This was absolutely heartbreaking. I think I made it about 20 or 30 min in before I broke down and couldn’t continue. I’ve never attempted to go back and finish it. I just can’t.
Specifically this was 2 episodes away from the end of the show but I just could not handle it. It was just so depressing. Family and friends being murdered, almost everything walt has worked for squandered, Skyler trying to kill him, having to steal the child and Skyler’s anguish. Man it was just too much to handle because EVERYTHING was just crumbling and collapsing in on itself.
What made it cut so deep is that Walter tried to provide for his family, so they could have a good life and for a time was extremely successful. After multiple missteps, some of his family is murderer or they hate him, trying desperately to remove him from their lives and resent his very existence. While Walter still loved them, he realized his and his family’s was utterly ruined. The second hand crushing and crippling guilt was too painful to bear.
Waler’s psychopathy and coldness was also building up at this point, killing, using and manipulating a lot of people. He began with good intentions but directly and indirectly ended and ruined countless people’s lives.
He didn’t want to die miserable with no respect from anyone.
He wanted to show the world he was great. He never was going to have “enough” that he would quit and die anonymously. He was going to keep going bigger and bigger until he was caught or killed.
I think you missed a good chunk of the point of that show. It was pretty clear after the first few seasons that Walt was not doing it to provide for his family. Walt loved his family but loved his job and power more. There were countless times that he could have washed his hands of it and walked away to go back to teaching. He chose to stay in even when it was pretty damn clear it was destroying his family and putting them in extreme danger.
I also quit in the last season - not sure what episode but it was towards then end. Enough time has past that I have no interest in finishing it. I don’t get so involved in series since then.
I understand and respect your decision to not continue, but I have to let you know that your feelings on it are totally justified and even vindicated in the final episodes that you didn’t watch. The misery and frustration is intentional. The arc of struggle, glory/success, and awful consequences are kinda the whole point of the show, and there’s almost some amount of cathartic redemption in seeing Walter realize just how badly he has fucked up and what he does with that knowledge. I’m being intentionally vague in case you or others decide to go back and finish, even though it’s pretty unlikely.
One of my favorite things about the show is that it’s very much a show that encourages discussion about morality in a very gradual way. Most people would agree that Walter starts off as a decent man, and he’s become an evil man somewhere along the way, but testimony differs from viewer to viewer about where exactly that line was along the way. So I’m curious, as somebody who didn’t finish specifically because of what a spectacular cautionary tale it was, where was the line for you? At what point did you stop rooting for Walter White?
I was gonna say “good” but settled on “decent”. He was certainly flawed like any of us, but he was a loving father and husband who was using his knowledge to teach the next generation. I think he was resentful of how his life panned out, and that’s why he so quickly decided to spend his remaining years proving that there was greatness within him to achieve something so much more, especially in spite of the whole Gray Matter thing.
Not me but when my wife was pregnant, the scene in Homeward Bound where Sassy is swept away in the river left her in tears. She stopped the movie and never watched it again lol.
Uhg. I watched an episode of The Curse when my wife found it. I am convinced that the curse is actually the entire show - they’re cursing the audience.
For me it was Nier: Automata after the Pascal’s rage. I just dropped my controller and cried for an hour. Their hatred, their loss… I couldn’t even find a space to place it. To place myself. Anywhere. Anyhow. I felt defective.
If you still have some heartbeat in you, remaster of the OG Nier is a thing to try. It would hurt you, even more than Automata, but in the end, with an added ending, you’d feel a relief like nothing else. That I can promise.
See if you’d be open to such a journey. Feel free to ping me back to discudss it if you would.
It’s OK. Yoko Taro is an outlier and a niche in himself. I, for example, can’t even enjoy Souls games besides Bloodborne, and I feel a little sad about it. But what games are to your taste?
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye. i can handle horror just fine, but Echoes of the Eye is on entirely another level of horror than most everything else. i was only able to complete about a third of it before i got too psyched out to continue
It is and both are masterpieces. I don’t like horror games and I bore through it. There is a setting to reduce frights but it does a good job using darkness and sound to freak you out. At least from the perspective of a person who doesn’t normally go for that kind of thing.
EOTE SpoilersI think what’s crazy about eote is that you figure things out that make everything visible, and once you understand how things work it really shouldn’t be scary anymore… but it is. As soon as you go back into the lantern’s bubble you’re just consumed by darkness and it feels just as scary as it was before - even though you know exactly what’s in the dark.
Eote is a masterpiece and I had to rly battle my fears to do it. Unlike the base game, you can play it in smaller pieces if playing it gets overwhelming