#mostly i'm just salty that her villain arc in season 6 was cut short

[thekimspoblog]

I mean I guess I'd have to see the post this is in response to to know what you're talking about, but I dunno man. Yes, it's not entirely rational to complain that Kim is underexplored, when really most of that is just a symptom of her being a supporting character. But I think what people are reacting to is how socially isolated Kim is. Yes, BCS wrote one interesting female character, but it utterly fails the Bechdel test. Kim's only relationships outside of Jimmy are to Howard and Chuck, and while Kim's adversarial feelings towards these two definitely have roots in something beyond Jimmy, that is usually what they're shown arguing about. Skyler at least had Marie to talk to. #KimWexlerHasNoFriends

It's not that Kim was "written by men", but the drum I have no intention to stop banging anytime soon, is that Kim was written backwards from the stance of "Fans sent the actors death threats because Skyler was too combative against Walt. How can we avoid a repeat of that?". This was probably the most interesting they possibly could have taken the idea of a love interest who was more on-board with criminality, but at the end of the day she does just have a bit of a Pick-Me aftertaste. A cool girl. There are limits to how mad she was allowed to get at Jimmy or why, and you can feel that especially in the later seasons.

sometimes critiques of kim wexler as a character are frustrating because they are written by people who loved breaking bad and better call saul but didn’t actually pay that much attention to her arc, her dialogue, her backstory, or her anything, really. kim is a reserved and intense person to a fault; to understand her reactions to the events around her you need to actually pay attention to her as a character (which isn’t actually that hard, it’s television not rocket science) and you need to take notice of what she’s doing even when she’s not saying anything. it’s always very funny to me when people make assertions that there’s something un-feminist (not to say her character IS feminist, because i don’t think most media in general is “feminist” even when the women are well-written) about her arc or her role in bcs that basically amounts to them telling on themselves. they just didn’t pay attention to her and didn’t bother to look at her character or her motivations seriously. and it’s crazy to me that these people will come online and critique kim’s character while not remembering half of the scenes she was in alone or the nuances of her solo sub-plots.

another good example of this type of off-base critique is when people claim she only exists in relation to jimmy, the main character. because when chuck’s arc revolves around jimmy that’s normal, right, since jimmy is the titular character? but when kim’s arc purportedly revolves around jimmy (it really doesn’t, but we’re talking about people who straight up didn’t pay attention to kim’s scenes) it’s suddenly bad writing or not feminist or kim is a shallow character in a show where no main character is shallow.

ultimately kim acts as an unusual litmus test for whether or not people understand what actually makes female characters poorly written and flat, and what actually makes their relationships with men a disservice to their character vs. a component of their own arc. if YOU think kim has nothing going on outside of her relationship w jimmy all that tells me is you didn’t watch the show carefully enough or you simply checked out during most of her scenes. and that is well and truly on you!