Grave of Walter White | Hacker News Reader

Grave of Walter White

atlasobscura.com

38 pointsThevet25 comments

This is a religious shrine in the making.

It's already been moved once. When the strip mall steakhouse goes bust, the marker will be moved again. And again. Each time the marker will become more elaborate. More realistic.

Walter White's story is told in such vivid detail in Breaking Bad, El Camino, and Better Call Saul that he's become the embodiment for the everyman who makes a bargain with the Devil in pursuit of greatness.

The universality of White's story will attract followers from every culture, long after the actors who starred in the show and the writers who created the character have passed away.

Did Jesus ever live, or is he the product of a freakishly good storyteller? Does it matter?

I think the religious shrine is going a bit far, Sherlock Holmes doesn't have a religious sect devoted to his gospel as far as I know, and I think that is probably a lot closer of an analogy in how important their respective stories may be to people.

Are you Jordan Peterson haha

Say my name...

This is quite interesting philosophical question. We usually don't bring attention to the end of imagined entities because that is what they are... Imagined entities that did not have a body. But then some people got into the story so much that this entity was like a real person for them. It made impact on their lives, one way or another. So is that entity just an idea, or we all are bunch of ideas?

I have to google that up because probably someone already came up with such way of thinking I am quite sure:)

Pretty much all religion and mythology is based around a telling of the hero's journey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

I think it's another twist on John Locke's idea of perception in essays on human understanding. Basically, humans are the product of our sensors (vision, hearing, touch, emotion, etc).

I'm going to butcher the explanation here, but IIRC in this view, everything is imaginary because we have no way of validating our sensors without using the sensors and we process the world entirely through them.

Great one! TV series look like "Dream argument", because what TV series or movies are, basically dreams come true while we are not sleeping. Then argument is about if mentally generated world can be real or not. We can see and hear those characters, we feel emotions towards them, and we feel empathy like their emotions in us.

Only thing is that we cannot touch them. Unless you go to some conference where actor is also playing that role :) so in the end you could touch "Walter White" if Bryan Cranston is making that personality real somewhere in our world :D

Yea it gets even more interesting when you consider historical figures. Charlamagne is no more real to me than Walter White is (in fact, I'd argue due to the additional sensation of audio and video he might actually be more real from a perception sense).

Yet I believe Charlamagne was a real human who did real human things centuries ago just as I believe Walter White is a character that was invented.

Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic on one of America's most notorious drug dealers, could they plausibly believe that? I watched American Gangster and I know that's based on a true story, because Frank Lucas was in jail and has court records. But again without that context, are the two stories really that different in believability?

I think that the ability to plausibly place a story within your own reality creates stronger emotions than something like star wars or lord of rings than can easily be placed into fantasy.

>Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic

Reminded of exploration of similar idea in Galaxy Quest https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/

> We usually don't bring attention to the end of imagined entities

True!

Anyway, easter's in three months.

I laughed, but this is really a comment suited for reddit and not HN.

Another reference is found in the epitaph, which quotes from Percy Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, the title and theme of the AMC series’ antepenultimate episode.

Maybe I'm just being dense, but I don't see an epitaph in any of those photos.

I don't know where Atlas Obscura got that from. It's definitely not in the photo. (And Atlas Obscura or sites that seem to have copied from it word for word is the only place that appears to mention it.)

The bit with the names of businesses, looks like it may be stuck over something else, it doesn't match the rest. Maybe that's covering it.

You have company, I didn't see an epitaph either.

I learned a new word, though. "Antepenultimate." And penultimate was already one of my favorite words.

Antepenultimate is a great word because of the antepenultimate rule, which is that in English, the antepenultimate syllable is (usually) the one to stress in a polysyllabic word.

The an-te-pen-UL-ti-mate rule. Makes it easy to remember!

IIRC, the residents of Riverside, Iowa have a monument commemorating the future birth site of Captain Kirk: https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2081

In Cardiff there’s an area called Roald Dahl Plass. It is, to put it politely, prime real estate. The Welsh Assembly is there. It was also a site used in Doctor Who and its short-lived spin-off Torchwood. The fictional location of the entrance to Torchwood has become a shrine to Ianto, a character that died in the third season. A _lot_ of people have left messages and artwork.

I came across this entirely by accident.

Is that still going? I remember seeing the shrine when i visited Cardiff about a decade ago, probably not long after that story. I know Torchwood ignited some particularly fierce fandom at the time, but i'd be impressed if it was still burning now.

It was definitely there five years ago. It was already a long time after Children of Earth had screened. Being a fan I loved discovering it, but everyone that I was with was just bemused.

Think about it: Walter White never died. He just moved on and became Malcom's father Hal. Hal told in one of the episodes that he had a past related to meth. So there's that.

Albuquerque still gets a lot of visitors because of Breaking Bad, just like that silly UFO story still brings dollars into the treasury of Roswell. Both cities play up their fictional connections. Albuquerque even renamed its Minor League baseball team the Isotopes because the city was mentioned so much on The Simpsons.

And BTW, Vernon's makes a great steak. But if you go there do your homework first. It's a speakeasy so you have to know the password to get in the door (not kidding).

I think what BB so great is the story of hope.

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