Do you ever miss a character from a show but not like in the way that you want to rewatch the whole show because theres so much stuff going on and thats not what youre looking for but you miss your boy

I love that there's really no "scientific" explanation for why Walt and Jesse are the only people who can perfectly cook the blue meth. It essentially functions as a kind of alchemical sorcery, the supernatural, demonic gift born from their twisted pact with the devil, their souls in exchange for the partnership and the "blue stuff."

It keeps them coming back together over and over again ("Your meth is good, Jesse. As good as mine.") and tears them apart (Gus only needs one person to cook it, and so he turns them against each other.) It's what Gus needs from Walt for his revenge on the cartel and motivates his manipulation of Walter back into the drug business, it's the one thing Jesse believes he's ever been good at so he goes back to doing it alone—until Hank's pursuit of them drives him back into his old partner's waiting arms, because however brilliant of a chemist Gale Boetticher is, he's not Jesse, the only partner in Walter White's life of crime he's ever actually wanted.

Jesse believes his gift the only reason Walt ever cared about him ("[Walt] made you a 50-50 partner. He didn't need to do that." "Yeah, he sort of did. I'm the only one near as good as him, so...") The happiest the two of them ever were in their partnership, the most emotionally fulfilled, peaceful and in-sync they ever were, was when they were making the blue stuff together.

Literal chemical poison.

The promise of Heisenberg's talent is what motivates Jack to come to the To'hajiilee even after he calls off the hit, when Walt himself is ready for it to be over, the fact that only Jesse can compare in skill is why he's kept alive, enslaved (as all are enslaved to sin), forced to make this perfect, blood-soaked poison or see his loved ones killed, one by one.

It's neither chemistry nor art. It's a perfect, crystal blue prison that binds them together and trapped them in a cycle of pain, death and betrayal.

remember how breaking bad established in like the third fucking episode that the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are not easy to delineate and not who you’d expect them to be. like the obvious smudging of these boundaries happens in the basement with walt and domingo (the respectable family man who killed one man and is preparing to kill the guy in front of him, this drug dealer and cartel affiliate who is barely an adult and fondly reminiscing about his dad the same way a child might ramble about what their parents do), but an underrated interaction is that parking lot confrontation between hank and wendy. hank the cop, the dea agent, the hometown hero, insulting and disparaging wendy because she’s a sex worker, she’s “scuzzy”, she’s “disposable”. treating her like an object, a pawn. a tool to teach junior a lesson. hank the good guy cop who keeps these drug dealers and addicts off the streets—by dehumanizing them and relishing in taunting them with his power, his ability to grind them further into the dirt. and then wendy finally gets away from the “protector of the people” and seeks solace in punk-ass, disrespectful drug addict jesse pinkman, who we haven’t seen the deeper nuances of yet, who is still just the rude, dumb, meth-cooking kid kept on walt’s leash. the kind of person to be swept off the streets to keep the people safe. the bad guy. showing compassion to wendy and continuing to show it throughout the series. that moment of them sheltered in the dark motel room together, the “dregs of society”, hiding out from a world and a people that sees them as subhuman and are much more likely to hurt the two of them than they are to cause harm. for a show from this era, it’s pretty transgressive to come out in the third episode and be like “you need to start reevaluating how you perceive and treat the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people in society because you are likely contributing to a system and power hierarchy that gets away with horrible mistreatment and dehumanization just because you refuse to affiliate yourself with addicts or sex workers or anyone else you deem lesser by empathizing with them”

when discussing Walt's body count do we include the plane full of people who died because he murdered an air traffic controller's daughter?

> Rose: We need to cook!

Gas mask sprite by @kalza. Hoodie base sprite by nerdferd.

based on @nitroglyphics's post that im so normal about

literally the people in the BrBa fandom who like think its super important to focus somewhat on the bad things Jesse's done instead of just acknowledging those things tend to have misunderstandings on either how selling drugs increase harm (which while there's other complexities to parts of the drug trade, simply making and providing drugs alone does not increase the harm those drugs cause) or they have misremembered some of his actual actions as being more in his control than they actually were, and with some people it really feels like it comes from the stigma against addicts even if they think they're not falling into that

and like again this lack of understanding around everything relating to drugs and addiction especially, even from people that mean well, is the whole reason it's more important to focus on the good in Jesse and how he's the victim rather than acting like there's no one acknowledges his flaws and the bad things he's done, cause a huge fucking swath of people outside our little tumblr circles do and act like every single bad thing in his life as entirely his responsibility without aknowledging any way that the world worked against him or the abuse he faced and see him as less of a person because he's an addict

and like I do think if Jesse wasn't the type of person that sees his own flaws and ultimately tries to do his best to change and learn even in the terrible situation he's in that doesn't want that change to happen, and instead needed people to like... constantly tell him to be better, then yeah it'd definitely be much more important to focus on those flaws and the bad things he did... but that's not the case, even the one thing he plans to do that was awful AND fully his choice (trying to sell drugs to the rehab group) was something he snapped himself out of when he was able to concretely see a consequence he hadn't considered before, this doesn't negate that trying to sell drugs to the rehab group was wrong, but it does add complexity to how we judge that action playing into Jesse as a whole

like you can't just sit there and act like ur so smart for aknowledging a character written like a real person is complex without thinking about the greater social commentary you're getting across when you insist we can't simply aknowledge the bad things a character does and have to still really judge them on those things or say calling them a "good person" erases the bad they've done and not consider if what you're saying is like... useful on a wider scale in combating the stigmatization of characters like Jesse (especially surrounding drug selling/making/using drugs) or if you're just refering to "woobification" bullshit that isn't particularly prevalent in the wider world

The Melodrama of Marie Schrader

Breaking Bad (2008-2013), prod. Gilligan | “Half Sister,” Protomartyr | The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto VI 73- 75 - Dante Alighieri | Portrait of a Young Woman, Lorenzo di Credi, 1490-1500 | Pandora, John William Waterhouse, 1896 | “Damn,” Aldous Harding | Sonnet 29, William Shakespeare | Vengeance is Sworn (Revenge Triptych), Francesco Hayez, 1851 | Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896 | Roman de la Rose, Guillaume de Lorris, 1230-50 |

shithole apartment

I just realized that Jesse Pinkman’s address in high school was his Aunt’s house. He was already living with her instead of his parents by the time he was in high school. The timeline of her cancer and death is a little fuzzy, but it’s likely he had to care for her while attending school. If that’s the case it’s clear he didn’t ask for accommodations or even use his Aunt’s illness as an excuse for his poor grades (Walt was surprised to hear she had been sick). Combined with his obviously untreated ADHD, it’s no wonder he turned to drug use and failed to ‘apply himself.’

And to think that through all this - taking care of his Aunt, struggling in school - his parents didn’t help; either directly with his Aunt’s illness or indirectly easing his responsibility for her by hiring care givers…

tuco/walt + lalo/nacho on a double date at los pollos hermanos

walt and nacho blinking at each other in elaborate patterns to figure out whether the other one is being held hostage or not

Walter white did not deserve such strong loyalty from jesse and skyler

Walt is the least sympathetic of all the BrBa criminals/anti-heroes/rogues gallery because he's the one (major) character who doesn't have a clear and unambiguous "reason" for being the way he is. There is an unflinching refusal to give this character a "Freudian excuse" for his behavior and I just...love that.

It is not only an extremely brave choice from a writing perspective for your protagonist (and really only works because Bryan Cranston can somehow wring sympathy out of this dry husk amoral sponge of a person), but also makes him the most realistic portrayal of what evil really is. Walt feels the least like a television version of how a person becomes bad because there's not one reason it happens, and there's an aspect to his moral descent that's both mundane and mysterious—his motives unfold gradually, they change, and the show never really seeks to outright explain why it happened beyond the obvious inciting event—his cancer diagnosis. Was there something in him always not quite "right" or was there just a unique confluence of circumstances that caused Walt's complete moral transformation? In his own words—he liked it, he was good at it, and it made him feel alive. Maybe it is just as simple as that. Evil is actually a lot less interesting than people give it credit for.

There are so many things about his personality that are just never explained but must have some explanation, surely. For example: Walt's hang-ups about money—his obsession with being the one who provides it for his family and his reactive disdain for charity (even Saul points out there's clearly deep-seated issues there lol.) You could very easily see a different writer backstory dumping a lot of explicit childhood trauma with Walt and his single mother being poor and him getting bullied and this being where his weird inferiority complex about hand-outs come from. Instead this is just a huge part of his personality that has no obvious singular explanation. Why is he like this? Who the hell knows!

Which I personally really like, because regardless of whether that happened to him as a kid (I have to assume something like that was going on with child Walt because he has really specific neurosis) it has no ultimate bearing on the morality of his actions. There is no excuse for what he does, ultimately, and I just love that the show gives you very few reasons to feel sorry for him, at least as far as his backstory goes. Even the merits of his Gretchen and Elliot resentment is called into question (though left vague.)

In a weird, counter-intuitive way this lack of explanation for his behavior makes me feel more sympathy for him (again, Cranston acting magic pulling its weight.) But it's such a subjective thing with him. How you feel about Walt hinges on the performance, the character's actions in the story itself and what the viewer chooses to extrapolate from both. I can't blame people for thinking he's just kind of a low-empathy asshole, though I personally find that explanation reductive and less interesting, I cannot argue with it as a valid read. He is very, very hate-able for so many reasons. There's something refreshing about how unapologetic the writing for him is in that way.

I have so much love to give and I am giving it all to fictional characters

I know it probably doesn’t mean anything and they’re just teasing us (this is kim and Jimmy’s story and it would make no sense to reopen the ending of breaking bad in this separate show) but they are so genuinely deranged for even slightly putting jesse’s ending in question. Like now I have to worry about kim AND jesse? who are literally tied for first place as my fave characters from both universes combined?? After I had crossed jesse off my “must worry for” list? they’re so sick

Breaking Bad (2009–2013) // The Catcher in the Rye