TW: Mentions of child sexual assault (no explicit details, more so the aftermath of the trauma)

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Succession does an amazing job at dropping these tidbits of information about the characters whenever they were younger, never allowing us a moment to sit and process it. It’s woven into the conversation as if they’re talking about the weather, like it’s something that’s deep in their past they’ve since then healed over. A bitter memory. But really, with the way that they carry themselves, it’s clear that the lack of flashbacks in Succession indicate that we are still living through their trauma. 

We are perpetually observing each of the Roy kids be unable to grow out of their childhood. The man’s health is declining, he’s eighty and still his bellows send them to feel seven again. Logan Roy is kicking them and opening wounds that they haven’t had a chance to lick clean, still wandering around bloody with the red that connects them with him. 

They could see one another with a gaping hole and still they’d ask the other “How’s dad? Is Dad okay?” as if he is an extension of themselves. If Dad is okay, so are they. The hurt that he has caused them never being enough to outweigh the love that they have for him. I know a lot of people refer to the relationship that they have with their father being one of hatred but the issue with these kids comes not from how much they hate their father but how much they love him. They’re still so desperate to find some resemblance of love in Logan Roy’s hollow body that’s been stuffed with nothing but ego & hurt of his own. They’re at his heels, watching the door close and barking right at it in an attempt that he might hear them this once.

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And if he did, it was only for one of them. He never had the time to love them all equally, always pitting them against one another. He knew that it was better to have them claw and bite at one another than at him.

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"I should've had dogs. Not with your father. He never saw anything he loved that he didn't wanna kick it just to see if it would come back."

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Though one must connect the dog motif to one of the siblings more than the others and that is none other than Roman Roy, Logan's third child out of the four and his youngest boy. Nicknamed Romulus after one of the twins from the story of Remus & Romulus, who were suckled by a wolf when they were left for dead in the Tiber River, it's to no one's surprise that his connection to their father becomes the heaviest. In the way that Siobhan and Kendall think that they are tethered to Logan Roy, Roman sees that there is something more between his father and him. There is a very clear indication that Logan would give physical punishments to his kids though it seems that Roman would be the one to get punished the most often. You would think that he would be the one to want away from his father the most often but the way he tends to remain as his father's side like some loyal hound makes it feel as though Roman has taken this as being seen as special. Something along the lines of Dad hit me as a kid so I've had a deeper connection with him. What he feels for me is stronger than what he feels for you all.

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And it certainly doesn't help that his siblings participated in this type of abuse, unaware that there was something terribly wrong about it. In S1 EP8: Prague, we learn that Roman used to be put in a dog cage, to which Kendall reacts horrified about since they were discussing it with someone outside of their family. Though Kendall's discomfort comes not from the fact that he did that to Roman as a child, but because he is convinced that it was a game, one which Roman enjoyed, he thinks Roman is exaggerating for the sake of making him look bad. They were both kids. It was all in good fun. Roman liked and asked to be put in that cage.

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It's not a strange to assume that we are simply spectators to the trauma that the characters unravel, our own judgement being based off the bickering that ensues behind the dog cage story that we never outright touch on again. We don't get any flashbacks and instead see the culmination of their trauma within their being present itself for us in each of their interactions. It's what makes Roman be unable to stand the touch of someone intimately, why he makes morbid jokes every few seconds, why he presents himself to his father with his head hung low as if a prey presenting itself to those that hunt after it. All we do know is that Roman saw it as traumatic and never fully healed from it even if his siblings try to convince him of it.

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Still shaken up by it, he goes and asks his eldest brother, Connor, if he remembers since he was older whenever it happened. Connor does indeed remember but he refutes Roman's claim that it was traumatic with a "No, you liked it. You asked to be put in that cage." Roman, confused by this insists that it was concomitant with him "going weird" and "starting to wet the bed" as well as it being why he was sent away to military school.

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It is implied throughout the series that Roman was someone who suffered from a form of sexual abuse whenever he was younger, though this comes mostly from smaller comments he makes throughout and his reaction to physical intimacy. For one, wetting the bed at the age that Roman has mentioned is a sign of sexual abuse having occurred, more specifically his mention of starting to wet the bed, suggesting that he hadn't before. Another example is when he goes into the bathroom with a potential business partner, he states to him, "So, I can't piss near other men due to...we don't know what reason", as though positions in which he is vulnerable in front of others comes as a discomfort to him. At the root of it all however, that is what makes him be such a foul mouthed man. He is unable to ever let himself be vulnerable, never able to let his guard down as if doing so is exposing his soft flesh for an apex predator to sink his teeth into, as if the mere thought of it would be asking to be hunted down.

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He flirts with his  trainer that has to physically move him and force him to be vulnerable — and Gerri, an older women who has been present to him all his life but he seeks out sexually, is in a position of power over him. If the action is wrong enough, Roman can distance himself from the action of sex so much that it no longer has to feel like sex. His girlfriend often tried to initiate intimacy with him and he would reject her, noticeably uncomfortable with the prospect of ever having sex. At one point, he says that they can have sex but only if she pretends to be dead. I know a lot of people were uncomfortable with this thinking that this was just Roman being strange (because he's such a little gremlin throughout the series and does/says things just to get a reaction out of people!) but this was a huge indicator of how his logic revolving around sex seemed. He backs away from her once she begins to start talking or tries to turn on the lights, murmuring something about how "Dead people don't get wet." Dead people don't provide a reaction, they don't touch him back or make sex feel like...well, sex.

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Men are often portrayed as sexual subjects, they are an active role in sex. Some people go as far as to claiming that men need sex, which has only made it so that any man who does not meet this standard of wanting to have sex are somehow "broken", there is something "wrong" with them that is making them unable to perform what they have been born to do. Roman, unable to be someone who ever wants to engage in sexual activities, is seen as being inadequate. There is something missing in Roman that ever other man (in his father's eyes) has. It's also no surprise that so much of the business conversation that is had in Succession is reminiscent of sex. "Did you bend for him?" "We're fucking you." "I'm not going to let you rape my company." "I'll even throw in a blowjob in there." etc. Roman cannot perform well in business, he cannot perform in the bedroom. Power and sex are intertwined with one another and Roman has never had either.

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The truth is Roman has always been seen as the weaker dog. The theory that his father had has taken its effect on the children's since they have played it in their youth, all of them waving it off as a game that they used to play together that Roman liked, that Roman asked to play.

Whether Logan had intended for it to happen, his children are still playing the game, fighting to never be seen as the weaker dog by him, permanently cementing a hierarchy where Roman is at the very bottom, hunched over and trembling. Unaware of what lies outside of it as it is all that he has ever known, flinching at acts of love that come as unfamiliar to him.

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