rmwalker

While suffering through my bout of mental illness in the late 2000s, I read a lot of those “sick-lit” books. It’s kind of like mental illness porn — you see people with the same problems you do, but they’re all swept away when the protagonist meets some handsome young man. And then everything’s okay. Only now, years later, do I realize how damaging this narrative is — and not just for the sick young women, but also the young men who love these women. It’s not healthy for any of them. No one person can be your savior. You’ve got to do that yourself.

I think it’s very interesting to see how much video games have evolved in the short span of time they’ve existed. Where will they go next? There’s so much focused on their aesthetics, but in many games, there’s a deep and profound story within them. I think Tolkien would be impressed with the writing of these games, the complexity within them — especially in one of my favorites, Mass Effect. It’s sci-fi, but what is sci-fi but fantasy in the future?

What I’ve always found most striking, symbolically, is the loss of Walt’s hair. Before, he’s the mild-mannered chemistry teacher who starts making some morally gray choices, but after the hair’s gone, he’s balls-to-the-wall meth cooker. I think this may reflect, as well, his willingness and acceptance of death: shaving his head is a way of acknowledging the cancer and the inevitability that he will die. Here, though, he’s giving himself another option: let the cancer kill him or go out fighting.