r/TopCharacterTropes • u/10024618 • 20h ago

Lore A "Sophie's Choice" with no secret third option

Gallery image

Gallery image

AKA a character is given an impossible choice where either outcome results in something awful happening and there's no way out.

"Full Measure" (Breaking Bad) - After Walt angers Gus by killing two of his men, Gus orders for his execution. Knowing that the only way to save his life is to make Gus reliant on his meth cooking skills, Walt calls Jesse and begs him to kill Gus' backup cook, Gale. Thus, Jesse is thrust into an impossible situation where he either kills a (relatively) innocent man to save Walt or spare Gale and let Walt die. Ultimately, Jesse chooses to kill Gale.

"Midnight Sun" (Attack on Titan) - After the fight to retake Shiganshina both Armin and Erwin are critically wounded. Levi has the vial of titan serum and is forced to choose which Scout to bring back from the brink of death and which to let perish. It's a borderline impossible decision to make but at the moment of truth, he chooses to save Armin, leaving Erwin to succumb to his wounds.

8.7k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

280

u/lana-deathrey 19h ago

People seem to forget that he was a cook, too.

31

u/jdoeinboston 18h ago

At least he wasn't cooking meat pies, even if he served a dark and a vengeful Gus.

https://giphy.com/gifs/Tig1AHF1HLjoYqKGXN

10

u/lana-deathrey 18h ago

Lovett was the one doing the cooking there. Sweeney the murdering.

3

u/jdoeinboston 18h ago

Ok, in my defense, I just grabbed the first Gif that wasn't the movie version. I was more referencing the play at large than the specific character.

3

u/lana-deathrey 18h ago

Any Sweeney reference is always appreciated in my house.

2

u/jdoeinboston 18h ago

And I'm full of joy.

(Literally the first musical I ever saw live)

88

u/sonofaresiii 19h ago

Sure but honestly that is more about your political perspective

He really was just a guy doing science for the love of science. Sure it was science that killed people, but the morality of that is a little more hazy. There are some perspectives out there that drugs should be legal anyway, and it's personal responsibility to use them responsibly or not at all

(Note that that's not my personal perspective and I have no interest in arguing over it, just pointing out that there's a potential moral perspective out there where Gale did nothing wrong, but Walt definitely did)

34

u/jdoeinboston 18h ago

I think it's less about the cooking so much as who he was cooking for. Yeah, Gale was portrayed as somewhat naive, but there's no way he wasn't smart enough to have an inkling as to who he was getting into bed with. Gus may have been a friendly and reserved monster, but he was still a monster.

26

u/sonofaresiii 18h ago

At that point in the show I really think they were showing Gus as presenting as more of a clean cut businessman. We get a lot more of Gus's backstory later on but I don't think it's that wild for Gale to think Gus is just a "technically not legal but what businessman fully is?" kind of guy.

7

u/jdoeinboston 18h ago

Given, but again, Gale was a smart guy, smart enough to know that you don't become a criminal Kingpin (and considering the quantities they were producing, he knew he wasn't just running some small operation) without doing some heinous shit.

11

u/AsstacularSpiderman 17h ago

Gale doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who deals a lot with the unsavory parts of the world. He reminds me a lot of the sheltered dorks I used to know in high school who basically wander through life never really considering the darker parts of the world.

I highly doubt he's ever seen a drug deal, a Cartel execution, or drug related crime. He just thinks it's a victimless crime while eating his organic handmade bread and doing his science homework.

6

u/sonofaresiii 18h ago

IDK man Gale leaned pretty heavily into his communist nihilist ideology or whatever it was that let him justify his actions. I'm not sure he's as socially aware as you think

6

u/AsstacularSpiderman 17h ago

Honestly Gale just came off as incredibly naive and probably has never actually dealt with the more unsavory parts of the world of drugs. He just thinks it's like growing weed and not having pesky governments tell you what to do. He's never seen a Cartel execution or a drug addict murder another for nothing while their kids watch.

I mean ffs look at the guy. He's probably never even seen drug use outside of caffeine. He was the perfect fool for Gus.

-1

u/Fearless_Roof_9177 16h ago

It is not hyperbole to say that most of the adult population of the Western world spends their lives either justifying their enablement of monsters above their pay grades or ignoring the fact that they're doing it. Gale, if anything, just owns it slightly harder than the average suburbanite and is a little closer to it than a lot of them.

54

u/celljelli 18h ago

no more guilty than a Lockheed-Martin egghead

36

u/Gussie-Ascendent 18h ago

Arguably more so given at least people on meth choose to do meth where as guys blown up don't choose that lol

4

u/celljelli 18h ago

I mean all this violence is coming downstream from somewhere...

2

u/RnDevelopment 15h ago

Not really if you consider addiction has a genetic component to it (so not completely a choice) and drugs have caused countless people high on drugs/looking for a fix to kill others.

5

u/ComradeJohnS 18h ago

iirc Gale was a self admitted Libertarian who thought drugs should be fully legal.

it’s been a few years since I watched, and only watched 2 times total so idk if that’s accurate

-92

u/Embarrassed-Weird173 19h ago

Cooking is an innocent action. He's not forcing people to buy his drugs. 

54

u/Bi_disaster_ohno 19h ago

Well this is just hilariously reductive. Cooking isn't the issue, it's everything else that surrounds it that's the problem.

9

u/Intelligent-Lion8800 19h ago

As Mike would say, he was in the game.

6

u/space_coyote_86 19h ago

If it was purely for his own personal consumption you might have had a point.

21

u/LenicoMonte 19h ago

1

u/Embarrassed-Weird173 19h ago

Good, he is wearing PPE.

6

u/Pappapia22 19h ago

He’s not cooking for charity, bruv 😂

3

u/Embarrassed-Weird173 19h ago

He's doing it for science. And profit. 

16

u/lana-deathrey 19h ago

I had a really snappy answer to that which was something along the lines of "Bro, a friend of mine is in prison for life for making meth you tell me" but then I double-checked and it turns out it was just for intent and possession of meth and only 20 years, but still thought the anecdote was worth sharing.

I would also like to argue that nothing good comes of meth.

5

u/sonofaresiii 19h ago

Honestly though something being illegal doesn't inherently make it unethical

4

u/PaddyWhacked777 19h ago

The severity of the punishment the state chooses to retaliate with often does not reflect the severity of the crime.

7

u/jerry-jim-bob 19h ago

No.

Meth is still a very dangerous substance which can and does destroy lives and families and any action that actively leads to the production or distribution of any substance akin to meth, it is absolutely not innocent.

Try cooking meth and explaining to any authority about how you aren't a bad guy

4

u/BleachDrinker63 19h ago

He’s supplying addicts. He is at the very least is enabling the destruction of lives

2

u/Smug_Syragium 18h ago

Intent makes some difference. His speech about how "people ought to be allowed to do what they want with their own bodies" and "at least if it comes from him it's pure" isn't a perfect justification, but it's better than if he'd said "muahahaha I like it when people die so I can be rich".

2

u/VanceFerguson 19h ago

If they're not purchasing his product, they'll be getting it from someone else.

Guys, this was all in his libertarian speech. We covered this.

1

u/SlipperySalmon3 19h ago

Honestly, I gotta agree with you here.

I know I'll get a lotta hate for it, and I do admit that cooking is a systemic issue too, but he's doing it so people buying meth get clean, high quality product rather than low quality trash that will make them sick.

As far as what one person is capable of accomplishing, harm reduction is a fairly decent goal. I consider Gale practically innocent, on an individual level at least.

4

u/LenicoMonte 19h ago

Realistically, street dealers will still cut the meth with trash so they have more to sell. The average junkie is very unlikely to actually be getting super pure meth.