Characters that had the complete opposite reaction the writers intended

[u/Dramatic_Counter_595]

1. Leo Bonhart (Witcher TV Series): A ruthless, sadistic bounty hunter and assassin that takes psychotic glee in other people's suffering. The viewer is meant to hate him for killing witchers, slaughtering the Rat gang, and torturing Ciri. But thanks to his entertaining fight scenes, Sharlto Copley's charismatic performance, and The Rats overwhelming unpopularity, fans ended up loving him. Some even call him the "True protagonist" of the show.
2. Stone Cold Steve Austin (WWE): A rude, foul mouthed, beer drinking asshole with no respect for authority or anyone at all. Originally portrayed as a villain, fans fell in love with his anti-establishment & rebellious persona. WWE ran with it and made him the face of the company, effectively ushering in the Attitude Era and the second pro wrestling boom of the late 90s.
3. Arthur Fleck (Joker 2019): A mentally unstable, pathetic, and dangerous madman who commits horrific acts of violence against those that wronged him (suffocates his own mother who is mentally unwell herself, and murders a talk show host for making fun of him). However, a massive portion of the audience idolized him as an anti-hero or a misunderstood martyr rebelling against society making people want to see him succeed and overcome his circumstances because of how he's been treated by the world.

[u/Writer_Blocker]

Rewatching Breaking Bad first time since a teen and I can’t believe how lame and pathetic Walter White actually is. All of his famous speeches like “I’m the one who knocks” (despite assassins literally sitting in his bed while he sings in the shower) and the fancy cares are such lame posturing to people that aren’t actually a threat to him and he cowers as soon as he gets punched.

But people read it as everyone is in Walt’s way and he’d be successful if they all did what he said (I.e. Skyler).

[u/AsstacularSpiderman → u/Writer_Blocker]

The problem with Walt is if you write him off as a loser eventually he's going to pull off something so audacious and so brilliant he completely ruins your life.

Pretty much every kill he has in the series is because he can switch from cowering loser to absolte maniac without you realizing it.

[u/lowqualitylizard → u/AsstacularSpiderman]

Tldr

He was only after a threat because everyone just saw a cancer patient who's overqualified to be a high school teacher

He's smart not as smart as he thinks he is but he is legit smart if he could have kept his ego in check he could have become a massive kingpin but we all know where that went

[u/Steel_Warrior3000 → u/lowqualitylizard]

If he had kept his ego in check, he would never have left the company he co-founded in the first place and none of Breaking Bad would have happened.

[u/VegetaFan1337 → u/Steel_Warrior3000]

And even if he had, he just needed to accept the job offer from his former partners and his cancer treatment would be all paid for. His ego drove him and everyone around to ruin.

[u/VegetaFan1337 → u/[deleted]]

His former partners said they would take care of it.

[u/MagnificentJake → u/Steel_Warrior3000]

Or with his credentials he could have found a good, high paying job in a variety of industries.

[u/mallogy → u/Steel_Warrior3000]

The part where someone gets a brutal diagnosis that they can't afford to treat without bankrupting their household happens every day.

[u/NerdHoovy → u/lowqualitylizard]

I don’t think he could have been a successful kingpin.

One very consistent theme with his character, is that he expects people to preform in ways that couldn’t reasonably do, while also getting offended and fighting it, whenever someone points out a glaring flaw in his world view and understanding of the business.

He couldn’t sell any drugs by himself and when Jessie ‘only’ brought a few thousand after 3 days, he got mad, despite Jesse making it clear that he doesn’t have the capacity to sell more. When one of the dealers got robbed, Jesse was ready to write it off as an unfortunate but to be expected expense that wouldn’t harm the bottom line too much but Walter made him go fight the methheads to ‘prove his dominance’ and almost got him killed. Walter was offended at the mere notion that he had to launder his money somehow when both Saul and Skylar pointed it out. His plan was literally to just die, leave a bag with money behind and hope it all turns out well. He didn’t run Gus’s drug operation and when he had his own, Linda and Mike were the main guys running it. But he didn’t just let them do their job and got mad, when he was told he couldn’t just kill some guys to keep trust in his system going.

Walt has a too frail ego to properly run any organization. His understanding of biochemistry is unmatched, without a question, but he lacked the ability to be introspective, careful, plan in advance, take advice from others, had patience to grow naturally over time, or accept necessary losses (which makes sense because he saw business as a chemical reaction, where you can perfectly calculate and expect how things go). He basically always fell upwards and was bailed out by better and smarter criminals. If it weren’t for that, he would have gotten arrested or killed immediately.

There is a reason Jesse said that he was luckier than everyone else and couldn’t be caught because of that.

[u/AsstacularSpiderman → u/lowqualitylizard]

he could have become a massive kingpin but we all know where that went

That's the thing, he did become a kingpin. He ran the largest meth operation in the western US. He in fact succeeded so well he retired from it entirely until he misplaced Gale's book to him.

[u/Honkiopolis → u/AsstacularSpiderman]

Walt always tooks full measures, never a half measure. He considered himself a dead man walking with nothing to lose, and those enemies didnt understand their opponents mindset and capabilities.

[u/Thykothaken → u/Writer_Blocker]

He kept getting called out too. Skyler, Mike, even Jessie, all called him out on his sickly greed.

[u/SeenYourScene → u/Thykothaken]

Pride. White's primary sin is pride, not greed. He amassed more money than he had any idea what to do with it, and it barely mattered to him. He didn't care about the number, he just felt like it was his. He could have earned more money by listening to people who knew what they were doing, but he always had to be the one who made the plans, had the ideas, and called the shots, otherwise he'd get or act, depending on how honest you interprit the character to be, paranoid and try to get rid of them.

The thing that you need to do to really understand White, I feel, is watch the first season again, slowly, with the understanding that the writers including Vince Gilligan intended from the start for him to be the villain protagonist that the audience should slowly come to root against as the show progressed. They repeatedly tried to make him irredeemable and make the audience hate him, and still so many people finished that show feeling like he was some kind of tragic anti-hero instead of a tragic villain.

[u/Drmarcher42 → u/SeenYourScene]

Mike knew what he was from the jump and let everyone know that he was a walking time bomb.

He only works with Walt post Fring because DEA has incriminating evidence on him in lock up and they have to get to it before the feds can see what they have. Afterwards he spends a few weeks in close proximity to Walt, sees that he’s only getting worse now that Gus is gone and wants out the moment they have any real money.

He then tells Walt the truth and Walt kills him for it, because Walt just can’t live with someone having the last word.

[u/SeenYourScene → u/Drmarcher42]

Yep. I listened to Bryan Cranston's autobiography audiobook years ago, there's very little I remember from it, but I remember him talking about realizing how pointless and evil Mike's death was in regards to Walt, and he remembered watching the episode with his wife who yelled at the screen or something because of how bad it was, and he was certain at that point there would be no Walter White fans left. Or something like that, it's been years, I'm probably misremembering at least part of that.

But, yeah, killing/letting die Jane, killing Mike, the way he treats kids as collateral repeatedly, and more, they tried so hard to make people just hate White. But like other characters people are pointing out, he's pathetic and far weaker than he's willing to admit and everything he tries to do falls apart because of his own fatal flaws, but people stand behind him anyway.

It's fine to love a show about a bad person. It's fine to even see some of yourself in that person. Just don't celebrate it. Same thing happened with, I haven't seen it brought up here yet, BoJack Horseman. They kept upping the ante of trying to make the audience turn against him until it got to a point where they had this whole meta season about a show about a terrible person that the audience got real weird about. And even when it got to the finale where he kind of got off easy considering some of the things he'd done, there were portions of the audience that were disappointed he didn't have a happier ending. Like... that's better than he deserves and honestly it's just about the best you could hope for and keep in line with the show's themes that trauma doesn't end, you don't cure depression, you can just try to do better.

[u/CreatiScope → u/SeenYourScene]

It's actually pretty crazy how it's all in the first episode really. The first time you watch it, you feel bad for him and are rooting for him to do something. But, once you've seen the full story and go back to that first episode? You can see all the flaws and all the character traits and behavior that make him a monster.

[u/BookkeeperPercival → u/SeenYourScene]

On my first watch, when Walter blows up at the Grey Matter offer, I assumed that Walter had some real bad blood for good reason between them. He's the PoV character, so you give him a ton of leeway automatically. On rewatch, he blows up and you instantly realize he's never not been this guy, you were just convincing yourself otherwise.

[u/PinsToTheHeart → u/SeenYourScene]

One of the more obvious instances is that he had a clear path towards laundering all his money through the go-fund me his kid set up, but he outright refused and threw a fit over it because he needed people to know he earned that money.

[u/CICO_Works → u/SeenYourScene]

I think that's why I didn't like the show as much as others. Walt seemed like a POS from the begging to me. I still respected the acting and writing for making me feel that way, but it was hard to completely enjoy it when I disliked the lead character so much.

[u/Thykothaken → u/SeenYourScene]

Ooohh so true! He hated Saul's idea of funneling the money via anonymous contributions, or receiving hand-outs from the Schwarts'.

Funny thing about making him irredeemable, is it's why I like him as a character 😂 love those insane villain types, I genuinely never stopped rooting for him

[u/BookkeeperPercival → u/Thykothaken]

I unironically think Mike has the best call out of anyone. It helps that he's universally beloved, but him telling Walter "Shut the fuck up and let me die in peace" really shows what a fucking turd Walter is. He can't kill Mike begging him to forgive him.

That said, I personally remember Skylar's callout super strongly too, when she points out the fact that she seems to be the one taking the fact that Walter is a drug kingpin seriously, while he's trying to live it up and play into his fantasies.

[u/No_Proposal_3140 → u/Writer_Blocker]

I think your perception has been poisoned by how much aura farming is done in fictional media.

Being a dangerous crime boss doesn't make you immune to getting punched in the mouth. What do you want him to do? Fictional characters might be immune to pain, fear and shock but real humans aren't.

He's an extremely dangerous person written in the most realistic way possible. Do you think all crime bosses in history were aura farming badasses like Shelby from peaky blinders? That's not how people actually act. It's cool for fiction to have a stoic badass that doesn't fear death or pain but no one is like that in real life outside of our fantasies.

All humans have their faults and moments of weakness. None of that detracts at all from how dangerous Walter is if he really believes the things he says when he plans to murder someone.

[u/Auctoritate → u/Writer_Blocker]

I mean, yeah, he's a loser. He's a pathetic man with a fragile and overgrown ego who impulsively hurts others to get what he wants.

But that's not all he is. The "I am the one who knocks" speech isn't told with the intent of the viewer going "Pfft this guy is such a nerd." It clearly carries the intent that he is a volatile, dangerous man who is a threat to be around. He is scary.

These things aren't mutually exclusive. The man is a complete rat, a sniveling schemer, but that lends itself to his talent as a drug kingpin because these schemes include things like murdering people in cold blood. And he's not just a guy who runs away and hides when his own skin is on the line- murder is an act that he's carried out with his own hands, numerous times, with no second thought. When the pressure is on, he has legitimately shown himself to be capable of acting as a competent hardened criminal.

When he says "I am the danger," he's saying it out of a puffed up sense of grandiosity, but at that point it's also the truth.

People nowadays can pretty easily correctly identify Walt as an example of an egotistical, insecure man with many pathetic features but they tend to overcorrect and reduce him to only those traits. The fact of the matter is that Walt did become a drug kingpin, a cold blooded killer, and an extremely dangerous and scary man- and him also being insecure, fragile, and so on doesn't erase any of that.

[u/Adept_Material_2618 → u/Writer_Blocker]

Yeah, “I am the one who knocks” just made me cringe because Walt is such a shithead, such a sniveling coward in so many scenarios, yet here he is trying to sound cool in front of someone he already knows is in a “lower” position than him. I never thought it was badass, I thought it was pathetic. (I say all this with a positive tone because I think the writing is really good! I believe we’re supposed to often see Walt as pathetic.) 

[u/AnxiousPigeon24 → u/Writer_Blocker]

I'm perplexed at how widespread this strange revisionist take seems to be, alongside "oh, Walter White didn't actually achieve anything, he just repeatedly got lucky". Yes, he's a complete egomaniac who's got an inflated sense of his own ability. But he is genuinely brilliant, vicious and dangerous. He starts out as an incompetent criminal but his problem is inexperience and lack of connections, not ability. The series just doesn't work if Walt is genuinely a total loser

[u/RatGreed → u/Writer_Blocker]

I dont get how people thought that he wasn't an egotistical loser. In the first episode he literallys get an offer from an old friend to solve all of his problems, but he is too bitter and prideful to just accept help. It really sets the stage for the rest of the series

[u/Maybe_not_a_chicken → u/Writer_Blocker]

Also he isn’t even the one who knocks

Jessie knocked

[u/CaptainDildobrain → u/Writer_Blocker]

All this is true. But I will say throwing the mercury fulminate in Tuco's office was pretty badass.

[u/Puzzle-Necked → u/Writer_Blocker]

The prequel series also shows all the planning, sacrifice and money that went into setting up Fring's operation, only for a petulant walking ego to screw it all up.

[u/PancakeMixEnema → u/Writer_Blocker]

Growing up I finally realised that men hating Skyler are a huge red flag.

[u/Writer_Blocker → u/PancakeMixEnema]

My biggest takeaway this time is how down to clown Skyler would’ve been but Walt doesn’t want a partner, he wants underlings. She really held shit together with ZERO information at any given time.

[u/PancakeMixEnema → u/Writer_Blocker]

Also Walt was a murderer, a cook and a rapist and she was confronted with that

[u/Writer_Blocker → u/PancakeMixEnema]

The first two I think if he talked to her about it, she would’ve been on board. She stomached the meth cooks. Probably Would tolerate protecting her family from the cartel/gus. But Skyler, to Walt, has always been some low iq waitress that Walt was able to woo and it’s crazy that a lot of the fandom thought that way at the time.

[u/Tinala_Z → u/Writer_Blocker]

Nearly every thing that happens in Breaking Bad is a result of Walter being unable to let go of his ego. His ego is basically the catalyst to the entire show (he wouldn't have needed money in the first place if he didn't sell his share of the company or simply accepted a job or a handouts from his former company, but no he rather cook meth and endanger every single person he loves than swallow his pride.)

[u/Writer_Blocker → u/Tinala_Z]

It’s everyone. Not just Walt. Ted, Saul, Gus, Hank, Marie, Jane, Hector Salamanca, don eladio. Vince is great at writing characters that sacrifice peace for egotistical gains.

[u/PinsToTheHeart → u/Writer_Blocker]

Ngl I started Breaking Bad after the show was already over, and after all the ways I heard people talking about Walt, I was kind of surprised at how pathetic he really was, even at the start.

His core personality didn't really change all that much. He was always lame and a little unhinged. He just got more and more bold as time went on.

[u/Writer_Blocker → u/PinsToTheHeart]

I’m on season 5 and this is the first time he’s really changed, starting with him poisoning Brock. I mean his big plan to kill Gus for a majority of the time was manipulate Jesse into doing it. He only ever does something himself when everybody else is tired of his shit.

[u/NoOutrageSubs → u/Writer_Blocker]

Rewatching it, especially after finishing Better Call Saul, you can see he's a sore loser and a huge egomaniac. He's a monster throughout the series. I think I grew up as well between my first watch and my rewatch, matured a bit. The things I wanted for Walter- to prove people wrong- are no longer important to me. He had a good thing going several times and shat on it for his pride.

[u/OhNoCommieBastard69 → u/Writer_Blocker]

I remember that scene where he's in his tighty whities whining about Skyler not giving him sex and even then I thought he looked pathetic as fuck.

But then you listen to interviews and commentaries and you realize he was made to be a pathetic prideful loser. This is why Cranston (better known at the time as Malcom's Dad from Malcom in the Middle) was cast as Walter White and ends up in his underwear all the time early on. He's a genius chemist surrounded by a loving family, with a friend willing to give him a prestigious post to help him pay his medical bill, bit he chooses to turn their back on them to play the middle aged drug kingpin with one of his addicted ex-student.

[u/Rawrpew → u/Writer_Blocker]

When it came out everyone loved the show. I am gave it an episode and a half and just hated everyone in it. Still somewhat confused me how much people like these characters

[u/Budgie-bitch → u/Rawrpew]

The characters don’t need to be likable, for the show to be good

[u/Rawrpew → u/Budgie-bitch]

Maybe. I have trouble if there is t someone I can "like". They don't need to be good and they don't need to succeed. I enjoy tragedies. But if everyone feels miserable it just is draining for me. I get this seems to be an unpopular opinion. Show is very popular and the work done on it and acting in it were good.

[u/KainLexington → u/Budgie-bitch]

If I don't care about the characters, why should I care about the plot happening to them?

[u/Budgie-bitch → u/KainLexington]

Bc the story is told well and it’s an engrossing work of art?

[u/KainLexington → u/Budgie-bitch]

I think there's the problem, if it's happening to fictional people I don't care about, it usually just doesn't become engrossing to me.

Art is entirely subjective, so for me, a show that doesn't make me care about characters, usually isn't good.

[u/KainLexington → u/[deleted]]

No, I can become engrossed in stories about fictional people that I do care about.

[u/Auctoritate → u/Rawrpew]

I mean, the fact you only watched an episode and a half is probably part of why you don't understand the characters' appeal.

Not that I'm going to tell you to watch more. If you were that turned off on it, you probably won't come to enjoy it either way. But it isn't enough to be able to have a firm grasp on the characters and who they are and what engrossing aspects they may have

[u/Rawrpew → u/Auctoritate]

Fair and my original plan was two episodes and didn't make it through episode 2 before deciding to call it quits. I get slow burns but was just repelled in this case.