Have you ever hated a movie or tv character so much that you began to hate the character's actor in real life? Which one and why?

I find Skyler's character fascinating due to how divisive she is among the audience, and how much someone's opinion of her reflects the perspective from which they chose to watch the show.

If you're in it for the "competency porn" angle, Skyler sucks because she continually breaks the illusion we have latched onto that Walt is a demi-god of manipulation and uber competence. Skyler is real life; she's a real human being that reacts to her husband's increasing spiral into narcissistic megalomania like a good, moral human being should react. Despite all of Walt's protestations that he's doing it for the family, it becomes increasingly obvious over the course of the show that he's doing it for himself; for his own sense of importance and as his internal monologue's come-back story, helping him reconcile his past failures (especially Gray Matter) with his view of himself as an unrecognized genius. Skyler is a woman in an abusive power relationship struggling to do anything she can to maintain an even keel, protect her family, and do what she believes is right as her husband increasingly becomes a monster.

But because her completely reasonable reactions threaten Walt's 'perfection', we hate her. The show tries to show both sides of the coin by occasionally touching on the ruin that meth brings to people, with episodes like Peekaboo (meth family and the ATM) - these are supposed to remind the audience that Skyler is the moral one, and Walt's successes are responsible for a lot of human misery. But then it cuts to Walt winning spectacularly in some new way through the use of a MacGyver-esque chemistry experiment or master manipulation of the plebes around him and we the viewers snap back into competence porn mode.

If you suspend realism and watch Breaking Bad as competence porn it's easy to root for Walt and hate everyone else stopping him, particularly Skyler. If you watch it as a complex drama she's possibly the best written character in the show, and acts like most real human beings would when put in that situation.

/r/AskReddit Thread