It Appears Everyone Quit The Walking Dead At The Same Negan …

The Walking Dead

Yesterday on Twitter, a number of Walking Dead characters started trending, so I tried to figure out what was going on. It was not an actual development with the show, it turns out, but instead a viral question that was asked by a user.

In short, at one point did you give up on The Walking Dead?

40,000 retweets and 230,000 likes later, and a very, very clear pattern started to emerge.

Far and away the moment brought up the most often was when Negan killed Glenn, beating him to death with a baseball bat in the most brutal fashion possible.

This echoes what Ive heard for years informally, some version of that shows still on? I quit after Negan killed Glenn. 90% of the time, thats the scene thats cited. And its true, ratings went down after this, and never recovered (though in context, TWD remains very successful).

Its a weird thing, because that death is straight from the comics, and one of the most jarring, horrifying moments of the series. But in the comics, its a classic moment, and certainly did make people quit reading the comics in the same way it got people to leave the show. Why?

First of all, I dont think people wanted to lose Steven Yeun and Glenn as a character. He was a season 1 original, and in many ways, the heart of the series outside the Grimes family. The show even wrote a way for him to escape his death, because they also had Abraham take the bat first, but this was an era when The Walking Dead valued shock value above all else, so when Daryl made a move against Negan, the group was punished with Glenns death.

The Walking Dead

The second reason was just howgross it was. The Walking Dead does a lot of gross stuff to be sure, but usually with the walkers themselves, and something here just crossed a line for many people. They wanted to make Glenns death look exactly like the comics, with his eye popping out of his socket and all, and yet it was just too much for some, and its hard to blame them. It was brutal in a way that was just bad and wrong, not remotely entertaining.

It did not seem like Steven Yeun was thrilled about being killed off the show at the time, as he was a great example of an Asian leading man in a major TV production, and paired with the shows most attractive white actress as his wife. It felt like a whole lot of progress, and then he was justexecuted to please the comics.

The rest, of course, is history for Yeun, who has gone on to star in a number of hugely praised films, including this years Minari, which should land Oscar nominations down the road either for the film, his performance, or both. I also highly recommend Burning, if you havent see him in that yet. And who knows if that would have all happened if Yeun had stuck around The Walking Dead for many more years. But I understand why this was the moment most people broke away.

The second most common moment I heard was Carls death, which took place almost two seasons later and is the most for no reason at all death the show has ever had, killing off literally the main character of the comics in a wild departure from the source material this time. The actor, Chandler Riggs, had no desire to leave the series, and had just bought a house in the area. Fans may have been shocked he was dead, but they were mostly angry at the writers, not the circumstances that killed him (which were stupid). I dont think its a huge coincidence that Angela Kang took over the show right after this happened and was able to right the ship with better decisions that have not involved shocking deaths for the sake of being shocking.

Anyway. Did you quit during those moments, or were there any others? Or did you stick with it the whole time, like me?

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It Appears Everyone Quit The Walking Dead At The Same Negan ...