Fans are bashing The Walking Dead calling it “misery porn”
AMC’s The Walking Dead delivered a shocking episode on Valentine’s day, during which three minor characters were brutally killed off and another major character had his eye shot out.
The episode feature Jessie, as well as her two young sons, killed off during the group’s attempt to make it out of Alexandria alive during the massive zombie invasion. Clearly not everything went according to plan, as Jessie’s young son Sam freaked out after seeing a boy his age having been turned into one of the zombies.
His inexperience with walkers got him bitten, which in turn led to his mother also being attacked by zombies. Eldest son Ron quickly attempted to kill the people he thought were responsible for his family’s death and turned a gun on Rick and his son Carl. That’s when Michonne immediately kills the kid by stabbing him in the stomach. However, Ron’s stray bullet hits Carl in the eye, bring a shocking scene from the comic books to live television.
This ended up pissing off a lot of people and people took to Twitter to bash The Walking Dead for violence.
Moms reaction to watching the walking dead “thats really violent”
— Al (@allison28miller) February 15, 2016
The walking dead is so violent…. Id be traumatized every week if I watched it
— cheyenne ?? (@cparks_4) February 15, 2016
One writer bashed The Walking Dead. iO9 writer Rob Bricken said the show was essentially traumatizing because it showed a kid getting killed.
I did not care to see zombies rip chunks of flesh off a 10-year-old, nor did I need to watch the blood spurt from the child’s wounds as he’s eaten alive.
This is very much what upset me upon my first viewing, and apparently I need to explain why to some people: This is the first child we’ve seen actually get murdered on screen. Yes, TWD has a long history of killing kids—Rick offs a little girl in the first episode, as well as Sofia, and of course there’s Lizzie—but most of them have been dead, and more importantly the show has always cut away so the violence is not directly witnessed.
This is the first time where we saw a kid die, horribly, and I will fully admit that I did not care to see zombies rip chunks of flesh off a 10-year-old, nor did I need to watch the blood spurt from the child’s wounds as he’s eaten alive.
The author adds that the killing served no purpose. “Sam’s storyarc, if one exists, is as follows: his life is horrible and then he’s murdered. If this is the meaning I thought TWD truly meant to ascribe to the scene, then the show would have truly earned the title of “misery porn.””
Well, the producers of The Walking Dead spoke with The Hollywood Reporter defending the violence on The Walking Dead. And as the producers have pointed out, fans love to see violence and character deaths.
“As shocking and as startling as it was in the comic, seeing the motion of it and the way we were able to pull that off makes it even more startling of a moment. These are the things that make our viewers invested in the show. The fact that anything can happen and the fact that these startling things do happen to these characters we love.”
The Walking Dead producers are right. According to a recent study, rating always increase after major characters get killed off.
