Being hateable doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Obviously Skyler was acting in her family’s best interest and walt was a psycho POS but she played such an unlikeable character.
There are plenty of likeable “evil” characters and plenty of unlikeable “good” ones. People act like if you hate Skyler you somehow don’t get the show, but no, I understand her character just fine, it’s just that she’s insufferable about everything.
Regardless, hating the actress for the character is smooth brain shit
In the realm of toxic masculinity power fantasies there is no room for a woman who acts kind of like a normal person.
The show was written to make you root for Walt and dislike Skylar because of that, but is she really that unlikeable if you step back and look at her actions and motivations?
Edit: Sorry for being terse and using charged language in this comment.
I’m a fan of Breaking Bad. I wasn’t trying to put it down or to say that people disliker Skyler because she’s a woman.
Upthread I clarified things a bit, hopefully.
My 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.
I hear what you are saying, and while I don’t fully agree that she’s inherently unlikable, I understand why you’re saying that you find her to be so. I mostly was asking you to question your assumptions on it, and I used some charged up language that wasn’t meant as a knock at the show.
To elaborate, what I meant was that the show exaggerates her mannerisms to give Walt motivation rather than to create a fully fleshed out character. She’s not a woman, but a symbol of how men have become emasculated by their wives’ “wearing the pants” in the family. At least early on she’s not much more than a framing device and justification for Walt’s decisions.
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, but 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 on the show is enough for me to take a minute and question my assumptions on her, at least. So I thought it was worth pushing back on your comment asking you, and others reading, to do the same.
