By that point I was hoping Jessie got out of it all alive, because while he was clearly a dumbass with questionable morals, nobody deserved what he was going through, and the abuse he'd put up with at the hands of Walt among others.
Walt was still fascinating to watch and maybe I approved of or disliked some of his individual actions, and we definitely had deep insight to his character by then, but I don't think I'd describe myself as rooting for him or experiencing his story in a particularly sympathetic way. I wasn't experiencing the story through him by then as I might have been early on, if that makes sense.
Hopefully this came across but I'm definitely not always rooting for either Tony Sorprano or Walter White.
Like you say, you experience the story through these dubious characters. Especially on multiple watch throughs you can really come to despise them but the series are so well made that the writers can bring you round multiple times.
There's something about the cognative disonence of how most people experience life there.
I was once told that most people that do bad things just convince themselves that what they're doing is actually OK.
So someone that steals from cars blames the car's owner for leaving it unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending their reality to justify their actions.
That's obvious criminality but I think that almost everyone is doing something like that to some extent.
For example, just look at the popularity of fast fashion that's almost certainly made with slave labour. At this point in time I don't think anyone buying from Shien[1] or Temu[2] could be in any doubt. They must know, they just don't care. They're still just everyday people.
I wrote a response to this many times, you write some good points. I like how you can keep disconnected and non judgemental while somehow making it appear that both ordering from Temu and grand theft auto are similarly bad.
Ah, I see the confusion. I think you've missed the word "from" there, as in some item taken from a car not the car itself.
Where I live using the words Grand Theft Auto, with that capitalisation, implies the video game of the same name. We don't have the crime of the same name (we call it Taking without Consent).
Since there's been quite a bit in the news about video game censorship, including GTA, I mistook your comment as trying to change the topic to that. My appologies.
Walt was still fascinating to watch and maybe I approved of or disliked some of his individual actions, and we definitely had deep insight to his character by then, but I don't think I'd describe myself as rooting for him or experiencing his story in a particularly sympathetic way. I wasn't experiencing the story through him by then as I might have been early on, if that makes sense.