“You have to watch this show. There’s this guy Kendall Roy, you’ll love him.”
Those were the words that got Emilia Smart-Denson, a 24-year-old woman in New York City, to watch HBO‘s Succession. For many this may be a surprising selling point for a prestige dramedy about a powerful, wealthy, right-wing family with famously unlikable and diabolical members. But Kendall has taken on a life of his own with young women on the internet.
Over the course of the past three seasons, viewers have watched Kendall, the multi-millionaire heir to his father’s media empire, grapple with his lack of paternal love through a cycle of duplicity, backstabbing, and drug addiction. Kendall, as played by actor Jeremy Strong, is a compelling mixture of blind confidence and painful insecurity, a human car crash you can’t avert your eyes from. He gained a cult following for iconic, cringe-worthy moments like his performance of a rap at a celebration for his father and yelling “fuck the patriarchy” at reporters.
But what does this 40-year-old killer have in common with young women online? More than you think.
Succession is so widely posted about that it’s reached unexpected corners of the internet. A subset of the fandom have plucked the men of out of the confines of the show to treat them more like boy band members than fictional right-wing media tycoons. And if the men of Succession are a boy band, Kendall is both the frontman and the “sensitive one,” ensuring he’s the fan favorite. But being a “Kendall girl” goes beyond having a lane or bias: it’s both a celebration of the flawed character and an identification with him — albeit one steeped in irony.
There’s popular Kendall merch: t-shirts and tote bags in the style of Twilight that read, “Team Kendall.” One prevalent t-shirt displays Kendall’s face framed in a heart with the bright pink text, “I can fix him.”
Edits of Kendall to songs that speak deeply to the female experience – Mitski and Taylor Swift are popular choices – thrive. One TikTok posted by @emmlaurenson slices together clips of Kendall in turmoil set to “Brutal” by Olivia Rodrigo, a song about the woes of being a 17-year-old girl. The caption reads, “only a month until I get my most pathetic 40-year-old man who’s also a teenage girl back.” His droopy, serious face is many TikTokkers’ muse.
It’s not uncommon for Kendall to be referred to as a teenage girl, girl-coded, babygirl, girlboss, girlcringe, or girlfailure on Twitter and TikTok. There’s an inherent humor to these nicknames: Kendall is not a young, misunderstood woman. But while saying Kendall is “just like me” might have started as a joke, it has a seed of truth to it.
“We’ve adopted him,” Fola, another young female Kendall fan, tells Mashable. “A lot of his tendencies are relatable to young women,” the 23-year-old New York City grad student explains. She points to his 40th birthday party as an example, a Season 3 episode in which he meticulously plans the event only to end up crying and miserable. Crying on your birthday is a common trope of disaffected womanhood.
It doesn’t end with Kendall’s birthday party breakdown: much of Kendall’s character resonates with young women.
“There’s just so much in Kendall Roy, that very oddly relates to those extreme highs and lows and strong feelings you have when you’re a young girl,” Julia Riggieri, a 21-year-old promotions assistant in Massachusetts, tells Mashable.
When Smart-Denson watched the pilot episode, in which Kendall has a silent, complete meltdown in the bathroom during a family lunch, she was sold.
“He rips up newspapers and breaks Q-tips and yells into a towel. And then he tidied everything up, and goes back out and rejoins the family lunch,” Smart-Denson tells Mashable. “I have felt that way so many times in my life, the silent, all consuming rage that you have to hide to keep the peace at whatever family event or professional event is happening.” It’s a scene that came up again and again in conversations with Kendall fans.
The way Kendall is posted about in these circles is similar to the way in which online culture has fixated on certain discontent, complex, female characters like Fleabag, Sally Rooney protagonists, and the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, among others.
“When you have young girls who are entering a society that doesn’t want them to win, they see that in Kendall because his dad is never gonna let him have what he wants,” Hayley Loftus, a 21-year-old film and marketing student in North Carolina and proud owner of a Kendall t-shirt that says “taking a break from feminism to serve my king,” explains to Mashable.
Smart-Denson echoes Loftus: “Kendall’s experiences of being passed over for opportunities that he’s very deserving of, or being given authority and then set up to fail and undermined, are things that a lot of women have experienced professionally. It’s kind of fun to watch a powerful man have the same sort of demeaning experiences that you’ve had.”
In an effort to isolate the parts of Kendall they find relatable, young female viewers have created their own version of Kendall decontextualized from the show. They’re forcing representation in a place it doesn’t exist and consuming Succession in a way it isn’t intended to be all in a tongue-in-cheek manner. And it’s entertaining and subversive to contort a powerful, fictional man into a teenage girl.
It’s kind of fun to watch a powerful man have the same sort of demeaning experiences that you’ve had.
Kendall fans know that that they’re ignoring a lot of Kendall’s character in order to “twist him into something that we know that he isn’t. But it’s fun to pretend that he is,” explains Fola. “We’re filtering so much of his existence out of it to make it so that I’m not a right wing sympathizer, I’m a Mitski fan.”
And what do the girls want from Kendall in the show’s final season? More tears and another song.
