what happened to her?
I also miss GlyphGlyph...
She's taking a lot of time off, and very rarely pops in for like, three minutes at a time to let us know that she's not dead yet.
Self-improvement sabbatical, is my understanding.
Yeah, although it's kind of looking like a semi-permanent thing. She said she might come round at the end of the summer to say hello one last time before she's off, not entirely sure if that's actually going to happen though.
But you know, whatever makes her happy and helps her in the end.
Yeah, I don't think she's ever coming back for more than a short period here and there. I miss her too. One of the most memorable people I've met in my 16 years online.
I'm having trouble even finishing this issue. You've done a lot of shocking stuff, but nothing that's come even close to hitting me like this. You better have a satisfying as hell ending in the works for this new big bad. I don't even know what else to say. Fuuuuuuck 
Gosh. I've only read up to issue 24 or so. 
Now I'm gonna have to keep reading to find out just what you're on about...
I'll just say that Kirkman knows how to cut deep, and doesn't hesitate to do so when it serves a purpose in his story. He's lost hundreds, if not thousands of readers by violating their sensibilities (pay attention to his letters column...). I'm not a soft reader. He's shocked me before, but always in a way that left me appreciating his boldness, not in a way that I felt crossed a line. This event left me conflicted and bitter.
The worst part is I can't disagree with it. I completely understand why he did this. It's excellent writing on many levels. This event just takes us soooooooo very far from the kind of stories our culture is accustomed to.
This issue had one very distinct point, and he was very direct about it, to the point that the villain's monologue was almost a fourth wall break. The Walking Dead is not about entertainment. It's about facing reality.
We are so accustomed to stories that fudge reality, even if just a little, to make it a positive experience for the audience. Even stories that feign brutality, like so many war movies or torture porns, do so in a way that is somehow romanticized. Violent actions by protagonists are justified, and when they're not it's so the protagonist can learn some moral lesson. Characters are usually granted closure before they're killed off and/or they're celebrated one last time with a cool moment. Even the most "real" death moments in media that I can think of that do neither of the aforementioned things will at least grant the audience catharsis by having another protagonist enter veangeful berserker mode. Even if said berserker mode amounts to nothing, it is a form of vindication as the audience gets to share in that portrayed anger and sadness. In one way or another, death is always granted some form of meaning. Your Saw-style torture porns attempt to subvert this by making death random and cruel, but even here writers take care to make the portrayal emotionally muted/distorted and the circumstances so unrealistic and cartoonishly forced that death doesn't have a real impact on the viewer. Here the romanticization takes the form of desentization and marginalization of our own mortality.
I feel like Kirkman's doing something completely different here. Unique. I cannot think of a single other story that handles mortality like this. The deaths that take place in this story have no meaning. Nothing is romanticized. Nothing is vindicated. Things just happen... not without reason, of course, but those reasons are not rooted in audience vindication. We follow these characters lives as they experience joy and fear and everything in-between. We watch some get tough and others crack and wither. We watch like-able characters change into disturbing characters. When someone dies, we feel just as powerless and empty as they do.
I just watched the very last truly relatable and like-able character of the series die. He was the last guy who hadn't been seriously traumatized. Never cracked and panicked or did anything disturbing. Never said a mean word. Did what he thought was best, but wasn't interested in being a hero either. The very last character who felt like he belonged in a civilized world. Gone. Begged for mercy, as everyone who cared about him watched helplessly. Some looked angry and others just cried, but nobody did anything. Not a single character did anything to grant the audience vindication, and not even the character who died did anything in his final moments to make you feel any better. His reactions were non-heroic, non-stoic, purely undressed, humble humanity. This has happened before, but never to anyone nearly so innocent or so much a victim. It's felt fitting when it happened to others. This time, it just felt like reality. I can't even hate the guy who did it. I can understand exactly why he picked this one character out of the group to kill. It makes perfect sense... and he wasn't even nearly as cruel about it as he could have been or even probably wanted to be. It was relatively merciful, for being a "don't fuck with me" statement, and it's undetermined at this point if his motives or true nature are any worse than the protagonists.
It was the most real thing I've ever seen. Kirkman has somewhat eased us up to this point. The story has gradually built up to this level of harsh neutrality, but it's quite clear that the build-up is done. This character's death signifies the very end of innocence in this world and the audience-handling gloves completely removed. If anything was previously written to cater to the audience's sensibilities or fragile need for a story to grant meaning to any notion of mortality, I get the feeling that practice is completely ended. This is a world where nothing happens for a "reason" in the sense that we're used to. Violence is justified only by survival, and not romanticized at all. This is a story where we like the characters who are still alive because we know them and how they got to where they are, not because they stand on some higher moral ground then their enemies.
Fuck, what a rant. It's just a comic book, right? I suppose being the best-selling single issue of a comic series since 1997, it's got to be something of a nature that's worth talking about...
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9702238 times)