![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
TLV — application.
User Name/Nick: Bobby
User DW: n/a
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
crowders or PM
Other Characters Currently In-Game: n/a
Character Name: Kendall Roy
Series: Succession
Age: 40
From When?: The end of S3E8. Kendall is lying on his front on an inflatable with a bottle of beer, clearly drunk to the point of near unconsciousness; the beer bottle falls out of his hand, and slowly his head starts to dip into the water. In canon, Kendall is pulled out of the pool by his PR manager Comfrey, but in game he'll have drowned.
Inmate Justification: Kendall is by no means the worst man in the world – in fact, one of the core tenets of his character is that he's aware of his privilege and plagued with guilt over the bad decisions he makes and how they affect others. But he's also 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 his ways on a fundamental level. He's also prone to self-destruction and that destruction often reverberates outwards. And last by no means least, he is technically responsible for the death of another human being. 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.
Arrival: He'd agree to come. Kendall is in many ways suicidal at this point in his canon, but actually dying is something that frightens him, so it wouldn't take much to persuade him to come aboard. He's also currently an alcoholic with substance abuse and addiction issues that will be coming with him.
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
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 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 fundamentally 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 wanted to run.
For the majority of his marriage to his now-ex-wife 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 that he hasn't really recovered from. He goes on to purchase drugs from sketchy dealers and declares himself "interested in becoming a meth-head." 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. 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 sees 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 retire and hand the company over to Kendall, who will simply make the company ethical again by virtue of not being as evil as his father.
After his father sends him a card for his 40th birthday telling him to cash out his shares and leave the company for good, Kendall has a fight with his brother Roman at his party, telling him miserably that, "You're not real. You're not a real person." This is obviously meant to cut him to the bone, and while it doesn't in Roman's case, it's worth noting that Kendall says it because it's the thing that he, Kendall, wouldn't want to hear about himself. He doesn't want to know that he isn't "real", and that his personality, especially now, has been constructed to hide behind. While searching for a handmade gift from his children among the piles of birthday presents he received from famous partygoers, Kendall is given a watch by his girlfriend Naomi. He's unsettled by the watch, pointing out that he already has one, clearly hurt by the fact that she doesn't seem to know him very well, and subsequently has what is pretty much a breakdown. "I wish I was," he says, and there's a pause during which the viewer assumes he's about to complete the sentence with dead before he says, "home." Kendall at this point has let the facade crack, which is only so well-founded as a facade because he has spent the last few weeks fervently believing it himself.
After his birthday, Kendall retreats in on himself, no longer acting the self-obsessed, arrogant man who thinks he's a hero. Attending his mother's wedding in Italy, he asks for a private meeting with his father, during which he begs his father, "Let me out." Logan, despite offering to buy him out at his birthday, says no. The next day, Kendall gets into the pool with a bottle of beer, and for the purposes of the game, he doesn't come out of it.
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 also spends a lot of time standing on rooftops and staring mournfully out at the city, often bringing to mind the image of someone who's at least considering jumping.
He's not a bad person. He's protective of his siblings – calling Logan out when he makes Shiv cry, 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 clearly guilty 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. But all that aside, Kendall still has a way to go to be truly redeemed.
Path to Redemption: At his current canon point, Kendall is in a bad place. He's once again consumed with guilt over the waiter's death, and feels that he's been an inadequate whistleblower now that it's clear to him that nobody's going to prison and the whole cruises scandal – which had seemed so monumental at the time – is simply going to be swept under the rug. 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 his failures 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.
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.
- 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).
- Being able to do more than simply feel guilty over the waiter's death – Kendall's fallen at the first hurdle in this case, since his guilt is all-consuming but really doesn't work as an active atonement. 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.
- 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.
Currently Kendall's incredibly vulnerable to his depression and is passively suicidal – he'd agree to come onto the Barge in a moment of weakness, but he's still intensely self-destructive and in many ways resistant to change. 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.
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. Honestly, I also think the simple fact that he's been made an inmate on the Barge would have some effect, so talking to other Inmates and realising that he's done enough to be counted among them would really unseat some of his hard-held beliefs. 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
Sample Network Entry:
Sample RP: TDM with Roman
Special Notes: i'm so terribly sorry for how long this is mods
User DW: n/a
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: n/a
Character Name: Kendall Roy
Series: Succession
Age: 40
From When?: The end of S3E8. Kendall is lying on his front on an inflatable with a bottle of beer, clearly drunk to the point of near unconsciousness; the beer bottle falls out of his hand, and slowly his head starts to dip into the water. In canon, Kendall is pulled out of the pool by his PR manager Comfrey, but in game he'll have drowned.
Inmate Justification: Kendall is by no means the worst man in the world – in fact, one of the core tenets of his character is that he's aware of his privilege and plagued with guilt over the bad decisions he makes and how they affect others. But he's also 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 his ways on a fundamental level. He's also prone to self-destruction and that destruction often reverberates outwards. And last by no means least, he is technically responsible for the death of another human being. 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.
Arrival: He'd agree to come. Kendall is in many ways suicidal at this point in his canon, but actually dying is something that frightens him, so it wouldn't take much to persuade him to come aboard. He's also currently an alcoholic with substance abuse and addiction issues that will be coming with him.
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
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 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 fundamentally 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 wanted to run.
For the majority of his marriage to his now-ex-wife 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 that he hasn't really recovered from. He goes on to purchase drugs from sketchy dealers and declares himself "interested in becoming a meth-head." 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. 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 sees 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 retire and hand the company over to Kendall, who will simply make the company ethical again by virtue of not being as evil as his father.
After his father sends him a card for his 40th birthday telling him to cash out his shares and leave the company for good, Kendall has a fight with his brother Roman at his party, telling him miserably that, "You're not real. You're not a real person." This is obviously meant to cut him to the bone, and while it doesn't in Roman's case, it's worth noting that Kendall says it because it's the thing that he, Kendall, wouldn't want to hear about himself. He doesn't want to know that he isn't "real", and that his personality, especially now, has been constructed to hide behind. While searching for a handmade gift from his children among the piles of birthday presents he received from famous partygoers, Kendall is given a watch by his girlfriend Naomi. He's unsettled by the watch, pointing out that he already has one, clearly hurt by the fact that she doesn't seem to know him very well, and subsequently has what is pretty much a breakdown. "I wish I was," he says, and there's a pause during which the viewer assumes he's about to complete the sentence with dead before he says, "home." Kendall at this point has let the facade crack, which is only so well-founded as a facade because he has spent the last few weeks fervently believing it himself.
After his birthday, Kendall retreats in on himself, no longer acting the self-obsessed, arrogant man who thinks he's a hero. Attending his mother's wedding in Italy, he asks for a private meeting with his father, during which he begs his father, "Let me out." Logan, despite offering to buy him out at his birthday, says no. The next day, Kendall gets into the pool with a bottle of beer, and for the purposes of the game, he doesn't come out of it.
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 also spends a lot of time standing on rooftops and staring mournfully out at the city, often bringing to mind the image of someone who's at least considering jumping.
He's not a bad person. He's protective of his siblings – calling Logan out when he makes Shiv cry, 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 clearly guilty 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. But all that aside, Kendall still has a way to go to be truly redeemed.
Path to Redemption: At his current canon point, Kendall is in a bad place. He's once again consumed with guilt over the waiter's death, and feels that he's been an inadequate whistleblower now that it's clear to him that nobody's going to prison and the whole cruises scandal – which had seemed so monumental at the time – is simply going to be swept under the rug. 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 his failures 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.
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.
- 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).
- Being able to do more than simply feel guilty over the waiter's death – Kendall's fallen at the first hurdle in this case, since his guilt is all-consuming but really doesn't work as an active atonement. 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.
- 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.
Currently Kendall's incredibly vulnerable to his depression and is passively suicidal – he'd agree to come onto the Barge in a moment of weakness, but he's still intensely self-destructive and in many ways resistant to change. 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.
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. Honestly, I also think the simple fact that he's been made an inmate on the Barge would have some effect, so talking to other Inmates and realising that he's done enough to be counted among them would really unseat some of his hard-held beliefs. 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
Sample Network Entry:
[ In theory, Kendall's no stranger to this kind of thing. Conference calls and half-assed "casual chats" on FaceTime are part and parcel of his life working for Waystar, or at least they were before – well, before a lot of things. But he still looks a little out of his depth as he sits in front of the camera, decidedly avoiding the lens as if he's trying to avoid eye contact with a viewer he can't even see. ]
Uh – hey. So. I'm not exactly sure what the, uh, protocols are for this network thing. But whatever, it doesn't matter. I guess I'll just talk into this and then fire it into the stratosphere or whatever. Feel kind of like an idiot but the vloggers are doing this shit all the time and everyone likes them, right?
So, does anyone have kids back home? I have two. They... They're great kids, you know? But I feel like I'm... [ There's a pause, which stretches just into the realm of uncomfortable, before Kendall inhales and continues. ] Did you ever, like, think you were a bad parent? To your kids? That's... that's, like, normal, right? To feel like that?
[ Kendall waits for a second, but not like he's expecting an answer. ]
That's... that's it. I guess I just end the, uh—
[ The screen goes black. ]
Sample RP: TDM with Roman
Special Notes: i'm so terribly sorry for how long this is mods