Comment on Anyone else?
stevestevesteve@lemmy.world 5 months agoMy whole point was that her motivations and actions are reasonable and she is mostly in the right (ie she is “good” not evil), but her character’s mannerisms are still extremely hate-able.
It’s not about acting like a normal person and it’s certainly not about being a woman.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 5 months ago
My point was that the show exaggerates her mannerisms to give Walt motivation rather than to create a fully fleshed out character. She’s not a real woman, but a symbol of how men have become emasculated by their wives’ “wearing the pants” in the family. At least early on that’s her the purpose she serves.
She grows as a character, and ends up having more agency, but only in the confines of Walt’s domination of their lives with his selfishly motivated, and traditionally toxic masculine, choices.
And I don’t think you meant it this way, you can’t really easily separate disliking her from being a woman. I don’t mean to imply that you dislike her because she’s a woman, but that her character’s role is to be a controlling wife. It’s an inherently gendered character that relies heavily on preconceptions of what a woman should and shouldn’t be in a relationship with a man who is a main character in a story.
I think it’s telling that she is considered unlikable enough to even warrant discussing in a show where the main character is a multi-murderer monster who destroyed the lives of everyone he loved, and the main villains include nazis, cartels, lawyers and corporate shills.
That, for anyone, she’s the most hated character in all of that should cause anyone to question their assumptions on her.
stevestevesteve@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The characters role is to be a controlling spouse. If Walt was gay married to a man who behaved the same way Skyler does, they would be just as frustrating to watch on screen. It’s not inherently gendered, you’re putting that on it.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
She isn’t a controlling spouse, she’s a controlling housewife in an exaggerated disappointing version of a post-nuclear American family.
The show states over and over again that Walt believes a man provides for his family… a necessarily and pointedly gendered role that is central to his entire character’s motivations. Skyler’s nagging is framed exactly in relation to his perceived shortcomings with respect to this gendered expectation.
In a gay relationship you don’t tend to just mirror straight relationships but the bottom replaces the women, or something. So you can’t just conjure Skyler as a dude and make it make any sense as a family.
When there are two or more men coming together, usually they all have their own separate careers and plans for life. There is no template gay relationships have to build off of, and having children is way more difficult and complicated. We have to define everything for ourselves.
None of the tropes that are foundations of Breaking Bad work if you swap the genders of the characters. If walt were a woman nothing she does would make sense to the audience and the treatment from her annoyed husband would be absolute nonsense. Why would he expect her to provide for the family? Why would he expect her to man up? Etc?