Happy Succession Sunday
Baby girl Kendall Roy is Back.
Today marks the beginning of a ten-week journey through the last season of Succession. I am as excited as everyone for the return of something to look forward to of high quality and entertainment value. I am equally excited for the return of Kendall Roy fan edits en masse. This new season gives the auteurs behind these pieces more colors to paint with. They will have more clips to take out of context or put in the right context. More scenes to shuffle and reshuffle so they go in the right order.
True Succession fans/online girlies know that the Kendall Roy edits never really go away, they just become less dense and more repetitive as time goes on. We’ve seen all the clips, we know all the content. The narrative remains the same. The artists behind Kendall’s online reputation have already twisted it as far as it can go. He’s so babygirl. We can’t unbabygirl him now no matter what anyone does and we don’t really have a new direction for the narrative to go. The only solution to breathe more life into these edits is a new season.
The die-hards of HBO Sundays and Twitter sophisticates remain confused about how a serious show about business and family gained the audience that it did. Many ask the question why all of the characters, not only Kendall get a fan edit and a subtextual narrative set to pop songs when they’re being silly and Fiona apple when they’re being moody. To me, the answer is simple. Kendal Roy fan edits were inevitable in the current internet landscape. Let me explain.
To some extent, the internet is about survival. No one is proud of this narrative when it comes to creative expression but it’s inevitable when the main apparatus that allows for all this creative expression is powered by ‘innovation” and the need to create what’s next. When we create what’s next, we often forget what was before. The Social Media we all use now is populated by people that moved there from somewhere else. The old Friendster to MySpace to Facebook trail. No matter where we started we’re all on Twitter together now. That’s where the Kendall Roy edits gain traction as bizarre and people demand an explanation.
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Kendall Roy edits exist in the because fan communities have moved from Tumblr, a text-and-image-based platform, and split their time between Twitter and TikTok. Twitter for the text and TikTok for the images. TikTok is so much more amenable to these nerds as far as creative expression. The Kendall Roy edits thrive there as normal healthy parts of the ecosystem. Of course, Twitter exists not only as text for the nerds but for adults to pick apart and speculate on what happens on TikTok. If it were just for making fun of TikTok, these Kendall Roy edits would not have the long second life on Twitter that they do. These edits are not just for making fun of, they are enjoyed and celebrated by even the most TikTok and fan culture averse among us.
To understand our deep love of these edits on Twitter, We must consider the Ironic Fan Cam wave of 2019. The fan cam came from the world of stan Twitter and starting in 2019 they breached stan Twitter containment. It is never clear which fan cams are made by deranged teenagers who have no idea how to process their interests or media-savvy adults who want in on the fun. It is equally plausible that the person making an Anne Dowd fan cam is a gay teen who loves The Handmaid’s Tale or an editor at Vulture who is still demanding justice for The Leftovers. Either way, we all became familiar with the practice and are on the lookout for bizarre and beautiful fan cams in the wild. Those of us who are very online but not involved in stan culture are familiar with this practice. We can recognize it and love it to some extent. We understand the language but don’t speak it. In the vast gulf between stan culture and nerd culture, exist the rest of us, bearing witness to their creations
We have a fondness for this kind of video and appreciate a job well done. The Kendall Roy fan cams are the next evolution and practically made for the same media-savvy adults with a soft spot for stan Twitter.
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Now we have a nerd culture that is far-flung and uncaged. We also have an aging fan population. Some people get stuck in the world of nerd shows forever. Finding the next thing to chase their Supernatural high. Some people grow up. They still have their skill fan edit skill set but their tastes have matured. They’ve entered the world of adults and HBO Sunday nights. While their tastes have matured, their talents remain sharp as ever. (Granted the most popular show on HBO is House of the Dragon so no one ever has to grow up that much. No one’s making anyone watch The Gilded Age, a show for Real adults. )
All this combines to create the perfect environment for The Kendall Roy fan community to not only exist but be a vocal majority of Succession fans. I have mixed opinions on the value of fan-created art, and judging the value of a show by what it inspires in fans but I will never count out the Succession stans. They bring fun and good content on the off days between episodes. I can’t wait to see what they come up with this time.
We can fix him