#my brain is going: the thoughts are there the articulation is coming out as bzzzzz

[septembersghost]

literally there are dudebros that r like Kim doesn't actually love him she's gonna con him she's actually evil etc and its soooo low-key misogynistic its like can't imagine a woman being nuanced in any way. but also its so obvious they complete each other

they've been like this for years, but they were usually silenced quickly before - recent events have sadly given them the excuse to double down on their heinous misogyny with less push back. these guys have been swearing for years that she was playing him - at the very least since S4 (and chuck's letter), but it began even more in earnest at, "maybe we get married," which for some reason made a whole host of them decide they hated her and she must be conning him, instead of understanding literally anything about the context of that scene. as if getting married didn't cause their bond to blossom even further. it's like they refuse to believe women are anything other than conniving harpies. :|

i was telling a friend about this, but it's legitimately horrifying to me that they're also rushing to unrestrained glee at not only the thought of her being violently murdered now (too bad for them, i fully believe this isn't going to happen), and additionally wishing cartel s*x slave/assault on her, as if this show would ever do such a thing, there's not even a TRACE of that threat in this narrative and they're foaming at the mouth wishing it on her as "punishment," as if she 1. pulled the trigger herself (she very much did not), or 2. as if that's a perfectly reasonable thing to hope a woman has to endure to bring her low in ANY circumstance. it's disgusting and it speaks to the way their minds work and how little they value women generally, tbh at a certain point that level of misogyny is so sick that it ripples far beyond fiction. they live like this? they see the world like this? despicable. i had to completely tap out of the subreddit because the comments i was seeing were too upsetting. /rant

she is a complicated, nuanced, insular woman. she always has been. this show has been a masterclass in how to communicate things with stillness, or minute movements that accumulate to far more. they've trusted us to spend enough time with her that we empathize and understand who she is as a person. she keeps herself tightly contained, so we see her measuring moments, being cautious with circumstances, but then when she lets that break open, we also see the complexity of her intellect, her emotions, and her fierce belief system - a system which includes jimmy. her moral compass being something that shifts seems to confuse some of them into thinking it means she's ~wicked~ rather than realizing WHY that shift has taken place. even her devotion to justice - it's very much something she uses to frame her world, but her sense of it changes as time goes on, and she experiences more, and gets more angry and frustrated at the broken aspects of the system. kim "breaking bad" is fueled by a sense of injustice mixed with hubris mixed with an almost fanciful quality. jimmy is capricious, but with kim to me it's almost like she's rational to the point of tipping into sophistry. she wanted to be atticus finch. she wants to improve the world, she wants people who aren't afforded fairness, who aren't heard, to be treated better, and if this means she has to make some sneaky moves and damage a few reputations and defy these men with privilege and power who keep the system unbalanced, doesn't she have the right to do it? we know it's illogical and ultimately even immoral, but she kept thinking the ends justified the means. after all, if they get the settlement faster, that means she can do good with it, right? they never foresaw it being blood money, which of course ruins everything. the hand of fate here isn't like...it's not coming down on the side of who is Good and who is Evil, which is why i wrote the post about EVERYONE in the entire story being to blame for this falling out the way it did. the repercussions are a reminder that even when we desperately want to, we can't take justice into our own hands.

the very quick turn to buy into howard's, "you're soulless, you're sociopaths" rant is an utter lack of nuance or understanding - they've been lying in wait for the chance to tear kim apart and they believe this handed it to them, and i do not in any way blame schauz or the rest of the writers' room for it, any more than i blame them for the way a much too large percentage of this same audience reacted to skyler back in the day. that damning judgment is not the intent of the storytelling imho, but the rot of the misogyny takes hold. we know that it isn't true. she isn't "evil." she hasn't been "psychopathic from the beginning" (lmao what? they're wholesale rewriting canon now, along with "howard never did anything wrong." he definitely did a number of things wrong, and acknowledging that isn't saying that what happened to him was justified). we have these small glimpses of her life and upbringing - an unreliable mother, an unstable home, her desire to achieve and accomplish things, her reaching for more - we know precisely why she and jimmy connect, and why their experiences of the world end up informing one another. we know why she defends him so fiercely. we know how deeply she loves him, and he her (but notice they don't question his love for her). i feel as though a lot of the comments convinced she's somehow playing a long con on him don't understand what this form of love and intimacy look like? it isn't spelled out for us in simple terms, it exists in their actions, gestures, even subtextually, but there's a startling, lovely realism about it that i personally find gorgeous and refreshing to watch, because we rarely see relationships depicted in this way. i don't know what more they needed than the beginning and end of bad choice road, which in and of itself speaks more volumes than some fictional couples ever do. it's such a genuine connection and it has always been portrayed that way.

they are very intentionally two parts of a whole. (whatever our souls are made of! i will keep saying it!) like you said, it's obvious they complete each other, they have from the start. where that eventually ends is difficult to say - violent delights or lovers meeting - but this has absolutely been a story about how these two people are united, and restorative and destructive, in one another.