*SPOILERS for 'The Walking Dead' up to and including season 7, and for the 'Here's Negan' comic prequel*
SOOOOOO I was Чтение some reviews of the season 7 finale and pretty much all of them mentioned some form of Negan hate (see examples link and link). These reviews come at the end of a season link and link. And yet here I am, finally enjoying the damn Показать еще as a whole (rather than just Болталка scenes или episodes here and there, as characterised my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the Назад 6 seasons).
I think there is an interesting thing going on in The Walking Dead fandom right now that Negan and his baseball-bat-y ways are stirring up, so let me take Ты through it as I see it. As a long-time hater of Prick Grimes, perhaps the following analysis could be considered biased. OH WELL. Here are my thoughts about Negan's place in the fandom and how Prick can go jump into a pit of zombies.
In-Groups & Out-Groups
Unsurprisingly, this Prick VS Negan arc can be thought of as some link dynamics. This is link in motion! Basically, this is the 'us VS them' stuff: we identify with a link and can be hostile towards alternative groups или individuals who are not part of our group and perhaps demonstrate a particular something that our group doesn't like или understand.
For 6 seasons, most of the TWD fandom (seemingly) has identified with Prick Grimes and his collection of survivors. They are called Team Family. We have watched this group survive (as a collective, not necessarily as individuals) threats from walkers and not-dead-peoples alike. For the bulk of the TWD fandom (again, seemingly), Team Family is the in-group, the identified-with group that Фаны see themselves as part of. And as such, threats to Team Family are met with hostility.
And fair enough. Team Family is the group that the Показать focuses on, so naturally it is the group that the bulk of the Фаны will come to identify with (some еще faithfully than others!).
BUT the thing about Social Identity Theory is that every in-group is also an out-group, and every out-group is also an in-group. Negan and his Saviors operate in the TWD as their own in-group, meeting Team Family (and their insistence on resistance) with hostility. However, a key difference between the Saviors and Team Family is that the Saviors broke with in-group/out-group tradition and offered Team Family a form of Savior in-group status by politely suggesting (ok, ok, violently demanding) co-operative community efforts.
So what the hell is my point here? Team Family is the fandom's in-group. In general, Фаны want Prick and his peeps to survive and survive well. Negan represents an out-group that threatens Team Family's survival. And so, Фаны hate Negan; или perhaps еще specifically, hate the Показать for putting Team Family in such severe peril.
But are Team Family really any better than Negan and his Saviors? Is it possible that Prick Grimes also leads a merry band of assholes?
Team Asshole
Team Family, since Negan's arrival, has been sitting atop that moral high-horse, whining about freedom and justice and blah blah blah, resisting Negan's orders at pretty much every turn. But I bet a million bucks Team Family украл, палантин that damn high-horse in the first place!
When Prick first meets Negan, Negan informs him how not cool it was of him to kill all those Saviors. And Team Family sure did wipe out a lot of Saviors. Team Family snuffed out lives. Lives of people they didn't know. Lives who were part of an extensive community and contributed to that community's protection, economy and social life. Under Prick's rule, many of the out-group (the Saviors) were killed. Under Negan's rule, only 2 of the out-group (Team Family) died, while the rest were offered a deal to ensure their survival and the survival of many others (through collective participation). Negan, despite being cast as the villain for killing only 2 Team Family members, in this context is the less deadly leader. Numbers-wise, Prick is surely the villain here.
Another example of Team Family not being as freedom-loving and justice-seeking as they pretend to be is their ran-sacking of Oceanside. Here, Team Family demand that their perspective overrides that of any other community. They barged into a peaceful, isolated community and took their possessions and threatened their people. Gee... that sounds familiar... when Team Family does it, it is righteous. When the Saviors do it, it is villainy... interesting...
Leadershit
Another thing that really interests me is this idea that Prick is a good leader, или at the very least, someone that should be followed. I'll be honest, I've never understood that one on any level, other than that he is the whitest man yelling the loudest, but I digress.
Prick has a tendency to lead his 'family' into trouble. His people die unnecessarily, in situations that could have been avoided if Prick had kept his mouth shut или hadn't pushed his luck. Prick is a risk taker, and with that comes the risk of his 'family' dying.
Negan, on the other hand, demonstrates a different leadership style. Negan seems to lead his people away from risk, creating strong and fortified Savior communities and, well, uh... motivating... other communities to build themselves up (in ways that, yes, benefit him greatly too). Sure, his soldiers are at risk of dying in battle, but he always seems to go in to risky situations fully prepared (plus, his combat Saviors seem to volunteer for those positions. There are choices for how to participate in the Savior community. Prick's people tend to have few choices, especially as their numbers keep dwindling... funny that...). For example, when Negan entered Alexandria in the season 7 finale, he was as prepared as he thought he needed to be (he just didn't know a few things... like there was A GODDAMN TIGER). So it seems to me that Negan's men and women tend to only die when Negan's usually on-target calculations are off. He knows the risks, but he minimises them. Prick's plans usually end with someone's head on the chopping block (or perhaps еще aptly, the batting tee) due to incompetence and/or premature volatile actions.
Reasonable Guys
There is also this perception, as suggested by the review Ссылки from the beginning of this rambling, that Negan, as a Телевидение character, is annoying, repetitive and/or lacking in dimension. Some Фаны seem irritated by his mannerisms and his constant string of jokes and/or offensive commentary.
Personally, I welcome Negan as a refreshing break from Prick's grunting, proclamations of "stuff and thangs" and self-righteous monologues. Prick has been a pillar of white Western masculinity, asserting, nay, erecting himself continuously as the moral right and defender of individual freedoms to sell black women (why does everyone forget that he did that?!?!?!?!?!) and dictate how every other survivor must live in these zombie times.
Negan too is a link figure. But he wields a bigger, and еще complicated, phallus (figuratively and literally). For the sake of Ты poor bastards who have actually read this far, I will spare Ты a discussion of my masculinity-femininity-Negan-Lucille vortex of brain-swirlings because I am myself still upside-down and back-to-front on my own thoughts there. But for the purposes of this discussion, Negan is a performer of brutally violent masculine hierarchical authority, just as Prick Grimes is.
To me, Negan is the actualisation of who Prick has always tried to be. He runs the show; he has working communities and armies; he appears unchallenged in his leadership for the smoother running of working communities. That is who Prick wanted to be when he grew up. But being that man, The Man in these zombie-times, requires the disintegration of something that Prick just can't quite let go of: self-righteousness.
While we don't know TV Negan's full back story, we do have the 'Here's Negan' comic series to look back on. TV Negan has hinted at loss, and this lines up with the comic Negan's double loss of his wife, first to cancer, then to zombie-ism. In 'Here's Negan', we learn that he has pretty much always been an asshole, choosing humour over niceties, as humour lead to еще "fucking". We do get the sense though that this is not as straight-forward as Negan claims, дана his Последнее re-devotion to his dying wife and his interactions with others at the start of the zombie apocalypse. Nevertheless, the 'Here's Negan' comic paints a picture of Negan as a character who has always been an asshole and enjoys being an asshole. This fits with the presentation of TV Negan.
But Negan, in both the comics and the tv series, is insistent on building communities and developing people's potential to thrive in the new zombie world order. Not the typical goal of a straight-up asshole. In the comics, he hates losing people, even ones he just met. He hates that others cannot, for whatever reason, survive like he can. To me, it seems like he runs the Savior communities in the way he does in order to enable survival even for those who would not survive in any other community. WOW that sounds familiar!
But the key difference here is that Negan is in no way self-righteous. He doesn't claim the moral high-ground. He knows he's a dick; he knows he's violent; most importantly, he knows what he is doing is not utopian. As he tells Prick: he isn't growing a garden. Prick, on the other hand, is hell-bent on growing that garden.
Nothing Matters If You're Dead
I think what bothers me about not only the Negan hate, but also the Negan fandom hate, is this idea that Team Family is inherently moral and good, and that Negan and the Saviors are not. This thinking is faulty and based almost solely on identification, rather than the qualities или actions of either group.
I link Ты to SherlockStark's great Статья link. Identifying with one particular group doesn't mean that Ты support that group's actions 100% of the time, nor does it mean that the 'villain' is actually a villain. I think sometimes the TWD fandom forgets that the Показать is about a variety of people trying to survive a disintegrating world. Those who are pro-Team Family excuse poor behaviour from the Family members based on the idea that morality is grey in apocalyptic times, but then throw that justification out the window when their in-group is threatened, even justifiably.
So what do Ты guys think about these stuff and thangs I've rambled about here? What point have I inevitably missed? Am I totally wrong on all counts? или do Ты totally agree and I am your new Negan (if so, I hope Ты are kneeling)?
SOOOOOO I was Чтение some reviews of the season 7 finale and pretty much all of them mentioned some form of Negan hate (see examples link and link). These reviews come at the end of a season link and link. And yet here I am, finally enjoying the damn Показать еще as a whole (rather than just Болталка scenes или episodes here and there, as characterised my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the Назад 6 seasons).
I think there is an interesting thing going on in The Walking Dead fandom right now that Negan and his baseball-bat-y ways are stirring up, so let me take Ты through it as I see it. As a long-time hater of Prick Grimes, perhaps the following analysis could be considered biased. OH WELL. Here are my thoughts about Negan's place in the fandom and how Prick can go jump into a pit of zombies.
In-Groups & Out-Groups
Unsurprisingly, this Prick VS Negan arc can be thought of as some link dynamics. This is link in motion! Basically, this is the 'us VS them' stuff: we identify with a link and can be hostile towards alternative groups или individuals who are not part of our group and perhaps demonstrate a particular something that our group doesn't like или understand.
For 6 seasons, most of the TWD fandom (seemingly) has identified with Prick Grimes and his collection of survivors. They are called Team Family. We have watched this group survive (as a collective, not necessarily as individuals) threats from walkers and not-dead-peoples alike. For the bulk of the TWD fandom (again, seemingly), Team Family is the in-group, the identified-with group that Фаны see themselves as part of. And as such, threats to Team Family are met with hostility.
And fair enough. Team Family is the group that the Показать focuses on, so naturally it is the group that the bulk of the Фаны will come to identify with (some еще faithfully than others!).
BUT the thing about Social Identity Theory is that every in-group is also an out-group, and every out-group is also an in-group. Negan and his Saviors operate in the TWD as their own in-group, meeting Team Family (and their insistence on resistance) with hostility. However, a key difference between the Saviors and Team Family is that the Saviors broke with in-group/out-group tradition and offered Team Family a form of Savior in-group status by politely suggesting (ok, ok, violently demanding) co-operative community efforts.
So what the hell is my point here? Team Family is the fandom's in-group. In general, Фаны want Prick and his peeps to survive and survive well. Negan represents an out-group that threatens Team Family's survival. And so, Фаны hate Negan; или perhaps еще specifically, hate the Показать for putting Team Family in such severe peril.
But are Team Family really any better than Negan and his Saviors? Is it possible that Prick Grimes also leads a merry band of assholes?
Team Asshole
Team Family, since Negan's arrival, has been sitting atop that moral high-horse, whining about freedom and justice and blah blah blah, resisting Negan's orders at pretty much every turn. But I bet a million bucks Team Family украл, палантин that damn high-horse in the first place!
When Prick first meets Negan, Negan informs him how not cool it was of him to kill all those Saviors. And Team Family sure did wipe out a lot of Saviors. Team Family snuffed out lives. Lives of people they didn't know. Lives who were part of an extensive community and contributed to that community's protection, economy and social life. Under Prick's rule, many of the out-group (the Saviors) were killed. Under Negan's rule, only 2 of the out-group (Team Family) died, while the rest were offered a deal to ensure their survival and the survival of many others (through collective participation). Negan, despite being cast as the villain for killing only 2 Team Family members, in this context is the less deadly leader. Numbers-wise, Prick is surely the villain here.
Another example of Team Family not being as freedom-loving and justice-seeking as they pretend to be is their ran-sacking of Oceanside. Here, Team Family demand that their perspective overrides that of any other community. They barged into a peaceful, isolated community and took their possessions and threatened their people. Gee... that sounds familiar... when Team Family does it, it is righteous. When the Saviors do it, it is villainy... interesting...
Leadershit
Another thing that really interests me is this idea that Prick is a good leader, или at the very least, someone that should be followed. I'll be honest, I've never understood that one on any level, other than that he is the whitest man yelling the loudest, but I digress.
Prick has a tendency to lead his 'family' into trouble. His people die unnecessarily, in situations that could have been avoided if Prick had kept his mouth shut или hadn't pushed his luck. Prick is a risk taker, and with that comes the risk of his 'family' dying.
Negan, on the other hand, demonstrates a different leadership style. Negan seems to lead his people away from risk, creating strong and fortified Savior communities and, well, uh... motivating... other communities to build themselves up (in ways that, yes, benefit him greatly too). Sure, his soldiers are at risk of dying in battle, but he always seems to go in to risky situations fully prepared (plus, his combat Saviors seem to volunteer for those positions. There are choices for how to participate in the Savior community. Prick's people tend to have few choices, especially as their numbers keep dwindling... funny that...). For example, when Negan entered Alexandria in the season 7 finale, he was as prepared as he thought he needed to be (he just didn't know a few things... like there was A GODDAMN TIGER). So it seems to me that Negan's men and women tend to only die when Negan's usually on-target calculations are off. He knows the risks, but he minimises them. Prick's plans usually end with someone's head on the chopping block (or perhaps еще aptly, the batting tee) due to incompetence and/or premature volatile actions.
Reasonable Guys
There is also this perception, as suggested by the review Ссылки from the beginning of this rambling, that Negan, as a Телевидение character, is annoying, repetitive and/or lacking in dimension. Some Фаны seem irritated by his mannerisms and his constant string of jokes and/or offensive commentary.
Personally, I welcome Negan as a refreshing break from Prick's grunting, proclamations of "stuff and thangs" and self-righteous monologues. Prick has been a pillar of white Western masculinity, asserting, nay, erecting himself continuously as the moral right and defender of individual freedoms to sell black women (why does everyone forget that he did that?!?!?!?!?!) and dictate how every other survivor must live in these zombie times.
Negan too is a link figure. But he wields a bigger, and еще complicated, phallus (figuratively and literally). For the sake of Ты poor bastards who have actually read this far, I will spare Ты a discussion of my masculinity-femininity-Negan-Lucille vortex of brain-swirlings because I am myself still upside-down and back-to-front on my own thoughts there. But for the purposes of this discussion, Negan is a performer of brutally violent masculine hierarchical authority, just as Prick Grimes is.
To me, Negan is the actualisation of who Prick has always tried to be. He runs the show; he has working communities and armies; he appears unchallenged in his leadership for the smoother running of working communities. That is who Prick wanted to be when he grew up. But being that man, The Man in these zombie-times, requires the disintegration of something that Prick just can't quite let go of: self-righteousness.
While we don't know TV Negan's full back story, we do have the 'Here's Negan' comic series to look back on. TV Negan has hinted at loss, and this lines up with the comic Negan's double loss of his wife, first to cancer, then to zombie-ism. In 'Here's Negan', we learn that he has pretty much always been an asshole, choosing humour over niceties, as humour lead to еще "fucking". We do get the sense though that this is not as straight-forward as Negan claims, дана his Последнее re-devotion to his dying wife and his interactions with others at the start of the zombie apocalypse. Nevertheless, the 'Here's Negan' comic paints a picture of Negan as a character who has always been an asshole and enjoys being an asshole. This fits with the presentation of TV Negan.
But Negan, in both the comics and the tv series, is insistent on building communities and developing people's potential to thrive in the new zombie world order. Not the typical goal of a straight-up asshole. In the comics, he hates losing people, even ones he just met. He hates that others cannot, for whatever reason, survive like he can. To me, it seems like he runs the Savior communities in the way he does in order to enable survival even for those who would not survive in any other community. WOW that sounds familiar!
But the key difference here is that Negan is in no way self-righteous. He doesn't claim the moral high-ground. He knows he's a dick; he knows he's violent; most importantly, he knows what he is doing is not utopian. As he tells Prick: he isn't growing a garden. Prick, on the other hand, is hell-bent on growing that garden.
Nothing Matters If You're Dead
I think what bothers me about not only the Negan hate, but also the Negan fandom hate, is this idea that Team Family is inherently moral and good, and that Negan and the Saviors are not. This thinking is faulty and based almost solely on identification, rather than the qualities или actions of either group.
I link Ты to SherlockStark's great Статья link. Identifying with one particular group doesn't mean that Ты support that group's actions 100% of the time, nor does it mean that the 'villain' is actually a villain. I think sometimes the TWD fandom forgets that the Показать is about a variety of people trying to survive a disintegrating world. Those who are pro-Team Family excuse poor behaviour from the Family members based on the idea that morality is grey in apocalyptic times, but then throw that justification out the window when their in-group is threatened, even justifiably.
So what do Ты guys think about these stuff and thangs I've rambled about here? What point have I inevitably missed? Am I totally wrong on all counts? или do Ты totally agree and I am your new Negan (if so, I hope Ты are kneeling)?