Carol fan. Caryl shipper.

It’s October and you know what that means..

Media & fans: Everyone hates the Lucille cliffhanger. It was the biggest misstep ever. No one likes it. No one wants to have a game over which of their favourite characters has been hideously bludgeoned to death.

fUCK OKAY so the other day at work Shameless came on the muzak at work and I just paused in the hallway I was walking down and was like "This was a good goddamn song." I'm so glad I could share this with you.

fUCK OKAY so the other day at work Shameless came on the muzak at work and I just paused in the hallway I was walking down and was like "This was a good goddamn song." I'm so glad I could share this with you.

Carol, mental illness, and why the media needs to educate itself or remain silent

Morgan finds Carol, crumpled on some random porch in plain sight — because, of course, that’s where you would hang out after everything she’s been through. Morgan bandages her up and tries to pep talk her into coming back to Alexandria, to no avail. ——————————————————————————– CAROL DESERVES BETTER — AND SO DOES THE AUDIENCE ——————————————————————————– Carol ends up leaving on her own, only to be captured by one of the Saviors. At first Carol smiles because she thinks she’s going to die and her struggle will finally be over, but the Savior instead decides to torture her. He shoots her in the arm; the leg. It’s slow, brutal, and most of all, cruel. Not just what the Savior is doing to Carol, but what showrunner Scott Gimple and his writers are doing to the legacy of the character. Carol’s struggle from the very beginning has been about a woman overcoming violence and abuse, becoming a formidable human in the process. And yet here TWD has put her, mewling for death in the street while a character that doesn’t even really have a proper name repeatedly calls her a “bitch” and fills her full of holes. ——————————————————————————– It’s not subversive. It’s not clever. It’s not upending expectation. It’s taking the enormous goodwill an audience has toward a character — goodwill built by powerful, thoughtful storytelling — and profiteering off of it in the name of mediocre violence. It’s the shape of things to come in this episode, to be sure, but there’s only one word for it: cheap. Carol as a character deserves better — and so does the audience.