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Heroic stories imagine people we love so that we may see them win. These people are, of course, us. In their success we imagine our own victories. The ones we failed to achieve in our own lives. And the converse is true. We imagine the people we hate, so that we can see them lose. The people we wish failed in real-life, but so who often succeed. We feel better because we get what we want. We suppress and deny the negative and come our ready to swing at future challenges. Everyone feels like they can box after they see a Rocky movie.
Tragic tales, on the other hand, imagine people we love, so that we may see them lose. Their failures are our failures. However, tragedy elevates failure, making it noble, even fated, and certainly catastrophic. We mourn our real-world failures through fiction. Conversely, we see villains succeed in tragic tales and we feel the wrongness of it. We feel bad, but the feeling is cathartic, and the pain is eulogized, meaningful. And whatever harmartia is revealed in the tale is a bit of advice for the future (i.e., don’t make this mistake again).
Succession is a strange television show. It seems to wear the mask of tragedy when it is actually a heroic tale. It is not a tragedy because it does not imagine people we love. Rather, we watch people we hate. The people who wrote this show hate the people they wrote it about. It staggering how little there is to redeem any of the characters on this show. It’s like watching someone’s life story written by their bitter ex. The Logan family is a concoction mixing the Murdoch family, the Trump family, and all those rich people TikTokers keep on threatening to eat. They are a “threat to the Republic” (a phrase they use on more than a few occasions). The characters are petty, decadent, cruel, broken, and incompetent.
If I were to place the this show in a genre I would say that it’s “torture porn.” I could only watch one episode at a time. This is not a world I liked to visit. Why spend time with people you’re supposed to hate? It’s clever, well-acted, and witty, but it is devoid of humanity and mercy. It is an orgy of invective directed at a generalized rich, capitalist, right-wing “other.” In the end, I think it is a failure, because it finds nothing worth loving in its opposition and thus becomes its opposition. It resembles the people it depicts. It is petty and cruel and screeching.
There is an interesting quotation from Ender’s Game:
Succession doesn’t really love what it destroys. It humanizes only just enough to see these characters as pathetic, damaged, but that’s it. They’re devils. They must suffer. The show fails the empathy test. They don’t understand their enemy.
Tragic tales, on the other hand, imagine people we love, so that we may see them lose. Their failures are our failures. However, tragedy elevates failure, making it noble, even fated, and certainly catastrophic. We mourn our real-world failures through fiction. Conversely, we see villains succeed in tragic tales and we feel the wrongness of it. We feel bad, but the feeling is cathartic, and the pain is eulogized, meaningful. And whatever harmartia is revealed in the tale is a bit of advice for the future (i.e., don’t make this mistake again).
Succession is a strange television show. It seems to wear the mask of tragedy when it is actually a heroic tale. It is not a tragedy because it does not imagine people we love. Rather, we watch people we hate. The people who wrote this show hate the people they wrote it about. It staggering how little there is to redeem any of the characters on this show. It’s like watching someone’s life story written by their bitter ex. The Logan family is a concoction mixing the Murdoch family, the Trump family, and all those rich people TikTokers keep on threatening to eat. They are a “threat to the Republic” (a phrase they use on more than a few occasions). The characters are petty, decadent, cruel, broken, and incompetent.
WARNING: "Spoiling Spoilers Spoil Within" spoilers below
The climax of the how is unavoidable. Everyone must lose. And they do.
If I were to place the this show in a genre I would say that it’s “torture porn.” I could only watch one episode at a time. This is not a world I liked to visit. Why spend time with people you’re supposed to hate? It’s clever, well-acted, and witty, but it is devoid of humanity and mercy. It is an orgy of invective directed at a generalized rich, capitalist, right-wing “other.” In the end, I think it is a failure, because it finds nothing worth loving in its opposition and thus becomes its opposition. It resembles the people it depicts. It is petty and cruel and screeching.
There is an interesting quotation from Ender’s Game:
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”