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Plenty of people thought that Don Draper and Walter White were heroes.
Walter White was an antihero. The US healthcare system was the villain.
The healthcare system was just a catalyst for his transformation into Heisenberg. He had multiple opportunities to stop during the first seasons. His greed and pride wouldn't allow him to do so.
I'm pretty sure the rush of it was his addiction.
In all honesty, I haven’t watched it again since it first came out. When did he have opportunities to pay for his treatment? I don’t remember that. I definitely remember the megalomaniacal development that you mention in his character arc.
The best opportunity was when he meets up with his former partners, Gretchen and Elliot. They feel sorry for Walt's diagnosis and the fact that he left the company the three of them started before it became profitable, and offer to fully pay for his cancer treatment.
He then lies to his wife, saying that they are paying while he continues to make meth and sell it to fund his treatment.
There are others, but this one happens early on (around S2 I believe).
You’re right. I remember that now. I think I’d enjoy a second watch through.
The only episode I’ve watched multiple times is The Fly. It has almost nothing to do with the story, but it’s a legitimately brilliant standalone art house short story.
The Fly was definitely a polarizing episode. My biggest complaint about it was that it completely threw off the pacing of the story that season.
If you haven't seen it yet, I would highly recommend you check out the spin-off series Better Call Saul. I ended up enjoying it even more than Breaking Bad, although it does spend a long time setting up the pieces before everything starts falling into place.
I really should. I’ve been a fan of Bob Odenkirk since Mr. Show. I’ll give it a watch.
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I really need to go back and watch the whole thing, but I remember in one of the first two seasons there's another point where his wife discovers some duffel bags that he's stashed that are just absolutely stuffed with cash. Like, tens of thousands of dollars, if not a six-figure number. And when she confronts him about it (I think she knew what he was doing and he had promised to stop?), he says that he wants to make sure that she and the kids are taken care of after he dies.
But he was lying through his teeth. What started out as a desperate attempt to save his life quickly spirals into a power trip, and his ego can't let him stop even when he has no need to keep going. The money is just a side benefit at that point.
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No. Regardless of the healthcare system, White had the option of going to the people at Grey Matters and asking for help. There were plenty of times he could have just walked away with a boatload of cash. He was a cold blooded killer.
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They dropped the whole cancer plotline by season 2.
Plenty of people thought that Don Draper and Walter White were heroes.
In our defense, I'd like to say that we have been living in a society that has been teaching us from birth to worship - no, fetishize is a more accurate term - the Don Drapers and Walter Whites of this world for hundreds of years now.
It's not an excuse... more just a mitigating factor that should be taken into account.
Walter White was a classic anti-hero. He started out with a just cause, and was ultimately corrupted by the power brought on by his own self righteousness.
I disagree. White had a simple choice; he could go to his old partners at Grey Matters and ask for help or he could get involved with murders. He never had a just cause, just the desire to prove he was smarter than everyone in the world.
There's important context about his old partners though: Walter was in love with one of them when she betrayed him, got with the other guy and then they cut Walter out of the same company that Walter's research turned into a mega success.
Was Walter prideful about their offer to pay for his cancer treatments? You bet. I probably would have been as well in the same situation.
Was he prideful there because he wanted to be a drug kingpin? I don't think that was his primary motivation.
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Go back and rewatch. He knows exactly what he's doing from the very beginning. He has chance after chance to get out. Each time he makes the choice to double down, knowing that what he's doing will hurt somebody, and he does it all for his own self aggrandizement.
Draper wasn't as much a villain as White. Draper was just a fraud.
I've seen people unironically and without self-awareness admire Draper and want to “be like him”. I don't get it.
They never did figure it out. They had to be told. Conservatives are really bad at seeing the obvious much less any level of nuance.
That would be because, by and large, conservatives are fucking stupid
That's what happens when you tout that learning and education is bad and for the devil.
It's a huge swathe of masses who envies the knowledge of others and fears that they do not understand. Rather than admit their faults they double down on "learning is for dummies"
Don't get me wrong, there are many learned republicans, but the smartest ones are the ones who get elected. They fuck everybody else over for their own gains while being worshipped.
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Reminds me of my stepfather who is deeply conservative and an huge supporter of the military but his favorite movie is full metal jacket. I’ve tried to discuss what he thinks the point of the movie is and it seems like he never got past the “it looks cool” part.
You can't have a good war movie that's also a parody, because people just take the cool/funny parts as approval of the atrocities.
And nothing is safe. You'll have sitting American Congressmen putting out hacked up Attack on Titan videos with zero context, because David v Goliath is just a cool image and you want to make teenager shock troops fighting hideous (((monsters))) on top of a big wall look Based.
Your enemy is always an existential threat and doing war crimes is incredibly cool. So yay fascism!
A huge portion of American men are only as tough as the things they own.
In Texas they call it "all hat no cattle" Skaters just call them "posers"
It’s like Paul Ryan (Republican politician) being a Rage Against the Machine fan. Even the band members were like dude, you don’t get it.
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Pick up a US or World Hstory book as an adult and two things will dispel the illusions you may have about Americans and the human race: First, the rest the world hates us for very good reasons, and the things we did on a smaller scale in previous centuries are now much more widespread. Second, our species is infinitely more capable of evil than you were made to understand.
The rest of the world doesn't hate the US. Most of the world is just kinda annoyed at how Americans can be ignorant and very loud about it.
I go to Vietnam and see people wearing Captain America T-shirts. The Vietnamese would have good reason to hate America, but they generally don't.
America is mostly hated in just the fashy parts of the world where the government tells people that everything is America's fault to avoid responsibility. And even then I think it's mostly just to loyal minions that actually hate America.
Just get rid of the Electoral College so we don't have to worry about Bushy Trumpy Presidents anymore and we'd be all good.
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So I haven't watched after season 2. What did Homelander have to do for conservatives to realize he's not the good guy?
Did he become an environmentalist or something? Because sociopathic narcissism, kidnapping, mass murdering innocents and being an allround asshole didn't do that, not even mentioning his literal nazi girlfriend.
I don't think it's Homelander's actions so much as Kripke saying in interviews that he and the writers are trying to be as obvious as possible that Homelander is the bad guy and based on Trump. And following up by saying if people think Homelander and his followers are role models then those people are not the fans they want.
The fact that he had to spell it out loud because media literacy is dead and most people are incapable of reading nuanced subtext is appalling. Some people actually believed that it was nothing more than a gory satire of Marvel and DC comics.
It stopped being nuanced after season one. Each season since has been an exercise in how far they have to go for some people to figure it out.
It's more that this season they have abandoned almost all the nuance and are really rubbing their face in it. There was a whole episode about how Homelander supporters are big into all the conspiracy shit that modern conservatives are
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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