Why Omar from the Wire gets progressive gayer as a character

Omar from the Wire becomes less and less compelling as you get further into the show. Reasons why to follow, but spoiler alert for anyone who doesn't want to be exposed to little details you don't know about yet.

Basically Omar starts falling off around the time Tasha gets killed in the gunfight at the beginning of season three and really hits the ground after Bunk talks to him in that little garden and makes him feel ashamed about what he's doing with his life.

Why is that? Because he reveals that he is aware of his own complexity and troubled by it. Like, he knows there are problems with the life he's leading and he is visibly grappling with the contradictions. As we see him doing this more and more, he becomes increasingly less (decreasingly?) mysterious, less larger- (smaller-?) than-life.

Ideelz and I talked about it and I'm pretty sure this is right: we are more fascinated by a guy who just keeps the shit out of his head and soldiers on as though he didn't know right from wrong. He lives by some private rules, and this is what makes him so singularly ruthless, brave, unstoppable.

When he starts to get all sad and self-conscious we can relate to him a lot more, but it feels banal and conventional compared to what he meant to us before. It's like when you turn the water up in the shower as hot as it can go and then turn it down a couple notches. Just feels lukewarm, if more comfortable.

This is related to NBS on Young Jeezy's "Bury Me a G" in which Jeezy raps about getting shot and a fake newscaster reporting live from the scene of the crime says over his dead body, "it was unclear whether he was the suspect or the victim." To articulate that so nakedly, NBS says, is a boring way to cheat, like turning on no clipping in Quake:

It's like, the suspect/victim thing is the only reason anything remotely morally difficult in rap is compelling at all to me. It's just too big--too big and banal and clumsy a thing to just, like, say, "It's unclear whether he was the suspect or the victim." I mean really now.

Weird fact though I guess not that surprising, NBS connects the issues raised by this song to the Wire in his thing too. He brings up Ziggy from Season 2, a guy whose enchanting, captivating ambiguity melts away not unlike Omar's as soon as he's in the cell with his father and he's telling him that the reason he did what he did was that he was tired of being the punchline to every joke.