There’s a lot I’ll miss now that Breaking Bad is over. I’ll miss Jesse’s boyish swearing, Hank’s percussive heh-heh laugh, Marie’s purple everything, baby Holly’s hats. My confusion over how hot I find Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman. The entire cast’s virtuosic performances, the script’s brilliance, the colors and clear blue brutality of the show’s New Mexican backdrop. Hell, I’ll even miss the vague feeling of mounting existential dread I feel as 9 pm approaches on Sundays. Here’s something I won’t miss, though: angry little men who hate Skyler White.
First, people hated Skyler White because she threatened to ruin Walter White’s burgeoning meth empire. Then people hated Skyler White because she stood up for herself and left her husband. But even after Skyler White gave “bad fans” what they ostensibly wanted and surrendered to her husband’s metastatic ego, anti-Skyler sentiment persisted.
Skyler’s not TV’s first female punching bag for jerks, and she won’t be the last. But the vitriol directed at her — and, creepily, at Anna Gunn, who is a person who was paid to pretend to be Skyler White and isn’t actual Skyler White — was so intense that it moved Gunn to write an op-ed in the New York Times last month. Skyler became the proxy for unfulfilled manchildren and their unresolved hatred for their own mothers or sisters or ex girlfriends or pretty classmates who wouldn’t fuck them, like Betty Draper or Carmella Soprano or every woman on The Walking Dead. Skyler hate even persists through the show’s laborious attempt to bash its viewers over the head with her blamelessness.
Here’s a good example of anti-Skyler man-hysterics, from some douchebag’s blog a few weeks ago (not linking to it; if you want to find him, google a line of text). Is Sykyler White a cunt? asks the blog’s author. (SPOILER ALERT: Yes!) But she’s not a very realistic cunt.
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