Hello. My name is Jason and I’m a pop culture addict. I don’t consume pop culture. I ravenously devour it. I meet shady dealers in shadier alleys (of the internet) to procure myself this drug. And whenever a new strain of my favorite narcotic hits the streets, I just have to try it. So when Walking Dead became a hot commodity in the comics world, I tripped on it as soon as I could. Then that stimulant took the same trajectory as cocaine and was refined into crack which delivers it’s dopamine clutching payload more instantly to your mind system via television. I. Got. Hooked.
I’m here to say that I confess “I am powerless over my addiction and that my life has become unmanageable.” So I’m quitting Walking Dead and sharing my experience with you. Warning: this article is about to go all surreal PSA on you.
If you have not read the comics, stop watching Walking Dead. Now. I know what Walking Dead is. I know the dark secret. And I will tell you that secret. Here’s what the writers of Walking Dead do.
They immerse you into an engrossing, brutal post-appocalyptic world, full of grit and spell-binding texture. They populate this world with mesmerizingly relateable characters. They then place these characters out on a limb and start sawing. Just as you think the characters can’t suffer anymore, that they are (in some case literally) almost at the end of their rope. At this precise moment the writers offer you the tiniest shard of hope. A barely blipping light at the end of a monstrously depressive, dark tunnel. A microscopic sliver of joy… Leave now! It’s a trap! Because at this point the writers grab that hope/light/joy by its hair, drag it screaming before you, rape it in full view of your stunned face and psyche, partially cannibalize it and then drag that death to your front door where your children will find it. And while your children stand there on the front porch of your happiness, paralyzed into a shocked horror at the sight of a rotting hope corpse, the writers then sneak in through your hope window and raid your hope cupboards. Finally, when you and your hope family have begun to recover – days later – and muster the courage and will to live and sit down for breakfast, you find that the sugary colorful cereals that could have had the slightest outside chance of restoring an infinitesimal amount of joy to your life, has been replaced by the hope bandits with syphilis-spitting spiders. And if you do manage to fight off the horrifying swarm of arachnids, you still have to worry about your now undead hope corpse attacking you while you’re holed up in a closet in the fetal position, trying to quietly cry yourself to death.
This is the Walking Dead. Lather, rinse, repeat. I swear it to you my fellow citizens. Nothing good will ever come out of Walking Dead. Nothing.
So leave now. Abandon ship. Abort mission. Use the force, quit cold turkey. Respect your psyche, preserve your hope and joy. Quit now.
Completely disagree with this. How you describe the writing is what makes The Walking Dead a good show. They are suppose to keep you wrapped in the story. If they kept showering you with hope it gets boring and the characters can’t develop well. Then on the other side they can not keep you in the dark depressed state either.
I have not read any issues of The Walking Dead comic and I don’t feel I need to. People have told me enough about the differences between the two for me to realize that they are not the same thing and just because you’ve read the comic doesn’t mean you know anything about where the show is going.
When was the last time you saw a zombie movie with a happy ending? Out of the 42 zombie movies I own (Yes, I counted before I posted)Only one of them has somewhat of a happy ending. Zombie movies should not be all butterflys and rainbows and if they are, They need to be shot.Zombie movies should not have happy endings, IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD.
@steven : Nowhere in this article do I mention how the show is “supposed” to be. I completely recognize the nature of the genre. Which I think I make painfully clear. I know where this is going, I’m just not going there with it.
I guess my joke got lost somewhere between me writing this editorial (which by definition is an opinion piece) and the reading of it.
I would elucidate my point here. But like any joke, as soon as you explain it it stops being funny.
But thank you for reading guys. 🙂
If you recognize the genre, stop hatin’.
I give up.
