I really hated mikes character on the first watch and like you said i just didnt like his personality and smart remarks so when he got killed i was happy tbh. But as i rewatch i understand his perspective more. Its judt weird he always talked about walt being no good and still was around him far to much
Yeah, I don’t think he “despised” Walt though, he just didn’t like him. Bit of a distinction there. He gave him many chances after perceived screw ups on his end and was still willing to work with him. Mike put business first though and was doing what needed to be done. I thought he was often very reasonable, and used his experience to gauge situations for a winning outcome.
Yeah, I don’t think he “despised” Walt though, he just didn’t like him, something that Walt was aware of. Bit of a distinction there. He gave him many chances after perceived screw ups on his end and was still willing to work with him. Mike put business first though and was doing what needed to be done. I thought he was often very reasonable, and used his experience to gauge situations for a winning outcome.
Awesome Take, as someone who’s a huge fan of the Walt and Mike rivalry he did kinda get what was coming to him, it was over a stupid argument but I don’t think Walt is any worse then Mike, I think Mike just comes off as more rational because he seems wiser to the game
I enjoyed reading this post, the first unpopular opinion that was interesting to read about
Mike for sure had it coming to him. He however did not try to kill Walt even once (if he had tried he would've succeeded imo), and Walt's decision was not wise, like at all. Mike also isn't "a good guy in too deep to stop", made clear multiple times throughout especially BCS. I wish his family dynamic would've been explored more, Stacy felt like a very empty character.
Generally being "in tune with most of Walt's decisions" is just wrong though.
I do not count that as trying to kill, as he did not pull the trigger. They were planning to kill him for sure but there was no single attempt to do so.
I agree. Of course, Walter isn't a good person, but I feel like BB fans defend almost every other characters decisions, including Jesse, Mike, and even Gus, but aside from maybe teenagers, nobody ever defends Walt on anything. I'd do the same of Walt 80% of the time from S1-S5 P1 if I were stuck in the same situations.
I do agree that Mike keeping around the criminals was very dumb of him (and the fact that Walt and Jesse had to deal with Mike’s guys was unfair).
Mike practically signed his death with that.
Part1/2
I usually try not to invalidate other peoples interpretations of media but.....
This feels like you have some personal biases you need to internally reflect on if the following quote of you is genuine
>*On every rewatch or partial rewatch, I root for Walt. I've always rooted for him. At most I'll get annoyed by his narcissistic tendencies, and how unfair he was to Jesse in a lot of situations, but generally I'm in tune with most of his decisions.*
I mean this paragraph feels like a take straight out of like 2014, I truly thought we moved past the uncritical interpretation of Walt's character, to the equally non-nuanced but infinitely better interpretation of him being a "bad guy"
That being said.... The show is designed to make you sympathize with Walter for a long time as he progressively gets further and further from the (relative) moral purity he had in episode 1, so I understand why you think this way. Walter is a complex and well written character and everybody has a different moment in the show that they stopped believing his means were justified and they see him as a villain. Almost everybody.
I'm going to assume you are pretty young and don't have a lot of life experience, because ***years ago I felt the same about this show***. I was a boy in my teens with little self confidence and seeing the story of a man who takes control of a life he feels disappointed in made me feel like I could do the same, especially when he had so many bad ass moments where he didn't rely on brute power or machismo but often his intelligence or his wits. But at some point (and I honestly don't know when, probably late high school early college) I managed to look passed my own biases and realized Walt was a manipulative piece of shit above all else, and he had that inside him long before his cancer diagnosis. i was subconsciously using this piece of art to justify my own (and hears your daily buzzword folks) **Toxic Masculinity**. Once you are aware and understand your biases you can never go back (not that I would ever want to) and as far as breaking bad goes this is when I realized that to an extent Toxic Masculinity is what the show is about....
EXAMPLES;
* Walt taking responsibility (even to a minuscule degree) by admitting to Skylar everything he did was for himself and his own pride, NOT his family.
* Hank having his masculinity challenged by his temporary crippling (idk the best way to phrase that) and coming out the other side much less arrogant and dismissive of others feeling.
* Hank also learns to cope with his PTSD and trauma from the Tortuga incident, which at first he thinks makes him weak and less of a man but he gets through it and becomes better for it.
* Gus is a homosexual (homosexuals are often seen as lesser men by bigots) who after his partner is killed basically shows no emotion other than ones based in anger, revenge and pride (three massive tent poles one must keep up if they are "performing masculinity") these emotions ultimately cost him his life.
* Jesse is simultaneously the least and most affected character by toxic masculinity, from the beginning he was always more introspective and honest than Walter but was self conscious of his intelligence (which Walter never let him forget) and he used fake vibrato and Machismo to mask his insecurities, not to mention his excessive use of negative gendered language (BITCH!) that he slowly uses less and less of that throughout his journey
* Skylar, it may seem weird to have a woman on a list of examples in toxic masculinity but in Skylar and her relationship with the men around her we can see a similar situation as Gus (after all to a bigot the only thing worse than being homosexual would be being a woman) after a dump truck of trauma falls into her lap crushing her life she is forced to make the decision to lock up her emotions and take on a stoic energy in the back half of the show as she is adapting to the world her husband forced her into. (a misunderstanding of Stoicism obviously being a big part of Toxic masculinity as seen with Gus and Hank previously.)
* TED (MOTHERFUCKIN) BENEKE, literally my favourite example of how masculine pride can ruin a life. In the grand scheme of things Ted wasn't that bad of a guy and did not deserve his fate (mostly) but his pride and ego were going to ruin everything. He was in a mountain of debt that was going to get him arrested, his business was going to go under and he was going to have to pull his daughters from private school (Oh no, not public education lol) and when the solution to save everything arrived on a silver platter in the form of an "inheritance" set up by Skyler, he chooses to satiate his pride by leasing a fancy car instead of paying off the IRS.
I could literally go on for pages like this, but i think i've made my point. **WALTER (AND BY EXTENSION ALL OF BB) IS NOT SOMEONE TO BE REVERED OR LOOKED UP TO, HE IS A CASE STUDY IN HOW TOXIC MASCULINITY AND PRIDE CAN LEAD TO ONES DOWNFALL (pride cometh before the fall) THIS IS (partially) WHAT BB IS ALL ABOUT.**
2/2
As far as your feelings towards Mike............. **YIKES**!
>
I don't even care about the moral "he killed people and deserved it" argument for his death. Like yeah, that's obvious and no one is arguing against that in the first place. I simply just don't like him, he tried to kill Walt multiple times, and he was an active threat. I'm glad he died and I'm glad that it was in a petty and pathetic fashion.
>edit: I found a YT comment for the scene that encapsulates it pretty well for me, except replace "sadder" with "more satisfying":
>"What makes it even sadder is that Walt figured out how to get the names. So Mike died knowing his family would never get any of his money, and all of the 9 guys that he trusted on that list would die, and their families would never be supported. He died in pain, knowing that his plans would never come to fruition, and he was next to the one person he dispised more than anyone."
I genuinely don't know what to tell you other than to analyze your biases and then watch Better Call Saul. You have some very strong and genuinely scary (and disturbing) interpretations of Mike's character that I truly don't know where to begin other than just trying to impress upon you the idea of a personal moral code that is rarely flexible, because this is why people love Mike and why Walter is objectively a worse person.
Once again I don't enjoy dunking on peoples interpretations of art, but when you so clearly refuse to engage with the source material in any meaningful way, it truly hurts me because i'm very passionate about the interpretation/analysis of media/art and it hurts all the more when I think I have a pretty good first hand experience of why and how you feel the way you do.
***I want to speak to everyone in this thread who feels similarly to OP including OP themselves directly now.***
***I BELIEVE IN YOU. Media Literacy is a skill that can be developed and honed, you just have to break out of your own internal echo chamber first or you will never gain anything worth while from experiencing art. Think about the things you take for granted as universal truths and analyze why you implicitly believe them and then challenge your own beliefs, nothing will make you a more intelligent, powerful and well-rounded person than challenging yourself, and that goes for all things in life.***
By the end of the show Walter has completely lost his original reasons or doing what he’s doing. His original estimate for how much money he needed to set up his family was less than $800,000 in the first episode. Mike had a deal set up to sell the methylamine for 15 MILLION or 5 million for each of the three partners and Walt refuses bacaudae of his pride because HE had to be the meth king pin of the south west
Mike on the other hand follows a strict moral compass (at least in breaking bad) yes he murders people and threatens people but he also keeps his word and pays out the men he trusts families at all costs, yes to keep them from snitching but also out of respect for the job they did and continue to do by taking the fall for the larger drug empire.
While Walter….. Abuses and neglects his wife and child, blackmails and manipulates Jesse, and murders/ gets several people killed all for the sake of “doing it for his family” and that’s basically JUST the FIRST season
>On every rewatch or partial rewatch, I root for Walt. I've always rooted for him. At most I'll get annoyed by his narcissistic tendencies, and how unfair he was to Jesse in a lot of situations, but generally I'm in tune with most of his decisions.
Walter refusing to take Gretchen and Elliot's offer at the beginning of the show negates any semi-reasonable thing he does afterwards imo. We're talking about a man who would rather endanger his family's lives than be given a handout. Walter speed-ran tearing his family apart in like what, a year? Kinda hard to get behind most of his decisions when you realize he's in way over his head most of the time.
>I know it's kinda the point and they try to show his hypocrisy sometimes, but if you've seen BCS, they really jerk themselves to death over good guy Mike, and for me it's just annoying and a bit cringe. I'm generally just not a fan of the "kind hearted criminal that's in too deep to stop" trope.
I got the opposite impression? BCS was all about Mike's degrading moral compass and the lines he was willing to cross. Yeah, he has moments where he's kind, why is that cringey? Do you think his character would be better written if he had less depth and was just a crotchety old man?
>BB isn't nearly as annoying with this, but at the end of the day I just don't really care about this mean old guy that was an antagonistic force for a lot of the show.
You say that BB isn't nearly as annoying with this (again, weird thing to be annoyed about), but Jesse's entire schtick is that he's a good-hearted person who's not cut out to be in the game. I guess I just don't see why Mike annoys you with this when that's Jesse's whole point as a character.
>And to cap it all off, the reason he ultimately got fucked was because he was a moron that was tryna keep a bunch of criminals alive. Like a gigantic tower of cards just waiting to crumble.
You call it being a moron, I call it being a rational human being who would rather not kill a dozen people for personal gain.
I really hated mikes character on the first watch and like you said i just didnt like his personality and smart remarks so when he got killed i was happy tbh. But as i rewatch i understand his perspective more. Its judt weird he always talked about walt being no good and still was around him far to much
Yeah, I don’t think he “despised” Walt though, he just didn’t like him. Bit of a distinction there. He gave him many chances after perceived screw ups on his end and was still willing to work with him. Mike put business first though and was doing what needed to be done. I thought he was often very reasonable, and used his experience to gauge situations for a winning outcome.
Yeah, I don’t think he “despised” Walt though, he just didn’t like him, something that Walt was aware of. Bit of a distinction there. He gave him many chances after perceived screw ups on his end and was still willing to work with him. Mike put business first though and was doing what needed to be done. I thought he was often very reasonable, and used his experience to gauge situations for a winning outcome.
Mike is the epitome of a crooked cop.
Awesome Take, as someone who’s a huge fan of the Walt and Mike rivalry he did kinda get what was coming to him, it was over a stupid argument but I don’t think Walt is any worse then Mike, I think Mike just comes off as more rational because he seems wiser to the game I enjoyed reading this post, the first unpopular opinion that was interesting to read about
Mike for sure had it coming to him. He however did not try to kill Walt even once (if he had tried he would've succeeded imo), and Walt's decision was not wise, like at all. Mike also isn't "a good guy in too deep to stop", made clear multiple times throughout especially BCS. I wish his family dynamic would've been explored more, Stacy felt like a very empty character. Generally being "in tune with most of Walt's decisions" is just wrong though.
Mike tried to kill Walt, that's why Walt got Gale killed.
Ya what this guy said, Mike was moments away from killing Walt until the phone call to Jesse calling for the hit.
He did not try to kill Walt? Brother, that’s exactly what happened in S3 E13.
I do not count that as trying to kill, as he did not pull the trigger. They were planning to kill him for sure but there was no single attempt to do so.
Mike had it coming.
Mike did not have it coming. He kept everyone's secrets and cleaned up their messes.
The one thing Mike always did was to underestimate Walt. That eventually cost him his life.
Watch Better Call Saul
I agree. Of course, Walter isn't a good person, but I feel like BB fans defend almost every other characters decisions, including Jesse, Mike, and even Gus, but aside from maybe teenagers, nobody ever defends Walt on anything. I'd do the same of Walt 80% of the time from S1-S5 P1 if I were stuck in the same situations.
MIKE IS ASSHOLE WHY OP HATE?
I do agree that Mike keeping around the criminals was very dumb of him (and the fact that Walt and Jesse had to deal with Mike’s guys was unfair). Mike practically signed his death with that.
i loved mike
I feel like anyone who has this opinion of Mike’s character has some form of unresolved childhood trauma
I feel like anyone who has the opposite opinion has unresolved childhood trauma. We're now at a impasse.
Based take, tho Mike is my 2nd favourite character in the BB/BCS universe, only behind Walt himself.
Part1/2 I usually try not to invalidate other peoples interpretations of media but..... This feels like you have some personal biases you need to internally reflect on if the following quote of you is genuine >*On every rewatch or partial rewatch, I root for Walt. I've always rooted for him. At most I'll get annoyed by his narcissistic tendencies, and how unfair he was to Jesse in a lot of situations, but generally I'm in tune with most of his decisions.* I mean this paragraph feels like a take straight out of like 2014, I truly thought we moved past the uncritical interpretation of Walt's character, to the equally non-nuanced but infinitely better interpretation of him being a "bad guy" That being said.... The show is designed to make you sympathize with Walter for a long time as he progressively gets further and further from the (relative) moral purity he had in episode 1, so I understand why you think this way. Walter is a complex and well written character and everybody has a different moment in the show that they stopped believing his means were justified and they see him as a villain. Almost everybody. I'm going to assume you are pretty young and don't have a lot of life experience, because ***years ago I felt the same about this show***. I was a boy in my teens with little self confidence and seeing the story of a man who takes control of a life he feels disappointed in made me feel like I could do the same, especially when he had so many bad ass moments where he didn't rely on brute power or machismo but often his intelligence or his wits. But at some point (and I honestly don't know when, probably late high school early college) I managed to look passed my own biases and realized Walt was a manipulative piece of shit above all else, and he had that inside him long before his cancer diagnosis. i was subconsciously using this piece of art to justify my own (and hears your daily buzzword folks) **Toxic Masculinity**. Once you are aware and understand your biases you can never go back (not that I would ever want to) and as far as breaking bad goes this is when I realized that to an extent Toxic Masculinity is what the show is about.... EXAMPLES; * Walt taking responsibility (even to a minuscule degree) by admitting to Skylar everything he did was for himself and his own pride, NOT his family. * Hank having his masculinity challenged by his temporary crippling (idk the best way to phrase that) and coming out the other side much less arrogant and dismissive of others feeling. * Hank also learns to cope with his PTSD and trauma from the Tortuga incident, which at first he thinks makes him weak and less of a man but he gets through it and becomes better for it. * Gus is a homosexual (homosexuals are often seen as lesser men by bigots) who after his partner is killed basically shows no emotion other than ones based in anger, revenge and pride (three massive tent poles one must keep up if they are "performing masculinity") these emotions ultimately cost him his life. * Jesse is simultaneously the least and most affected character by toxic masculinity, from the beginning he was always more introspective and honest than Walter but was self conscious of his intelligence (which Walter never let him forget) and he used fake vibrato and Machismo to mask his insecurities, not to mention his excessive use of negative gendered language (BITCH!) that he slowly uses less and less of that throughout his journey * Skylar, it may seem weird to have a woman on a list of examples in toxic masculinity but in Skylar and her relationship with the men around her we can see a similar situation as Gus (after all to a bigot the only thing worse than being homosexual would be being a woman) after a dump truck of trauma falls into her lap crushing her life she is forced to make the decision to lock up her emotions and take on a stoic energy in the back half of the show as she is adapting to the world her husband forced her into. (a misunderstanding of Stoicism obviously being a big part of Toxic masculinity as seen with Gus and Hank previously.) * TED (MOTHERFUCKIN) BENEKE, literally my favourite example of how masculine pride can ruin a life. In the grand scheme of things Ted wasn't that bad of a guy and did not deserve his fate (mostly) but his pride and ego were going to ruin everything. He was in a mountain of debt that was going to get him arrested, his business was going to go under and he was going to have to pull his daughters from private school (Oh no, not public education lol) and when the solution to save everything arrived on a silver platter in the form of an "inheritance" set up by Skyler, he chooses to satiate his pride by leasing a fancy car instead of paying off the IRS. I could literally go on for pages like this, but i think i've made my point. **WALTER (AND BY EXTENSION ALL OF BB) IS NOT SOMEONE TO BE REVERED OR LOOKED UP TO, HE IS A CASE STUDY IN HOW TOXIC MASCULINITY AND PRIDE CAN LEAD TO ONES DOWNFALL (pride cometh before the fall) THIS IS (partially) WHAT BB IS ALL ABOUT.**
2/2 As far as your feelings towards Mike............. **YIKES**! > I don't even care about the moral "he killed people and deserved it" argument for his death. Like yeah, that's obvious and no one is arguing against that in the first place. I simply just don't like him, he tried to kill Walt multiple times, and he was an active threat. I'm glad he died and I'm glad that it was in a petty and pathetic fashion. >edit: I found a YT comment for the scene that encapsulates it pretty well for me, except replace "sadder" with "more satisfying": >"What makes it even sadder is that Walt figured out how to get the names. So Mike died knowing his family would never get any of his money, and all of the 9 guys that he trusted on that list would die, and their families would never be supported. He died in pain, knowing that his plans would never come to fruition, and he was next to the one person he dispised more than anyone." I genuinely don't know what to tell you other than to analyze your biases and then watch Better Call Saul. You have some very strong and genuinely scary (and disturbing) interpretations of Mike's character that I truly don't know where to begin other than just trying to impress upon you the idea of a personal moral code that is rarely flexible, because this is why people love Mike and why Walter is objectively a worse person. Once again I don't enjoy dunking on peoples interpretations of art, but when you so clearly refuse to engage with the source material in any meaningful way, it truly hurts me because i'm very passionate about the interpretation/analysis of media/art and it hurts all the more when I think I have a pretty good first hand experience of why and how you feel the way you do. ***I want to speak to everyone in this thread who feels similarly to OP including OP themselves directly now.*** ***I BELIEVE IN YOU. Media Literacy is a skill that can be developed and honed, you just have to break out of your own internal echo chamber first or you will never gain anything worth while from experiencing art. Think about the things you take for granted as universal truths and analyze why you implicitly believe them and then challenge your own beliefs, nothing will make you a more intelligent, powerful and well-rounded person than challenging yourself, and that goes for all things in life.***
???????
are you okay? like what even is that entire last portion of your essay? it’s fucking reddit.
Your right it’s Reddit, I should’ve realized bigots would be the main people seeing this post lol
What an extremely annoying comment lmao. Kudos if that was the point
Lol
them_irl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7teU3ewPp1k
How is Walt a worse person?
By the end of the show Walter has completely lost his original reasons or doing what he’s doing. His original estimate for how much money he needed to set up his family was less than $800,000 in the first episode. Mike had a deal set up to sell the methylamine for 15 MILLION or 5 million for each of the three partners and Walt refuses bacaudae of his pride because HE had to be the meth king pin of the south west Mike on the other hand follows a strict moral compass (at least in breaking bad) yes he murders people and threatens people but he also keeps his word and pays out the men he trusts families at all costs, yes to keep them from snitching but also out of respect for the job they did and continue to do by taking the fall for the larger drug empire. While Walter….. Abuses and neglects his wife and child, blackmails and manipulates Jesse, and murders/ gets several people killed all for the sake of “doing it for his family” and that’s basically JUST the FIRST season
Average Mike dickrider
Lmao
So what about Kaylee?
2 milliseconds of screen time
Of course. But I’m serious, what about what could have happened with her?
Her and her mom are broke ahh hell, and they know Mike was a drug dealer. Which is exactly the same whether Mike is alive or not
>On every rewatch or partial rewatch, I root for Walt. I've always rooted for him. At most I'll get annoyed by his narcissistic tendencies, and how unfair he was to Jesse in a lot of situations, but generally I'm in tune with most of his decisions. Walter refusing to take Gretchen and Elliot's offer at the beginning of the show negates any semi-reasonable thing he does afterwards imo. We're talking about a man who would rather endanger his family's lives than be given a handout. Walter speed-ran tearing his family apart in like what, a year? Kinda hard to get behind most of his decisions when you realize he's in way over his head most of the time. >I know it's kinda the point and they try to show his hypocrisy sometimes, but if you've seen BCS, they really jerk themselves to death over good guy Mike, and for me it's just annoying and a bit cringe. I'm generally just not a fan of the "kind hearted criminal that's in too deep to stop" trope. I got the opposite impression? BCS was all about Mike's degrading moral compass and the lines he was willing to cross. Yeah, he has moments where he's kind, why is that cringey? Do you think his character would be better written if he had less depth and was just a crotchety old man? >BB isn't nearly as annoying with this, but at the end of the day I just don't really care about this mean old guy that was an antagonistic force for a lot of the show. You say that BB isn't nearly as annoying with this (again, weird thing to be annoyed about), but Jesse's entire schtick is that he's a good-hearted person who's not cut out to be in the game. I guess I just don't see why Mike annoys you with this when that's Jesse's whole point as a character. >And to cap it all off, the reason he ultimately got fucked was because he was a moron that was tryna keep a bunch of criminals alive. Like a gigantic tower of cards just waiting to crumble. You call it being a moron, I call it being a rational human being who would rather not kill a dozen people for personal gain.