It is very easy to hate Negan. He came in swinging his bat in The Walking Dead Season 6 finale and did something no one ever thought they’d see happen: take down Rick. However, considering the circumstances in which Negan was introduced to Rick’s crew, the residents of Alexandria are coming out of this pretty easily.
Think about it. Rick’s group planned a stealth mission to infiltrate what they believed to be Negan’s home base. They murdered people in their sleep. The Saviors that Rick’s group killed never attacked them. Yes, Daryl, Abe and Sasha had a pretty bad encounter with them, but Daryl fired a missile launcher at them and took them out. Rick’s group felt threatened, so their automatic response was to take drastic measures before they were killed.
Fast forward to The Walking Dead Season 6 finale. Rick and his group are on their knees, waiting for Negan to kill one of them. Negan makes his decision. Whether he kills one, two or three people to make his point, Negan will come at the group with a generous counter offer to make up for the blood they’ve spilled: give me half your stuff and you live.
Ross Marquand, who plays Aaron on The Walking Dead, recently spoke about Negan’s deal to ComicBook.com. It’s easy to see Negan as the big bad wolf, but at this point Rick is just the lesser of the two evils. Rick doesn’t care who he kills. The only people that matter to Rick are the people in Alexandria.
“I think it's the complete emasculation of Rick and you get to see a huge power shift in the group,” Marquand told ComicBook.com. “What you'll see is that the entire way their society has been structured, the power and the leadership roles, will now be completely thrown on their head. I think people are going to have to adapt to that. People are going to have to look at that world and say, "Is this something that I can truly assimilate into or am I going to have massive issues with this new world that Negan has laid out before us?"
Marquand added, “Truthfully, Negan has a very simple premise that he's put in front of these people. He says, ‘Give me half of your things or I'll kill you.’ For some people in the apocalypse or otherwise, namely Rick's group and Rick specifically, that's a hard pill to swallow. The idea of giving half of your things to someone who has not earned it and has earned it only through intimidation and fear and other violence and brutality, that's going to be something that some people have a difficult time grasping and they're going to have to decide how they're going to work in this new society.”
No one blames Rick for wanting to protect his own. His group has dealt with The Governor, cannibals, “Wolves” and just straight up batsh** crazy people. Rick is right to distrust people, but he should’ve listened to what Morgan was trying to tell him when we built the cage in Alexandria: you need people to survive. Let’s face it, the dead still outnumber the living.
The Walking Dead Season 7 premieres Oct. 23 on AMC. Is Rick one bad day away from becoming Negan? Let us know in the comments below.
