Hello lovely readers,
Welcome to the second and final discussion of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. This autobiographical comic was Canada Reads (an annual "battle of the books") winner for 2023. You can read the first discussion here.
Summary
The story picks up one month after that horrible party. Kate sleeps with Mike. She continues to get weird sexual comments from the men she works with, but she has started to laugh the comments off. Many of the men seem to have problems with her giving them orders, and her superiors get pissy with her for minor things or for wanting ‘special treatment’. Joe, a fellow Nova Scotian, overhears her swearing in frustration and tells her that everyone at the mine is just yelling at the guy next to them for work they’re not doing themselves, but that people tend to be friendlier to people from their own region of Canada. Kate wonders aloud to Doug whether the oil sands make people better or worse.
The men at the mine have heard that Kate’s ‘little friends’ (her sister Becky and friend Lindsay) are going to be joining them, and she warns them to leave them alone. When Becky and Lindsay arrive, they are wearing skirts and they quickly notice the staring and weird behaviour from the men on site. Kate apologises for it, and they wonder why she is saying sorry.
Kate tells Becky and Lindsay that the other men have been leaving her alone since most people know about her and Mike, and they tell her it’s because in their eyes she’s ‘claimed’.
They take a trip to Gregoire Beach, but Kate doesn’t wear a swimsuit or go swimming. Becky asks her what’s up with her, as she’s noticed something is wrong. Kate talks about how everything at the beach seems so normal, but that she isn’t. However, she doesn’t explain further.
Kate looks for other jobs online, and sees a post for a job at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia.
Not long afterwards, she sees the man who forced himself on her at that party. He and the group of men he’s with see her and they start laughing.
Kate hears a man playing Peter’s Dream on his guitar, and joins in singing the song.
She goes to Becky’s room and tells her that she needs to leave the oil sands for a while, even though she and Lindsay have just arrived. She asks her to promise that she and Lindsay will look out for each other, and finally tells her about the assaults. Becky tells her that it wasn’t her fault, and wishes she had been there sooner to protect her as that’s her job as the big sister. She tells Kate that it happened to her too, at her university dorm. She tells Kate she should go.
We leave the oil sands, for a year in Victoria. Kate gets the museum job but it’s no more than 21 hours per week, so she gets a second job. In a coffee shop, she hears the song An Innis Aigh playing, and tells a woman who was wondering aloud about the language that it’s Gaelic.
Victoria seems like a nicer place than the oil sands, but it isn’t perfect – the city big problems with homelessness and mental health, but none of the old, rich people living there care [read runner note – according to Victoria’s Wikipedia page, the city is known for its disproportionately large retiree population. Some 23.4% of the population of Victoria and its surrounding area are over 65 years of age, which is higher than the overall Canadian distribution of over 65 year-olds in the population (19%). A historically popular cliché refers to Victoria as the home of "the newly wed and nearly dead"]. Kate is fired from her job for not taking American money and not wanting to sell the merchandise badly enough. One of her colleagues (I think?) sees her drawing a comic, and suggests that she should make a website.
Kate tells her parents that on her days off she works at a grocery store, and her father wonders what her degree was for. Shortly afterwards, she is fired from the grocery store for yawning and ‘being surly’. She goes on a date, but panics when the guy tries to kiss her at the end.
Kate can’t get a reprieve from her student loan payments, even though she paid half of it off the previous year with her oil sands earnings. She decides to go back to the oil sands to pay the rest off, and says goodbye to the museum.
After that brief reprieve, we’re back in the oil sands, this time at Shell Albian Sands. Kate has taken a job in the warehouse office, and her living quarters are a bit fancier than at the previous sites. The site also has a Tim Hortons, Wi-Fi and a gym, even yoga classes. Lindsay tells her that a lot of the warehouse crew from Long Lake have moved up there too. One of her new colleagues is Hatim, who is creepy in a new way, plaguing her with messages despite having a wife and children.
The team get a congratulations message with a gif for achieving three million man hours without a lost time incident (LTI). Kate’s boss, Ryan, tells her that they don’t have LTIs at the site because they look bad for the company, I guess implying that they cover them up.
She sees Doug again, who seems to feel that she’s all high and mighty now with her office job, and struggles with her ‘bossing him’ since she’s younger than him (and presumably because she’s female). When she has to cover a warehouse shift, Doug laughs about how she’s down from on high and has gone soft. He tells her that he sang with The Men of the Deeps and even sang for the queen, which she doubts because he has a terrible voice. She sings a bit of Coal Town Road (which I’m kind of disappointed doesn’t sound like Old Town Road) and asks if she could be in the choir too, but he seems annoyed about her singing a mining song when she’s not a miner.
Kate’s sister Becky is still working at Long Lake, but lives in Fort McMurray, and Kate goes to meet her there; she says it’s much better than living in the camp. She tells Kate, that one time a guy jumped out of the closet in her room, but she was able to kick him out. She always locked her door, but often heard the handle jiggling at night. She even had a stalker, who managed to get into her room with a bottle of alcohol and suggested doing body shots – she didn’t report it, but when he got fired everyone thought she had.
Kate struggles to read some of the order sheets because many of the workers are bad spellers or have unclear handwriting; many of the older men at the mine left school in grade six. Lindsay tells her about one of the lead hands from Newfoundland, who can’t read, and was humiliated by the other workers when they tried to make him read the safety memo aloud so they could laugh at him. Lindsay says she’s never seen a grown man ashamed like that, and they discuss how he’s one of the nicest guys there.
A group from the Calgary office visits the mine site, and Kate has to find the nice hard hats and safety vests for the visitors, the ones the actual workers can’t have because they’re too fancy. Basically, they have to put on a show for the head office people – everyone has to look sharp, make things tidier than normal etc. One of the visitors takes a photo of Kate. After they leave, Damian asks if he can have one of the fancy new vests, but they were taken back to Calgary even though they don’t need them at head office.
Kate continues doing her comics, and her colleagues occasionally read them. Ryan finds some of them in the scanner, which she had used to upload them to her website, and tells her not to leave her stuff lying around at work.
Becky and Kate discuss what it would have been like if their father had gone out to the oil sands to work when they were children, as many people did. They wonder if he would have been like the other men they work with, and how they must all be normal at home. Kate says she tries to remember that there are a lot of men who don’t bother her, but she doesn’t remember them because they’re not the ones in her face.
Their safety lectures tell them basic information about how ice is slippery and is all over the ground, which presumably every Canadian already knows. One of the men remarks that it’s not about safety, but an arse-covering exercise so that a worker can’t sue them if they fall. Kate doodles a pony in her notebook (thank you u/Amanda39 for linking to this comic in last week’s discussion!).
Many of the staff have families that they don’t see very often. One of the men gets a phonecall from his wife’s phone, which he answers thinking it’s an emergency as she never calls during the day; it turns out to be his young son, who is calling to see when he’s coming home next.
Brian asks Kate if she heard about the ducks (TITLE DROP!!); three hundred of them got stuck in a tailings pond at another oil sands site [read runner note – two years later, Syncrude was actually found guilty of the death of 1,600 ducks]. The site begins installing anti-waterfowl devices, and the staff are reminded that they have to wear PPE at all times. They’re also told about the death Gerald Snopes, another worker; some of the men talking amongst themselves, and Ryan tells them to have some respect. He had a heart attack while operating a crane, and threw himself out of the cab so that he wouldn’t land on the controls and cause an accident.
Kate hears about a road accident involving some men from Cape Breton. She asks Davy about it to see if she knows them, but neither of them do. Kate finds the news articles and feels annoyed that they were misidentified as Calgary men.
Kate notices some welts on her back; Lindsay has them too but doesn’t know what it is. Kate mentions all the dust they have to wipe off everything, and how there’s so much crap in the air. Lindsay wonders what kind of cancer they’ll have in 20 years.
Kate finds Doug building a scarecrow for the tailings pond, which is meant to scare off the ducks. Probably another arse-covering exercise.
Activists from Greenpeace try to block an oil sands pipeline, and 11 people are arrested. One of the workers gets angry about it, asking who will put their life on the line to unclog the pipe Greenpeace has blocked, and that it sure as hell won’t be the president of Shell. Kate hears about another death – a contractor was in his trucks, and one of the heavy haulers drove over it, crushing him.
Lindsay writes an article for a grassroots paper, giving the inside perspective on working at the oil sands. Kate considers doing a comic about it for them. Lindsay later wonders if she made a mistake writing her article, as many of the comments are critical, including many from women which Lindsay did not expect.
Kate sees a video on YouTube of Celina Harpe, an elder in the Cree community of Fort McKay, talking about the effect of the oil sands on the First Nation. Kate had not realised when she arrived there that Fort McKay was a First Nation, nor that it was so close to Syncrude. She thinks about how she’s not the president of Shell, but she’s still working there, and she can’t extract herself from having come.
At another safety meeting, the staff are down the safety pyramid, which has different levels: at the base it has at-risk behaviours, then near misses, then minor incidents, and it all leads to a major incident or a fatality.
Kate receives a phone call from a reporter at the Globe and Mail who had seen her comics about the oil sands. She asks several leading questions about her experience as a woman at the remote sites and the harassment, but Kate feels uncomfortable giving her examples. She later tells Lindsay that she couldn’t talk to the reporter as she felt like she just wanted gossip, and that the story was already written before she called.
The leering of one of the other workers bothers Kate in the lunchroom, and she tells Lindsay about her assaults. Lindsay is horrified that Mike and Brian laughed at her when she told them about it. Lindsay tells her that it happened to her in university as well.
Kate calls her parents to tell them that she’s finally paid off her student loan, but she needs to keep working at the site because now she has no money. She’s going to try making it as a cartoonist, and her parents are unimpressed.
Kate notices that Ryan is acting strangely, being absent a lot and not doing his work, and it can’t fully be explained by his recent divorce. She hears about other workers who are taking cocaine and behaving strangely too. She asks Ryan if he’s ok and he brushes it off. Kate contemplates the safety pyramid again. She finds a piece of paper on Ryan’s desk with an appointment for the employee assistance program. Emily later tells her that Ryan has left suddenly, and that they need to figure things out until a replacement is found.
Kate wonders why there are so many safety meetings but none have ever talked about drugs or alcohol. Her coworkers say that everyone knows why there is so much of both, and that the company can’t have safety meetings about illegal activities anyway.
Kate finally gets to leave the oil sands and go home. Her colleague Norman gives her prints of some of his photos of the northern lights as a leaving present, including one of a rainbow. Before she leaves, the company organises a staff photograph with all the workers on the site. Kate sees the man who assaulted her the second time, and he recognises her but can’t remember her name or who she is, and asks her how it’s going.
Kate trains her replacement, and finds out that she’s earning more than her despite not having any experience in tools. She complains to John about it, and finally rants about all her shitty treatment in the oil sands. She goes to see Gary in the head office, and demands her full bonus, which was going to be docked because she was leaving. Gary tells her it’s company policy. She tells him about the harassment, and he claims she could have come to them about it, but she fires back that he knows she couldn’t have. Gary agrees to give her the bonus. Her colleagues organise a going-away barbecue, and even Mike attends.
Back in Nova Scotia, Kate is reunited with her family. While out enjoying the seaside air, she chats to a farmer who tells her he’s keeping a field for his son who is working out west in case he ever comes back and wants to build a house. A man called Lauchie visits the house before moving west himself, and tells them there’s something for everyone out there and that the young people have everything they want. Out in Halifax with friends, she and Becky see a man from one of the camps, who tells Becky that they had a bet on who would sleep with her first. Their friends who haven’t worked in the oil sands can’t believe they’d let a man talk to them like that.
In the book’s afterword, Kate talks about how the book chronicles her specific experience at a specific time. She is wary of sensationalism of her story, especially because sexual assault is so common that it’s not actually sensational. She notes that neither of the men who raped her probably consider it to have been rape. She is also critical of the treatment of Indigenous people, and says the YouTube video of Celina Harpe was a “sword that cut through my ignorance”. We also find out that Becky died of cancer, and that her former coworkers pooled money together to send to her.
Bookclub Bingo 2023 categories: Non-Fiction, Graphic Novel (grey), Mod Pick (grey)
Other links:

• The first discussion
• Canada Reads page about Ducks [I hadn’t realised that Station Eleven, another recent bookclub read, was the runner up]
• Kate Beaton on Wikipedia
• Hark! A Vagrant, the archive of Kate Beaton’s comics website
• The original Hark! A Vagrant sketch comic about the oil sands (links to all five parts; I’ve posted the parts individually below this in case that’s easier)
• Original Ducks Part 1
• Original Ducks Part 2
• Original Ducks Part 3
• Original Ducks Part 4
• Original Ducks Part 5
• Lindsay Bird was one of the people in the book whose name wasn’t changed, and in 2019 she published a poetry collection about working in the oil sands called Boom Time. There’s a CBC article about the book here.

The questions are in the comments below. Thank you for joining me and u/fixtheblue in reading this book!

Thursday, May 25 - Wednesday, May 31

Dev

score	comments	title & link
13,235	352 comments	What did we do to deserve such an awesome Dev Team?
3,277	358 comments	Decontaminator Pack changes
1,215	54 comments	I GRADUATED HIGHSCHOOL!!!!
410	23 comments	Am I the only one who sees it in the Decontaminator DLC?

 

Discussion

score	comments	title & link
2,831	135 comments	made a comparasion between the old and the new decontaminator dlc pack
2,092	469 comments	This game has unlocked so much gender euphoria I never knew I could experience!!
1,331	108 comments	The game literally tells you where a lobby's host is from. Use that information, people.

 

Ideas

score	comments	title & link
4,606	204 comments	Idea to make mining Gold fast AND fun - "fracture points"!!
125	4 comments	I am once again asking for the first time that we get a voice line for bloopy fruit
65	10 comments	I've made a COMPLETE concept of a rescue---mission based gamemode. Do you think it would it fit into the game?

 

Question

score	comments	title & link
4,116	147 comments	I need this confirmed (found under Warhammer 40k: Darktide)
1,761	114 comments	Im a level 56 but I've never seen anything like this. Any Greybeards know what I'm looking at?
1,014	42 comments	How does this dwarf have scale brigade armour at level 24?

 

Rock & Stone

score	comments	title & link
5,032	93 comments	Bosco, buddy, all I wanted was a rocket, you didn't need the orbital strike the poor thing
3,085	106 comments	I made a thing.
2,747	54 comments	I love critical weakness.

 

Err

score	comments	title & link
3,619	94 comments	I underestimated how jarring this turned out to be
3,573	282 comments	what if...
2,849	91 comments	Not a Korlok, not a Nexus. A living, moving, Lithophage Meteorite!

 

Twitter

score	comments	title & link
207	4 comments	And he does it well!

 

HumoMeme

score	comments	title & link
9,107	159 comments	DRG makes me feel like:
8,475	109 comments	Deep Rock really needs to invest in some better equip-! dies
7,052	60 comments	They are such drama queens.

 

Modded Gameplay

score	comments	title & link
601	48 comments	sandbox fun
142	26 comments	AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
49	5 comments	The weapons in spawn mod is the best mod ever made

 

Board game

score	comments	title & link
69	3 comments	As the driller, the scout having the satchel charge scares me
6	4 comments	Movement Rules Clarification
6	2 comments	Mood Publishing have gone radio silent on UK backers (board game)

 

OC

score	comments	title & link
6,154	211 comments	O.Dwarf.S.T.
3,596	66 comments	gender
3,424	97 comments	New world record. All barrels in launch tube. 1 minute 12.9 seconds

 

Weapon Build

score	comments	title & link
109	11 comments	i got the funny
43	8 comments	I can't get enough of Hyper Propellant
5	6 comments	Help with RJ250 (Engineer rocket jump) build

 

Other Posts

score	comments	title & link
6,654	161 comments	Our Driller arrived inside the heartstone so Doretta had to drill him out
5,637	262 comments	Cheers for Season 4!
5,199	50 comments	[MINER MEME] leaf lover scary
4,993	290 comments	Ew, gross leak
4,805	309 comments	Water, because i am a minor miner

 

Top Comments

score	comment
2,643	Ser_Pounce_theFrench said It's partially true. Deep Rock Galactic was indeed founded by 5 people, quickly joined by their actual CEO (so there was originally 5 person but the real number of founders is 6). And it was...
2,152	DoktahDoktah said We finally sealed him away and you broke the seal?!
2,018	Snoo61755 said GSG Reaction to the promotion bug resetting the weekly core event: "Hey, you know what, this bug was well received, so we're reincorporating it as a feature." GSG Reaction to double jump being remov...
1,802	TheyHungre said What's your gender? Dwarve. What's in your pants? Extra Magazines. Who's your type? Team Players. When You Rock And Stone, You're Never Alone!
1,617	RaynSideways said Wow. I don't think I've ever heard of this happening. Devs announce a cosmetic pack, and hearing less than positive feedback for it, they decide to go back and tweak it to make it better before it's e...

 

Awarded Posts

score/comments	awards	title & link
1,771 - 81 comments	1 I'd Like to Thank..., 1 Plus One	[OC - I made this! :molly:] Some old concept art/suggestions I made back when DRG was a baby.
1,183 - 23 comments	1 Bravo Grande!	[Humor] Im new, is this the right subreddit?
288 - 49 comments	1 Wholesome	[Off Topic] DRG just makes me happy
2,036 - 46 comments	1 Starstruck	[Humor] Boomers trying to set up a wifi router:
3,201 - 19 comments	1 Narwhal Salute	[MINER MEME] Orders from Wonka: stop dancing and get to it!

 

Awarded Comments

awards	score	comment
1 Gold	638	Drakith89 said Quick tip: When using the laser pointer hit your "Use" key and it will set a permanent marker visible only to you. With proper use you can learn to dig into walls, up, and into the ceiling above the f...
1 Take My Energy	298	Soft-External1533 said Well miners, it looks like some enterprising green beard opened a portal to hell using error cubes. Good news is, R&D have found some new valuable minerals on the other side. Bad news is, the locals a...

 

Good morrow fellow D&D'ers. My name is Kevin. Let me bring you closer to the fire and spin you a tale. Bring your brew and let's spend a few minutes just listening to my tale for I am old and old men have nothing better to do than wag their tongue. (TLDR below is in the spoiler. It is a high-level synapsis of the one-shot. A lot of the players are wanting to continue the adventure.)
TLDR; We had a blast! The group loved the story. My wife and kids helped put the minis together (see the pictures). My voice acting was on point...in the beginning. My wife, one new players, figured sh*t out effin' QUICK! The halfling rogue tried to ride a Mastiff, my High-Elf Daughter "attacked with her bow" and didn't state she shot an arrow (literally made a throwing motion)...so she threw the bow at Noke and hit him with it... the party spoke with animals...acid splashed a tower... It was a GOOD time. Thank you, everyone who suggested this adventure. Fond memories were made.
Chapter 1: Weary adventurers and the weird sheep.
Our battle-tested group was sitting outside of the town, sharing some dinner and recapping their latest adventure. Our party's eyes are pulled away from the fire and their conversation is brought to a halt when this muffled bleating comes running toward the party! Magic Storm, Human Druid, is the one to receive this weird creature and removes the parchment from its mouth. After some discussion with the party, she casts her own "Speak with Animals" on the fevering ewe. This creature very quickly introduces himself, "I aaam Finriiir Shinebright. I aaaam a great wizaard and am in neeeeed of your help!" *At this point, the players bust out laughing!* Magic begins translating for rest of her party.
Shortly after getting introductions done and Shinebright requesting help, *perception roll only the two druids notice* a gruff half orc, three mastiffs with an intelligent spark about them, and a bear come walking up... "Oi! U've got mi mastar's sheep an ee wonts 'm bak. I am willin' to pai wot ewe wont. But I wont be eavin' witout dat dere creechur." Needless to say, Guz attempts to persuade each of the party members individually except the halfling rogue. Guz doesn't like addressing things he can squish with his feet. Guz is turned down by everyone. A fight ensues!
The battle lines are drawn and the three mastiffs try to flank the party (really, none of the enemies stood a chance as there were too many hitpoints on the player's side). *First time players, I know I did wrong by rules-as-written...but I allowed my wife to wild shape into a brown bear (too high of a CR for a level 4). First time player, but I always go with the rule of cool.* Mastiffs one and three split the group to the north and south, mastiff two charges my wife who's in bear form now. Our cleric stands next to the scared sheep who's bleating out of fear consistently. Our Dragonborn Paladin, who was built for sword-and-board consistently yeets javalins at Guz. My wife runs toward the other bear and starts boxing with it. Guz is pissed as he's trying to control the battlefield. Mastiff 1 get hit HARD and gets knocked down to 1 HP. Mastiff 3 grabs Shinebright by the leg, the rogue takes that opportunity to mount the beast and is in for the ride of her life. My ranger is pelting Guz with arrows. Because Chaos reigns! My wife out-bears the true polymorphed bear and it falls. Guz is littered with arrows and javlins, mastiff one and three are downed, two ran away in fear. At this point, Guz is offered a chance to give up to which he says no. He is soon felled there-after.
Our Dragonborn decided to take Guz's head as a trophy.. he sharpens a stick, fashions a sash to hold the stick... and now he has Guz, the Head... on a stick!
The party decides to help the schewd, haughty ewe in his endeavor to turn himself back into his elven self. He's offered 500gp to each party member because he's a powerful wizard and is well respected.
Chapter 2: Weary Adventurers and the Bubbling Tower
Our expert party makes their way to Noke's Tower. The decide to scout the place and see two apes carrying greatswords playing with huge dice on the lawn. After a successful scouting mission, the druids decide to approach the two apes and speak as if they mean no harm. Magic uses her Animal Speak spell again and speaks with the two primates. With a couple of persuasions and some finagling, the druids get two of the three apes and the bear to escape. The one remaining ape stays because "he Rob, sergeant of friends. he help make them fixed. he want see wife and daughter again." *Rob is the sergeant of the other apes and the bear...at least before they were polymorphed He is upset that he's been a gorilla for too long and wants to help his friends return to themselves, see his wife and daughter.*
The party splits (not "split the party" split)...some went to sneak in to the tower while the ranger, cleric, and the second druid stay near the sleeping quarters of Noke. The group successfully enters the tower. Magick, Rob, the Nimblefingers, and the Dragonborn (with Guz, the Head) are just about to make it across the main tower when... Bored ranger does bored ranger and casts acid splash near the battlement of the sleeping quarters. Noke awakens and wakes up his bed, polymorphs his bed, and rides in on this amazing-looking wooden dragon. With a single spray of splinters, the cleric is nearly downed, the ranger and the second druid are hurt but ready to fight! Party of Thieves hears the commotion and makes their way outside...some jump from the bridge and others run around. Second druid is chomped HARD by the dragon and is downed...her life flashing before her tiefling eyes: she was forced to fight as a slave as a youngling. This caused her to become very upset with the world. She took to a life of crime and murder because the world hated her...she'll hate the world.
A few fire spheres later, the dragon hits the ground and Noke jumps off. He takes a few more javlins, arrows and whats-have-you and decides he's going to transform himself, Jafar style! Instead, he sucks at being an actual wizard and changes himself in a grotesque creature. A couple of hitpoints later, the dragon and Noke are felled. The party gets together and decides what to do. When it is brought up that the group was tasked with turning him back into an elf, Druid 2 attempts to use the wand and explodes in her hand, downing two party members.
R&R later, the group decides that some want to see this through (actually help change Shinebright back) while others want to leave this alone...take their gold and go. Much to their surprise, Noke was horrible at finances and there's NO real reward for the group...
yet.
FIN
Again, thank you all for this suggestion. It was fun playing. Now I leave you with some pictures that I think a lot of you will appreciate!
https://imgur.com/a/oNoDVp8

We've been together for about 8 months now, and while the first month was amazing, things have taken a turn for the worse. Here's what's been happening:
I started noticing my boyfriend talking frequently with a friend, and whenever I asked about her, he would say she was just a good friend. At first, I didn't mind their video calls, but I got suspicious when I saw some old texts between them with romantic GIFs and kisses. When I confronted him, he denied it and locked his phone. I cried a lot because I wanted to know who she was, but he didn't show me their chats. Later, I found out that she was actually his girlfriend and they hadn't broken up. I was completely shocked, but we decided to continue our relationship.
Another girl named Rachel from his college came into the picture, and he started flirting with her. When I asked him why, he explained that he had doubts about our relationship because of my past friends-with-benefits relationships. He thought I might leave him soon, so he wanted to explore other options.
He went on a trip with his college friends (all guys), but I didn't want him to go. I expressed my concerns about being alone because I struggle with sleeping, getting emotional, and having panic attacks when I'm by myself. He reassured me that I would manage and be strong while he was away. However, during the four days he was gone, I couldn't sleep and kept texting him to share my feelings. Later, I found out that he had called his ex and told her that he felt pressured in our relationship and that his relationship with her was better. Once again, I was shocked and hurt by his actions.
We had planned to have a threesome with another girl, and both of us were talking to her. However, I discovered that he had separately asked her to have sex with him and explicitly told her not to tell me about it. This revelation left me in utter shock.
In his job search, he communicates with HR representatives over WhatsApp for updates. One HR representative happened to be his ex's friend, and their conversation turned to the topic of sex. He even asked her if she wanted to sleep with him. Once again, I was shocked and hurt by his actions.
Throughout our relationship, he has been comparing me to his exes and friends in terms of physical attributes like boobs and body shape. This constant comparison has made me feel inadequate, especially since I've gained weight due to depression.
Main issue: We've had discussions about all these incidents, and he attributes his behavior to low self-esteem. He explained that he feels proud when other girls want to sleep with him because it makes him believe he's good enough for me. It's been 1.5 months since he last flirted with anyone because he promised he would change. We currently live together, but we're moving back to our hometown where our families live just 3 km apart.
I'm struggling to trust him with other girls, even though he claims to love me. I've given him countless chances because I don't want to lose him, but I'm concerned that when we move back home, he might repeat his past actions since I won't be able to check his phone or monitor his behavior as closely. Yesterday, I broke down in tears again thinking about how he used to compare me to others and how he flirted with other girls. His excuse for all this has been his "low self-esteem."
I do everything for him and I try my best, the sex is good and everything is good apart from this phase. This phase has affected me a lot, I cry over little things, I get hurt quickly.
Please suggest how I get over this situation, because I keep thinking about what he did in the past and what he can do in future. I don't want him to leave and I want to help him. He has not done such things in 1.5 months now but I'm scared.
TDLR: I f21 struggling to trust my bf m21 with girls.

Help me out polysomnographic technologists (sleep doctors), because I have this scary phenomenon that happens every so often that freaks me the fuck out.
These kinds of dreams do not repeat the same nightmare, but they have similarities. A blood curling scream that indicates something horribly wrong is going to happen in the dream.
The dream I just had started very simple. I was at the side of my shed, I probably was taking out the garbage. My surroundings were mixed with pitch black and rays of artificial warm light. With this combination, I can barely see the dirt ground, the roots, the garbage can, etc. I kinda was walking aimlessly, with no purpose, keep in mind it was pretty dark. I tried to walk away from the area, but my peace gets abruptly halted by a ferocious cat. It hisses a maniacal roar as it violently leaps onto my forearm. It attempts to shred me to pieces, and my brain attempts to recreate the pain (THIS IS A DREAM) and the pain was very intolerable. I wiggled my arms like the weird cylinder floaties with eyes at those cheesy car dealerships, but like an anchor interweaved with a rock on the ocean floor, the...cat...wouldn't...move. So, I balled up my unclaimed fist, aimed it at the rabid feline, and punched it two times. A cat would normally try to get off me, whine, maybe even yelp in that situation, because cats are fucking resilient as shit, however, the response I received from it scared the absolute shit out of me.
It screamed at the top of the lungs, but it was not a cat screech. The cat hollered like a human, getting it's limbs chopped off without anesthesia. And the worst thing was that I could feel the sound waves emit from the psycho kitten. The auditory sound level was extremely overwhelming, as it caused me to lose composure. It jumped off of me (I did punch the cat in the face with all my force) and cried like a human. After that, I was immediately sucked into this pee yellow wormhole filled flashing lights, static, me being thrown around like i was clothes in a washing machine. My brain forces me to travel to this imagunary dimension where I encounter God.
MY GOD, THE ANXIETY WAS SO HIGH, I COULD FEEL MY HEART POUNDING FROM MY REAL-LIFE BODY.
My brain pictured it as a typical American depicted an old Japanese sensei/dojo teacher, but with a silhouette that removed any feeling of security. The piss yellow environment was very trippy, almost psychedelic. The sound was condensending the more i progress. Everything was moving, like it was a waves of piss crashing into each other, including "God". It kinda was like the feeling of vertigo put into an animated gif. My amygdala was in overdrive at this point. It didn't speak, it didn't move, it didn't try to reason with me. But i could feel its.aura, and it felt like i was about to feel the fires of raging Hell. I was terrified because I found out I was getting punished because I defended myself from the vicious cat. I was also horrified because this was the point where I realized that it was a dream. I tried to wake myself up, but I couldn't. I was sticking viewing this void. An interstellar ruler of the universe.
Fortunately, it was pretty anticlimactic. The "God" just slapped me across the face and called it a day. Oddly enough, I didn't feel the slap, but I wasn't complaining. Usually, I would get snatched into some darkness or get eaten by a ravenous creature. But the God has shown mercy.
It was like a fever dream, but a nightmare. I have no clue why this happens. This phenomenon is not reserved for this dream, but it happens multiple times. Sometimes the enemy is some sort of entity, maybe alien, some dude, and this case a God. But mayhem and terror always begins from a bloodcurdling scream/distressing sound. Believe me, the screams drowns out everything else. Maybe it's because of anxiety or left over stress, but there have been times when I went to sleep peacefully, then i wake up in horror. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. It's been a hour since I woken up and my heart feels sore from beating continuously. Im still on edge, feeling like some monster is going to assassinate me any second. I'm definitely not going back to sleep anytime soon.
If you read all of it, you are amazing, I tried my best to tell a story, but the dream was so confusing, so I'm sorry if you got lost in my mind.
Could anyone explain or at least give an opinion of what could I do in the future to maybe prevent this?
I love sleep, but God Damn, that dream ruined it for sure.

Hey y'all F 24 M 26 almost 4 years together, lived together for 3 of them.
TLDR; We've both done bad stuff, lied, been sneaky. We were open and a lot of boundaries that were put in place to help that work got broken. I feel like she always gets her way establishing boundaries, breaking her own boundaries, refusing my boundaries, etc. A lot of this has to do with how we interact with others on social media. We finally sat down and I wrote out a detailed explanation of this and made sure we agreed to some hard boundaries to move forward with, and then just this morning she breaks the boundary we set 2 days ago and gaslights me about it again.
The first year we were dating she moved in with me because of covid. It was a bit overwhelming, we had discussed being open, she decided against it, I just went along with things. I ended up talking with some girls from the NSFW subs on here and trading pictures. My GF was very admit about being sex positive and non judgmental at the time. I thought it was p*rn, she didn't, it hurt her a lot and sparked this forever lasting issue.
Over the next two years she goes through my phone and computer a number of times. She had asked me to block all the people I had talked to and I had stopped doing anything but she was paranoid and I tried to fix things by allowing her to look for herself (probably a bad choice). She does fashion stuff and during all of this she is posting see through shirt pics/ludes/butt pics on her story and profile. I also try to be progressive and non judgmental jealous so it wasn't an issue for me really, but there were a number of guys who would reply to her stories constantly and flirt etc etc. I asked her to block these two particular people who would always message her and she refused because she "didn't want to effect her follower count".
Then last summer we finally decided to be open. We talk a lot and sometimes communicate well so we thought we had reached a point where things seemed like they would work well. We go on dates, issues arise, feelings come up in both of us, we work though them, we talk through them etc etc etc. I wasn't having much luck with dating and she was and I had asked her to slow down repeatedly and she didn't want to.
The morning after a date last winter she tells me the person is in this band, I look the band up, and guess who it is. One of the guys I asked her to block two years prior. We had even made a specific rule not to hook up with anyone we had talked to before being open. She had been hooking up with him and keeping it from me. Albeit we were open, but for sure breaking boundaries, lying and being sneaky. We fight we get through it, we work things out. I tell her gif she really likes the guy who cares she can still see him.
Then randomly one day she starts asking em all these weird questions regarding people I've talked to/been on dates with. One thing leads to another, shes on a date and I decide to go through her computer for the first time in our relationship. Big mistake. JFC was there a lot of stuff I wish I wouldn't have seen/read. Again, we were open, so I knew things were going on, but no this.
She had gone through my phone the day before without me knowing. I sensed the weirdness and went through her stuff for the first time ever. How f-ing toxic right. She was sexting with guys she had promised me were platonic friends who she talked to constantly, she was sexting while around me and my family on holidays and telling people about it like it was a turn on (after we established not sexting while together). She had been talking to the guy I had asked her to block for months, about me, about me controlling her and wanting to see him etc etc.
So then somehow this all turns into we both did bad stuff past and present lets just move forward. Even during this talking it out period she is lying through her teeth. She says one girl I dated had a roommate who told her something, she says she only slept with the guy I asked her to block once and he said it was twice or three times. Just totally confusing me.
The whole time weve dated she asks why I follow someone, or why I liked a pic. Or comments about how she saw I was liking someones stuff, or how I commented on something. We talked 3 weeks ago and I said that this needed to stop. We had gotten back from a trip, we decided to close the relationship. Then shes sitting and messaging someone and I go oh who's that and shes says my friend asking about my senior thesis. Then it comes out it was someone she had matched with and she lied again and was telling him we were closed for now but maybe she could see him this summer.
Then on the couch a week ago I liked a girls story while sitting next to her and she started complaining about it. I was just like look stop. We had a big fight. I ended up staying up super late reading self help stuff and writing a whole doc to talk to her about. We sat down 2 days later and talked about our boundaries and how to work through all of this and move forward. I made like 3 big boundaries and said ok here is the new rule from here on forward. I repeated it and said can we both agree and respect each other and uphold this. She agreed. I didn't coerce her, I didn't threaten her, it was a mature mutual agreement.
Then today, she comes out of the bedroom and says, I saw you followed this person on IG. I was just like WTF, did we not just agree to this. She says its not fair because this is an issue from the past and that was a new agreement, and then she says that she thought about it more the next day and wanted to change her mind but didn't tell me.
I'm soooooooo sick of this. We are supposed to move to New York together this summer after graduating from college but I'm confused. Sorry for such a long story but I need help. I want to preface things by saying I love this girl very very much. I thought that I would stay with her forever. But the more and more time goes on and these things keep happening Im getting scared. I have definitely messed up as well, i'm not perfect at all, but reiterating this I'm kinda like wow am I crazy for sticking with this person. I'm TERRIBLE at ending relationships or judging when things should end or letting go of love. I just want to make things work and I think I allow myself to get taken advantage of, even if not purposely, because of this. Like she wants to change for sure but nothing has changed in 3 years.
I'm kind of just like when is the last straw?

So I’ve been down the rabbit hole, trying to chase every off-the-cuff reference, stray allegory, allusion, comparison, and tangent. I’m going to need you to bear (hug) with me for a bit because I think I’ve stumbled on some truly insane parallels between this show and the myriad of references it makes and it will take a lot of text to justify to you that I'm not crazy (or that I am, but at least I do my research).
This is a show that employs a ton of intertextuality and what the poet T.S. Eliot (someone quoted frequently throughout the series) calls “the mythic method”: essentially using historical, literary, and mythological allusions to draw parallels between characters on the show and characters throughout history (real and imagined).
This method helps the audience to build both conscious and unconscious associations with each of the characters and, ultimately, underscores the Roys’ (and humanity’s) damning commitment to making the same mistakes over and over again. The show seems to draw a lot from Greek mythology, Arthurian legend, biblical parables, Shakespearean tragedy, and modernist poetry (among many other things).
These networks of symbolism span from the earliest recorded history to modern celebrity culture and yet they reveal frighteningly unchanged elements in the stories they tell. The parallels of these references throughout the show serve to highlight the cyclical (the illusion of progress) and deterministic (the illusion of free will) nature of existence.
While I will be dipping in and out of the existing references, I want to call particular attention to the poetry of the aforementioned T.S. Eliot (who champions the mythic method) and John Berryman’s poem Dream Song 29 because I believe much of their work has served as a foundation for characters.
In the show, Frank makes mention of his poem “The Long Song Of J Alfred Prufrock” more than once. Outside of the show, Matthew McFayden (the actor who plays Tom) references the same poem to describe his character. Jeremy Strong (the actor who plays Kendall) says Eliot’s work The Four Quartets is a huge inspiration to his acting and character. A line from this particular work did strike me as being quite on the nose, which is why I continued to comb the poem for more (which it does deliver on):

"In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf."

This will probably be a monster of a post, so I will attempt to break down the following sections between poetic parallels, visual and dialogic symbolism of eternal recurrence, and an exploration of the historical and mythological allusions. Ultimately, I believe all of these clues point to the overwhelming conclusion that we will end where we began, in some way or another.
Circles & Cycles: Endless Recurrence & The Futility Of Progress
The show toys a lot with the philosophical concept of eternal recurrence, which postulates that “time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that exactly the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way, over and over again, for eternity.”
These eternal loops are symbolized visually with mirrors, water, fractal reflections; in the “uh-huh” and “mhmms” of repeated, near-palindromic dialogue; and in the show events that echo and repeat: in-air death scares, asynchronous business deals, family betrayal, weddings, retreats, implosions, family reunions, trauma bonding, baptism, funerals, etc.
In this understanding of time, there is no linear progress — or even progress at all. Time is cyclical. People are cyclical. As are the events that transpire. This is particularly interesting in a show like Succession whose title alone implies the phrase “line of succession.” Viewers would expect to see what comes next — who comes next — but as Logan himself yells, “Nothing is a line. Everything is moving all the time.”
Logan consistently evokes the circle shape in his speech, “Put a circle around him” he tells Shiv. “We’ve been circling for an hour, tell them we’re out of gas,” he complains in a moment of grim foreshadowing on his plane. “Crawl in a circle and close your eyes,” he shouts during the game of Boar on the Floor.
And he is the bright, burning nebulous center of this circle. He’s described as “carr[ying] his gravity. He's not a man, he's a f*cking planet.” And the people around him are described like satellites and moons. Characters exist in his orbit. And every complete orbit (or “revolution”) leaves characters in exactly the same place. There are motions, there is the illusion of progress, but the result is the same. Eliot again:

“every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure”

With this understanding, the show may just end where it begins. Not only in “nothing” happening, but in repeating the same events ad infinitum: A kid tries to take over the family business, they try to align with their siblings, they eventually backstab their siblings, they end out in the cold, and then they reunite, swear not to do it again, until it all repeats.
As most of us are aware, the show has made very direct mention of the John Berryman poem Dream Song 29. The names of the past three season finales (as well as the name of the upcoming fourth) are all direct excerpts from the poem, which deals with grief and sadness and the guilt of killing someone when you can’t even confirm there’s been someone killed at all.
Berryman consistently wrote about the guilt and grief he experienced from his father’s suicide. Berryman himself would eventually end up taking his own life, which on its own is a brutal reminder of the cycles of trauma. It also doesn’t feel insignificant that Berryman jumped off a bridge.
What’s really interesting is how each subsequent finale is named for a line that comes earlier and earlier in the poem. It also toys with this concept that things come full circle and end where they begin. This echoes Eliot’s essential thesis of the poem:

“What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

But while the speaker of the poem comes to realize he has not murdered “nobody” by the poem’s last line; Kendall, moving through the poem backward, must reckon with the idea that he may have killed somebody even if they were a “nobody.” And while we may encounter this as a moment in which Kendall is genuinely despairing over his season 1 inadvertent murder, I believe we are far more likely to see Kendall embrace this moment.
We see "nobody" and "no one mentioned" a lot when it comes to Logan, who believes most people are "fungible as f*ck," and "pygmies" while he's "1,000 feet tall." When Kendall is involved in the accident, we see him echo "NRPI" or no real person involved.
The reason Kendall couldn’t live up to his father’s expectations is that he couldn’t be the killer his father needed him to be (even if his morality or basis of being a good person is off). This retroactive movement through the poem could be Kendall realizing he is, in fact, the killer his father always needed him to be, enabling him to take the necessary steps of seizing the crown on his own.
Allegories & Allusions: Mythic Comparisons & Determinism
It’s Shakespearean, like Roman says, “I kill Kendall, get crowned king, like we’re in f*cking Hamlet or something.” But it’s not just Hamlet, it’s King Lear, King Richard III, Coriolanus, Macbeth. And it’s not just Shakespeare, it’s Oedipus Rex, The Odyssey, The Waste Land, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Cronus devouring his children, Romulus killing Remus, Noah cursing his child for looking upon him naked.
The concept of the monomyth was popularized in "The Hero With 1000 Faces" and discusses throughout history, throughout different times and places, different cultures, different religions, different people have developed stories with relatively similar fundamental elements. The show is rife with allusions of stories that follow that same thread. Logan is Cronus who is King Lear who is Romulus who is who is. This is another form of endless recurrence: the inability to break the cycle. Or, in a very Hamlet reference, "maybe the poison drips through."
The themes of patricide, fratricide, and incest in particular are rampant. Rhea (like Rhea Jarell) in Greek mythology is both sister and consort to Cronus. Both are part of the first generation of aptly named Titan gods. Cronus overthrew his father Uranus and learns his children are fated to overthrow him. So he eats them as soon as they are born. Logan does refer to people as food a surprising amount throughout the show, varying from red meat to vegetables. He outright calls for blood sacrifice, which evokes the language of the gods.
Logan is referenced specifically as one of the last real American titans in his obituaries and eulogies. The language around him is frequently god-like. He's known as "the big man" or even "the big man upstairs." Tom tells Greg to "be his representative here on earth"; Roman asks the audience, "who is going to climb Mt. Olympus and be the next Dr. Zeus?" And that's where the myth gets interesting.
The only child not to be eaten is Zeus, who does end up killing his father and was surprisingly interested in marrying his mother. We're familiar with this plot formula through a different archetype: the Oedipus Complex, which we see referenced in the show with “Oedipus Roy,” “Oedipussy,” and “stabbing my eyes out.” The same story is repeated again in Hamlet with brother killing and brother and son yelling at his mother about her milky breasts (something Roman does to Shiv more than once). In the show when Logan says to Roman, “You may want to f*ck your mother but I don’t.” We know none of these stories end well. As Connor muses, “It’s not right to kill one’s father; history teaches us that.”
In the story of Romulus and Remus (whose mother’s name is also Rhea), the two brothers were initially chased out of their city as potential threats to the King (yet again). They were left by the river to die and were saved by the river god (important). After successfully overthrowing the kingdom that left them for dead, they agree to found a new city. They ultimately disagreed on which hill to found it and decided to have a bird-watching competition to see who could see the most omens indicating they had divine approval for the hill. Remus says he saw 6 auspicious birds but Romulus claims to see 12. Romulus kills Remus over this.
It should remind you of Logan visiting his childhood home with Ewan: “I saw a mistle thrush at the bandstand,” and the log book he kept as a child of birds he “saw” that Ewan would cross out if he didn’t believe him. It may also echo a part of The Four Quartets, “Other echoes/ Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?/ Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,/ Round the corner. Through the first gate,/ Into our first world, shall we follow/ The deception of the thrush?"
There is much to be said about the themes of warring brothers. Also the themes of fathers worried their children would one day overthrow them who take action to thwart or murder their children, which inadvertently sets into motion the very outcome they fear. It happens over and over again in stories old and new. As Panhandle Pete says, “I push him, he pushes me, and around and around we go.” Or as Eliot puts it, “that the wheel may turn and still / Be forever still.”
Much of these works touch on a sort of determinism, or the slow crushing reality that every action you take — even if that action is an attempt to thwart your fate — will ultimately lead to the same inevitable ending. This is the illusion of free will on top of the illusion of progress. And Logan, in fearing his children would usurp him (and also disparaging his children for not being able to), set into motion his own death and his own messy succession.
It’s also a reminder that the greatest men in life are all the same when laid to rest:

"O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark…"

Structure & Symbolism: Water As Rebirth & Destruction
The show has very much been structured around Kendall, and we watch him move through bodies of water with what feels like different symbolism each time. Is he drowning, is he reborn? We witness Kendall at his lowest point face down in a pool and at one of his highest, splashing into the Pacific ocean. We watch a man drown. We watch Logan beg Kendall for water as they walk through Adrien Brody’s maze. We watch Roman clamor for water at the funeral when he needs to calm down. Poetry has long played with this life and death dynamic in water, like the sailors dying of thirst in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner who cry:

“Water, water, every where,. And all the boards did shrink;. Water, water, every where,. Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ!”

This sub has noted Kendall’s connection to water, which has been represented over and over visually. But once you realize every metaphor, analogy, and simile he uses is water-based, you can’t unhear it. He calls his father “a tsunami of corruption” and describes things “as more precious than water”; he calls deals “choppy” and “dead in the water,” and asks to “help steady the ship”; he offers to “row back” on business deals, says timing is “high tide,” and that he has “bigger fish to fry.”
Logan is apt to use similar water symbolism, even telling Shiv that she’s marrying a man “fathoms” beneath her. As Rhea tells him, fearful of his own monstrosity, “I can’t see the bottom of the pool. I don’t know if you care about anything. It scares me.” ATN’s major scandal was “death cruises.” Even his operating nemesis is called “Sandy.”
In fact, there is mention of all elements and seasons — in particular, fire from Shiv, air from Roman, and earth from Connor. T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets confront these same themes and share some surprising similarities with show scene locations, dialogue, and plot points.
That’s because Succession is an allegory for the micro and the macro: the rise and fall of families, civilizations, monarchies, dynasties, and empires. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, the cycles rinse and repeat. Eliot modeled the four quartets on the 4 elements and the 4 seasons. And you can see even in Succession a similar manifestation of 4 elements. And, well, 4 seasons of the show. (And what occurs after 4 seasons? A full revolution around the sun, bringing you to where you began.)
Water seems to be at the root of it all. Even Ewan’s eulogy meditates on his and Logan’s journey on a boat. Even their abusive uncle is named Noah. In the show, we watch our nobody die by water, we watch our main character nearly die by water, and then we watch him revive in the ocean. As Kendall and his father wind their way through Adrien Brody’s circuitous Long Island home, Kendall remarks, “I think this leads to the ocean.” Because every path leads to the sea in some way or another.
The overarching narration from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is the Arthurian Legend of The Fisher King. This story is told a million different ways with a million different outcomes, but always boils down to an injured or maimed monarch ruling over a dying land. Or as Ewan refers to his "empire of shit": “He’s built a wasteland and called it an empire.”
He’s looking for someone, anyone, to heal him, rescue the kingdom, and ensure the dynasty survives. This is the myth of the holy grail, which, in this show, can be seen as the throne: The original stories of the holy grail were not Christian/religious but they do employ a lot of the same mythmaking from earlier religions and mythologies to tell their stories and thus construct their new realties. As Eliot says in The Four Quartets:

"The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire, Wherein, if we do well, we shall Die of the absolute paternal care That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere."

I believe Kendall (and the other children) represent the grail knights who try to save the king. (On the same level they stand in for the gods, the elements, or anything at all). When Christianity became more popular, these myths adapted to Christian overtones, but they still had the Celtic and pagan myths at their core: the grail becomes the chalice from the last supper.
That’s why Kendall’s easy comparisons of himself to Jesus feel less blasphemous than revelatory. Jesus is another hero archetype in the show’s mythology. He is willing to sacrifice himself, which Kendall must do in order to become the successor his father wanted. As he says, "this is a culmination of my life's journey to be crucified for you morons."
(It’s worth noting: In some legends, the knight saves the king; in others, he inadvertently destroys him. We know Logan dies, but it does feel less likely that Waystar Royco survives.) Drowning is a constant feature of Eliot's poems, but so is baptism and renewed life. It is difficult to determine the meaning of water in either instance, except that it doesn't discriminate as a life or death bringer, which is both beautiful and terrifying.
Parallels & Predictions: Piecing The Plot & Poetry Together
To repeat again, as this show is wont to do: “Crawl in a circle and close your eyes!” Logan Roy shouts during a game of Boar On A Floor. It’s an allegory, like many games on the series, and proudly says the quiet part out loud: Logan always wins. Here’s a little boar on the floor reference in The Four Quartets:

"We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars."

We’ve seen the L.O.G.A.N. system at work many times and with many people. He dangles a carrot, a morsel of love, as each character attempts to play the game over and over while expecting different results. They are doomed to crawl in that circle, to play that blind game, as Logan angrily shouts, “It’s fun!” And this game doesn't end in death. The children still ask. "What would dad do?"
Games on Succession (which are a consistent refrain), it turns out, are rarely fun and are often designed to humiliate or inflict pain. The same goes when characters say “I’m just kidding” after an eviscerating remark. Logan thinks life is a game, and as he says, games should be taken seriously. And because Logan explicitly makes the rules, there is no winning, just trudging around the board, passing Go, and collecting $200. The games are essentially Sisyphean tasks that the kids wouldn’t be able to win even if they were actually competent enough to run the company. And yet they keep rolling the boulder. It’s endless. The repetition. It ends where it begins.

"Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph. And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them. We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments."

Please also note the use of “the rose” and “the yew tree,” which are the names of Logan’s siblings Rose and Ewan, which derives from yew-tree. Other important name comparisons include Kendall’s association to spring/river valley; Siobhan’s nickname either a knife (Shiv) or Pinky (a variation of the name Rose); Roman’s connection to Romulus/Corialanus; Tom’s name meaning “twin” because there was already someone named Judas in the bible HELLO; Logan’s name meaning little hollow, which recalls another Eliot poem, The Hollow Men.
We know this show is a game, one that isn't fun at all, and one whose rules Logan made up. Even when there's a winner, there's no winner. So it's almost futile to play at all. That said, it’s impossible to make sense of any of it all without the ending — to confirm this ball has been rolling toward an inevitable conclusion, but given the show’s ending has probably occurred already, here are my thoughts:

• Kendall drowns

This may feel a bit on the nose given we’ve already seen this almost happen to “the Kurt Cobain of floaties,” but it would certainly be poetic. This could be sad (launched from a bridge); empowering (a la The Awakening); or metaphorical (a drug overdose). At some point Kendall says, "If dad didn’t need me right now I wouldn’t know what I would be for." The kids exist with Logan as their sun; they are moons, satellites, in orbit. And when their sun dies out, they repeat the motions in the cold, slowly losing their patterns and motions. The term is science is a rogue planet and the following lines from the poem remind me of Kendall and his broken, hollow stare.
“It would be the same at the end of the journey, If you came at night like a broken king, If you came by day not knowing what you came for, It would be the same, when you leave the rough road And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.”

• Kendall is king of the ashes

Any victory feels like it will be a Pyrrhic victory regardless when you've had to systematically take down everyone you love to achieve it. The same lines above can echo here "the purpose is beyond the end you figured/And is altered in fulfilment." A hollow victory. The Fisher King question Logan poses is, "Who can replace me?" Logan wanted each of his children to display the killer instinct. Kendall’s backwards journey through Dreamsong 29 may very well see him realize he is, in fact, the killer his dad always wanted — with open eyes. This will probably involve taking down his siblings. In this version, winning is a lot like losing, which feels very Succession.

• Mattson wins it all

These Shakespearean histories and tragedies rarely end well for existing houses. With Richard III (the-multiple-lineage-ending war of the roses) and Hamlet (the-whole-house-dies-but-a-norwegian-king-swoops-in-to-take-it-all dynastic struggle) references abound. We may just see a new house rise up and rinse and repeat. This would probably also occur if the kids take each other down and leave it open for another party. We saw last season that Roman thought he had an in with Mattson until it didn’t serve Mattson anymore. I see the same thing happening between Roman and Mencken. This puts Mencken and Mattson in a position to take over, which may make Mattson win it or…

• Mattson destroys it all

When Mattson is introduced, he is referenced as a trickster. Generally, in mythology, this character is quite intelligent or in possession of secret knowledge, and he uses it for trickery and commandeering situations. (Is that blood thing real???). Hamlet concludes with every major character killing the other with their own tragic flaws until a third party Scandinavian comes in to take the crown with no necessary action or bloodshed at all. We already know he's unscrupulous; what is his end game? It reminds me of one of his early lines to Roman, which would be an eerie foreshadowing:
“Success doesn’t really interest me anymore, it’s too easy. Analysis + capital + execution. Fucking, anyone can do that. But failure, that’s a secret. Just as much failure as possible as fast as possible, burn that shit out, that’s interesting.”

• Tom betrays Shiv

We’ve seen it happen before (which is why it should happen again). We’ve also seen Tom remove the thin veneer of his ambitions to the point where he almost feels like Richard III. He has played the fool, which is Shakespearean estimation, is often equivalent to the trickster. This would be a fun and distorted parallel to Shiv offering this job to him for Logan to offer it to her. This would probably happen in conjunction with Mattson winning. As I mentioned earlier, the name Tom means “twin” and the apostle Tom was only called as such because there were already one too many “Judas” in the mix. He's also from Minnesota (the twin cities!), so this is becoming very real, you know???

• Greg betrays Tom

While we know Tom has betrayed Shiv before, we also know Greg betrayed Shiv and Tom when he spoke to Geri in the first season about Tom having a press conference on cruises. He leads Tom to believe Shiv has betrayed him, getting one over on both of them. There may also be something with the Rule of 3 and being betrayed 3 times that feels biblical. The show also makes TONS of references to holding on to blackmail for opportune moments. Will we see something like this?
I’m not a big believer that Greg will fail so far upwards that he will win (this would feel like a betrayal in its own right), but do I believe there’s a world where Greg gets himself on a piece of paper with a question mark. Maybe???

• Geri finally beats Tom

This is my personal hope because I want the Tom and Jerry allusion to be real more than any other I put together (we love a good cat and mouse game). If Mattson wins, he needs a US CEO. Geri has collected a massive amount of dirt on everyone. And to call back to season 1’s interim CEO discussions, Shiv says, “I don’t like Geri. But I don’t hate Geri either.” It would feel particularly good given how much time and effort Logan spent clarifying Geri would be terrible at the position. Especially as Logan disparaging someone generally means he’s afraid of what they can do.
I’ll end at the ending. Or conclude where Eliot did on The Four Quartets:

"We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one."

PS. Given ‘Pinky’ is another name for ‘Rose’ does this mean Shiv wins??? JK let’s just watch the show tonight and laugh at our predictions in the morning.