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[lala-blahblah]

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[bettsfic]

I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on breaking bad if you feel like sharing!! You're done with it, right?

oh my god thank you for asking. you have no idea how much i want to talk about this show but i’m running in a decade late with starbucks and feel weird just cold posting about it. i just finished the whole series and i watched el camino twice, and i’ve also been catching up on bts stuff and digging through a bit of the meta commentary of the time. i haven’t started BCS but i plan to soon.

first off, when i started watching the show, i realized i actually had seen a bit of it. it turns out i saw the first 3 seasons back in 2011, but it was shortly after my dad had died of cancer, and my boyfriend insisted on watching it. i remember telling him that it made me uncomfortable because it was too close to home. my dad had cancer for 4 years, and mom was going through bankruptcy because of all the medical bills. my boyfriend didn’t care. he made me keep watching, and i guess we broke up before we got to s4. or maybe there were only 3 seasons out at the time. either way, i set it down in 2011 and vowed not to watch it. 

then a month or so ago, i finished westworld 3, got obsessed with aaron paul, and decided to give brba another go.

(this gets personal. so putting the rest under a cut!)

so s1 and 2 are solidly okay. the show seemed like it was finding its feet and didn’t know what it wanted to be, a comedy or a tragedy, but i know that feeling and sometimes i really like when stories toe that divide, so i didn’t mind. s1 and 2, i was mostly marveling over how utterly beautiful aaron paul is. my god.

s3 has some major pacing issues (monologues! so many monologues!!), but the show starts to really come into itself and figure out What It Is. i skipped over a lot of stuff after reading wiki summaries, mostly that just seemed like suffer porn and which i knew would dwell a lot in discomfort. then we get to the episode where jesse monologues at walt about how walt ruined his life, and i was just sobbing. i don’t think a tv show has ever made me cry like that. i was ruined.

even if the writing of those seasons isn’t the best, the direction and performances are some of the best i’ve ever seen in television. aaron paul and bryan cranston could read a phonebook at each other and make it compelling.

the entire time, i just wanted jesse and walt to get on each other’s sides and work together. i was in it for the loyalty kink. i had no idea there would be so much angst, and i was veering toward the point of giving up. but i was assured repeatedly by friends that it would get better.

and it did. walt saves jesse. walt fights for jesse. jesse fights for walt. THEY WORK TOGETHER. and more importantly, their relationship starts to get so fucked up, so codependent, so toxic. and not in the way shows usually portray fucked-up relationships, like totally oblivious to its own toxicity. this show leans in. it seems to know the entire time exactly the psychological connotations its evoking, and it does it intentionally. and i really value it for that. 

s4 is where the show went from “pretty good” to “holy shit.” i’ve never seen a more accurate and clear portrayal of a narcissist. my triggers are many, varied, and wildly inconsistent, but i was in a state of being mildly triggered for days, and i really appreciated that feeling, that a story could push me that far and make me reflect as deeply as it did. i tend to go wild over anything that can make me feel something, even if it’s bad. most stuff i read and watch just kind of numbs and distracts me. this show wasn’t an escape so much as an assault. and i loved it for that.

my dad was a narcissist, and every interaction between jesse and walt or skyler and walt brought up a thousand memories of things my dad said and did. at one point, when walt is really at his worst, i think around skyler telling him she’s waiting for his cancer to come back, i remember thinking, “if walt were a little bit meaner, he would be just like my dad.”

and oh boy, that thought fucked me up. my dad was worse than the most believably evil character in the history of television. i got diagnosed with ptsd in 2017 and have spent these past 3 years more or less fighting that diagnosis, thinking, “it wasn’t that bad!” because my dad wasn’t physically violent. at least not frequently. and i’ve never been able to articulate what exactly my dad did that was so bad, or how insidious his behavior was. he didn’t cook meth obviously, but he had that false disenfranchisement attitude, that resentfulness that walt has toward his family for taking his greatness from him, that regret at not being more than he was. 

but seeing my dad’s behavior playing out on screen, not just accurately but calling it out for exactly as fucked up and toxic as it was -- and how it affects, destroys, all the other characters -- it may have been hard to watch, but i’ve never felt so validated. i finally feel like i’m not faking it anymore or making it up or being dramatic. or, as my dad liked to say, “too sensitive.” i’ve only ever been able to write about my dad in sections, put pieces of him in different characters, because to put him fully into anything, fiction or non, feels like it would completely eject a reader from the story. brba showed me there’s a way to do it, and now i feel inspired to maybe tell that story finally. 

so i’m intensely grateful to vince gilligan for making a believable, empathetic (not sympathetic) narcissist, and writing his long and steady decline into evil. on a storytelling level, it was extremely satisfying to watch, because most writers don’t have the patience to stick with evil characters, or really get into their psychology. on a personal level, i feel like i’ve worked through a lot of stuff while watching it, and i feel like a major weight has been lifted. 

a lot of mass media is made by people who are just taking jobs and don’t really care about what they’re doing. it’s clear that everyone involved is just looking for a paycheck. but i got the sense the entire time i was watching brba that everyone really loved and believed in what they were doing. there was a carefulness to the story and a sensitivity in it that kept me glued the entire time. 

and i won’t even get started with el camino because that’s a whole different rant, involving how in absolute awe i am of aaron paul, but i loved it so so much, and i’m 10k into a post-EC fic that i’m hoping to post in a week or so. (unrelated but i just watched a table reading of a s5 brba episode and aaron paul just WRECKS himself during it. everyone else is kind of panning their lines, but he’s just sitting there SOBBING. i’m glad he won the emmys he deserved for his performance. if anyone wants to come talk to me about aaron paul, i am HERE)

we’ll see how i feel in a year, but as of right now, brba in my top 5 favorite (drama) shows of all time. it’s really rare that i both 1) think show/book/movie is extremely good and 2) get obsessed enough to write fic about it. usually i only write fic about stuff that has unmet potential, and i feel compelled to fix it or use the characters for something else. but in the case of brba, i’m more interested in expansion and homage.

anyway i’m probably going to watch el camino again tonight. happy to take more asks about brba!