Succession’s Kendall Roy and Breaking Bad’s Jesse explained as baby girls

As Kendall Roy, the number one boy in HBO’s tragic comedy successorWith tears in his eyes, he stands on stage and debuts as CEO of Waystar Royco. He introduces Living+, an unholy combination of WeWork and Theranos, a new real estate opportunity that comes with bespoke entertainment and medicine. He’s smiling up there, but there’s a hectic energy in his eyes. He is actively having a nervous breakdown; he is the murderer his father wanted him to be; he is baby girl

“Babygirl” is a ubiquitous but ill-defined internet slang that has been around for a number of years but has recently gained traction with its fourth and final season successor. While some key actors were adopted by their fandom as baby girls, such as Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, most often it is a descriptor collected for certain characters. Right now, Kendall Roy is the most prominent baby girl on the internet. He joins the ranks of longtime Babygirls Lestat de Lioncourt Interview with the vampire – from both the Anne Rice novels and the recent TV series on AMC – and breaking Badis Jesse Pinkman.

Pinpointing exactly what makes a character a baby girl is a bit finicky. On the surface, the term “baby girl” is pretty easy to understand. These characters are emotionally sensitive in a feminized way – they wear their hearts on their sleeves, often cry openly during scenes on the show, and are sometimes victims of abuse from other men. But there is also a bit of irony in the application. While Kendall Roy, Jesse Pinkman, and Lestat de Lioncourt are all characters who feel things deeply and experience great emotional pain, they are all also morally compromised: a capitalist, a meth dealer, and a vampire, respectively.

In Lestat’s case, he’s also a murderer and insults his partner, but he’s hard to hate even when he’s at his baddest. Even when he’s definitely wrong, like when he tells his lover Louis that he can have sex with other men and then resorts to it, the depth of his feelings is hypnotic. There’s agony on Lestat’s face as he exclaims, “I heard your hearts dance” — pain so great it looks like he’s been stabbed. Jesse Pinkman has a similar talent for absorbing and containing emotional pain. He’s caught in a cycle of poverty and drug use, and every time he tries to break the cycle, something or someone pulls him back into it. He even fell in love once, only to wake up to his girlfriend lying next to him, dead from an overdose. All of these men suffer from a mistake women and other women commonly hear: they are “too emotional.” You cry too much. Their hearts are full of too much emotion.

Right now, Kendall Roy is the babygirl’s heir apparent. There are countless articles about the character’s fandom – the so-called Kendall Girlies – that describe him as girl coded or a girl boss or a girl failure. Primarily, fans of Kendall describe his baby girlness as expressed through his emotional pain. There’s something pathetic about him, the way he tries so hard but never wins, the way he can never live up to his father’s expectations, like he’s caught in a trap of his own design. These are traits his father, abusive media tyrant Logan Roy, has often called serious character flaws, sometimes to the point that he’s accused of being gay for feeling things in the first place.

The last episode’s press conference is a striking example of how Kendall often prepares for failure: the day before his presentation to investors, he challenges the production crew to stick it out all night to build a house and create foggy clouds that that will hang about it. When those efforts prove a miserable failure, Kendall’s face gently sags in an expression of heartbreak not seen since Lisa Simpson broke Ralph Wiggum’s heart

(or the last Kendall tripped over his own feet). Not only does Kendall always fall into his own trap like Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner, he turns the pain inward, whether through addiction or self-sabotage or ultimately suicide. Even though it hurts him to be alive, he doesn’t shy away from the pain of life. He needs the high highs, like hitting on his dad at a press conference, but is held back by the deep lows.

Part of what makes Kendall a character that has inspired such intense fandom is the way Jeremy Strong portrays him. Though Strong has often been turned into a meme for taking his craft seriously, it’s his level of seriousness and devotion to the character’s emotional state that makes Kendall feel so real and so pitiable.

“I hate the word cringe because it means a dish.” Strong to New York Magazine. “I’m not in the business of judging. We as a culture would be much better off judging a little less and empathizing more. But surely, as an actor, one cannot judge his character. You cannot stand above them.”

It’s because Kendall is so incredibly embarrassing that I still have empathy for him even when he commits things like manslaughter. Sometimes I even want him to succeed. What makes Kendall a babygirl are the things that set him apart from other emotionally damaged television antiheroes — Don Draper in mad Men would never let him fall apart emotionally the way Kendall did. Walter White out breaking Bad directs all of his self-loathing outward, toward his wife and child, and especially toward Jesse Pinkman. Kendall and Jesse share the same impulse to blame themselves and drown in their own guilt. In breaking BadAfter Jesse’s girlfriend dies of an overdose, Jesse goes to a rehab facility, which takes him and a group on an overnight camping trip. Sitting by the fire, he asks the rehab group leader if he has ever hurt anyone, and later how he stays alive without hating himself.

These are not questions that Walter White or Don Draper ask themselves. Where these characters can reinvent themselves within the confines of violent, stoic masculinity, Kendall and Jesse cannot. It is the violence of manhood that suffocates her, her guilt turning inward like an ingrown nail. As a queer character, this is even more pronounced in the case of Lestat de Lioncourt, who flatly rejects the security of heteronormative masculinity. He prefers to be the monster everyone says he is, portrayed with aplomb by Sam Reid in AMC’s Interview with the vampire, where Lestat uses his connections to be the King of Mardi Gras by pretending to bite a baby on a float while wearing a jeweled corset and a giant feathered ruff. Although he knows he will betray his lover Louis, he still has a deep love for him. He can’t love anything without hurting her, hurting himself. He doesn’t know how.

Babygirls are all porcupines, stabbing themselves while trying to keep other people away. But that’s what makes you want to keep them.