words

vedlington:

so what’s with all the outrage in the breaking bad tags?

people are bitching about walter white being a sympathetic portrayal of a privileged white male drug dealer. now, while i understand why that particular trope is so problematic — do you even watch this show?

breaking bad has never been about a poor white man falling victim to a broken system and trying to beat that system through any means necessary. no no no no no. no. that’s only the story that walt tells himself and anyone who will listen to him. the system was only broken for him because he blatantly sabotaged it, quitting his job and turning down help left and right. he shot down every safeguard he had in order to protect his choice.

and that’s the real point of breaking bad. walt made a choice in the chaos after he found out he had cancer and realized he had nothing to lose. 

he chose to be evil. 

the joke is that walt was always evil. he always wanted to be a drug dealer. he always wanted to tell his boss to go fuck himself. he always wanted to tell his wife to climb out of his ass. but it wasn’t until that moment that he had the balls to act on any of those things, so he took that chance and ran with it.

straight off a cliff.

into a pit of fucking evil. 

and if you pay attention, you can even see how walt creates chaos once things start to settle down. remission? lots of money? absolutely ideal set-up with gus? he does something reckless and things go to hell again. why does he do this? because he is completely in denial and sees himself as a victim of circumstance, so he needs to recreate the circumstance — chaos — in which he’s “allowed” to be heisenberg. 

i mean fuck. heisenberg created the uncertainty principle, guys. it’s a clue.

if people don’t realize how manipulative and evil and unsympathetic walt is by now then i just don’t even know what to say. i adore him, but only as the brilliant unapologetic self-deceptive badass villian that he is. he is not the victim. he even says so himself, remember?

“i am the danger.”

tl;dr: please find another reason to hate breaking bad.

that has been devin’s rant of the day.