r/NoSantosHateReborn

Here you see a TV dad's heart break over his TV son having the worst take, knowing he fictionally raised him wrong.

Vince Gilligan wanted the audience to sympathize with Walter White in the beginning, but assumed he'd lose the audience over time. HE stopped rooting for his character fairly early on.

>Even though it’s a show ostensibly about a man dying of cancer, metaphorically speaking, Walter himself is cancer. Walt is the malignancy at the center of the show that affects others to their detriment — his family first and foremost.

Now, I don't have an issue with people rooting for the bad guys. I'm here to say I support a woman's rights and their wrongs and in fiction you can vicariously be emotionally bankrupt.

However, it confuses me when viewers (or readers) don't own this and instead try to pretend the bad guy is good and that the people who oppose them are the problem. You can want Walter to break bad, you can want Skyler to epically fail to rein him in, but it's incomprehensible to me to argue Skyler is the villain.

She had normal reactions until she was pulled into the madness and, in a mirror image of Walter never losing the fans, she was almost always despised. Women, as we know, must be infinitely maternal and yet even as a mother who realizes her husband put their whole family at risk as he lead an unfathomable secret like, she was just the shrew.

Skyler was inherently unlikable to a portion of the audience no matter what. Killjoy or complicit, she wasn't going to win. Bad mother, not wanting her kids to be financially set. Bad mother, putting them at risk. And bad wife, telling her husband no, ever.

And this animosity spilled out into the real world towards Anna Gunn.

Breaking Bad ended in 2013. And in 2026 Isa Briones has to tell people it's not okay to heckle her during Broadway shows. We're here because you still can't have a measured discussion elsewhere on women characters unless you build a community yourself, post by post.

What I like about our community is that we enjoy analysis. We can have problematic favorites without trying to deny the problems. We can have balanced and nuanced takes. We can handle complexity, We don't want saints for women characters, but we also don't want women to be vilified for choices that make men heroes or beloved antiheroes.

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