🧠 1.Both Are Intelligent and Tactically Aware
- Skyler runs the household books, uncovers Walt’s lies early, and eventually masterminds the money launderingscheme with the car wash.
- Shiv is a seasoned political advisor — silver-tongued, socially agile, and fluent in manipulation from boardrooms to bedrooms.
These women aren’t clueless side characters — they’repower-aware strategists, even if they enter the game differently.
🎲 2.Both Get Pulled Into Male-Made Empires
- Skyler gets dragged into Walter White’s criminal descent, trying to protect her children while holding the line of morality.
- Shiv is born into Logan’s empire — Waystar Royco — and becomes entangled in its web of corporate warfare, ultimately sacrificing values for proximity to control.
Neither of them built the system.
But they both learn tonavigate it, bend to it, and shape it — sometimes at their own expense.
💣 3.Their Betrayals Are Rooted in Different Drives
- Shiv emotionally abandons Tom again and again — leveraging her intellect and beauty without ever offering real intimacy or respect.
- Skyler’s betrayal of Walt is moral, not emotional — she turns against him only after he lies, manipulates, and endangers everyone around them.
Shiv’s betrayal is aboutego.
Skyler’s is aboutethics.
😠 4.Both Are Vilified — Unfairly, and Differently
- Skyler was infamously hated by audiences — not for doing wrong, but for standing in Walt’s way.
- Shiv is also divisive — viewers admire her confidence but flinch at her cold ambition, especially when she chooses Tom over Kendall in the finale.
Both women are judgedmore harshly than the men who wreak real havoc— a reflection of how audiences react to powerful women in morally grey narratives.
🔄 Key Difference:
| Skyler White | Shiv Roy | |
|---|---|---|
| Motivation | Survival, protect her family | Ego, power, status |
| Moral Compass | Strong — sheresists corruption | Fading — sheembraces it |
| Agency | Forced into crime | Born into power |
| Endgame | Isolated but ethically clearer | Still inside the machine — and helping run it |
🧠 Final Thought:
Skyler was aresisterof power who bent under pressure.
Shiv is aproductof power whochose to become it.
Skyler clawed to protect her family and sanity.
Shiv sacrificed both — and called it strategy.
In the end, only one looked at the empire and said,
“I’ll stay.”
And that’s what makes Shiv morecorrupted by power.
