
Grave of Walter White - Thevet
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/grave-of-walter-white
======
aazaa
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?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
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.

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ozim
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:)

~~~
WoahNoun
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.

~~~
ozim
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

~~~
WoahNoun
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.

~~~
trhway
>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/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/)

------
teraflop
_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.

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

~~~
samatman
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!

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

------
moomin
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.

~~~
twic
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.

~~~
moomin
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.

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dusty_mc_dusty
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.

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dreamcompiler
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).

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

