#twd analysis

Sometimes living in an abusive household as siblings means appeasing the abuser over and over again and failing your sibling in the process. Being unfair to them. "Stop crying, I hear dad coming." "Go with him on that hunting trip, it won't be as bad as you think and you know you can't just say no to him." "You're right, but don't talk back to him like that." You don't remove them from situations, even though you know you should and would in an ideal world, because in this one you can't. The fallout would be so big that you wouldn't know how to deal with it. You want to shield both of you, so instead of saving them, you teach them how to live with it.

And I think that is so important with both the psychology behind Merle abandoning Daryl and how we see Daryl behave as an adult. Because despite his tendency to lash out and behave violently, Daryl is someone who endures. Daryl is loyal to a fault. He's the executioner. He'll ignore his own wants and needs to get shit done for people. Sometimes, especially if it's with Merle, he doesn't even recognize mistreatment.

This love letter is addressed to the character of Beth in The Walking Dead. A profound character, with an arc defined by pain and suffering that are difficult to overcome, ending in a way that is unclear, confusing, and illogical—a conclusion that could perhaps be better defined as a beginning.

I FINALLY MET MICHONNE! and she is everything I expected her to be and like… 10 TIMES BETTER THAN THAT. I LIVE!!! 😭😭🤌🤌🤌

BODY COFFEE CAUSE TEA ISN’T STRONG ENOUGH!!!! I have no other choice but to stan. Seriously contemplating changing my username to "Michonne's abs" or "Michonne's-bootlicker" or something because I am unwell.

Also… not me catching Rick checking out Michonne in literally every scene they’re in together 👀, he's just like me FR 😂😂

Live pic of me and Rick catching each other staring at Michonne’s ass every time she walks into frame:

I am SO violently jealous of the Richonne shippers who were here from DAY ✨ONE✨. Like y’all saw the vision so early, did you astral project into the writers’ room?? Are you psychic?? PLEASE drop the lottery numbers. PLEASE. I’m BEGGING. 🙏

You clocked the soulmate energy and the big "fuck me" eyes Rick was giving Michonne from their first meeting, the sexual tension, the chemistry long before the rest of the fandom even noticed, and you held your ground against the racist, toxic cesspool that was 2012 stan culture. Y’all were in the trenches, fighting for your lives, and still came out on top.

COME GET YOUR BADDIE CHAINS 😌🤏🤏🤏 IKTR!!!

Honestly, I wish I had been there with you. I would’ve been in every TWD YouTube comment section, subreddit, and Facebook group, guns blazing like:

“RICHONNE IN FIVE OR I BURN THIS WHOLE FRANCHISE TO THE GROUND.”

And when they finally got together?? I KNOW some of y’all levitated. I KNOW you ascended. The spiritual VINDICATION you must’ve felt?? The SMUGNESS??? Went to bed that day like

AND AM I THE ONLY ONE who clocked Rick’s tiny little flicker of disappointment when Merle was all, “Michonne and Andrea was all cuddled up during the winter👀” and lowkey hinted there was something there?? And then like TWO episodes later, Michonne casually drops the “I talk to my dead boyfriend sometimes” line and Rick lights up like a damn Christmas tree 😭😭 Like sir… was that RELIEF I detected?? Was he thinking, “oh wait... I might actually have a shot”??? Bc SAME, hot boy Rick, same!!! I see you!!! I am onto you, cowboy!!! 🫵🏾😤

Anyway, Michonne is bi in this house. That’s a personal headcanon argue with yo mama!

Now SPEAKING of chances… Andrea. Girl. You had like. So many. TOO MANY. And what did you do?? You had a whole opportunity to send the Governor to hell's ashy gates, and you FUMBLED. For WHAT?? Just for him to absolutely humiliate you during the negotiation talks later like it was his full-time job?? I got violent secondhand embarrassment from that whole scene. Like girl... GRIMY, EYEPATCHED, CULT LEADER vs. MICHONNE??? HOT GIRL SURVIVOR WHO KEPT YOU ALIVE IN THE WILDERNESS FOR 8 MONTHS STRAIGHT???

I'm sorry but if a stunning sword-wielding woman took care of me while I was fever-dreaming in the woods for nearly a year, the moment I recovered I’d be like, “Yes ma’am 😩 what do you need? Firewood? Fresh water? A new life in the woods where we live off berries and trauma bonding? Say less, I’m on it.” Like literally I’d be her emotional support simp.

Some of y’all don’t know how to recognize divine favor when it’s handed to you on a plate and that’s why Andrea got what she got. 🤷‍♀️

Also, me realizing a ton of TikTok sounds come from TWD and I’ve just been unknowingly quoting them for years??? Every time I hear one, I’m like:

And then I rewatch the scene like 50 times just to laugh again 💀💀

Anyways...Now for the trauma portion of this post…

Ok down to business, I’ve finished Season 3 and I’m five episodes from the end of Season 4 and I have a lot of things to say about some people so, buckle up and as usual ⚠️spoilers ahead ⚠️:

First of all, I Can’t Stand Behind Carol’s Choice During the Flu Outbreak

I've been turning this over in my head since it happened, and here it is: Carol was wrong. Killing Karen and David wasn’t brave. It wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t necessary. It was fear disguised as leadership. And ultimately, it was pointless.

Why? because the virus still spread, people still died and the group was only saved because of Hershel’s compassion, Daryl, Tyresse and Michonne’s courage, and the strength of the sick fighting to live. (Notice how I didn't mention Bob? yeah fuck him)

Karen and David were already quarantined. Hershel later used that same strategy, but with empathy. He risked his life to comfort the infected, not kill them. And it worked.

Carol didn’t even try. She didn’t warn them. Didn’t comfort them. Didn’t talk to Rick. She just… decided their lives weren’t worth the risk. That’s cold-blooded.

And the question I keep asking myself: If it had been Carl or Daryl who got sick… would she have done the same thing? I THINK NOT! She didn’t see Karen and David as her people.

But Hershel did...And that's the problem.

Hershel pookie bear 😭😭, He was the heart of the prison group. While others were spiraling, shutting down, or making fear-based decisions (looking at you Carol), Hershel walked straight into the fire.

He chose to enter the infected cell block, not because anyone made him, but because no one else would.

He didn’t kill the sick to stop the spread and He didn’t run from them. He sat with them, held their hands and prayed over them, He tried to heal them, even knowing he could die.

“You step outside; you risk your life. You take a drink of water; you risk your life. And now you breathe, and you risk your life. Every moment now... you don’t have a choice. The only thing you can choose is what you're risking it for.”

That quote hit me like a train. Because Hershel didn’t just say that he lived it. Carol acted in secret, Hershel led by example, Carol chose fear, Hershel chose compassion. Thats why his death hit me hard

He was good, in a world that desperately needed good people.

And I think the Governor's scene added the missing piece that tied it all together:

The moment where the Governor captures Michonne and Hershel, and Hershel, in pure Hershel fashion, tries to appeal to his humanity:

“If you understand what it’s like to have a daughter… then how can you threaten to kill someone else’s?”

And the Governor just… looks at him and says:

“Because they are not mine.”

And in that moment, I swear, everything from Seasons 1–4 snapped into focus.

That’s the whole thesis of the show so far.

Because that’s the answer we keep getting to the moral questions Dale, Hershel, and even I have been asking since day one: In a world where the outside threat are the walkers/zombies, why do humans fight among each other? Why don’t we help each other survive? Why do people steal, kill, betray, or destroy instead of cooperating?

The answer is always the same:

“Because they are not mine.”

Not my family. Not my responsibility. Not my people.

That mindset, the tribalism, the conditional empathy, the “us vs. them” logic, that’s the real apocalypse. Not the walkers, not the virus.

It’s the loss of humanity. That’s why Carol and Shane felt so comfortable killing Karen, David, and Otis, because they didn’t see them as their people. Their lives were treated as expendable.

Dale warned us. Hershel lived it. Rick is struggling with it. And men like the Governor, carol and Shane? They’ve fully embraced it.

Secondly, the mirroring between Michonne and Carl

The destruction of the prison scatters the group, and emotionally, it breaks them too. In Season 4, Episode 9 (“After”), we follow two characters in parallel: Michonne and Carl. Each is isolated, traumatized, and trying to figure out who they are without the group, but they move in opposite emotional directions.

When Michonne cuts the arms and jaws off two walkers and ties them up, she’s going back to what kept her alive before she met the prison group: camouflage, silence and detachment. The world has fallen apart again, and her response is to revert: to survive alone.

But something’s different this time, the walker herd becomes a mirror.

As she walks among them, the camera slows down. She’s not just hiding, she’s studying them. Observing. Is she one of them now? They're dead. Silent. Numb. And so is she, emotionally.

She’s lost her found family. She’s alone again. She’s not living, just drifting.

And worst of all? It feels too comfortable. The flashback confirms what I suspected, her first walker “pets” were her boyfriend and his friend. What starts as a peaceful domestic scene slowly decays into horror: they’re armed, unstable, and already becoming monsters in her memory.

It’s her mind processing grief, guilt, and trauma. She turned people she loved into tools for survival. Now she’s doing it again.

When she snaps and kills the walkers, even the ones she chained up it’s more than a survival choice.

It’s symbolic. It’s a rejection.

“I’m done walking with the dead. I want to find the living again.”

She’s choosing life over numbness. Choosing emotion over detachment. This to me is an episode were a lot of characters come to realize a lot of important things. I find it so fitting that her scene parallels Carl's:

All through season 3 and even season 4, Carl has been battling with what doing the "right thing" meant.

After the prison falls, he’s furious. Not just because of the death of Judith or Hershel (RIP) but because he’s finally seeing his father’s limits.

He berates Rick, “I don’t need you anymore.” Tries to survive alone, kills walkers and then self-soothes by eating pudding... after nearly dyeing, twice.

He’s trying to prove he’s an adult, but when Rick appears to be turning into a walker, Carl can’t pull the trigger.

That’s the breaking point: He realizes he can’t be cold and detached like Shane. He does need his father. He wants to survive, but not at the cost of his humanity.

Here’s the genius of this episode:

Michonne is opening back up. She’s saying, “I want to feel again.”

Carl is shutting down. He’s saying, “Feelings are dangerous.”

They’re on the same emotional path but headed in opposite directions. And that’s what makes their reunion at the end so powerful.

It’s not just “Yay, we found each other 😀.” It’s: “We need each other to stay human 🥹🥹.”

Carl’s emotional arc echoes Shane’s influence. He believes if Rick had just killed the Governor when he had the chance, none of this would’ve happened. It’s a black-and-white view; the kind Shane would have approved of:

“Mercy is weakness. Morality gets people killed.”

But the show keeps challenging that idea. Yes, Rick showed mercy, but was that wrong? Or was it a refusal to abandon civilization completely?

Carl isn’t ready to grapple with moral nuance, not really. He’s still a kid, after all. A kid who deeply loves and respects his father, but is being forced to confront death, violence, and impossible choices at an age when he should be learning algebra and playing videogames, not battlefield ethics.

Most of the talking points he clings to in Seasons 3 and 4 are just words he parrots from Rick and Shane. Carl wants so badly to prove he’s mature, that he’s strong enough to carry the same burden Rick does. But the truth is… he can’t. Not yet.

“Should’ve shot him” isn’t a thoughtful moral stance, it’s emotional shorthand. A way to avoid the complicated grief of what might have been. That kind of black-and-white thinking is exactly what a grieving child would cling to, because it feels safer than facing the gray.

I’m honestly so curious to see how the other character arcs unfold, and whether more of them mirror or invert each other the way Michonne and Carl’s do.

I obviously have other thoughts about other people, but this is getting too long so I will end with Rick.

That’s a whole other beast I haven’t even begun to fully unpack. But it’s clear he’s going through a metamorphosis. You can feel it building all season, from officer friendly to farmer Rick to… whatever comes next.

When he wakes up from this "deep slumber"… I wonder what kind of man he’ll be. One thing’s for sure though, he and Michonne are still gonna be hot as hell. 😌😌🤏🤏🤏

I’m on The Book of Carol, Episode 4, and I can’t shake the feeling that the writers are dangling the world’s cheapest carrot in front of us—especially those of us in the Caryl corner. (Hi, guilty as charged. Always and forever.)

Season 1 already proved the obvious: Daryl on his own just doesn’t land. The reviews, the ratings—meh. So what do the producers do? They bring Carol back. Great! Except then they start breadcrumbing the fanbase into thinking that, maybe this time, they’ll finally stop stringing us along romantically.

Case in point: Daryl looks at Carol and says, “Dépaysant. A place that makes you see things differently.” Before this, they used Isabelle as a prop to show Daryl might be capable of romance now. Layer it all together and you’ve basically got a neon sign blinking: Different Daryl, different story, maybe different ending.

And then, just to rub salt in it, they throw in an old not-married couple waxing poetic about love in the apocalypse. Cue the older lady declaring: “Children see things we’re afraid to. Laurent thinks Daryl loves you, but he won’t say it because he won’t be able to leave.” Which… excuse me? Daryl literally told Carol he loved her in the series finale, and then still left. Make it make sense.

Here’s the thing: the manipulation is working. I’m watching. I’m curious. But I’m also bracing myself, because I already know they shove Carol into another relationship in Season 3. And honestly, I wouldn’t put it past the showrunners to end the whole thing with some smug “courtly love” nonsense.

If you don’t know the concept, Barbra Streisand’s Rose Morgan spells it out in The Mirror Has Two Faces:

“A love that has nothing to do with marriage, nothing to do with sex. It’s defined as a passionate relationship between a knight and a lady of the court who’s already married… so they could never consummate their love. They took sex out of the equation, and what’s left was a union of souls.”

Can’t you just see it? Ten+ years of buildup, and instead of giving us the romance we’ve been waiting for, they pat us on the head and say: See? Their love is ~transcendent~ because they never touch each other.

Now everything’s been aesthetic-ized. Plots and characters feel trope-y, cliche, and overused. The camera is overworked but not for anything meaningful. It’s a lot of static shots that don’t feel natural and the moving ones are filtered with weird focuses or just simply bad. A lot of emotion that should be done by the actors acting is actually written and spoken with dialogue just to fill the silence now.

There’s lots of skipping over major things in multiple episodes just for the outcome to be underwhelming because we didn’t get a proper built exposition and climax. It’s very “keep it moving, next” now.

I loved how in the early seasons they didn’t fetishize sex. No mood lighting, no music, no over choreograph sexy poses. Lori and Rick straight up had sex after they reunited WHILE Carl was literally sleeping 1 cot over in the same tent and it was treated completely fine with no overproduction. Carol joked about sex with not only Daryl but also Axel during the prison era. Beth was able to have boyfriends and explain how dating can still be dating without the expectation of marriage just because you hook up in an apocalypse. Glenn and Maggie were horny for each other all the time and everyone knew it. Where the naturalness started to go downhill was with Alexandria’s introduction. Carl was getting older and kids go through those confused emotions they have to sort out somehow, but the moment they introduced Enid it was super obvious with what they were doing and kind of cringy. Next was Rick and Michonne. I love them, they’re great, but I think the pressure from fans for them to get together really put that moment into the spotlight. They got candlelit lighting with dramatic handholding and eye gazing really drawn out too. It was a really overproduced moment that didn’t fit them personally. What was great was them immediately being found out by all their friends because of Jesus in the SAME night they have sex. I feel like Rosita was definitely a sex symbol at first. She had a lot of crop tops, booty shorts, and often posed with her arms on her hips or head, extenuating her form for the audience’s eyes. And then they developed her character and found a stride that worked for her and it still works so she’s thankfully a character that got away from that stylization.

The overproduction where the show loses that natural identity for me is AOW. Andrea almost killed Daryl with a hunting rifle, head graze with 1 shot in s2. You’re telling me dozens of people with some who have a personal vendetta against Negan couldn’t get 1 bullet to graze him?? Unbelievable. The endless monologues and speeches that no one remembers 6 seasons later. The horde stunts. And it gets worse with the time jump because now they have to use dialogue to explain the friction and tension of all the years that past while trying to maintain the present and move the episode plot forward. We get drastic character personality changes and decisions and more monologues for dramatic reveals like Michonne about Magna’s prison tattoo which didn’t really lead to anything considering Michonne never had the intention of changing her mind and just did it to reaffirm her opinion onto the masses. We get a totally overproduced sex scene between Magna and Yumiko with a song that goes on forever showing us what other characters are doing with quick transition cuts between all of them. We get Covid filmed episodes that have borderline out of focused motorcycle road shots. There’s one scene in 11x23 of Maggie and Negan talking at the back of the bus that’s just purely disorienting verging on motion sickness and all they do is close a door and walk. Maggie gunning down the Reapers was beautiful, but you compare that scene to the Shane and Rick showdown, or to Merle chasing Michonne and you can SEE how overproduced the show has gotten.

A lot of the characters don’t even seem to have opinions anymore or ANY inner turmoil unlike Glenn and Dale did. It’s all monotone bickering about the same shit for several seasons which leads to no ACTION, no CONFLICT, and no CONSEQUENCES. They spent what felt like half of season 2 debating Randal’s fate as a group even taking a vote, but Negan’s is decided only by Rick, in a matter of seconds, a decision he makes in the spur of the moment betraying his word to a lot of people who just stood there and took it and didn’t react and say no and just shoot Negan then and there. That moment of Rick vs Negan was a build up for 2 seasons, only to turn into a huge let down and was the moment they truly fell into classic TV productions with twists and turns and completely destroying a character driven show for a plot driven one.

Okay I will explain, to me, why this song (and the scene it was used in) is so important in my opinion.

There is a metaphor between Lori and Jessie- he saw Lori in Jessie so he got obsessed over her, wants to give her the love he regret not giving his deceased wife Lori- act more and face the problems more, because he would keep running away from the problems when he was with Lori, what made their marriage troublesome. However, the truth is hard, he cant live in that fantasy- Jessie isn't Lori- and Lori is dead and the world outside is brutal and far gone.

The position Rick gets against the wall is almost the same he got against the prison metal grid right before walkers attacked and Lori would get killed minutes after- That moment the song goes "the sun of my life, it is dead, it is dead".

In the shot, Rick is alone- the dead walker on the other side- his wife is dead-

The last camera shot has space to fit 2 people side by side, yet Rick is alone.

This is the episode Rick snaps out of this little new fantasy he wanted to live in Alexandria.

it was something that had boiled over to the point where he could no longer run from the version of himself that he was so desperately trying to turn into something useful- something acceptable. daryl lashing out at beth i think as a narrative point exists as a mirror, one in which daryl passes by and cannot ignore the way that his lips form words like his father sometimes.

his past has found him yet again and he’s confronted by all of the preconceptions he was exposed to at the start, and he begins to fall victim to the cycle of abuse, with beth being a confused, albeit unintentionally willing and vulnerable target. a reflection of daryl- hurt, lost, having lost (or never really had) a father figure- something any abused child has to carry the grief of every day. especially with beth’s suicidality, it’s a reflection of daryl’s desire to “kill” his history, the character he has always been forced to burden- be it through an angry facade, or be it through the redemption of his preconceptions by letting his loved ones see his heart.

i’m personally very fond of the fact that the writers made sure that daryl fully, at some point, was forced into conflict with his s2 self. i think his fight with beth was less so that, and moreso a fight with himself, for his life- the one that he has now. if the life that s4 daryl had was thrust upon s2 daryl, he’d have ran. so far away that the vulnerability of happiness could never tempt him again. having internalized the idea that he was “lesser” due to class differences, i think it was difficult for him to let go of the idea that when things finally were working out for him, he was just peacocking himself into a blue collar do-gooder. and always, always, waiting for the other shoe to drop. so when beth assumes he’d been imprisoned, or when she projects ideas onto him that align less so with his personal character and moreso with his childhood incidental circumstances, highlighting the differences in their upbringings, there’s that shoe dropping. it confirms his narratives and he further confirms them by breaching the sanctity of his own character- acting dangerously and foolishly towards a child so like he was in the past.