#feminine and turned into like Death Pits for 'strong women') esp when thru especially humiliatingly 'feminine' (again - perceived as fem-

[brookheimer]

hi! i started following you when i found your veep posts after i finished the show! I've been enjoying your posts discussing the shiv pregnancy plotline and i love all of your analysis posts! ❤️ i'm also REALLY hoping they don't pull an amy plotline on this, but i don't think they will. and this message below got really long, i'm sorry!

i think shiv's plotline is also a new way to look at femininity and womanhood through her eyes. she's considering if it will hold her back professionally, and also how people may see it as an excuse to treat her differently or fragile bc of it -at least that's how i took the fall scene and her conversation with tom on the steps. it does seem like she might be trying to prove something to her mom. she also mentions their mom the most (maybe the same/more than roman does?) and their conversation last season in italy wrecked me, personally.

i don't always agree with shiv, but at those exact points it's just like the aspect and pain of how she's seen or treated differently bc she's a woman is emphasized and it stabs right through me. like, i get it. i can truly understand what it feels like, and they portray that perspective perfectly.

awww oh my god hi !!! so glad to have another veep expat onboard here there are disconcertingly few of us. and yes i completely nd totally agree -- i'm - gulp - maybe looking forward to the pregnancy plotline possibly?? like, do i trust succession to do it well? not entirely. but do i trust it more than any other show currently airing that i can think of? ummm yeah probably. i am also a known Complicated Female Character Aficionado and while i have always liked shiv a lot, for some reason i never quite resonated with her the way i have some other female characters -- not entirely sure why that is, maybe it's the wealth, but maybe it's the lack of focus on her inner life in prev seasons. not that she isn't complicated or interesting, but that a lot of what we know about her really only relates to her relationships with men and how she exists around them -- which is obviously an incredibly huge aspect of her character and the lives of women generally (i fuckin know it is for me), but we haven't seen much of who she is outside of that. and even if she's literally nothing outside of that, i still want to see and explore it, because that's character depth too (she's so wrapped up in roy-style masculinity that she literally doesn't know who she is outside of it etc).

to me, the most interesting shiv scenes have largely been the ones she shares with other women -- with gerri, with her lawyer friend, with the woman she talked out of coming forward about cruises, with fucking caroline?? like, there are just a lot of Career Women Who Shove Down Femininity To Exist In Masculine Worlds in television these days, and i just want to see some more interiority with shiv, because i know it's there, we get hints of it and it plays across snook's face in every scene. i'm not saying i want to be explicitly told every aspect of her life -- god, no, that would be an entirely different show -- but that i want some like focus on her, not her relationship with tom or logan or kendall or roman but something with the purpose of developing her. more than any other character on the show i feel like i just know so little about her life before, beyond, outside of waystar royco. and if there isn't stuff beyond that, then i want to see that too! i just think there is so much that could be done with shiv that hasn't been quite covered already (it is an ensemble show, after all) and i'm really hoping this plotline will kind of fill that void. maybe it won't, maybe it'll suck, but maybe it will be the deep dive into shiv i've been waiting for. praying and praying and praying succession does for shiv what i so desperately wanted veep to do for amy brookheimer fr <3

#ok so fun fact i accidentally ended up writing out like five more paragraphs of thoughts bc this is literally my Pet Issue i'm sorry yall #i will probably be posting that next as a separate thing LOL #so sorry for not shutting up about thsi everyone. but to be fair. you are literally asking ME the girl notoriously obsessed with narratives #about female characters who struggle with being perceived as female forced to reconcile with their gender and their relationship with it #and the fact that maybe they do desire 'feminine' things (like family/love/etc aka basic aspects of human life we have inexplicably dubbed #feminine and turned into like Death Pits for 'strong women') esp when thru especially humiliatingly 'feminine' (again - perceived as fem- #inine bc pregnancy isn't just feminine blah blah blah but the roys and their ilk sure fucking see it as such) experiences like pregnancy #you're asking ME to not be insane about a shiv roy pregnancy plotline? that could literally heal the world from the disaster of veep s7??? #be so for real rn #LOL #but yes thank u for the ask hard hard hard agree <3 that convo w caroline fucking destroyed me bro #asks #succession #shiv roy #succession spoilers #honeybunchcalum #casey shut the fuck up about shiv roy