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So once again, I feel like TWD is trying to make narrative parallels between our group of survivors and the foes that they face. And once again, I feel like they are testing that boundary of “okay if they doooo thiiiis are they evil? if they do thiiiiis much are they still the good guys? what if we have them do thiiiiiis???” - but are still, overall, wanting our take-away as the audience to be “yea, this is morally grey territory, but our group is still in the right.”

Something They Need is probably the first time I’ve had to stop and think about it seriously though, tbh. What they did in taking weapons away from a community against their will, a community that is already vulnerable considering how many of it’s number are children, was objectively wrong. I won’t excuse it. I don’t condone it.

But I also don’t feel like anyone in our group condones it, either. Yes, Tara makes the decision to tell them about this group despite her promise not to. And yes, the group makes the decision to take the guns - whether given willingly or not. And yes, they believe they have to do it, and that it’s for a greater good, and yadda yadda. But that doesn’t mean they feel good about it. You could tell none of them did. Rick telling Tara she doesn’t have to feel bad, and Tara agreeing in the end that she doesn’t have to feel bad - doesn’t mean they feel GOOD about it.

But, so, moving beyond that. Because however they feel about having done it, they made the choice to do it and then did it. That’s done. It was wrong, they had their reasons, they don’t feel justified, but they’re also not going to sit around and feel guilty about it.

What makes what they did so different from what Negan and the Saviors did to them?

The narrative parallels were so clear in this episode.

Our group flushes the people of Oceanside out with bombs, similar to how the Saviors set roadblocks for our crew. They surround them. They threaten death to the one member of Oceanside, Natania, who attempts to stop them. They announce that they’re in control and nothing Oceanside does will dissuade them. They say you can be a part of us, or we can just take what you have sorry not sorry. They leave them vulnerable and feeling powerless and lesser than they were before.

It all feels a little too uncomfortably familiar doesn’t it?

But it’s not the same. And it’s not the same in some very important ways.

The point of flushing Oceanside out was to cleanly get them all together and get the weapons without anyone getting hurt. While they made sure their presence was intimidating so that no one would fight them, that was to ensure no one got hurt.

Everything Rick and co. do is meant to get in and out quickly, and to give Oceanside the chance to see that they genuinely mean no harm and would rather these people come and fight alongside them. They want them to freely choose - not because they’ve been intimidated and humiliated into submitting. But to choose whether or not it’s the right thing for themselves.

While Natania holds Tara at gunpoint, Tara deliberately looks up at where she knows Michonne is holed up and says “no”, no don’t do it. Don’t shoot this woman. And if Beatrice or one of the others had shot up to try and grab someone’s gun or whatever, well, she might have gotten shot at - but our people surely would not have held a member of her family down and threatened her to take her arm off, ykwim? Again, the point was to, yes, get the guns and get out - but not to specifically harm or even frighten anyone.

Likewise, the offer to join them was given as a clear cut choice. Fight by our side or not. Either way, we’ll try to bring your guns back to you when it’s over. Our people are not saying - not only are we taking all of your guns, but we’re going to hunt through your village to make sure you aren’t hiding any other weapons and then return every couple of weeks to collect more so you better get some for us. No. While taking their weapons is objectively wrong, they are not forcing the people into doing anything beyond allowing that to happen.

When the walkers come, the two groups fight side-by-side, with our group even sharing their own weapons with Oceanside’s fighters. They prioritize the safety of the children. Instead of using the presence of the walkers as yet another tool to intimidate and degrade these people, they fight alongside them to stop the threat together.

So yea, clear writing and directing choices here to parallel when the Saviors trapped Rick and the others to Rick and the others trapping Oceanside. And yet those parallels are still meant to make us see that our group are not, in fact, descending into villainy.

Even Oceanside, for the most part, does not see the choices that Tara and Rick have made as villainous. Cyndie even thanks Tara for standing up to the Saviors. And it wasn’t even a “I’m glad you’re doing this but did you have to take our guns??” Because Cyndie, Beatrice, and many of the others, understood that yea, actually, they did have to. If they have a shot in hell of winning, they have to.

None of this was meant as an attack on Oceanside, per se, even though it was an attack. But our group was not attempting to kill, enslave, or even subsume the community of Oceanside. They left the members of this community weaponless, but not identity-less, nor even powerless, as the choice to come and fight is still left open to them.

Are the actions taken by our group in this episode meant to make us think they’re riding that sliding scale of morality straight to the bottom? Naw. Are we meant to think about their choices and consider how far we think they can go before they’re the bad guys? Sure.

But when Negan tells Sasha, in the other plot of this episode, that he wants her to know they’re not monsters - are we meant to consider how the Saviors see themselves as, well, saviors and not villains? Eh, I’m not sure about that.

Negan makes monstrous decisions, takes monstrous actions, and does them very purposefully in order to make people see that he is, in fact, a monster. But like any good tyrant, he has to feed with one hand and punish with the other. Keeping his subjects unsteady and wary is part of how he operates.

We have a code. I can kill you at any time. We don’t allow rape. I can keep you in a cage. We have good food and clean clothing. If you fight for me. We can keep you safe. If you submit to me so entirely that you forget you even have a name or identity outside of mine. You have choices. But you better make the right ones. It’s all very intentional. And it works for the most part. But that doesn’t make it any less monstrous.

And the Saviors, going along with it all (well the ones who do go along with it vs. the ones who are enslaved to it), are they monsters or just doing what they have to in order to survive? When Sasha tells Eugene she’d rather die than help Negan hurt their friends, she’s hoping not only to get something from him but to sway him. She’s trying to stop Eugene from becoming part of the monster himself. Because she knows, she knows that to stay and to help Negan is to become him.

And that’s a very far cry from the morally grey stuff that Team Family does on occasion. Eugene, even passively going along with Negan, is doing more harm than Tara and Rick stealing weapons from Oceanside.

TL;DR - No, I don’t approve of what Tara and Rick and the others did to Oceanside. But no, it doesn’t make them monsters, it doesn’t even make them villains. But yes, we are supposed to note the narrative parallels in this episode and take stock of what we do and don’t think makes a villain a villain.

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