Just finished this show for the first time.
Someone please explain to me what the purpose of this character even was, from a narrative perspective? It seemed like we had to follow a bunch of uninteresting bullshit in his life that ultimately led nowhere. I don't understand why he had so much screentime. I mean, Meadow never did anything interesting either but she wasn't focused on nearly the same amount.
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So Yea Forums could have a relatable character
It's a commentary on many many things. One that comes to mind is inherited wealth. But there are many many ways to look at it.
Lay off the fuckin chitchat rooms OP
Just finished this show for the first time.
Someone please explain to me what the purpose of this character even was, from a narrative perspective? It seemed like we had to follow a bunch of uninteresting bullshit in his life that ultimately led nowhere. I don't understand why he had so much screentime. I mean, Meadow never did anything interesting either but she wasn't focused on nearly the same amount.
Something something cycle of abuse something something.
I don't think Chase knew what to do with him, desu.
Does inheriting wealth ALWAYS cause you to be a pussy ass bitch? Is that really what the show is suggesting? It also seemed like it was just making fun of people with depression, although that may just have been a product of the times? I don't know.
Ever since he broke up with the single mom he never recovered from the JUSTing he got.
>meadow is a successful college graduate who has multiple bfs throughout the show
>AJ is a total dropout loser who has to pay some black guys with a bike just to fuck some latina single mother
Holy shit what a total loser.
AJ and Meadow are both "Types" that you see a lot in suburbia, as are Carm and Tony, really. The whole show is a crime drama but it's also a family drama and a black comedy social commentary about american consumer culture. Late series AJ with his half-assed social causes and fake suicide attempts is just a heightened presentation of an effete male stereotype, just like Tony is like a heightened version of the hypermasculine father who throws money at his problems that produces him.
Basically this. Other posts in this thread are on the right track too.
Basically, the viewer is watching a form of ultimately masculinity unfold in the NJ/NY Italian mafia and its members, and its a point of comparison to see the new generation, the very own son of the main character/ hero, turn out so different
It's a good character from a narrative perspective. He has to have a purpose. If this person has a purpose. It would be interesting to explore what the purpose of this person is.
So what's really up with the two main female characters (as far as I'm concerned), Meadow and Sandy, at first? Are they just a way for Meadow to get away with her crime and show us how nice she could be and not actually care about the lives of innocent people, or is their main purpose to act as sympathetic women? How does this go for the audience?
In the first season, Sandy was the closest thing we had to a genuine female character. So yes I can see why she had so much more screen time in the second season. She had some real issues I don't think she ever really discussed with either side.
AJ is used to convey many messages over the seasons. But the biggest one is that a father, intent on men being masculine, raised a faggot.
>he never recovered from the JUSTing he got.
dude, he ended up with a model gf, a job in the movie (lol) business and tons of cash after tony got killed. he recovered pretty well imho.
his fathers son. Only plebs hate AJ
>strong men
>good times
>weak men
>bad times
etc
>a lazy pseud frequent neet who has dropped out of college twice and half-assedly considers going into the armed forces but is easily talked out of it and only isn't on the street because his parents cannot bear to force him to endeavor to try at anything
People who relate to AJ are 90% of this website's traffic
More like he tried to charge the guy who shot his dad in the restaurant and got capped like a bitch for it.
>his failed attempt to stab Junior
>deciding to bribe those moulinyans with a bike when his mommy gf told him her ex used to beat them up
he curled up in the fetal position and cried
aj is miserable, he has panic attacks, he has some anti-social personality traits, he isn't very intelligent and does not do well in school, he has a father in the mob, he got a rush out of seeing his car explode
i mean do i really need to go on? who does that sound like to you?
Someone who'd end up dead, frozen stiff in a warehouse after ODing on smack, after getting spattered with your father's brains in a diner.
You do realize The Sopranos is about Tony balancing being a mob boss and having a family right?
His children represent the conflict of having a mafia father.
Meadow was the "good one" amd ends up becoming a lawyer. Anthony Jr wants to be tough like his dad but is too weak mentally and physically because of his comfortable upbringing.
AJ was there to show the negative result of Tony being in the mob.
meadow wasn't the good one, she turned into an updated version of her mother who made excuses for her fathers criminal lifestyle. do you not remember what she said in the last episode about why she wanted to go into law? all that education and she is still deluding herself.
Sons of powerful men are almost always fucked in the head
this guy thinks hes a tony but hes really a vito
I think the difference is that Tony is right in saying early on that AJ cannot handle this life. He's almost just like Tony. He has a small capacity for sympathy and a little less for empathy (outside affectation) and constantly feels sorry for himself and his lot (despite all his privileges), but he doesn't have the nerve.
iirc It's also sort of implied she will join her fiance and become a mod lawyer to fight against "the racial profiling of italians" or whatever.
Commentary on "today's" youth, Tony & Carmella's shitty parenting, etc.
>but he doesn't have the nerve.
i actually think he does. in carms session with the therapist she even says herself that she believes he has the capacity to get sucked into the mob lifestyle. he helped his friends hold a guy down and they poured acid on his feet, and he didn't have much of a problem with it. he got a rush out of seeing his car explode, similar to how tony got a rush out of seeing his father chop some guys finger off. its just happening later for aj than it did for tony.
He's what Tony would be without the hardening influence of the mafia shaping him into the person that we see on television.
would you a meadow?
>Just finished this show for the first time.
Pleb I've watched it 10+ times
>Someone please explain to me what the purpose of this character even was, from a narrative perspective?
Like some other characters in this show he didn't really have a defined purpose other than to show the (weak) side of Anthony soprano himself and the real fragility of young manhood imho. That's what I took from it.
Could have been David chases way of self inserting hin/his sons childhood for all we know maybe he talks about it in an interview as I know T's mom is based on his irl mother
>It seemed like we had to follow a bunch of uninteresting bullshit in his life that ultimately led nowhere. I don't understand why he had so much screentime. I mean, Meadow never did anything interesting either but she wasn't focused on nearly the same amount.
So literally me? Life is boring and tedious for most of us mate that's what I like about this show it's a true slice of life story that like life itself isn't always clear and defined but more chaotic and pointless
I honestly think he's the best character in thr show besides T himself basically mirror image bizzaro tony
Wait a bit and rewatch the show it might take you a couple of rewatches to (get) where he was coming from
First watch he appears like a little zoomer (now xoomer) sjw but it becomes obvious he has massive daddy issues
Id love to see a sequel with gandalfinis irl son playing young Tony (as opposed to the prequel we are getting) and aj resume his role
I kind of compare aj/T to Walter white and Jesse pinkman they compliment each other as characters
Season 2 Meadow was H U S K Y
out of respect for Mr. Soprano, no, i wouldn't
I think if you fused Chrissy and AJ and their relationships to Tony, you'd have a 1:1 analog to Jesse and Walt
If Tony is Walter White then Christopher is Jesse and AJ is more like Flynn but a cripple of the mind instead of a cripple of the body.
when i first watched the show like 10 years ago i thought aj was just a spoiled little shit. now i see him as the result of terrible parenting. you really need to be older to see what they were trying to do with aj. they were both shitty parents.
I feel like in Season 5 they really turned the motif of shitty parenting on overdrive. Tony and Carmela are both incredibly selfish people and AJ was just being used as a way to either smooth over or exacerbate the rift between them during their marital separation.
I was waslike nine or so when s2 aired and I remember almost passing out when I saw her newly massive ass
I was gonna mention chrissy (also my favourite char besides aj/T) but op just asked about aj
But flynn is pretty under written and has no real meaningful screen time compared to aj tho
This.
I had/have nice parents and im still a loser
Sometimes kids just turn out how they turn out no matter the parenting
Other kids their parents obviously shape their lives to the extreme
yea they're both shit. i think what people don't really understand is that carm and tony did not go out of their way to be bad parents, they did want the best for AJ, but they just constantly made awful decisions and everything they said to him didn't have anything to back it up. they're telling him he needs to do good in school, meanwhile tony is making money off illegal card games, stolen goods, and loansharking, and tony is buying carm expensive shit with dirty money. they're just hypocrites.
you can't even really compare him to meadow because meadow is a girl...she was just a good student, and in the end she still couldn't escape shitty parenting.
You guys keep saying Tony and Carm were horrible parents but nobody ever says why, or what they did wrong. Can I please have some examples?
I'm not a father myself but I'm old enough to be one (yes you can laugh at me, but I wouldn't want kids anyways even if I had a potential mother for them which I do not), yet I really don't see what either of them did wrong. Tony always provided for his kids and disciplined them when necessary and Carm always made sure they had breakfast each morning, dinner every night, tried to talk to them about shit, kept the house clean, etc.
I finished the show recently as well and it was really good. Plot points were nicely set up and you could see them coming if you paid attention but the 2nd hit that Tony B did made no sense to me. Maybe because we didnt see his perspective but why would he do the hit when T set him up with the casino earnings. I understand why he did the first one.
tony is constantly belittling aj and basically considers him a weak failure. tony does give him advice sometimes, but its just empty bullshit like keep your eye on the ball. most of the time their interactions involve tony yelling empty threats at ajs face about taking his car away and kicking him out on the street and a bunch of bullshit that we all know he would never do. he did not know and he did not want to teach aj anything worthwhile, he just wanted aj to know things, its a typical trait for narcissistic parents.
carm wasn't half as bad as tony, but she babied AJ and she also had no clue how to raise him or teach him anything. she was too busy reading magazines and buying shit. she did cook for everyone, so i'm not saying she is completely awful, she spent a lot of time in the kitchen. food just isn't enough.
Well, part of AJ's issue is neurological. As for the parenting, I think there's too much to list, but the greatest thing Tony does wrong as a dad is that he constantly belittles his son, is aggressive with his son, while also constantly feeding him money, especially when he feels regret about the belittling. Tony draws a hard line in ugly language and then erases it constantly. The times when he is sympatico with AJ and admits that AJ's tendancies are like his only help to validate that AJ's behavior is fine. Then, when AJ has to be bailed out of expulsion and threatened with extreme measures like Military school, these last minute salvations show AJ that he truly doesn't have to worry about repercussions for his actions. His Carm, for her part, is one of those mothers that treats her kids like they are untouchable and builds them up only to occasionally burst out with shit like "You are nothing but a cross to bear."
I really can only surmise that chase knew a family a lot like this, because this kind of parenting and its result is not uncommon.
He's insanely hot. I want his lips wrapped around my dick.
The second hit was because they killed some guy (Angelo (?)), who Tony'd become close with in prison in retaliation for the first hit.
that's why I used quotations around "good". She was so smart and promosing but in the end she was still a Soprano. Kind of like how she was dating Jamal Ginzberg at first but then ended up dating Jackie Jr..who ends yp getting killed. Then she starts dating some other mob kid.
Thats the point I was making. Both kids grew up with every opportunity, even with 2 loving parents. But that mafia stuff would affect them no matter what.
Maybe all 4 of them died in the end too
>Jackie Jr.
Despite Ralphie killing pregnant kids and Paulie suffocating grandmas to steal their money, I am still more disgusted by this kid than anyone else in the show. I don't know why, really.
>Maybe all 4 of them died in the end too
I doubt it. Usually it's taboo to hit wives and children.
because jackie jr was just a try hard dipshit, it also doesn't help that the kid playing jackie is a godawful actor and every single line that came out of his mouth was pure cheeseball. fucking porno actors have a higher acting skill set than that kid
Just finished this show for the first time.
Someone please explain to me what the purpose of this character even was, from a narrative perspective? It seemed like we had to follow a bunch of uninteresting bullshit in her life that ultimately led nowhere. I don't understand why she had so much screentime. I mean, Irina never did anything interesting either but she wasn't focused on nearly the same amount.
>Someone please explain to me what the purpose of this character even was
always stick your dick in crazy because crazy girls are fucking AWESOME
>Her body is mad RIPE though
>I'm telling ya man she's CREAMING for me
My wife and I were watching this episode last night and she commented about how unrealistic and ridiculous lines like that are and how they serve to pull you out of the immersion of the episode. That being said, the entire Jackie Jr. plot in ep 3 was supposed to be secondary but got elevated into the primary line after Nancy Marchand died and the original S3 plot had to be scrapped. So that little bastard wasn't supposed to get all that screen time.
>she commented about how unrealistic and ridiculous lines like that are and how they serve to pull you out of the immersion of the episode
Where are you from? I agree with him being a bad actor, but I don't think these lines are as unrealistic as you think.
New Jersey, but desu I never really associated with people like Jackie Jr.
>Sandy
who?
You wanna end up like Coco?
I grew up in Iowa in the early 00s, where two writers of the episode went to college, and I've heard talk a exactly like that. The only thing missing was a reference to "slaying her pussy." The issue might be that they took lingo not typical for NJ and put it into the show.
The entire show is about the fact that the glory days of the Italian mob are over. This is explicitly said many times. Tony's son being a retard and a pussy are just two of hundreds of points supporting the central theme.
>moulignans
They were spics.
To give me a boner so intense that it actually hurt
>brunette
>petite
>sharp features
>milfy cougar look
AJ lacks balls, aggression, and Tony's cunning. He fails at literally everything he attempts, including suicide.
This is actually an interesting idea. >>
Yeah the only ones who speak so disparagingly of women where I grew up are extremely low class or are trying to behave like the mulignans you see on the television.
They were subnormals, all I know
>Tony and Carm were horrible parents but nobody ever says why
AJ is an over indulged spoiled rotten little brainlet faggot.
Trying to drown himself in the pool was the only righteous thing he ever did.
No. She's a miscegenator
>t. Vito Spatofore
do everyone a favor and never have kids, if that's what you get out of AJ then you're just going to bring an actual AJ into this world and raise him to be a dipshit just like him
>watching Sopranos at nine
what a childhood
good on him for not throwing his life away to serve ZOG
FUCK THE TROOPS
If you watch the show with that in mind his character makes a tremendous amount of sense.
>AJ reminded me of myself and that made me mad
Isn't it obvious? The Sopranos frequently took the surreal life of a mafioso and slapped realism onto it.
Naturally his kids aren't going to turn out the way he wants. I agree some of his storylines were too stretched, maybe he should have joined the army instead of going to college making Tony ashamed to admit it in public rather than him trying to assassinate Junior, however it was an important character, he was deliberately dislikeable. He had depression (for instance not being delighted at winning a game) and he was spoiled (by tony).
hes basically us if we were born rich
complete fuck up, literally suicidal, but gets a QT 9/10 gf, 60k car and great job anyway
Her personality was very similar to his mothers. We see him trying to please her despite the negative and destructive things she does, mirroring his relationship with Olivia Soprano.
With his dad dead, I guarantee Carm is left in the cold and AJ's life turns to shit. Managing that Pizza place was probably the highest plateau in his professional career.
Don't give a real answer. The show literally spells this out for us.
>Just finished this show for the first time.
Someone please explain to me what the purpose of this character even was, from a narrative perspective? It seemed like we had to follow a bunch of uninteresting bullshit in his life that ultimately led nowhere. I don't understand why he had so much screentime. I mean, Meadow never did anything interesting either but she wasn't focused on nearly the same amount.
Tony is right when he says it his fault for what AJ is "passing on his poison genes". It's not just the parenting or lack thereof. If AJ was built like Tony and could physically bully those around him in school he would probably end up the same vicious sociopath.
No..the show is about balancing being a mob boss and a family man. Its literally called The Sopranos.
>tfw AJ was so worried about his weight but strongfat AJ was the ideal.
Wrong. The show is about the Soprano family. Its literally called The Sopranos.
it always pissed me off how melfi handled that. she tells him to stop blaming himself, while at the same time knowing tony is a fucking sociopath narcissistic mob boss murderer criminal. like are you fucking serious? it is his fault
The show is a huge critique on the "science" of psychotherapy.
>One that comes to mind is inherited wealth
the lack of goals and self discipline rather than wealth
t.born in a rich family
like a grown ups version of the simpsons
thats why I used the word "balanced". Tony is the head of 2 families. His literal family and his mafia family. Why do you think the show ends with him getting killed when hes with his wife and kids?
A good Jew prop. One child is a coal & dradle burning "humanitarian" the other is a failed suicide pizza worker who can't even keep a 56%er. Sopranos, like any other HBO production is solid kike entertainment.
>Don't go daddy!
I agree with you 100% and was just shitposting because I am trying to bump with dogshit to keep this thread alive
>because meadow is a girl.
because being a girl is life on easy mode
>I really can only surmise that chase knew a family a lot like this
could be the case, i had a narc mom but thankfully my father was alright, although i´m prone to depression like AJ
>bunny you know how i feel about pussy
Tony decides who gets to live in this world. He is the leader of men. We respect his decisions, and when he decides that a lesser man needs to die, we respect that. He represents that dynamic. Nature denies her fruit to unworthy men.
What happens when his own sun is unworthy? Beyond a doubt unworthy. Tries to kill himself. And what does our leader do? Cries and holds the ugly thing in his arms. What are we supposed to think now?
heres a bump for (you) bro!
Big pussy? He wants to fuck my Pussy?
>It won't be cinematic