#sympathizing with jesse and skyler is HUMAN so it does actually disturb me when people twist canon to make them out be the true villains

[pinkmandias]

i was sifting through a bunch of jesse hate (for an edit not bc i’m obsessed😭) and the gist of what i got was just. a willful misunderstanding of his character, his trauma, and his naivety/innocence in regards to his age/the power imbalance present within his relationship with walt and like. almost everyone else on the show.

obviously all of the people that loathe him and have paragraphs upon paragraphs of misinterpretations & simplifications of his arc to spew online are all people that love & identify with walter (surprise surprise), but i feel like it’s also so very reminiscent of the shit i noticed these last two years with certain media where a large portion of audience is both too stupid to recognize nuances present in writing & leans heavily on their confirmation bias.

and on that note, what was not shocking to me was how many of these complaints could be boiled down to him getting in walt’s way, making things more difficult for walt, or subverting walt’s authority. it’s incredibly similar to the hatred for skyler that has only recently begun to taper off (or at least take different forms or been redirected to other characters - like jane). jesse shares significantly more similarities with female characters in brba than any male character, and i think it’s only because he is not a woman (whereas skyler is) that jesse hate was not more prevalent while the show was airing/i see more of it now than ever.

jesse is a pussy, he’s a little bitch, he’s weak, he cries too much - because it’s not “manly” for him to feel remorse and to be destroyed by guilt. when he self destructs it’s selfish and when he lashes out he’s ungrateful. never mind the fact that he has been through more than enough to deeply traumatize even the most well adjusted individual by s3, much less at the end of his captivity by s5. with no one to turn to, no one to talk to, no one to comfort him. he’s neglected time and time again by the man who, from the very beginning, violated & disrespected his boundaries, his belongings, his personal life, his home, his time & has (both intentionally and unintentionally) methodically chipped away at any meaningful relationship jesse had or could have & left him with nothing but Him, nurturing a deadly codependency. he has at least two members of walt’s family being projected onto him as well as the role of a student & business partner. perfect obedience & perfect fulfillment of these roles is expected, but not praised.

would you not also be a little bitchy sometimes? do impulsive & risky things to gain attention or love or some semblance of power in your otherwise powerless life? would you not fall prey to fleeting affection given by a dying man (with the same sickness as your late aunt that you shared a home with and loved so dearly that you spent her remaining time on this earth by her side, taking care of her) when that affection is so heady? when you have nothing and no one else??

it always circles back around to “he knew what he was getting into”, “he deserved xyz”, “he could have stopped at any time”, and “why didn’t he just leave” - just like with skyler. i don’t think i have to explain why those comments are so disturbing & i don’t think it’s difficult at all to understand why he cries or bitches so much…

anyway, i’ll conclude this post with these quotes because i think it says a lot that the only character vince remembers the audience hating so much is skyler -