An ode to the mild-mannered leader-type.
Yo. I felt like sharing something I wrote a couple days ago as I reflected on fandom and the opinions I've soaked up ever since playing the game and roleplaying Luke. It has been interesting. And so here I am, standing by the idea that Luke deserves a liiiittle more acknowledgement as a leader - no less than what many give Kenny or Rick - and that, like with most characters in S2, the game doesn’t show him to his fullest capacity largely because of a railroading plot.
Arguments against Luke as a leader tend to be that he’s weak-willed because he avoids going down the dark road of revenge-killing, or doesn’t shoot said person when they’re already helpless, or because he hears out the opinions of his people rather than almost forcing them conform to his. It’s true that when he stepped up to become the group’s de facto leader, he didn’t get to be one for very long. :'D But even with the differences of opinion among Luke’s folks, his death proves he was effective enough of a leader to act as the glue. A group is only as strong as its leader, Luke points out himself. And it's his death that really sets into motion the crumbling of what remains of the group, imo.
I find that the Walking Dead show, particularly, consistently pushes this idea that you have to have a degree of ruthlessness and/or detachment to survive. So many sensitive characters with nagging moral consciences (see: Beth, Tyreese) are bumped off because that’s often perceived as a weakness. At the end of the day, what generally seems to matter most – what tends to make characters the most ‘valuable’ to more than a few fans, I’ve noticed (but not everyone, of course) - is how many kills a character can rack up, walkers and humans, without breaking much of a sweat or blinking an eye.
Don’t get me wrong, the brutality of the series is what drew me to it in the first place. I love me some flying walker heads and buckets of blood and fierce, unyielding toughness. But in light of all that I’m kind of drawn to Luke’s restraint towards dealing with human threats even more.
Luke can kill - he knows what he needs to do if a situation calls for it. When Matthew's approaching him and Clem on the bridge, Luke says clearly that if it comes to it and that guy looks like he’s going to shoot, he’ll shoot him first. And Luke didn’t hang back and do nothing during that firefight with the Russian group - he was right up in there, doing what he could to protect his people.
But while he has those weapons and he can wield that machete like a pro, he prefers to use them as a deterrent. Shooting is loud and noise attracts walkers, that’s another thing. But yes – he knows he doesn’t always HAVE to kill. Someone he spares might come back to haunt him someday, that’s true. And maybe he'd have paid for that one day. But what if you’ve gone and killed someone who could have really helped you, one of those rare few good people left, because you made the wrong call? Then you get something like the situation with Matthew on the bridge. Knee-jerk violence doesn’t always have to be the only solution even if it seems like the best and quickest one at the time. (That said, I'll openly admit that I was in the camp of Getting Rid of Carver ASAP 'cause he scared the fuck out of me, lol)
The actor who played Tyreese in the show brought up a very good point I’d like to share because it’s so damn fitting. He says:
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“You should always wrestle with whether to kill or not. You should be uncomfortable. I really don’t care if somebody thinks it’s soft. If you’re not in touch with your vulnerability, you’re not going to be an effective leader. You need a balance [and] to be in touch with your feminine side.”*
For someone 'hindered' by morals, Luke has lasted a very long time and it couldn’t have been luck that got him that far. He’s a good survivor, a guy always trying to approach situations with a plan. And like everyone else, he has suffered his share of loss. His heart could have folded in and he could have given up on people so easily. But he’s resilient. He can not only self-reliantly push on in the toughest of times but still keep a sense of humour like Omid. And he knows that you need to find others you can trust, that there’s nothing more important in the world than gaining allies and forming strong connections, and that means taking calculated risks. It’s not his crew telling him, ‘why don’t we give so-and-so a chance?’ He’s the guy still saying, ‘he’s [Arvo’s] jus' a scared kid, man’. In that same way he’s one of the only people to defend Clementine in front of his group when they argue over what to do with her when others might have easily just offed her and eliminated the threat because it’s easy and they’re scared.
Luke’s a fairly compassionate guy and he makes some stupid-adorable, achingly honest sadfaces – it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s part of the reason why he can be easily passed off as a 'lesser' leader-type character. He might not look like he’ll stand his ground and put up a fight. He’s not gruff, doesn’t threaten, isn’t loud, and doesn’t really put his pain above anyone else’s.
And Luke doesn’t get a satisfying scene where he gets to take that crowbar and beat Carver’s face in for all the pain he caused. But he stands before the man who terrorized his people for so long and beat him and Kenny half to death, looks him right in the eye, and against every fibre of his being and his lizard brain screaming for justice, he says, 'I’m not doing this. I’m not going to go down that dark and slippery slope he wants me to and *I’m not going to become him*, even when there isn’t one part of this fucker I don’t hate. His kneecaps are blown, he’s not going anywhere, and walkers are coming’.
It takes incredible strength to walk away from that situation - that *opportunity* - then for him to surrender to his base desires and swing that crowbar. He says himself that he doesn't know would have done in that situation -- but he tells Clem, 'less'. And as much as I think him rolling with his injuries well or hacking up the undead is pretty cool, that struggling restraint, to me, will always be badass.
**In conclusion, I’m definitely NOT saying Luke is a *better* leader than anyone else**. He made mistakes, a big one, which he at least owns up to, and has a hard time striking that balance, sometimes, between leader and friend. He can come off as condescending to his best bud (not out of malice, I honestly think) under the strain of leadership, and yeah, maybe the one guy or girl he might have let go down the road would come back to bite his ass. That's always a legit risk. But I’m just saying that I think he and every other ‘nice guy/girl’ across all mediums of TWD deserve a hat-tip every now and again. They might be quieter, in a way, but I think they're no less important to have around.
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