Warning: rambling salt post about TV TWD ahead. Honestly, this is like literal thought diarrhea here.
As ya’ll know, I’m not really invested in TWD show anymore. I mainly only watch it because my mom does (and I got her into it XD). So I’ll sit there and draw or chat online or whatnot while it’s on. So it’s not like I’m hardcore into it, and it’s really just a source of irritation or eye-rolling for me at this point. (The new intro is badass though. Can we get a total reboot and have it animated in that style and follow the comics (but with more character development))
OK ANYWAY.
So as usual, I have contempt for the stuff they’re doing with Negan. Lol. I mean, the writers shot themselves in the foot by killing Carl and they’re kinda screwed by Rick’s exit. Two characters that have bonds with Negan and ‘know’ Negan. Carl came down and talked for years with Negan in his cell. Rick and Negan had a much more... dynamic relationship in the comics - they were the nemesis... not Negan & Daryl and sometimes Rick, but just Negan and Rick. Negan and Rick have a long history at this point. They’re... familiar with each other. Rick and Negan tried to out-cat-and-mouse each other in All Out War, they both did nasty things to each other’s people, and they both had their people’s survival in mind. Thus, they understand each other. Rick also kept Negan alive for the sake of his son. Carl wanted to kill Negan. Rick told him no. ‘We don’t have to live in that world anymore - where we just kill. We can be better but we can still punish him.’ He didn’t want a world where his son thought death was the answer and death was just... the norm. Accepted. Nothing to shrug over.
Of course, the writers fucked this up by killing Carl on the show. They used Simon as a scapegoat for the Oceanside stuff to try to make Negan look ‘not so bad’. But they must have realized how cardboard they made this character of Negan. No care for his people, no sense of doing this just to protect them. No, he treated them like shit. So they desperately scrabble for something to make Negan human... oh, ok....yeah, he had a wife, Lucille! Ok, we’ll use that! We’ll take every opportunity to shove Lucille into the audience’s face. Because we have to have some way to make Negan human and relatable!
They don’t have: oh, he was protecting his people. They don’t have the back-and-forth shit where Negan only ‘went to war’ after Rick tried to kill him. And then he only attacked Alexandria with grenades after Rick brought a fucking herd to Sanctuary, knocked down the walls and left Negan and his people - many who were innocent people including children - at the risk of being overrun, eaten, starved, etc. (I didn’t watch Season 8 so correct me if I’m wrong on this shit not happening in the show). When Negan returned Carl to Rick - Rick attacked him and Negan only fought back to the point of Rick being subdued. He didn’t beat him. He didn’t punish Rick’s people. When they came to Alexandria for supplies and Rick wasn’t there, Negan and his men stayed in a vacant house... they didn’t harass the Alexandrians (in the show they beat up Aaron? Or maybe Eric...) The point is - Negan was a dick in the comics but he was a dick for his people. Rick could be a dick too... and he was also a dick... for his people.
Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is... the stuff with Negan and Michonne... it just doesn’t work. Not the way they’re trying to do it. They’re grasping at this desperate shard of humanity that they left Negan - the fact that he loved his wife. Because they didn’t give him the humanity of caring for and fighting for his people (in a misguided way. Yes.) And as much as I love Negan/Lucille...this being the only shard of humanity is weak. Everyone’s lost someone.
In the comics, he rarely ever talked about Lucille. He talked about her once in the early days. Then he mentioned to Alpha that he ‘lost someone’ and his world fell apart. Talking to Alpha is essentially like burning your diary - nobody’s gonna get to repeat your secret words. Then he talks to Rick about Lucille, again vaguely - worst thing I ever did was leave my wife to rot. It’s not this ‘omg my wife Lucille, who died, mah wife, she died of cancer and I was totally shitty to her and she was an amazing angel!’ It’s not this overkill outpouring to anybody within earshot of him in a ham-handed attempt to make Negan human and vulnerable.
And it was Rick whom he talked to about Lucille. Rick. Like I said above. Rick - who he has a bond with. Who he feels close to. Who he feels kinship with. Who is Michonne? He mentioned that Michonne doesn’t even talk to him. Thus this ‘bond’ they’re trying to make feels very forced and contrived to me. The ‘I care about Carl’ stuff feels contrived too. Negan was seconds away from bashing Carl’s brains in on the show and I’m supposed to feel a bond between them? That’s the problem - they left Negan bereft of being an empathetic character and they left no bonds between he and the other characters. They’re trying to force something that isn’t there. Everything just falls flat to me - keeping Negan alive (why? In the comics I understood it. It made sense.), trying to make Negan ‘human’ by constantly bringing up Lucille and making him actually extremely pitiful, trying to force a relationship out of thin air with Michonne.
I DUNNO GUYS. This is all over the place. I don’t even know what point I’m trying to make. I don’t even know why I care. I’m still always gonna be salty about TV Neg and how TWD show went down the drain and pissed away the comic content. They could have built up on the comic stuff, elevated it, made it great - instead...they spit on it. They set up the foundations of their house with worm-eaten wood and built that fucking house anyway. I realize AL leaving throws a big stick in the machinery, but if the foundations had been solid... it wouldn’t have collapsed the whole house.
(Like did we really need Oceanside? They are so pointless. The whole ‘killing Saviors’ and Simon slaughtered everyone and basically Oceanside itself... I just hate it. What was wrong with having a moral back-and-forth because Rick’s group killed Negan’s people and Negan’s group killed Rick’s people...? And these two leaders are bullheaded and stubborn because they’re both trying to protect their people and both think they’re right - only for Negan to realize later he was misguided, jaded and his leadership stagnated and stayed in survival ‘dog-eat-dog’ mode even when the world had moved past that...?