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TLV — application. (2)
User Name/Nick: Bobby
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Other Characters Currently In-Game: Angelo Salucci
Character Name: Kendall Roy
Series: Succession
Age: 40
From When?: About a week post-finale. Kendall’s death will be the result of a car accident while driving under the influence.
Inmate Justification: Until very recently, one of the core tenets of Kendall’s character was that he’s aware of his privilege and plagued with guilt over the bad decisions he makes and how they affect others. But after the death of his father, the centre of his universe, Kendall has begun a downward spiral into amorality, feeding on his worst impulses in an attempt to ‘become’ his father. In pursuit of the CEO role, something he believes to be his birth right, he’s been manipulative, egoistical, and even physically violent, lunging at his brother and even his pregnant sister. For him, not even familial bonds are stronger than getting what he believes he deserves. Generally speaking, he’s very much entrenched in the world of the one-percent, and can be selfish, myopic, arrogant and self-obsessed, all traits which continue to prevent him from truly changing on a fundamental level. All of these things have been solidified within him by his father’s death (which happened less than just two weeks ago), because now he sees himself as the last attempt to preserve Logan Roy’s personality, traits, and actions. Very recently, he agreed to endorse a presidential candidate (and even used Waystar’s media influence to swing the election) who is effectively a far-right fascist, even when knowing that this politician’s supporters were generating a climate in which his non-white adopted daughter, Sophie, felt threatened and afraid for her life. And last by no means least, he is technically responsible for the death of another human being; his lingering guilt over this was one of the last shreds of empathy tethering him to reality, but he very recently shed that guilt too, denying outright that he was even in the car when the accident happened.
Arrival: Kendall will agree to come to the Barge.
Abilities/Powers: No abilities or powers unless “doing the cringiest things imaginable with no self-awareness” counts as a power.
Inmate Information: Content warning: parental abuse and neglect, suicide and suicidal ideation, drowning, car accident mention, alcoholism, drug use, drug addiction, parent death
Kendall Roy is simultaneously an insufferable rich prick with delusions of grandeur and a blinding sense of entitlement and also a deeply scarred, unhappy and lonely man whose practically Shakespearian family situation has damaged him more than he’ll ever really be able to reckon with. From a young age his lifestyle, education and aspirations were all funnelled into eventually becoming the CEO of his father’s multimedia corporation, Waystar Royco, only for his cruel, manipulative and abusive father Logan to snatch it all away from him. When your whole life is narrowed down to one single desperate desire, and you’re about to get it only to have it taken away for no apparent reason, it’s enough to send you into a tailspin. Kendall was seven years old when his father promised him that the company would one day belong to him; that’s a hard thing to shake, and it’s enough to have damaged his psyche and also ensured that his entire life revolves around grabbing for what his father promised him.
Kendall is a powerful cocktail of some of the worst traits imaginable, especially when they’re combined to create a one-percenter with unimaginable privilege who was born into the lap of luxury. He’s cocksure, arrogant, needy, self-centered, and always one bad day and one bad decision away from a self-destructive spiral that really becomes more of a hurricane, upending the lives of anyone close to him. Besides all that, though, he’s always fundamentally been a kicked puppy that continues to run back to its owner just to get kicked again, and being born already in his father’s fist has made him unable to see any other way of existing. He’s chased by addiction, depression, depersonalisation and the knock-on effects of a childhood of emotional abuse, which he experienced first-hand and also saw his siblings experiencing. This is both an explanation of the way he acts, and also something of a shield to him – though in the early seasons he was firmly under his father’s thumb, desirous of approval and love from him to the point of being a sycophant, he is also not above using the way he was raised as an excuse, safely stepping behind his abusive childhood to protect himself from being held fully accountable.
He’s done awful things in the name of doing what Logan tells him, such as planting false stories about two women in the press because they didn’t want to go into business with him, and firing around fifty people because they were about to unionise, and betraying his college best friend Stewy Hosseini (who sums him up pretty well) to save his own skin. His quest for his father’s approval also makes him necessarily complicit in a lot of the less than moral things Waystar has done as a company. Waystar owns a news network which is widely known to be extremely conservative, its news output tabloid-y and not particularly ethical. After all, if Logan can convince them to spread false stories to damage Kendall’s reputation, then it stands to reason he can do that for anyone else. One of Kendall’s major sins is a kind of willed ignorance – he demonstrates at least some social conscience, but seems to close his eyes to the corruption and various -phobias spewed out by the company he so badly wants to run. This has crystalised most recently during the in-universe presidential election. In Season 3, Logan threw his support behind Republican presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken, who is for all intents and purposes a far-right fascist. On the night of the election, Waystar-owned news network ATN (essentially the Fox News of Succession) called a contested state in favour of Mencken under dubious circumstances – a fire at a vote-counting building destroyed uncounted votes that most political forecasters argued would have gone to the Democrat candidate, but the count when the fire happened had been in favour of Mencken. Earlier that day, Kendall had been informed by his ex-wife Rava that their daughter Sophie, who is adopted and is not white, had been racially abused and perhaps even physically attacked by Mencken supporters. Kendall was superficially concerned for Sophie’s safety, but eventually ended up agreeing that ATN should make the call in favour of Mencken. His sister Shiv tried to persuade him otherwise, but Mencken was politically advantageous to Kendall because, if he won the election, he would have scuppered a deal that Kendall didn’t want to go through and had been trying to sabotage himself. With Mencken’s backing, the deal would have been dead in the water. In the end, Kendall’s desire to ruin that deal – a desire borne out of his need to hold onto Waystar and get the CEO position – was more important to him than democracy, than opposing fascism. This is perhaps, in some small way, understandable, since Kendall is in many ways separated from the ‘real world’; what is not understandable is the fact that he placed his own ambitions ahead of his daughter Sophie’s safety and comfort. Following Mencken’s election victory, Kendall also flipped out at his long-time assistant Jess, who is mixed race, when she tried to tell him she wanted to resign; he was cognizant enough to ask her if it was because of Mencken’s dubious election victory, but dismissed her outright and called her ‘dumb’ for trying to quit her job.
After the election, which because of the contested results had led to dangerous protests in the street, Rava decided to take her children out of the city, meaning that they wouldn’t be able to attend Logan’s funeral. Kendall, distraught, threatened that he would get custody of his children. Kendall has been an incredibly distant and neglectful father for almost all of his life, always placing his job above any real relationship with his kids; he wants custody not because he actually wants to raise his children, but because he doesn’t want Rava to keep them from him. In many ways, his children are not fully real to him, just things that he can bargain with and fight over. Kendall has demonstrated a level of care and love for his children in the past – Iverson is clearly autistic, and especially in the early seasons Kendall shows himself to be patient and caring with Iverson when he’s struggling, and he yells at Logan when Logan strikes Iverson during a party game. Ultimately, Kendall’s decision to support Mencken was a selfish one motivated by greed, but it wasn’t motivated by a lack of care for Sophie’s wellbeing – he just sincerely believes that his money and power will be enough to protect her. His threats about getting custody of his kids are also a light shining onto his hypocrisy – when Logan and Kendall’s mother Caroline divorced, Logan pushed hard to make sure he got full custody of his children, and Caroline was separated from them entirely, resulting in a distant relationship between Kendall and his mother. Kendall, notably, blames his mother for this, and not his father. It’s extremely difficult for Kendall to blame Logan about anything.
For the majority of his marriage to Rava, Kendall was a drug user, who, at his very worst, snorted cocaine off his children’s iPads. He’s done multiple markedly illegal things in the service of his drug habit; until fairly recently, he’d been sober and in recovery, but when his father planted false stories of relapse in the news, it acted as a trigger to him, leading to an actual relapse into drug use and alcoholism that he hasn’t really recovered from. He goes on to purchase drugs from sketchy dealers. He’s also stolen small, cheap items like batteries from corner stores only to throw them right in the trash – it’s more about trying to grasp control over his life than about actually needing the batteries, since he has more money than he’ll ever know what to do with. And most importantly, there was the night of his sister’s wedding.
In the aftermath of triggering a ‘bear hug’ in which he and Stewy were planning to perform a hostile takeover of Waystar and oust Logan, Kendall asked a waiter at Shiv’s wedding reception if he could get him any drugs. Luckily for him (or unluckily, as it turns out), the waiter had a hookup, and they drove out together. Kendall, not used to driving stick-shift and fairly inebriated already, was looking down while changing gear so he didn’t see a deer in the road; the waiter reached for the wheel and swerved it violently to the right, sending the car careening off a bridge and into a lake. Kendall managed to swim out, and even dove back down a few times to try to help the waiter, but he couldn’t. Soaked to the bone and numb, Kendall climbed out of the lake, ran back to the party, changed clothes and danced with his kids.
The death of the waiter has haunted Kendall ever since it happened, though he all too easily accepted his father’s help in covering it up and effectively absolved himself from taking responsibility, with the official line that the waiter accidentally killed himself driving alone. Whether he’s directly responsible is up for debate – it was the waiter who swerved the car, but Kendall shouldn’t have been driving it, and if he hadn’t been desperate to get high neither of them would have been in the car in the first place – but Kendall clearly blames himself, saying that he should take the fall for an unrelated Waystar scandal as atonement for “the boy”. In fact, it’s his father’s description of the waiter incident as “NRPI” (No Real Person Involved, the same phrase used whenever a worker died in ‘mysterious circumstances’ on a Waystar cruise ship) that sets Kendall on his Season 3 arc of trying to expose Logan for corruption instead of taking the fall himself.
Though ostensibly trying to put real effort into changing Waystar by ousting his father and bringing various criminal actions to light, Kendall spends a lot of Season 3 getting high on his own supply, so to speak. Once he’s become the centre of attention for his actions, he becomes aloof, arrogant and spiteful, allowing his ego to be blown up by the international conversation he caused. He begins to think of himself as a hero, and it’s very easy to see it all going to his head. When his lawyer berates him for the way he talked in an interview with the authorities, he fires her; when his siblings refuse to side with him, he calls them names, picking at their insecurities, accusing them of being avaricious cowards and even levelling horribly misogynistic insults at Shiv. Kendall’s major problem for a lot of this season is that he’s unable to see that justice requires work, and not just one bombshell press conference where he accuses his father of being systematically corrupt: the reality is that he has to wait for the Department of Justice investigation and for the slow wheel of legal justice to turn; he has to consistently stand up for marginalised individuals instead of just tweeting “we must overthrow the culture of corruption that silences women” and expecting his job to be done; and he has to accept that he previously worked to uphold Waystar’s corruption, though he was ignorant about its precise nature, and his lifelong desire to take over as CEO is corrupted by the business itself. He saw his role in this whole thing as a hero and a figurehead for the cause, and believes at his worst that all that needs to be done is for Logan to go away and hand the company over to Kendall, who will then simply make the company ethical again by virtue of not being as evil as his father.
Though Logan Roy is a bully and an abuser, he sometimes says things to his children that aren’t entirely untrue. At one point, he says to Kendall, ‘You’re a hothouse flower ... you’re curdled cream. For the world? Nah, you’re not made for it.’ To a certain extent, he’s right. As a result of his upbringing, where he was simultaneously sheltered from the harsh reality of the world and also treated with an appalling lack of love or care, Kendall is alarmingly fragile, and makes up for that with a strange combination of false bravado and affected humility that protects him as much as it makes him unlikeable to others. When challenged, his reaction often depends on his mindset at the time – on a high, he’s confrontational and smug and will lash out, trying to use words to hit people where they hurt; at his low points, he retreats into himself, grasping for innocence in a childish way, like wrapping himself up in a kids’ blanket and putting his head in his girlfriend’s lap or recreating his childhood treehouse at his 40th birthday party and pettily refusing to let his siblings in.
He’s been protective of his siblings – calling Logan out when he makes Shiv cry, criticising him for his neglect of his first son Connor, yelling at his father when Logan strikes Roman and also Kendall’s son Iverson, and explaining at one point that he wanted to get all of his siblings out of the company and away from their father. He’s shown guilt for the part he played in the death of the waiter at Shiv’s wedding, even though he skirted actual legal proceedings on the matter. He even confessed what he did to his siblings in a tearful moment, only for them to console him, telling him that it was an accident, that it wasn’t his fault, that he tried to help. But after Logan’s death, none of those small but vital acts of goodness, or at least the potential for it, matter to him anymore.
Logan’s death could, in theory, have freed Kendall from this awful endless cycle, but instead, it locked him in it forever. Logan’s wishy-washy approach to which of his children would succeed him means that when he dies, out of nowhere, it leaves Kendall and his siblings squabbling over ‘what dad wanted’. The parameters of Logan’s final wishes are vague enough that nobody is entirely sure what they were. Most impactfully for Kendall, a debate erupts over whether, on a print-out of Logan’s will, Kendall’s name had been underlined or crossed out. Kendall is convinced that he’s the only one of his siblings who could effectively run the company – once he sees his name in Logan’s will, he convinces himself immediately that it was underlined, and proceeds to act with determination to fulfil it. His eulogy at Logan’s funeral crystalises what Logan’s death has done to him: he states outright that Logan was ‘a brute’, that he had ‘magnificent, awful force’, and that he hopes that same force is in him. Just a few months previously, he had told Logan to his face that he was ‘kind of evil’, that he didn’t want to be like Logan, that he was a good person – but Logan’s death flipped all of that for Kendall. With the absence of his father, Kendall must become his father.
Trying to scupper the deal to sell the company to Swedish tech billionaire Lukas Matsson, Kendall finally manages to persuade both of his siblings to vote against the deal at the next board meeting. The alternative pitch, of course, is installing Kendall as CEO – actual CEO, not acting CEO or co-CEO. It’s the culmination of everything Kendall’s ever wanted, everything Logan promised him. His brother Roman, who recently got into a fight and has a cut on his forehead, wobbles a little bit before the vote: he asks Kendall why it couldn’t be him, and Kendall, who understands that Roman craves hurt and comfort in the same stroke because of the way he was raised, embraces him and pushes Roman’s forehead into his shoulder at the same time, hard enough to open the cut again. It’s a horrifying moment, because Kendall has put aside his slavish loyalty to his father in the past and yelled at him when he saw Logan hit Roman. Now, so close to what he’s always wanted, Kendall is the one hurting Roman. During the actual meeting, with Shiv the last one to vote, she leaves the room, clearly about to vote against Kendall in a last-minute turn. Kendall and Roman head out after her, and have a huge argument in a glass-walled conference room for everyone to hear. At one point, Shiv tells him that he can’t be CEO, because he killed someone. Kendall immediately denies it; when his siblings question why he's denying it, he lies, and says that it never happened. The boy drowned, but Kendall wasn’t there. He never even got in the car. Finally, to Kendall, the boy really is “NRPI” – no real person involved.
In the big blowout with Shiv and Roman over Shiv’s vote, Kendall goes from trying to persuade her that he’s the best choice, to shouting at her for being ‘stupid’ enough to vote against him, to begging her with the energy of a child about to throw a tantrum because someone’s trying to take away his favourite toy. ‘I’m the eldest boy!’ he screams at her, spit flying, and she laughs in his face. (He is not the eldest boy.) When Roman suggests that Shiv is the only ‘bloodline’ of the family and that makes her more viable than Kendall as their father’s successor (because Kendall’s children aren’t biologically his), Kendall loses it, lunging at Roman and scrapping with him, grabbing his face and trying to press on the wounds on his face again, this time with his bare hands. Shiv tries to leave the room, and Kendall lunges at her too, only for Roman to have to try to pull him back. Shiv storms out, votes in favour of the deal, and it’s all over for Kendall. Numbly, Kendall leaves the building, walking to Battery Park and sitting on a bench to look out at the Hudson River while being followed at a respectful distance by his father’s former bodyguard Colin, who he’d hired after Logan’s death, and who is one of the only people in the world who outright knows about Kendall’s responsibility for the waiter’s death. He’s almost died twice in water before, once chasing a cocaine hit and a second time potentially a suicide attempt, and the last shot of him seems to implicate that maybe he’ll try again. He’s lost everything, and he kind of deserved it.
Path to Redemption: At his current canon point, Kendall has nothing. He’s swung back from mania into depression, but this time there’s no clawing it back: the board meeting has irrevocably taken the company from him, and in the process he destroyed his relationship with his siblings, his ex-wife, and his children. In that argument with Shiv, he tells her that if he doesn’t get to be CEO, he ‘might die.’ She rolls her eyes, but for Kendall it really is a life-or-death thing. The danger here isn’t that Kendall is unaware of his moral failings, but rather that his mental health gets in the way of him making any real change in himself: rather than acknowledging the core issues he needs to face, Kendall is going to spiral, beating himself up about what he’s lost, rather than actually trying to change anything. In this way, his biggest problem is that he runs on a cycle of self-aggrandisement, ego stroking and arrogance followed by a sharp crash into depression and self-hatred where nothing is solved and he doesn’t really change. It’s been suggested that he’s bipolar, but never confirmed in canon – nevertheless, the swings from extreme mania to extreme depression (bordering on suicidality) reflect someone who is not in control of his emotions.
Major milestones Kendall will need to reach before graduation are in no particular order:
- Acknowledgement of his privilege in a meaningful and active way, i.e. more than just paying lip service to the fact that he’s "lucky" in terms of his circumstances.
- Acknowledgement of the wrongs he’s done and an ability to be able to think critically about his role in Waystar, the company as a whole, and the things he’s done in a quest to secure Logan’s approval and, after Logan’s death, the things he’s done to get the CEO role, including agreeing to use ATN to install a fascist as president.*
- Attempting to make amends for the way he destroys or affects others’ lives when he spirals (e.g. relapsing; throwing tantrums; insulting, betraying and belittling others; firing innocent people).
- Addressing his role in the waiter’s death. After it happened, he accepted his father’s help in covering up the death, which was at least partially Kendall’s fault due to negligence, DUI or at worst vehicular manslaughter, but at least he felt guilty about it. Now, he’s skipped over denying responsibility and straight to claiming that it never happened. At some point, the waiter stopped being ‘real’ to him.
- Acknowledgement that Logan’s abuse and Kendall’s own mental health issues are not excuses for any of his behaviour.
- An active and meaningful effort to get back on the wagon and aim for sobriety. Addiction doesn’t make him a bad person, but the way he acts when he’s using drugs is self-destructive and often delusional.
* Regarding the Mencken situation, I want to make it clear here that Kendall doesn’t actually agree with Mencken’s politics, and a prospective warden absolutely would not have to persuade him that fascism is bad or try to “convert” him politically. Kendall’s issue here is that, at his peak of self-delusion, he thinks he would be powerful enough to protect his children, and ultimately that, once he’s CEO, he will be more important and impactful than whoever is president. I think this is because the role of CEO almost has mythic importance to Kendall, after growing up with his father at the centre of his universe.
On the Barge, he’ll keep to himself at first, withdrawing the way he usually does when his mental health issues resurge, and becoming something of a slave to his addictions and vices. It’ll take some time to pull him back out of his shell. His reaction to being wardened specifically would depend largely on the style in which the warden went about it, but generally speaking he’s bound to be a little stubborn while also self-flagellating to the point of uselessness.
Losing CEO, something Jeremy Strong called an ‘extinction-level event’ for Kendall in an interview, is going to impact the way he interacts with everyone else on the Barge, in the sense that he has nothing to aim for, nowhere to point his motivation. His brother Roman is on the Barge, but he’s been here much longer than Kendall and his canon-point is also considerably earlier. Once Kendall realises this, he will try to take advantage, pretending that nothing major happened so he can exist in a world where he never lost the vote, where he could still be CEO, where he didn’t ruin his relationship with his siblings, and where Logan is not dead. It’s an extreme coping mechanism and one that will only be destructive for him, as it’s going to prevent him from wanting to try to address anything that he did after Logan’s death.
Being out of his rich-kid bubble where he’ll be forced to engage and interact with people he otherwise wouldn’t even have to acknowledge is going to be an important factor in pushing him out of a destructive cycle. The hypothetical ideal warden would be able to talk to him plainly in a way that acknowledges his history and the circumstances of his upbringing while also not pulling punches in terms of criticising his actions and bad behaviour. He wouldn’t respond well to moral high-horsing or preaching from someone who just attacks his negative personality traits, but would respond well to someone who can give him a balanced assessment of himself, who isn’t being paid to tell him what he wants to hear. Basically, he needs a therapist who won’t pull their punches. He also wouldn’t respond well to someone who has an inalienable prejudice against rich people, however valid they might be in that assessment.
The triggers that would motivate real change for Kendall are most likely time and exposure to people he otherwise would never have been able to access. People whose worldviews and circumstances are entirely different from him, people who can give him a perspective he never had before. He’s also alarmingly passive in a lot of his life – he accepts a lot of things that other people might not, and the ports and floods would force him to get his hands dirty. Helping to save someone else’s life would do wonders for him, as would some extremely frank words from people who might be able to see his life and situation with complete objectivity. Even when he’s at his worst in canon, he can fall back on money and his family name, which often prevents him from really improving himself. On the Barge he’ll have none of that.
History: Season 1 and 2 | Season 3 | Season 4
Sample Network Entry: TDM with Eiffel
Sample RP: TDM with Roman
Special Notes: I had Kendall on the barge for a little while about a year ago, but he's returning from a newer canon point and with no memories of his first go around! I have also, of course, spoken extensively to Chase (Roman's player) about Ken's return, especially regarding his vastly different canonpoint.
User DW: n/a
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Angelo Salucci
Character Name: Kendall Roy
Series: Succession
Age: 40
From When?: About a week post-finale. Kendall’s death will be the result of a car accident while driving under the influence.
Inmate Justification: Until very recently, one of the core tenets of Kendall’s character was that he’s aware of his privilege and plagued with guilt over the bad decisions he makes and how they affect others. But after the death of his father, the centre of his universe, Kendall has begun a downward spiral into amorality, feeding on his worst impulses in an attempt to ‘become’ his father. In pursuit of the CEO role, something he believes to be his birth right, he’s been manipulative, egoistical, and even physically violent, lunging at his brother and even his pregnant sister. For him, not even familial bonds are stronger than getting what he believes he deserves. Generally speaking, he’s very much entrenched in the world of the one-percent, and can be selfish, myopic, arrogant and self-obsessed, all traits which continue to prevent him from truly changing on a fundamental level. All of these things have been solidified within him by his father’s death (which happened less than just two weeks ago), because now he sees himself as the last attempt to preserve Logan Roy’s personality, traits, and actions. Very recently, he agreed to endorse a presidential candidate (and even used Waystar’s media influence to swing the election) who is effectively a far-right fascist, even when knowing that this politician’s supporters were generating a climate in which his non-white adopted daughter, Sophie, felt threatened and afraid for her life. And last by no means least, he is technically responsible for the death of another human being; his lingering guilt over this was one of the last shreds of empathy tethering him to reality, but he very recently shed that guilt too, denying outright that he was even in the car when the accident happened.
Arrival: Kendall will agree to come to the Barge.
Abilities/Powers: No abilities or powers unless “doing the cringiest things imaginable with no self-awareness” counts as a power.
Inmate Information: Content warning: parental abuse and neglect, suicide and suicidal ideation, drowning, car accident mention, alcoholism, drug use, drug addiction, parent death
Kendall Roy is simultaneously an insufferable rich prick with delusions of grandeur and a blinding sense of entitlement and also a deeply scarred, unhappy and lonely man whose practically Shakespearian family situation has damaged him more than he’ll ever really be able to reckon with. From a young age his lifestyle, education and aspirations were all funnelled into eventually becoming the CEO of his father’s multimedia corporation, Waystar Royco, only for his cruel, manipulative and abusive father Logan to snatch it all away from him. When your whole life is narrowed down to one single desperate desire, and you’re about to get it only to have it taken away for no apparent reason, it’s enough to send you into a tailspin. Kendall was seven years old when his father promised him that the company would one day belong to him; that’s a hard thing to shake, and it’s enough to have damaged his psyche and also ensured that his entire life revolves around grabbing for what his father promised him.
Kendall is a powerful cocktail of some of the worst traits imaginable, especially when they’re combined to create a one-percenter with unimaginable privilege who was born into the lap of luxury. He’s cocksure, arrogant, needy, self-centered, and always one bad day and one bad decision away from a self-destructive spiral that really becomes more of a hurricane, upending the lives of anyone close to him. Besides all that, though, he’s always fundamentally been a kicked puppy that continues to run back to its owner just to get kicked again, and being born already in his father’s fist has made him unable to see any other way of existing. He’s chased by addiction, depression, depersonalisation and the knock-on effects of a childhood of emotional abuse, which he experienced first-hand and also saw his siblings experiencing. This is both an explanation of the way he acts, and also something of a shield to him – though in the early seasons he was firmly under his father’s thumb, desirous of approval and love from him to the point of being a sycophant, he is also not above using the way he was raised as an excuse, safely stepping behind his abusive childhood to protect himself from being held fully accountable.
He’s done awful things in the name of doing what Logan tells him, such as planting false stories about two women in the press because they didn’t want to go into business with him, and firing around fifty people because they were about to unionise, and betraying his college best friend Stewy Hosseini (who sums him up pretty well) to save his own skin. His quest for his father’s approval also makes him necessarily complicit in a lot of the less than moral things Waystar has done as a company. Waystar owns a news network which is widely known to be extremely conservative, its news output tabloid-y and not particularly ethical. After all, if Logan can convince them to spread false stories to damage Kendall’s reputation, then it stands to reason he can do that for anyone else. One of Kendall’s major sins is a kind of willed ignorance – he demonstrates at least some social conscience, but seems to close his eyes to the corruption and various -phobias spewed out by the company he so badly wants to run. This has crystalised most recently during the in-universe presidential election. In Season 3, Logan threw his support behind Republican presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken, who is for all intents and purposes a far-right fascist. On the night of the election, Waystar-owned news network ATN (essentially the Fox News of Succession) called a contested state in favour of Mencken under dubious circumstances – a fire at a vote-counting building destroyed uncounted votes that most political forecasters argued would have gone to the Democrat candidate, but the count when the fire happened had been in favour of Mencken. Earlier that day, Kendall had been informed by his ex-wife Rava that their daughter Sophie, who is adopted and is not white, had been racially abused and perhaps even physically attacked by Mencken supporters. Kendall was superficially concerned for Sophie’s safety, but eventually ended up agreeing that ATN should make the call in favour of Mencken. His sister Shiv tried to persuade him otherwise, but Mencken was politically advantageous to Kendall because, if he won the election, he would have scuppered a deal that Kendall didn’t want to go through and had been trying to sabotage himself. With Mencken’s backing, the deal would have been dead in the water. In the end, Kendall’s desire to ruin that deal – a desire borne out of his need to hold onto Waystar and get the CEO position – was more important to him than democracy, than opposing fascism. This is perhaps, in some small way, understandable, since Kendall is in many ways separated from the ‘real world’; what is not understandable is the fact that he placed his own ambitions ahead of his daughter Sophie’s safety and comfort. Following Mencken’s election victory, Kendall also flipped out at his long-time assistant Jess, who is mixed race, when she tried to tell him she wanted to resign; he was cognizant enough to ask her if it was because of Mencken’s dubious election victory, but dismissed her outright and called her ‘dumb’ for trying to quit her job.
After the election, which because of the contested results had led to dangerous protests in the street, Rava decided to take her children out of the city, meaning that they wouldn’t be able to attend Logan’s funeral. Kendall, distraught, threatened that he would get custody of his children. Kendall has been an incredibly distant and neglectful father for almost all of his life, always placing his job above any real relationship with his kids; he wants custody not because he actually wants to raise his children, but because he doesn’t want Rava to keep them from him. In many ways, his children are not fully real to him, just things that he can bargain with and fight over. Kendall has demonstrated a level of care and love for his children in the past – Iverson is clearly autistic, and especially in the early seasons Kendall shows himself to be patient and caring with Iverson when he’s struggling, and he yells at Logan when Logan strikes Iverson during a party game. Ultimately, Kendall’s decision to support Mencken was a selfish one motivated by greed, but it wasn’t motivated by a lack of care for Sophie’s wellbeing – he just sincerely believes that his money and power will be enough to protect her. His threats about getting custody of his kids are also a light shining onto his hypocrisy – when Logan and Kendall’s mother Caroline divorced, Logan pushed hard to make sure he got full custody of his children, and Caroline was separated from them entirely, resulting in a distant relationship between Kendall and his mother. Kendall, notably, blames his mother for this, and not his father. It’s extremely difficult for Kendall to blame Logan about anything.
For the majority of his marriage to Rava, Kendall was a drug user, who, at his very worst, snorted cocaine off his children’s iPads. He’s done multiple markedly illegal things in the service of his drug habit; until fairly recently, he’d been sober and in recovery, but when his father planted false stories of relapse in the news, it acted as a trigger to him, leading to an actual relapse into drug use and alcoholism that he hasn’t really recovered from. He goes on to purchase drugs from sketchy dealers. He’s also stolen small, cheap items like batteries from corner stores only to throw them right in the trash – it’s more about trying to grasp control over his life than about actually needing the batteries, since he has more money than he’ll ever know what to do with. And most importantly, there was the night of his sister’s wedding.
In the aftermath of triggering a ‘bear hug’ in which he and Stewy were planning to perform a hostile takeover of Waystar and oust Logan, Kendall asked a waiter at Shiv’s wedding reception if he could get him any drugs. Luckily for him (or unluckily, as it turns out), the waiter had a hookup, and they drove out together. Kendall, not used to driving stick-shift and fairly inebriated already, was looking down while changing gear so he didn’t see a deer in the road; the waiter reached for the wheel and swerved it violently to the right, sending the car careening off a bridge and into a lake. Kendall managed to swim out, and even dove back down a few times to try to help the waiter, but he couldn’t. Soaked to the bone and numb, Kendall climbed out of the lake, ran back to the party, changed clothes and danced with his kids.
The death of the waiter has haunted Kendall ever since it happened, though he all too easily accepted his father’s help in covering it up and effectively absolved himself from taking responsibility, with the official line that the waiter accidentally killed himself driving alone. Whether he’s directly responsible is up for debate – it was the waiter who swerved the car, but Kendall shouldn’t have been driving it, and if he hadn’t been desperate to get high neither of them would have been in the car in the first place – but Kendall clearly blames himself, saying that he should take the fall for an unrelated Waystar scandal as atonement for “the boy”. In fact, it’s his father’s description of the waiter incident as “NRPI” (No Real Person Involved, the same phrase used whenever a worker died in ‘mysterious circumstances’ on a Waystar cruise ship) that sets Kendall on his Season 3 arc of trying to expose Logan for corruption instead of taking the fall himself.
Though ostensibly trying to put real effort into changing Waystar by ousting his father and bringing various criminal actions to light, Kendall spends a lot of Season 3 getting high on his own supply, so to speak. Once he’s become the centre of attention for his actions, he becomes aloof, arrogant and spiteful, allowing his ego to be blown up by the international conversation he caused. He begins to think of himself as a hero, and it’s very easy to see it all going to his head. When his lawyer berates him for the way he talked in an interview with the authorities, he fires her; when his siblings refuse to side with him, he calls them names, picking at their insecurities, accusing them of being avaricious cowards and even levelling horribly misogynistic insults at Shiv. Kendall’s major problem for a lot of this season is that he’s unable to see that justice requires work, and not just one bombshell press conference where he accuses his father of being systematically corrupt: the reality is that he has to wait for the Department of Justice investigation and for the slow wheel of legal justice to turn; he has to consistently stand up for marginalised individuals instead of just tweeting “we must overthrow the culture of corruption that silences women” and expecting his job to be done; and he has to accept that he previously worked to uphold Waystar’s corruption, though he was ignorant about its precise nature, and his lifelong desire to take over as CEO is corrupted by the business itself. He saw his role in this whole thing as a hero and a figurehead for the cause, and believes at his worst that all that needs to be done is for Logan to go away and hand the company over to Kendall, who will then simply make the company ethical again by virtue of not being as evil as his father.
Though Logan Roy is a bully and an abuser, he sometimes says things to his children that aren’t entirely untrue. At one point, he says to Kendall, ‘You’re a hothouse flower ... you’re curdled cream. For the world? Nah, you’re not made for it.’ To a certain extent, he’s right. As a result of his upbringing, where he was simultaneously sheltered from the harsh reality of the world and also treated with an appalling lack of love or care, Kendall is alarmingly fragile, and makes up for that with a strange combination of false bravado and affected humility that protects him as much as it makes him unlikeable to others. When challenged, his reaction often depends on his mindset at the time – on a high, he’s confrontational and smug and will lash out, trying to use words to hit people where they hurt; at his low points, he retreats into himself, grasping for innocence in a childish way, like wrapping himself up in a kids’ blanket and putting his head in his girlfriend’s lap or recreating his childhood treehouse at his 40th birthday party and pettily refusing to let his siblings in.
He’s been protective of his siblings – calling Logan out when he makes Shiv cry, criticising him for his neglect of his first son Connor, yelling at his father when Logan strikes Roman and also Kendall’s son Iverson, and explaining at one point that he wanted to get all of his siblings out of the company and away from their father. He’s shown guilt for the part he played in the death of the waiter at Shiv’s wedding, even though he skirted actual legal proceedings on the matter. He even confessed what he did to his siblings in a tearful moment, only for them to console him, telling him that it was an accident, that it wasn’t his fault, that he tried to help. But after Logan’s death, none of those small but vital acts of goodness, or at least the potential for it, matter to him anymore.
Logan’s death could, in theory, have freed Kendall from this awful endless cycle, but instead, it locked him in it forever. Logan’s wishy-washy approach to which of his children would succeed him means that when he dies, out of nowhere, it leaves Kendall and his siblings squabbling over ‘what dad wanted’. The parameters of Logan’s final wishes are vague enough that nobody is entirely sure what they were. Most impactfully for Kendall, a debate erupts over whether, on a print-out of Logan’s will, Kendall’s name had been underlined or crossed out. Kendall is convinced that he’s the only one of his siblings who could effectively run the company – once he sees his name in Logan’s will, he convinces himself immediately that it was underlined, and proceeds to act with determination to fulfil it. His eulogy at Logan’s funeral crystalises what Logan’s death has done to him: he states outright that Logan was ‘a brute’, that he had ‘magnificent, awful force’, and that he hopes that same force is in him. Just a few months previously, he had told Logan to his face that he was ‘kind of evil’, that he didn’t want to be like Logan, that he was a good person – but Logan’s death flipped all of that for Kendall. With the absence of his father, Kendall must become his father.
Trying to scupper the deal to sell the company to Swedish tech billionaire Lukas Matsson, Kendall finally manages to persuade both of his siblings to vote against the deal at the next board meeting. The alternative pitch, of course, is installing Kendall as CEO – actual CEO, not acting CEO or co-CEO. It’s the culmination of everything Kendall’s ever wanted, everything Logan promised him. His brother Roman, who recently got into a fight and has a cut on his forehead, wobbles a little bit before the vote: he asks Kendall why it couldn’t be him, and Kendall, who understands that Roman craves hurt and comfort in the same stroke because of the way he was raised, embraces him and pushes Roman’s forehead into his shoulder at the same time, hard enough to open the cut again. It’s a horrifying moment, because Kendall has put aside his slavish loyalty to his father in the past and yelled at him when he saw Logan hit Roman. Now, so close to what he’s always wanted, Kendall is the one hurting Roman. During the actual meeting, with Shiv the last one to vote, she leaves the room, clearly about to vote against Kendall in a last-minute turn. Kendall and Roman head out after her, and have a huge argument in a glass-walled conference room for everyone to hear. At one point, Shiv tells him that he can’t be CEO, because he killed someone. Kendall immediately denies it; when his siblings question why he's denying it, he lies, and says that it never happened. The boy drowned, but Kendall wasn’t there. He never even got in the car. Finally, to Kendall, the boy really is “NRPI” – no real person involved.
In the big blowout with Shiv and Roman over Shiv’s vote, Kendall goes from trying to persuade her that he’s the best choice, to shouting at her for being ‘stupid’ enough to vote against him, to begging her with the energy of a child about to throw a tantrum because someone’s trying to take away his favourite toy. ‘I’m the eldest boy!’ he screams at her, spit flying, and she laughs in his face. (He is not the eldest boy.) When Roman suggests that Shiv is the only ‘bloodline’ of the family and that makes her more viable than Kendall as their father’s successor (because Kendall’s children aren’t biologically his), Kendall loses it, lunging at Roman and scrapping with him, grabbing his face and trying to press on the wounds on his face again, this time with his bare hands. Shiv tries to leave the room, and Kendall lunges at her too, only for Roman to have to try to pull him back. Shiv storms out, votes in favour of the deal, and it’s all over for Kendall. Numbly, Kendall leaves the building, walking to Battery Park and sitting on a bench to look out at the Hudson River while being followed at a respectful distance by his father’s former bodyguard Colin, who he’d hired after Logan’s death, and who is one of the only people in the world who outright knows about Kendall’s responsibility for the waiter’s death. He’s almost died twice in water before, once chasing a cocaine hit and a second time potentially a suicide attempt, and the last shot of him seems to implicate that maybe he’ll try again. He’s lost everything, and he kind of deserved it.
Path to Redemption: At his current canon point, Kendall has nothing. He’s swung back from mania into depression, but this time there’s no clawing it back: the board meeting has irrevocably taken the company from him, and in the process he destroyed his relationship with his siblings, his ex-wife, and his children. In that argument with Shiv, he tells her that if he doesn’t get to be CEO, he ‘might die.’ She rolls her eyes, but for Kendall it really is a life-or-death thing. The danger here isn’t that Kendall is unaware of his moral failings, but rather that his mental health gets in the way of him making any real change in himself: rather than acknowledging the core issues he needs to face, Kendall is going to spiral, beating himself up about what he’s lost, rather than actually trying to change anything. In this way, his biggest problem is that he runs on a cycle of self-aggrandisement, ego stroking and arrogance followed by a sharp crash into depression and self-hatred where nothing is solved and he doesn’t really change. It’s been suggested that he’s bipolar, but never confirmed in canon – nevertheless, the swings from extreme mania to extreme depression (bordering on suicidality) reflect someone who is not in control of his emotions.
Major milestones Kendall will need to reach before graduation are in no particular order:
- Acknowledgement of his privilege in a meaningful and active way, i.e. more than just paying lip service to the fact that he’s "lucky" in terms of his circumstances.
- Acknowledgement of the wrongs he’s done and an ability to be able to think critically about his role in Waystar, the company as a whole, and the things he’s done in a quest to secure Logan’s approval and, after Logan’s death, the things he’s done to get the CEO role, including agreeing to use ATN to install a fascist as president.*
- Attempting to make amends for the way he destroys or affects others’ lives when he spirals (e.g. relapsing; throwing tantrums; insulting, betraying and belittling others; firing innocent people).
- Addressing his role in the waiter’s death. After it happened, he accepted his father’s help in covering up the death, which was at least partially Kendall’s fault due to negligence, DUI or at worst vehicular manslaughter, but at least he felt guilty about it. Now, he’s skipped over denying responsibility and straight to claiming that it never happened. At some point, the waiter stopped being ‘real’ to him.
- Acknowledgement that Logan’s abuse and Kendall’s own mental health issues are not excuses for any of his behaviour.
- An active and meaningful effort to get back on the wagon and aim for sobriety. Addiction doesn’t make him a bad person, but the way he acts when he’s using drugs is self-destructive and often delusional.
* Regarding the Mencken situation, I want to make it clear here that Kendall doesn’t actually agree with Mencken’s politics, and a prospective warden absolutely would not have to persuade him that fascism is bad or try to “convert” him politically. Kendall’s issue here is that, at his peak of self-delusion, he thinks he would be powerful enough to protect his children, and ultimately that, once he’s CEO, he will be more important and impactful than whoever is president. I think this is because the role of CEO almost has mythic importance to Kendall, after growing up with his father at the centre of his universe.
On the Barge, he’ll keep to himself at first, withdrawing the way he usually does when his mental health issues resurge, and becoming something of a slave to his addictions and vices. It’ll take some time to pull him back out of his shell. His reaction to being wardened specifically would depend largely on the style in which the warden went about it, but generally speaking he’s bound to be a little stubborn while also self-flagellating to the point of uselessness.
Losing CEO, something Jeremy Strong called an ‘extinction-level event’ for Kendall in an interview, is going to impact the way he interacts with everyone else on the Barge, in the sense that he has nothing to aim for, nowhere to point his motivation. His brother Roman is on the Barge, but he’s been here much longer than Kendall and his canon-point is also considerably earlier. Once Kendall realises this, he will try to take advantage, pretending that nothing major happened so he can exist in a world where he never lost the vote, where he could still be CEO, where he didn’t ruin his relationship with his siblings, and where Logan is not dead. It’s an extreme coping mechanism and one that will only be destructive for him, as it’s going to prevent him from wanting to try to address anything that he did after Logan’s death.
Being out of his rich-kid bubble where he’ll be forced to engage and interact with people he otherwise wouldn’t even have to acknowledge is going to be an important factor in pushing him out of a destructive cycle. The hypothetical ideal warden would be able to talk to him plainly in a way that acknowledges his history and the circumstances of his upbringing while also not pulling punches in terms of criticising his actions and bad behaviour. He wouldn’t respond well to moral high-horsing or preaching from someone who just attacks his negative personality traits, but would respond well to someone who can give him a balanced assessment of himself, who isn’t being paid to tell him what he wants to hear. Basically, he needs a therapist who won’t pull their punches. He also wouldn’t respond well to someone who has an inalienable prejudice against rich people, however valid they might be in that assessment.
The triggers that would motivate real change for Kendall are most likely time and exposure to people he otherwise would never have been able to access. People whose worldviews and circumstances are entirely different from him, people who can give him a perspective he never had before. He’s also alarmingly passive in a lot of his life – he accepts a lot of things that other people might not, and the ports and floods would force him to get his hands dirty. Helping to save someone else’s life would do wonders for him, as would some extremely frank words from people who might be able to see his life and situation with complete objectivity. Even when he’s at his worst in canon, he can fall back on money and his family name, which often prevents him from really improving himself. On the Barge he’ll have none of that.
History: Season 1 and 2 | Season 3 | Season 4
Sample Network Entry: TDM with Eiffel
Sample RP: TDM with Roman
Special Notes: I had Kendall on the barge for a little while about a year ago, but he's returning from a newer canon point and with no memories of his first go around! I have also, of course, spoken extensively to Chase (Roman's player) about Ken's return, especially regarding his vastly different canonpoint.