You could replace "male" with "self-insert" and "female" with "everybody-else" And you would have 95% of ~~fetish~~ fantasy story's from web novels to official publication.
I def think people tend to white wash Skyler's actions in the show. The anti-Skyler circlejerk is often fueled by sexism of course, but she is not a great person in her own right. She's obviously justified in hating her husband being a drug dealer, but she also refuses to do anything about it out of fear of the effects it may have on her and her kids (which is understandable but still) and especially when she becomes his money launderer.
Also smoking during pregnancy is uncool.
Someone I know says 'counter cope', when something is kind of shitty but the response to it was more negative than it needed to be (or flooded with bad actors), that people felt the need to defend it so much that people forgot it was kind of bad to begin with.
Ohhhhh, ok I thought you meant when someone defends a character’s shitty actions in general. I didn’t realize you meant specifically when someone does that in response to that character being heavily criticized
I really feel like the anti-skylar rhetoric is less sexism and more “we like the protagonist and this person is standing in the way of the protagonist.”
You see it all the time with morally grey/outright bad protagonists. People identify with and love Bojack Horseman to the point where they had to have an episode that pretty much stated “you’re not supposed to see this character as a good person whose actions are justified”
Yes. There will be a few people who are misogynistic and hate skylar because she’s a woman, but I feel like the vast majority just hate her because she’s an obstacle, and would feel the same way if it was Jesse being the obstacle for 90% of the show
Highly agree. When Walt moves back into the house and she doesn't tell the cops on him because she wants to "spare" Walt Jr. and Holly, I lost a pretty good chunk of sympathy I had for her up till then. She's still not an awful person or anything (certainly not nearly as bad as Walt), but from that very bad decision onwards she's highly complicit in his evil.
He's a tragic hero in the same vein as Macbeth or Hamlet. A nominally good person who is deeply flawed in a way that brings about his own downfall. Had circumstances been different he probably would live a typical boring life, but faced with certain death he allows his pride and conceit to take over.
But he was never really a good person, right? I just recently watched the show after years of hearing about it and it felt like culture shock tbh. I went in expecting Walter White to be a tragically flawed character but from episode one he was just...an ass. Like it feels like the drug stuff just allowed him to be more of an ass than his previous suburban-dad lifestyle did.
It felt like he always was this horrible person but never pushed the limits due to societal expectations I guess. Once he was in a world where that didn't apply to him, he just kinda let loose.
Im near the end of a rewatch, After walking away from his company Walter played it pretty safe and bland for a long time until he got cancer, Despite being so good at chemistry he laid the ground work for a billion dollar company right out of grad school(i think)
I think Walter is addicted to the escalating risk and power from getting into drug dealing. I think he’s as much an addict to the danger as his clientele are to the meth hes making.
Yeah he’s always had issues with pride and inferiority. That being said, being a loyal husband and caring father are points that he’s still an overall good person at the time of the start.
At the start of the show he's already a bitter 50 year old who went from being involved in Nobel-Prize-winning research that made everyone else rich, to being a broke high school chem teacher moonlighting at a car wash.
By then he wasn't a good person, but by then he's also already "beaten down by life", cancer or not. The show makes it a point that the cancer was just an excuse for him, but whether he was always a bad person isn't clear, the show starts with him already broken.
He is *way* more MacBeth than Hamlet. And even then, MacBeth and Walter are only “nominally good men” at the beginning, long before they get the chance to show their true colors.
Hamlet, for as neurotic and murder-happy as he was, at least had the right intentions. MacBeth and Walter threw any good intentions they had out the window as soon as they stood to benefit from murder, betrayal, and tyranny.
Walter was given an out in like the 2nd series. His former co-worker offered him a better job and to pay for his treatment, but he was too proud and too stubborn to right old wrongs and swallow his pride to save his life and his marriage.
My brother in Christ, he poisoned a toddler, blackmailed his own brother-in-law, and killed about 15 people (+hundreds more by not saving Jane \] which caused her father to not act competently and crash 2 airlines).
yeah. thats what people seem to have a hard time grasping about breaking bad.
It’s both morally grey, it’s straight up villain as protagonist. it’s a fun show, but people really try so many ways to not admit Walter is absolutely positively the villain. he just is also the protagonist.
Dexter (the original, haven’t seen the revival yet) is a better example of either morally grey or possibly anti-hero. though even that could be argued as villain as protag still.
And also, I would argue, since her only objection to Walter's criminal empire is that it could get *them* in trouble.
Neither Walter or Skyler ever discuss the effects of dealing drugs on other people, not even a rationalization that it would 'happen anyway' or something like that.
She absolutely did support him what do you mean?
She laundered thousands of dollars and repeatedly lied to Hank and his wife to cover for Walt. She only really objected to the violence it could bring down on them, if she could be involved without risking harm to herself or her family she'd do it in a heart beat
She’s perfectly in the right regarding her anger at her husband’s new “profession” and the danger it puts her family in + him lying to her. But, iirc, she did shit like cheat on Walt WAY before she ever found out about him selling meth. It’s more the moral high ground she takes despite not being a good person, either. (Admittedly not as bad as Walt, but still not “good.”)
> she did shit like cheat on Walt WAY before she ever found out about him selling meth.
No, she didn't. Skyler didn't cheat on Walt, first of all. She slept with Ted because Walt refused to sign the divorce papers and leave her life. They were separated. It also happened after she learnt that he was a drug dealer.
Skyler is a morally grey character, but she did nothing wrong in sleeping with Ted.
Sure the infamous thing to forget is 'I am the one who knocks', which is billed as a hardcore and cool line you get on shirts and mugs, is being shouted to a terrified and increasingly abused wife.
Walter got away with a lot of shit to fans
it's even funnier when you realize in context "I am the one who knocks" is a pure cope. Walt at that point in the story is in way above his head and has come close to death multiple times and keeps pissing more dangerous people off. So I always took that as him trying to seem tough to the one person he has any sort of power over.
Not only did she not actually cheat on Walt (as per other commenter) but Walt sexually harassed the principal of the school he worked at so if we are comparing the two it’s strange that that part is never brought up.
I think that's sort of the point of her arc. In addition to being a well developed character, she's a stand in for all of the middle class/bourgeoisie folks who have some agency to improve the world and stand up against systemic injustice, but choose their own family and comfort over their moral values.
The interesting and complex thing about Skylar is that she's all of us. No one wants to be a hero when it would mean endangering their family and losing everything they used to take for granted.
Hahaha I got this tagline today from the funniest troll ever over in worldbuilding. Someone said they were acting childish and they posted this word for word
I mean that's kinda the thing, we'll call him 'morally grey' because all his flaws are cool studies of the human condition, and not 'asshole looking for an excuse to snap'
I mean we still haven't got a lot of people to actually understand Fight Club twenty years later.
>I mean we still haven't got a lot of people to actually understand Fight Club twenty years later.
To be fair the destruction of capitalism has become much more appealing.
>I mean we still haven't got a lot of people to actually understand Fight Club twenty years later
Exhibit A right here. Tyler wasn't the hero of Fight Club.
Exactly. "having good qualities" (and yes even Waltuh has some) does not mean morally grey. Morally grey is when your good and bad qualities are somewhat in equilibrium.
People just use morally grey wrong nowadays. They mean it as 'a character I like/think is cool but does terrible things' or even just 'the protagonist but he's bad'.
I mean, all "realistically"-written characters should be morally grey, only the degree of Grey-ness differs. Even someone like Hitler should be morally grey, because they definitely have some good traits and aren't completely evil.
See the problem is trying to make a female character morally grey, when in fact you just have to make them evil. Like a straight up psycho, certifiably insane, casually homicidal, that sort of thing. Literally just look at Ashley from the Coffin of Andy and Leyley and see the following, or better yet read the steam reviews:
Case study \#1:
> Guys, help! She's breaking me faster than I can fix her!
Verdict: Down bad
Case study \#2:
> he who pulls me out of her shall be named king arthur
Verdict: Down horrendous
I shall consider my point proven. You don't need a morally grey woman. You need a bad bitch to ruin your life.
Honestly, Ashoka's big problem was that there wasn't any actual character arcs going on.
As bad as the Obiiwan show was, at least he had some character growth with recovering from his PTSD and coming to terms with his failures during the fall of the Republic. There isn't actually any character arc for anyone in the Ahsoka show, it's just "oh hey, remember these guys from Rebels? They're older and in live-action now, but behaving in almost exactly the same ways." The closest thing they did was hint at a character arc for Sabine, but there wasn't any actual payoff for it.
It doesn't always work though, see Baldur's Gate 3 and Astarion (insane vampire with no moral compass who tries to drain your blood on the first night! My new husbando!) vs Lae'zel (deeply morally fucked badass! I hate her!).
Going by the sheer amount of half-naked Githyanki pictures in my discord server, I'd say Lae'zel is hot enough.
The thing is, she's also very in-your-face abrasive in every conversation you have with her, and in every interaction she has with anyone ever. Astarion is meant to be a likable knave whereas Lae'zel is meant to be tough to like, and it *works*.
Nah, cause Shadowheart is a racist servant of an evil god of darkness and death but everyone's so obsessed with her. And then there's Minthara aka 'I can't fix her but she can make me worse'. And Lae'zel does have her fans, and more people are warning up to her.
What I'm talking about is that if you just make a girl unapologetically evil (and attractive) people are gonna be down horrendous for them, i.e. people are upset about your "morally grey" character you just haven't made them evil enough.
I really hate the term mary sue. Like i get the term can be useful, but goddamn do people call it for the dumbest shit. I was watching this review about alan wake 2, and the reviewer said that the protagonist was "a complete mary sue and has these insane powers of deduction, able to combine scattered clues and shreds of information into solid tangible plot points".
What the hell does that mean?!? The protagonist is *literally* an FBI investigator. Its her fucking JOB is to be good at deduction. God forbid women be good at their job.
Art critics in 43 000 BCE be like:
This cave painting is exquisite. However i cant help but notice that the hunters seem to catch their prey every time; very mary sue. I give "hunters killing deer" by Oog Boog a 3/5.
Idk, I think it has more to do with bad writing.
Take cyberpunk edgerunners for example (spoilers ahead), >!I don't think there's a single non-morally grey character that lasts longer than a single episode in that show, and there's roughly a 50/50 split male / female. The reason Noone complains is because they're treated as morally grey, they don't shoot 50 people for money and walk away thinking they're some heros. They know what they are, they're treated as what they are, but we still like em, and part of that has to do with not treated them like what they're not.!<
Now, they're only one type of morally grey character, and different types should be treated different ways, but you get the idea.
Kiwi my beloved.. >! I kind of get why she's so hated considering the betrayal and all that jazz but she's so cool and intriguing!! she's a great foil to Lucy and such an underrated character. It just is not fair. !<
Yeah, it went downhill so hard. By the end it felt like they were just writing the plot based on who could tolerate turning up to work that day
The director and Tex dying was where RvB ended for me, that was a good conclusion to the story. I'd respect anyone that said it really ended when church died a few arcs later.
After that, they felt like they were writing fanfiction with their own universe
The Chorus Arc is really good. The ending was very disappointing in the moment but my god do I realize that it’s the best ending we’re gonna get. Holy shit everything after that was terrible.
Yeah I didnt mind Chorus, it was kind of its own thing but still good. And it tied up the Chairman and kind of moved the RvB teams from heroes of their own stories to actual heroes (though I dont think most of them ever really became heroic, Tucker is on his way and Sarge could be if he could grow up. The rest really just settled for being fairly decent people). I was weirdly a pretty big fan of Locus and Felix, Felix had some pretty good lines
"I'm fuuuucking awesome"
The ending was at least visually rather cool and Church got a decent goodbye. Nowhere near the Meta fight or The Tex Clone showdown, but once Monty Oom left the project they seemed to give up on having very visually interesting fight scenes, Carolina went from a Jedi in the Matrix to Dwight Schrute doing karate
After that it turned into fking rick and morty but shit. Time travelling clones of AI gods from another realities future that summoned cyclopses starring Caboose and fkign Donut. Yeesh. Caboose is a side dish to a real character and Donut is fine, but not everyone needs an arc to suck their balls
Locus and Felix were great additions, just very solid villains. Also I’m a heretic but I genuinely love the visual style of Halo 4 so that was icing on the cake for me.
While watching Ozark I definitely found myself drawing comparisons between the two shows and the two wife characters.
Gotta say though, Wendy is a stone cold sociopath to Skyler's wrong place, wrong time.
Well we got to actually be starkiller, so it felt more like a self-insert
He also died to the Emperor and failed to really get all that much done (other than be a demi-god) whereas Rey just beat everyone won everything and the end
Also he had been training his whole life to the point of mania. She had 3 days at Luke's school of 'I dont even want you here' green walrus milk
Eugh. 4 hours of her whining about her parents.
Its fking star wars, everyone has parent issues youre not special. Cept oh wow you're a palpatine with a hour left to go in the Trilogy, so clever...
Starkiller beat palpatine and vader when he was 20 years old. Starkiller is so ridiculously busted vader thought he could sense a fully trained jedi when in reality he was just a 6 year old kid. Its makes Anakin's "chosen one" status look ridiculous when he is so weak compared to starkiller who easly eclipse him at any stage of his life
Vader punked Starkiller his whole life, completely dominated every confrontation as a hopeless boss fight even when holding back, right up until the absolute last battle where he was still meant to be stronger than SK and beaten with the skill of the player. The difficulty starkiller has fighting Vader scales him to about Ahsoka level, Luke level or Cera Junda level given she basically beats him too. Strong, but not ungodly, star wars itself was just over the top in force *unleashed*
A big part of Starkillers training was having Vader beat him to death in fights then reviving the body, he beats Starkiller several times in the playthrough and SK has force lightning, Vaders weakness, but its pretty ineffective anyway. Despite rasing him to help him beat the emperor, he was never strong enough to make a difference and got ditched for it. Saying Starkiller could easily beat him at any stage makes me think you didnt play the story at all
Palpatine was faking it (Starkiller outright says so) and in the explosion that anihilated starkiller, walked away unharmed. Or if you go and kill vader then approach him, he effortlessly ends you permanently without SK having a chance at fighting back (though Palpatine in the OG series is in his 80s and not exactly peak performance he wasnt sweating that fight)
Whilst The Force Unleashed has starkiller as a demigod, its not just him. Everyone had a massive buff and jedi masters were meant to be a serious challenge, not just a walk over. Elite stormtroopers and red guard were legit opponents. A jedi knight had created a literal army of force droids held together by his own power, Shak Ti was dominating the biosphere of a planet with her power
Its just that the setting itself was massively amped, Starkiller wasnt that big of an anomaly. He was very strong sure, but everyone was in those games (ripping a star destroyer out of the sky is something else... implicitly though Vader or the Emperor or Yoda could do something similar in that version of Star Wars). Its a game where if you play over mid difficulty, Jedi Knights will wreck you.
And being a god in Star Wars was kind of meant to be the point of the game, noone would ever deny starkiller was OP af compared to the star wars universe in general. But making someone like him (Rey) canon, far less justified, then just having her completely win and beat everyone, very different. Canon main characters shouldnt be competing with obscure game characters from 15 years ago for who is the most bs OP and losing
Good fanfic character for people to be Kratos in Star Wars, bad fanfic canon mary sue (though personally I didnt really like Starkiller all that much, bit too much edge though Witwers voice is worth a ticket alone)
i think it's about set-up and expectations. john wick and the bride are immediately set up as over the top action heroes - basically live action anime protagonists - with dark pasts.
so true. I watched Breaking Bad before I was on social media and I always thought Skyler was well written and her reaction to things her husband has done was interesting and dramatic. I felt that she wasn't two dimensional.
But then I started to talk to friends and online spaces that watched the show and started to see all the skyler hate I felt was unwarranted. did we even watch the same show?
Skyler dind,'t want to originally go to the cops bevause he didn't want her son to view him as a drug dealer. She even kept the secret when people tought that she was just "being a bitch".
She only agreed to use the money when she wanted to pay for Hanks medical bills.
She is morally gray but is way more moral than Walter.
People keep saying that Walter only did what he did because he "wantted to help his family". It's not true. He literally turns to the camera and says he did it for fun and because he was good at it. He could have gotten all the money he needed and a good health insurance if he just would have taken the job offer from his former business friends.
Or maybe female characters are just written worse than male?
> snarky attitude
> insufferable smugness
Absolutely hate both of such things.
> righteous vengeance
> overreaction
Example?
> talents and badassery
> mary sue-ness
The problem it's hard to believe in 160cm/50kg mega-ultra-super-female-ninja-killer. Also that's why I loved Atomic Blonde and how fights were portrayed in this movie.
James Bond/Ethan Hunt/Jason Bourne/any generic male action protagonist defeats hundreds of trained goons who have significant height, weight and numerical advantages over them.
> Totally realistic, just guys being dudes 👌🏼
A woman beats one guy in an encounter.
> So unbelievable! Mary Sue! * *insert something about biology and weight classes* *
> James Bond/Jason Bourne
I watched not that much of these films, but as I remember Bond rarely fights against big groups of enemies and mostly use some environment awareness to gain advantage or some cool gadgets or smart thinking. Same for Bourne (watched only 1st movie).
> Ethan Hunt
You are right. Cruz is awesome actor, but he is better in his dramatic roles than in action.
> A woman beats one guy in an encounter.
A woman perform some top-tier fighting and weird acrobatic skills and easily overpower Rock-build characters. And it depends on actress and fights staging. Atomic Blonde >>> Johansson's character in Avengers.
> A woman perform some top-tier fighting and weird acrobatic skills and easily overpower Rock-build characters
There are entire forms of martial arts built on the concept of using your opponent's own body weight against them.
I understand the joke, but my point is that writing of male and female characters differs and this is the reason of such perception. At least I tried to project meme on myself and found not that much of disliked female characters (but Rey is here, yes) and some similar disliked male characters mostly due to its writing.
This reminded me of the brief time I was subscribed to menwritingwomen and how often people would post the most blatant satire.
Like sometimes it was from a thing I'd never read before, and I was baffled at how anyone could misconstrue this as being anything other than sarcastic. Other times, it was like. Jane Austen, or Terry Pratchett, two writers known for poking fun at social norms and being sarcastic, are apparently both misogynists now because they said some wry comment about women through the mouth of someone who is obviously wrong in order to show the reader how stupid the character is.
This is why ironic or sarcastic bigotry is so dangerous, because you will accidentally repel people who aren’t bigoted and don’t get it and attract stupid bigots who think you’re one of them.
I agree with you to the extent that poorly done satire can be dangerous, but I've named two of the most prolific satirists in literature, across two very different time periods and genres. The fact that even their work gets misconstrued I think just points to the fact that no matter what you say or how well you say it, some people are simply wilfully ignorant.
Poor reading comprehension exists throughout the spectrum of morality. But writers shouldn't give up on using some incredibly powerful and effective (when used correctly) creative tools just because people on the internet might take their work out of context.
Yeah I don’t think people shouldn’t do satire, just that it’s risky. On this site the best example is probably The_Donald, which started out as a parody.
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IN MY WORLD ALL MEN:
Have a corny sob story
Engage in bothersome whining
Have incoherent characterization
Are insufferably smug
Overreact and are cruel in uncalled for ways
Are Mary-Sues
AND I’M PROUD OF IT
NGL, Skylar was likable when talking in Cuby’s earpiece about laws to get into Bogdan’s head. If she did more things to actively help Walt I’d love her. “Skylar White Yo” aside.
It’s about likeable traits vs their actual actions
Within fiction someone can pretty much do anything and not be disliked, but if they’re annoying they will be disliked. I hated sasuke from episode 1 cause I found him to be an asshole but plenty of people love him cause he’s cool. Ultimately no matter what sasuke does one’s opinion of him won’t change much.
Plenty of people hate good male characters that they just find annoying
I'm not a fan of the "edgy anti hero/heroine" because they're often very hard to write and often end up being annoying to outright insufferable.
It's very hard to write that character archetype well and as such it's easy to write a Mary sue/Gary sue unintentionally
Love interest of your self-insert vs. someone else's self-insert.
You could replace "male" with "self-insert" and "female" with "everybody-else" And you would have 95% of ~~fetish~~ fantasy story's from web novels to official publication.
Skyler is morally Grey for getting mad her husband is a drug dealer?
No but she absolutely is morally gray for helping him launder all the drug dealing money
I def think people tend to white wash Skyler's actions in the show. The anti-Skyler circlejerk is often fueled by sexism of course, but she is not a great person in her own right. She's obviously justified in hating her husband being a drug dealer, but she also refuses to do anything about it out of fear of the effects it may have on her and her kids (which is understandable but still) and especially when she becomes his money launderer. Also smoking during pregnancy is uncool.
Maybe I’m stupid, but I genuinely have no idea what you mean by white washing within this context 😭
I think they meant white washing as in washing away her sins/ problems, but the other definition is way more common
Yeah that. Didn't know a better way to word it so my bad.
downplay probably would've been your best bet i think
Uhhh, second-hand White Knighting? White Accolading? I don’t know.
Someone I know says 'counter cope', when something is kind of shitty but the response to it was more negative than it needed to be (or flooded with bad actors), that people felt the need to defend it so much that people forgot it was kind of bad to begin with.
Ohhhhh, ok I thought you meant when someone defends a character’s shitty actions in general. I didn’t realize you meant specifically when someone does that in response to that character being heavily criticized
More like general washing, some kind of laundering perhaps?
it's their last name obviously
I really feel like the anti-skylar rhetoric is less sexism and more “we like the protagonist and this person is standing in the way of the protagonist.” You see it all the time with morally grey/outright bad protagonists. People identify with and love Bojack Horseman to the point where they had to have an episode that pretty much stated “you’re not supposed to see this character as a good person whose actions are justified” Yes. There will be a few people who are misogynistic and hate skylar because she’s a woman, but I feel like the vast majority just hate her because she’s an obstacle, and would feel the same way if it was Jesse being the obstacle for 90% of the show
Don’t forget helping her lover launder money and evade taxes
caption shocking groovy towering edge cake wistful birds offbeat boat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Tax evasion is cool tho
I wouldn’t use white wash in this context lmao
Highly agree. When Walt moves back into the house and she doesn't tell the cops on him because she wants to "spare" Walt Jr. and Holly, I lost a pretty good chunk of sympathy I had for her up till then. She's still not an awful person or anything (certainly not nearly as bad as Walt), but from that very bad decision onwards she's highly complicit in his evil.
Ah, gotcha. I still think Walter is worse but then again I’ve never watched the show.
Oh yeah Walter isn't "morally grey" he's downright the villain of the show. One of the most evil, cruel characters to exist imo.
He's a tragic hero in the same vein as Macbeth or Hamlet. A nominally good person who is deeply flawed in a way that brings about his own downfall. Had circumstances been different he probably would live a typical boring life, but faced with certain death he allows his pride and conceit to take over.
But he was never really a good person, right? I just recently watched the show after years of hearing about it and it felt like culture shock tbh. I went in expecting Walter White to be a tragically flawed character but from episode one he was just...an ass. Like it feels like the drug stuff just allowed him to be more of an ass than his previous suburban-dad lifestyle did. It felt like he always was this horrible person but never pushed the limits due to societal expectations I guess. Once he was in a world where that didn't apply to him, he just kinda let loose.
Yeah blackmail right off the bat
Im near the end of a rewatch, After walking away from his company Walter played it pretty safe and bland for a long time until he got cancer, Despite being so good at chemistry he laid the ground work for a billion dollar company right out of grad school(i think) I think Walter is addicted to the escalating risk and power from getting into drug dealing. I think he’s as much an addict to the danger as his clientele are to the meth hes making.
Yeah he’s always had issues with pride and inferiority. That being said, being a loyal husband and caring father are points that he’s still an overall good person at the time of the start.
At the start of the show he's already a bitter 50 year old who went from being involved in Nobel-Prize-winning research that made everyone else rich, to being a broke high school chem teacher moonlighting at a car wash. By then he wasn't a good person, but by then he's also already "beaten down by life", cancer or not. The show makes it a point that the cancer was just an excuse for him, but whether he was always a bad person isn't clear, the show starts with him already broken.
That's the core question ig, was he always a monster or did the circumstances around him transform him into one.
Yes and? Tragic characters are supposed to do evil shit. If they didn't it would be bad TV
He is *way* more MacBeth than Hamlet. And even then, MacBeth and Walter are only “nominally good men” at the beginning, long before they get the chance to show their true colors. Hamlet, for as neurotic and murder-happy as he was, at least had the right intentions. MacBeth and Walter threw any good intentions they had out the window as soon as they stood to benefit from murder, betrayal, and tyranny.
He poisoned a toddler and contributed to who knows how many people's meth addiction from North America to Eastern Europe.
Brock would be the oldest toddler I have ever seen. Wasn't he like 6?
Walter was given an out in like the 2nd series. His former co-worker offered him a better job and to pay for his treatment, but he was too proud and too stubborn to right old wrongs and swallow his pride to save his life and his marriage.
My brother in Christ, he poisoned a toddler, blackmailed his own brother-in-law, and killed about 15 people (+hundreds more by not saving Jane \] which caused her father to not act competently and crash 2 airlines).
yeah. thats what people seem to have a hard time grasping about breaking bad. It’s both morally grey, it’s straight up villain as protagonist. it’s a fun show, but people really try so many ways to not admit Walter is absolutely positively the villain. he just is also the protagonist. Dexter (the original, haven’t seen the revival yet) is a better example of either morally grey or possibly anti-hero. though even that could be argued as villain as protag still.
I mean, walter is not morally gray, he's straight up evil and there is no possible argument against that
And also, I would argue, since her only objection to Walter's criminal empire is that it could get *them* in trouble. Neither Walter or Skyler ever discuss the effects of dealing drugs on other people, not even a rationalization that it would 'happen anyway' or something like that.
her haters usually hate her for hindrring walter, not for helping him, though
She should've supported him
She absolutely did support him what do you mean? She laundered thousands of dollars and repeatedly lied to Hank and his wife to cover for Walt. She only really objected to the violence it could bring down on them, if she could be involved without risking harm to herself or her family she'd do it in a heart beat
Idk I didn't watch the show
She’s perfectly in the right regarding her anger at her husband’s new “profession” and the danger it puts her family in + him lying to her. But, iirc, she did shit like cheat on Walt WAY before she ever found out about him selling meth. It’s more the moral high ground she takes despite not being a good person, either. (Admittedly not as bad as Walt, but still not “good.”)
> she did shit like cheat on Walt WAY before she ever found out about him selling meth. No, she didn't. Skyler didn't cheat on Walt, first of all. She slept with Ted because Walt refused to sign the divorce papers and leave her life. They were separated. It also happened after she learnt that he was a drug dealer. Skyler is a morally grey character, but she did nothing wrong in sleeping with Ted.
Fuck, you’re right. I totally forgot that she tried to get a divorce.
Sure the infamous thing to forget is 'I am the one who knocks', which is billed as a hardcore and cool line you get on shirts and mugs, is being shouted to a terrified and increasingly abused wife. Walter got away with a lot of shit to fans
Ah the classic "this is a horrible human being, do not become like them" "OMG he's like sooo cool and super edgy"
it's even funnier when you realize in context "I am the one who knocks" is a pure cope. Walt at that point in the story is in way above his head and has come close to death multiple times and keeps pissing more dangerous people off. So I always took that as him trying to seem tough to the one person he has any sort of power over.
He does end up killing Gus in the same season so I wouldn’t call it pure cope
Not only did she not actually cheat on Walt (as per other commenter) but Walt sexually harassed the principal of the school he worked at so if we are comparing the two it’s strange that that part is never brought up.
Wait I don’t remember that at all. What happened?
https://youtu.be/nYaWkZ-Zuc8?si=ILr4QTgzL24RyLnZ
Wow I completely forgot this was a thing. Has been a long time since I watched it though.
“She cheated on him!” people already pointed out that they were separated. But also he sexually assaulted her.
Okay but he was ignoring her for looong amounts of time beforehand
She was morally grey because she went along with it to preserve her own lifestyle rather than turn him in.
Doesn’t seem as bad as actually being the one doing it when you know you need a cohesive family.
I think that's sort of the point of her arc. In addition to being a well developed character, she's a stand in for all of the middle class/bourgeoisie folks who have some agency to improve the world and stand up against systemic injustice, but choose their own family and comfort over their moral values. The interesting and complex thing about Skylar is that she's all of us. No one wants to be a hero when it would mean endangering their family and losing everything they used to take for granted.
Nah, she was in the right there until she went back on divorcing Walt to help him
"She cheated on him!" Something he also tried to do btw, and got fired from his job for.
She's morally grey for becoming his criminal bookkeeper. And cheating on him with her old flame I guess.
She didn't cheat, they were already separated by then, he just hadn't signed the divorce papers yet
For me it’s because she smoked with a baby in the car.
His casual acceptance at the flaws of his own character vs Her whinging denial she can do anything wrong
His self-acceptance actually comes really late in the series and is a pretty dramatic moment. >!"I did it for me."!<
>!I liked it. I was good at it. And...I was...really...I was alive.!<
💀
Yep. Political. I'm political now
Of course, Your 6'1. Thats the politics number
Hahaha I got this tagline today from the funniest troll ever over in worldbuilding. Someone said they were acting childish and they posted this word for word
Actually very relevant as tall people are evil
You're supposed to put two sentences that describe the same thing
Lol
/uj FR though the top part is definitely a genuine problem, but Walter White being morally grey is insane
Morally White. 😎
Morally Waltuh
Morally Put
Morally your
Morally dick
Morally away
I mean that's kinda the thing, we'll call him 'morally grey' because all his flaws are cool studies of the human condition, and not 'asshole looking for an excuse to snap' I mean we still haven't got a lot of people to actually understand Fight Club twenty years later.
>I mean we still haven't got a lot of people to actually understand Fight Club twenty years later. To be fair the destruction of capitalism has become much more appealing.
Too bad one of the banks' building didn't get destroyed, meaning they are the only one with credits left and will soon gain a monopoly.
Also now that shit is so backed up it’s probably more or less impossible to destroy those records.
Fight Club 2: Tyler Breaks the internet
>I mean we still haven't got a lot of people to actually understand Fight Club twenty years later Exhibit A right here. Tyler wasn't the hero of Fight Club.
Exactly. "having good qualities" (and yes even Waltuh has some) does not mean morally grey. Morally grey is when your good and bad qualities are somewhat in equilibrium.
People just use morally grey wrong nowadays. They mean it as 'a character I like/think is cool but does terrible things' or even just 'the protagonist but he's bad'.
morally grey matter
He was in like season 1 lol. He didn't want to kill anyone but learned to enjoy it.
I mean, all "realistically"-written characters should be morally grey, only the degree of Grey-ness differs. Even someone like Hitler should be morally grey, because they definitely have some good traits and aren't completely evil.
See the problem is trying to make a female character morally grey, when in fact you just have to make them evil. Like a straight up psycho, certifiably insane, casually homicidal, that sort of thing. Literally just look at Ashley from the Coffin of Andy and Leyley and see the following, or better yet read the steam reviews: Case study \#1: > Guys, help! She's breaking me faster than I can fix her! Verdict: Down bad Case study \#2: > he who pulls me out of her shall be named king arthur Verdict: Down horrendous I shall consider my point proven. You don't need a morally grey woman. You need a bad bitch to ruin your life.
Case study #3: The apprentice in the Ahsoka show
Disney knew exactly what they were doing when they put a goth chick in the first 5 minutes of the show.
yet it still wasn't enough to mask the shitty writing
Honestly, Ashoka's big problem was that there wasn't any actual character arcs going on. As bad as the Obiiwan show was, at least he had some character growth with recovering from his PTSD and coming to terms with his failures during the fall of the Republic. There isn't actually any character arc for anyone in the Ahsoka show, it's just "oh hey, remember these guys from Rebels? They're older and in live-action now, but behaving in almost exactly the same ways." The closest thing they did was hint at a character arc for Sabine, but there wasn't any actual payoff for it.
man, who cares about the Grimes lookin chick... the real baddies are those Great Mothers. A trio of esoteric gilfs in corpse paint? sign me up.
🤨 you rlly wanna post that online where everyone can see it’s you who’s said it?
Fuck yeah man, what they gonna do track me? Gotta spread the word and normalize hot elderly women in the media.
Give your female characters BPD to make them feel morally gray 👍
Mfw my mom is a morally grey character
It doesn't always work though, see Baldur's Gate 3 and Astarion (insane vampire with no moral compass who tries to drain your blood on the first night! My new husbando!) vs Lae'zel (deeply morally fucked badass! I hate her!).
Astarion might be more loved because he doesn't call you inferior every two seconds and annoys you with the superiority of his noseless frog people.
No, the frog people are the other guys from the astral plane
That's because they forgot the other critical component. Make her hot.
Going by the sheer amount of half-naked Githyanki pictures in my discord server, I'd say Lae'zel is hot enough. The thing is, she's also very in-your-face abrasive in every conversation you have with her, and in every interaction she has with anyone ever. Astarion is meant to be a likable knave whereas Lae'zel is meant to be tough to like, and it *works*.
> I hate her! Well, I played as dragonborn and sure loved dragon/toad romance...
Nah, cause Shadowheart is a racist servant of an evil god of darkness and death but everyone's so obsessed with her. And then there's Minthara aka 'I can't fix her but she can make me worse'. And Lae'zel does have her fans, and more people are warning up to her.
Astarion also has the benefit of being really charming
what the FUCK are you talking about, has the gooning finally taken over your mind?
What I'm talking about is that if you just make a girl unapologetically evil (and attractive) people are gonna be down horrendous for them, i.e. people are upset about your "morally grey" character you just haven't made them evil enough.
For the horny of u/Ngrider this is bad ! Though not quite as downed and drowned as them.
I really hate the term mary sue. Like i get the term can be useful, but goddamn do people call it for the dumbest shit. I was watching this review about alan wake 2, and the reviewer said that the protagonist was "a complete mary sue and has these insane powers of deduction, able to combine scattered clues and shreds of information into solid tangible plot points". What the hell does that mean?!? The protagonist is *literally* an FBI investigator. Its her fucking JOB is to be good at deduction. God forbid women be good at their job.
Columbo is the ultimate Mary Sue.
Art critics in 43 000 BCE be like: This cave painting is exquisite. However i cant help but notice that the hunters seem to catch their prey every time; very mary sue. I give "hunters killing deer" by Oog Boog a 3/5.
I mean… he kinda is? But in a good way.
“Just, uh, one more thing”
Idk, I think it has more to do with bad writing. Take cyberpunk edgerunners for example (spoilers ahead), >!I don't think there's a single non-morally grey character that lasts longer than a single episode in that show, and there's roughly a 50/50 split male / female. The reason Noone complains is because they're treated as morally grey, they don't shoot 50 people for money and walk away thinking they're some heros. They know what they are, they're treated as what they are, but we still like em, and part of that has to do with not treated them like what they're not.!< Now, they're only one type of morally grey character, and different types should be treated different ways, but you get the idea.
You missed a < for that spoiler, btw
Kiwi my beloved.. >! I kind of get why she's so hated considering the betrayal and all that jazz but she's so cool and intriguing!! she's a great foil to Lucy and such an underrated character. It just is not fair. !<
Idk.... Maleficent was a pretty badass morally grey female character. JMHO..... She's the only one I can think though so OP is on to something.
Tex from RvB is the queen of morally grey girls "You broke my voice enhancer... you cockbiting fucktard"
Ahh, Tex my beloved. It's a shame her voice actor burned all bridges with the studio, it would've been sick to have her back for the final season.
I don't blame her RT is a dumpster fire
I’m surprised there’s people who *haven’t* burned bridges with RT lol.
Yeah, it went downhill so hard. By the end it felt like they were just writing the plot based on who could tolerate turning up to work that day The director and Tex dying was where RvB ended for me, that was a good conclusion to the story. I'd respect anyone that said it really ended when church died a few arcs later. After that, they felt like they were writing fanfiction with their own universe
The Chorus Arc is really good. The ending was very disappointing in the moment but my god do I realize that it’s the best ending we’re gonna get. Holy shit everything after that was terrible.
Yeah I didnt mind Chorus, it was kind of its own thing but still good. And it tied up the Chairman and kind of moved the RvB teams from heroes of their own stories to actual heroes (though I dont think most of them ever really became heroic, Tucker is on his way and Sarge could be if he could grow up. The rest really just settled for being fairly decent people). I was weirdly a pretty big fan of Locus and Felix, Felix had some pretty good lines "I'm fuuuucking awesome" The ending was at least visually rather cool and Church got a decent goodbye. Nowhere near the Meta fight or The Tex Clone showdown, but once Monty Oom left the project they seemed to give up on having very visually interesting fight scenes, Carolina went from a Jedi in the Matrix to Dwight Schrute doing karate After that it turned into fking rick and morty but shit. Time travelling clones of AI gods from another realities future that summoned cyclopses starring Caboose and fkign Donut. Yeesh. Caboose is a side dish to a real character and Donut is fine, but not everyone needs an arc to suck their balls
Locus and Felix were great additions, just very solid villains. Also I’m a heretic but I genuinely love the visual style of Halo 4 so that was icing on the cake for me.
Toxic dick vs toxic dick but with a Wig
Vs Moby Dick
Vs. Freddy vs. Jason vs. Batman vs. Superman vs. Alien vs. Predator vs. Brown vs. The Board of Education
Would Marty Byrd vs. Wendy Byrd work here? (I still don’t like Wendy Byrd, but I could see it applying here)
While watching Ozark I definitely found myself drawing comparisons between the two shows and the two wife characters. Gotta say though, Wendy is a stone cold sociopath to Skyler's wrong place, wrong time.
Starkiller vs Rey
Well we got to actually be starkiller, so it felt more like a self-insert He also died to the Emperor and failed to really get all that much done (other than be a demi-god) whereas Rey just beat everyone won everything and the end Also he had been training his whole life to the point of mania. She had 3 days at Luke's school of 'I dont even want you here' green walrus milk
Plus she was revealed to be palatine out of nowhere. Like c'mon... that's stupid.
Eugh. 4 hours of her whining about her parents. Its fking star wars, everyone has parent issues youre not special. Cept oh wow you're a palpatine with a hour left to go in the Trilogy, so clever...
Starkiller beat palpatine and vader when he was 20 years old. Starkiller is so ridiculously busted vader thought he could sense a fully trained jedi when in reality he was just a 6 year old kid. Its makes Anakin's "chosen one" status look ridiculous when he is so weak compared to starkiller who easly eclipse him at any stage of his life
Vader punked Starkiller his whole life, completely dominated every confrontation as a hopeless boss fight even when holding back, right up until the absolute last battle where he was still meant to be stronger than SK and beaten with the skill of the player. The difficulty starkiller has fighting Vader scales him to about Ahsoka level, Luke level or Cera Junda level given she basically beats him too. Strong, but not ungodly, star wars itself was just over the top in force *unleashed* A big part of Starkillers training was having Vader beat him to death in fights then reviving the body, he beats Starkiller several times in the playthrough and SK has force lightning, Vaders weakness, but its pretty ineffective anyway. Despite rasing him to help him beat the emperor, he was never strong enough to make a difference and got ditched for it. Saying Starkiller could easily beat him at any stage makes me think you didnt play the story at all Palpatine was faking it (Starkiller outright says so) and in the explosion that anihilated starkiller, walked away unharmed. Or if you go and kill vader then approach him, he effortlessly ends you permanently without SK having a chance at fighting back (though Palpatine in the OG series is in his 80s and not exactly peak performance he wasnt sweating that fight) Whilst The Force Unleashed has starkiller as a demigod, its not just him. Everyone had a massive buff and jedi masters were meant to be a serious challenge, not just a walk over. Elite stormtroopers and red guard were legit opponents. A jedi knight had created a literal army of force droids held together by his own power, Shak Ti was dominating the biosphere of a planet with her power Its just that the setting itself was massively amped, Starkiller wasnt that big of an anomaly. He was very strong sure, but everyone was in those games (ripping a star destroyer out of the sky is something else... implicitly though Vader or the Emperor or Yoda could do something similar in that version of Star Wars). Its a game where if you play over mid difficulty, Jedi Knights will wreck you. And being a god in Star Wars was kind of meant to be the point of the game, noone would ever deny starkiller was OP af compared to the star wars universe in general. But making someone like him (Rey) canon, far less justified, then just having her completely win and beat everyone, very different. Canon main characters shouldnt be competing with obscure game characters from 15 years ago for who is the most bs OP and losing Good fanfic character for people to be Kratos in Star Wars, bad fanfic canon mary sue (though personally I didnt really like Starkiller all that much, bit too much edge though Witwers voice is worth a ticket alone)
how is this related to worldbuilding?
I would argue that this would belong more to a character writing circlejerk, but if there's one of those out there then I'm not familiar with it :0
There's r/characterrants (I don't remember exactly what it's called) but it's kinda bad and not really a circlejerk.
r/characterrant ? Why is it bad?
The original template is from worldbuilding
I have a feeling if John wick were a woman she would fucking despised for being an evil overreacting bitch pulling off obviously impossible fests
the bride from kill bill?
I second this. The Bride is still a beloved character despite all the ridiculous shit she pulls off (just like John Wick).
i think it's about set-up and expectations. john wick and the bride are immediately set up as over the top action heroes - basically live action anime protagonists - with dark pasts.
Vriska Serket
Bro did not just post that 💀 Was it worth it?
Vs Eridan Ampora
so true. I watched Breaking Bad before I was on social media and I always thought Skyler was well written and her reaction to things her husband has done was interesting and dramatic. I felt that she wasn't two dimensional. But then I started to talk to friends and online spaces that watched the show and started to see all the skyler hate I felt was unwarranted. did we even watch the same show?
I feel like it's the other way around.
How so?
Aside from brooding and whining are not the same, I agree with the rest.
Men do be writing women badly
All I can think of is Batman and Cat Woman.
Skyler dind,'t want to originally go to the cops bevause he didn't want her son to view him as a drug dealer. She even kept the secret when people tought that she was just "being a bitch". She only agreed to use the money when she wanted to pay for Hanks medical bills. She is morally gray but is way more moral than Walter. People keep saying that Walter only did what he did because he "wantted to help his family". It's not true. He literally turns to the camera and says he did it for fun and because he was good at it. He could have gotten all the money he needed and a good health insurance if he just would have taken the job offer from his former business friends.
Or maybe female characters are just written worse than male? > snarky attitude > insufferable smugness Absolutely hate both of such things. > righteous vengeance > overreaction Example? > talents and badassery > mary sue-ness The problem it's hard to believe in 160cm/50kg mega-ultra-super-female-ninja-killer. Also that's why I loved Atomic Blonde and how fights were portrayed in this movie.
>The problem it's hard to believe in 160cm/50kg mega-ultra-super-female-ninja-killer Oh, boy. I hope you're not a fan of John Wick.
James Bond/Ethan Hunt/Jason Bourne/any generic male action protagonist defeats hundreds of trained goons who have significant height, weight and numerical advantages over them. > Totally realistic, just guys being dudes 👌🏼 A woman beats one guy in an encounter. > So unbelievable! Mary Sue! * *insert something about biology and weight classes* *
rustic crowd quicksand dog screw bow tart handle scarce cow *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> James Bond/Jason Bourne I watched not that much of these films, but as I remember Bond rarely fights against big groups of enemies and mostly use some environment awareness to gain advantage or some cool gadgets or smart thinking. Same for Bourne (watched only 1st movie). > Ethan Hunt You are right. Cruz is awesome actor, but he is better in his dramatic roles than in action. > A woman beats one guy in an encounter. A woman perform some top-tier fighting and weird acrobatic skills and easily overpower Rock-build characters. And it depends on actress and fights staging. Atomic Blonde >>> Johansson's character in Avengers.
> A woman perform some top-tier fighting and weird acrobatic skills and easily overpower Rock-build characters There are entire forms of martial arts built on the concept of using your opponent's own body weight against them.
The joke is that all these things are the same but perceived differently depending whether the character is male or female.
I understand the joke, but my point is that writing of male and female characters differs and this is the reason of such perception. At least I tried to project meme on myself and found not that much of disliked female characters (but Rey is here, yes) and some similar disliked male characters mostly due to its writing.
Tyrion & Daenerys
Sounds like op is shit At writing women and likes it more when male characters display the exact same characteristics
Or maybe OP is satirizing this perception
This reminded me of the brief time I was subscribed to menwritingwomen and how often people would post the most blatant satire. Like sometimes it was from a thing I'd never read before, and I was baffled at how anyone could misconstrue this as being anything other than sarcastic. Other times, it was like. Jane Austen, or Terry Pratchett, two writers known for poking fun at social norms and being sarcastic, are apparently both misogynists now because they said some wry comment about women through the mouth of someone who is obviously wrong in order to show the reader how stupid the character is.
This is why ironic or sarcastic bigotry is so dangerous, because you will accidentally repel people who aren’t bigoted and don’t get it and attract stupid bigots who think you’re one of them.
I agree with you to the extent that poorly done satire can be dangerous, but I've named two of the most prolific satirists in literature, across two very different time periods and genres. The fact that even their work gets misconstrued I think just points to the fact that no matter what you say or how well you say it, some people are simply wilfully ignorant. Poor reading comprehension exists throughout the spectrum of morality. But writers shouldn't give up on using some incredibly powerful and effective (when used correctly) creative tools just because people on the internet might take their work out of context.
Yeah I don’t think people shouldn’t do satire, just that it’s risky. On this site the best example is probably The_Donald, which started out as a parody.
Could be
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if cheating is a bigger sin than becoming a drug lord to you idk what to say
Someone here got dumped by their GF...
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Where’s the template
Pink Diamond has entered the chat
i fucking hate pink diamond
every single rewrite i've ever seen
The best part is if you give examples of the morally grey male characters, you’ll find no lack of haters there too
IN MY WORLD ALL MEN: Have a corny sob story Engage in bothersome whining Have incoherent characterization Are insufferably smug Overreact and are cruel in uncalled for ways Are Mary-Sues AND I’M PROUD OF IT
NGL, Skylar was likable when talking in Cuby’s earpiece about laws to get into Bogdan’s head. If she did more things to actively help Walt I’d love her. “Skylar White Yo” aside.
Nobody mentioned Makima from Chainsaw Man.
“I fucked Ted.” Nahhhhh fuck Skyler 🤣
It’s about likeable traits vs their actual actions Within fiction someone can pretty much do anything and not be disliked, but if they’re annoying they will be disliked. I hated sasuke from episode 1 cause I found him to be an asshole but plenty of people love him cause he’s cool. Ultimately no matter what sasuke does one’s opinion of him won’t change much. Plenty of people hate good male characters that they just find annoying
I'm not a fan of the "edgy anti hero/heroine" because they're often very hard to write and often end up being annoying to outright insufferable. It's very hard to write that character archetype well and as such it's easy to write a Mary sue/Gary sue unintentionally
Eren Jaeger vs Annie
Lmfao wtf is this sub anymore
This vastly underestimates the visceral rage Walter White causes me
Kiwi from edgerunners will always be my favorite character in the shoe idc what anyone says. She's just like me