king schultz is such an interesting character hmmmmm. he starts off believing himself to be a principled man who "despises slavery," as he tells django, but really he's not at all above using it to his advantage by keeping django enslaved for a bit, he's patronizing, and he's ultimately naive (in the opening scene he gives a very startled look when he sees django's back).
he enjoys being django's benefactor and teacher because rescuing this uneducated "kid" makes him feel good about himself, but even with that undercurrent of selfishness and self-importance he's still fairly well-meaning.
his attitude first shifts when he hears about broomhilda and sees django's determination to save her.
he goes "wait wait wait, let me get this straight: your slave wife speaks german and her name is broomhilda von schaft??" like up until that point the idea that someone sharing his language and culture could ever be enslaved was totally alien to him. it just doesn't compute, girls with german names aren't owned, and germans don't own people and name them. those realities shatter the neat dividing lines that allowed him to see slavery as disgusting without losing sleep over it so far. he gets another one of those realizations when he (still a bit paternalistically) tells django the story of sigfried rescuing broomhilda.
when told how sigfried scaled the mountain, slew the dragon and walked through hellfire "because broomhilda is worth it," django goes "i know how he feels," and schultz says softly "i think i'm just starting to realize that."
up to that point he - unconsciously - didn't see django as possessing the same internality as a free man. but here django is showing that not only does he have the same passions and emotions as any other man, he also has the same motivations, the same identity as the great german legend sigfried.
treating django as an equal made king believe he saw django as an equal, and in that moment he realizes he hadn't up to that point. this "kid" is a fellow person.
he still slips up into paternalism/mentoring django because of how he feels and not fully because of django himself quite often, but he's at least making progress
but where it gets ever more interesting is in how the dynamic reverses once they get into django's world. where before king was the one teaching django about killing bad guys, urging django to be more ruthless and even mocking him for being too soft, now django's the jaded one teaching this soft-hearted, not-cut-out-for-this-world white man about the reality of evil. it's not "killing people and selling their corpses for cash," it's slavery, and it's worse.
and now that king is starting to see slaves as people and not "poor devils", he just can't cope. I really disagree with the take that king shooting candie was a selfish white savior act done to satisfy his own ego, i think it was more of a trauma response.
king tried to play it too smart with the elaborate mandingo fights charade when buying broomhilda as a "comfort girl" through a proxy would probably have worked better because he's playing it like one of his bounty hunting cons, because he doesn't actually know the world of slavery. the hefty reality check of being roundly outsmarted, his first taste of real helplessness in the face of danger and injustice, plus what he sees in candyland, especially d'artagnan getting mauled by the dogs (yet another european-named person) and broomhilda's back, opens his eyes to a vast darkness he just can't deal with and in the end he snaps.
because ultimately he was the uneducated, impulsive, too gentle nature, not the "kid."
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