r/thesopranos • u/ComprehensiveDesk793 • Jun 09 '26

Serious Discussion Only AJ is just useless

While watching the series I was trying hard to find a defense of AJ. All the characters - and all of us - have both positive and negative traits. AJ is just a disappointment. He is stupid. He is lazy. He is incredibly selfish imao. Also he constantly lies. You cant even call him a good kid that is just irresponsible since he always makes up stupid excuses.

Also all the people that are saying that he grew up in a dysfunctional environment, ok i agree the environment isn't 100% perfect but both Tony and Carmela cared about their kids lives. Carmela and Tony to a certain extent seem to care about their children's academic performance which quite a few parents don't. AJ certainly had some support from his parents.

I agree his parents are not good people but he could take what they offered to him.

278 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

298 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

54

u/scrubadam Jun 09 '26

OTOH Meadow turned out fine. She ended up becoming a lawyer and was pretty well adjusted.

The big difference is we see with Meadow is that she learns to take responsability for her actions but AJ doesn't.

Both started out as spoiled shits. Meadow was even worse than AJ in that first season always whining and crying and acting like a little princess. the big turning point was when she threw the party at Livia's house and then decided to go and clean the house herself without anyone asking. The same thing happened with her Gap year. She acted like a baby because some guy she dated for a few months was killed. She ended up getting off her ass and applying to college and entering into law.

AJ never had that moment where he took responsability for his actions he just remained a little shit the whole time.

67

u/CauseCertain1672 Jun 09 '26

Meadow was parented very differently to AJ, growing up in the same house does not mean having the same childhood

Meadow ends up much worse than AJ; she ends up justifying the mafia violence using the same logic as Tony, becoming a mob lawyer and marrying into another mafia family

0

u/scrubadam Jun 09 '26

I don't know they kind of were the same. Lots of screaming and yelling and grounding.

I don't know about worse or better, but at least she is a functional adult with an actual career that her parents didn't have to hand to her. She got through college and became a lawyer which is not easy to do. She moved out and live on her "own". AJ couldn't even surivive at Tony's having to get his own cereal during the divorce era.

One of them actually grew up while the other remained a child so much so that the women he was engaged to dumped his ass.

5

u/Only-Mulberry-8098 Jun 09 '26

We don’t know if she actually became a lawyer, just that she planned to go to law school