This take on BB is 100% incorrect and reflects a total misreading of the show. Tony starts out a monster in ep 1. The entire point of BB is watching a monster be created.
âŚexcept that everyone loves the monster the entire time. When the people making these shows claim that they were surprised by how much the audience liked the antihero, it just seems dishonest. We all know that we are cheering for Walt. Nobody cares about the kid on the dirt bike.
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I didnât love him at all, and thought one weakness of the show was in making the anti-hero so hard to empathise with.
Contrast it with Better Call Saul which I think was a far superior series, and youâll see what I mean.
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Thereâs a certain American infatuation with Tough Ruthless Strong Leader Guy that makes a lot of people lean toward viewing Tony as a protagonist or at least an anti-hero. Especially when Sopranos is (I think correctly) viewed as a kind of allegory for American capitalism/social values, it changes what it means for you to root for the âheroâ. Even if you can see clearly that Tony is a terrible person, if you adopt the position of an enthusiastic American capitalist, what actually matters is that he is a winner. You simply cheer for the strongest person to win the contest because thatâs your overriding value system. If people are hurt or even die along the way, well thatâs just all justified by the winning.
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There is no comparison between Walt and Tony regarding intended audience sympathy.
Walt is obviously intended to be far more of a sympathetic tragic character than Tony.
This is why we need a Tony vs. Walt sidequel
Spoiler: they fight for a bit, and then theyâre mates
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Oh?
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Mario Kart is queued up and ready to roll 
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I think thatâs a good analysis. Not sure if I made it clear I was talking about Walt who much of the same applies to, except that theyâre sucked in by the idea of the little nobody trying to buck the system and drugs barons âfor his familyâ and by the end are fist pumping for him as he mercilessly wipes out weaker people in the name of greed and ego.
It takes a lot for me to say this but I had more sympathy for his brother in law lol.
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Could be fun to ask people âat what point did you start to feel bad about Waltâs victories?â
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I think is the wrong way to look at it. Once he decides (correctly) that he needs to scale up in order to make enough money for his break bad to mean anything, it leads fairly inexorably to each next step. Walt gives a speech at the end about âchoices that he stands byâ which I think is VGâs nod that, while Walt made choices, they were highly delimited by the very narrow universe in which he traveled.
Letting Jane die is a great example of VG showing how not black and white apparently obvious moral choices are. Jane is a heroin addict that will probably lead to Jesseâs demise. She is selfish. She is shown to be unreceptive to treatment. She seals her fate by threatening a drug dealer. If Walt was Stringer Bell many of the âtough Americanâ trope crew would be in his corner (so to speak).
If you think Walt is a monster for letting Jane die, youâre missing the point. I didnât think he was ârightâ to let her die; I understood why both he and she made the choices they did.
Brock fully recovering is no accident, either.
e2 similarly meh, also I have no idea wtf is happening. Literally canât follow the plot.
I mean, this just isnt true. She has, what, a 15 month chip when we meet her? Jane is clearly responding well to treatment when we meet her. Jesse ruins her recovery, not vice versa.
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The question asks people to articulate their authentic emotional experience.
I understand if thatâs not interesting to you. Iâm not interested in intellectualizing the conversation independent of the in media res emotional experience.
Iâm getting sad thinking about the scene where she decides to break her sobriety for him. Heartbreaking.
Fair enough.
I felt bad for Walt when he received his diagnosis.
I felt bad for Walt. Jr. when he was bullied at the store.
I felt bad for Jesse when he had to kill Gale.
I canât say when my feelings for Walt changed but it was definitely pretty early in the series. I pretty much always viewed him as a huge pile of shit and didnât really root for him. Probably in the minority though.
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I have no idea what anyone was even saying during the scene with the lady cutting her Trump-style well done steak and shaking the table so hard that sangria was spilling everywhere and Pedro was losing it, but the reactions made it hilarious.
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Lol I finally watched the Mario Kart sketch lmao I want that movie.
Also saw this clip and this is contagious laughter 
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Itâs been a long time since Iâve seen so many SNL members all break in the same sketchâŚit was hilarious
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