interested in the dark current that cuts through Roman’s psyche. His jokes veer into the taboo–molestation, incest–and his inability to have penetrative sex, or even pee next to other men, raises eyebrows for those of us on succtwt who recognize signs of sexual abuse. The dog motif brings any good Roman girl to her knees. It’s not uncommon to scroll the timeline and see a meme calling Roman a little court jester atop a nuanced analysis of his neuroses.
Shiv is the only girl. It’s important we don’t forget this, because no one on Succession ever does. While she’s just as selfish and warped as her siblings, Shiv often bears the brunt of “unlikeable” or “evil” accusations from the fandom. Because….we know why. Her passionate defenders, the Shive or Shivcels (a nickname assigned in cruelty but embraced ironically), are some of the best editors of succtwt. While the wider world of Succession discourse might sideline or crucify her alone, Shiv gets her due as beloved girlfailure on succtwt.
Though characters like Gerri, Stewy, Tom, Willa, Rava, and even the Frog-and-Toad-coded Frank and Karl see less screen-time than those with Roy blood, succtwt still lays flowers at their feet. The cast is such that even small roles sparkle, inspire analysis, and contribute to that common tongue (peace on planet Krank.)
Those outside of succtwt tend to ogle, at best, the “babygirlification” of Succession characters. At worst, they catastrophize about succtwt users who empathize, lust after, or, yes, baby, these fictional billionaires. I won’t lie–that happens a lot. It would be silly to say that media and cultural reactions to it don’t carry with them the potential to warp our real-life values, so perhaps the pearl-clutching is warranted. As someone more in the trenches of succtwt than most people who write thinkpieces about it, I can confidently say that not once have I seen a Succession stan sympathizing with a Murdoch sibling. No one is making a Lachlan’s Turn edit. (That’s not to say Fox news watchers/Succession enjoyers don’t exist — just that succtwt doesn’t breed them by way of Beyoncé fancams.) We have a mirror to the real world, and we see that the rose-colored glasses only apply to one side.
There are articles in which real, actual psychologists attempt to explain just why succtwt exists–why Succession has attracted such a dedicated following of young women and young queer people. I am not smarter than a psychologist, certainly, but I do speak the language of succtwt. I helped build it. So my best guess is that Succession strikes the balance between tragedy and comedy well in a world that increasingly commodifies sadness and asks people to undercut it with cynicism; that Succession shows the complexity of abuse, in that someone who loves you can hurt you irreparably, that you can love someone and still hurt them irreparably, a dynamic often simplified or sped through in lesser shows; that Succession has masterclass acting performances; that Succession demonstrates a feeling of stuck-ness, fated repetition, and the inability to change, which is to say that Succession understands what it’s like to be a teenage girl.
Pick any other reason from the many pixels that make up succtwt; cultural phenomenons cannot be boiled down, completely, into neat sentences. There’s a magic to them that even writers who try very hard, that even tweeters who never shut the fuck up, can’t fully describe. Fights with Louis Tomlinson stans, Logan Roy rollin’ with the LGBT, Kendall Roy x Dennis Reynolds fancams, Subway Surfer shoes — like flashes of light, I can describe them to you, but descriptions can’t match the vibrancy of being there to see it yourself. That’s a good thing–I promise.
In real life, I walked home drunk alongside the Monongahela River and wished very hard to not be in my body. Wished very hard in the moonlight to bridge the gap between my face and my Twitter. Maybe then I would not be “fucking lonely; all apart; blown into a million pieces.”
Moving forward, I can only hope that I have captured some of succtwt’s magic. meg succession text posts was steeped in it, after all. That magic — to quote Kendall Roy one last time,“My god, I hope it’s in me.”
With love to Al, Kelsey, Chelsea, Fiona, Nab, Angel, Mia, May, May, Megan, Sivi, Andrea, Rachel, Jay, Madeline, Leyla, Anne, Ridley, Ri, Sonia, Fee, Maf, Claudia, Amy, J, Zee, Nat, Marina, Brunna, Ava, Kiara, Alan, Irie, pericoripiao, Aarya, dee Ryan, Holly, Clara, and Emma, who told them I was famous, and as such made it so, if only for a few moments. (So many others, too.)
