Negan Smith vs. the World
In the real world, a murderer can eventually show remorse or accept responsibility. They can change their behavior or even dedicate the rest of their life to helping others. It’s a personal transformation that never erases their past deeds. Murder is irreversible. No act of kindness, however well-meaning, can compensate someone’s family for their loss, so societies will always remain divided over whether murderers can ever truly be redeemed because their fundamental path to redemption began with a horrifying act that drew a permanent line in the sand that even decades of good behaviour cannot erase.
There’s also a big difference between recognizing that someone has changed and saying they deserve forgiveness. A murderer may regret what they did and become a different person, but they still have to accept that their victim’s loved ones may never forgive them. Maggie will never forgive Negan. Yet in the third season of Dead City, she decides that her hatred for Negan and her quest for vengeance are destroying her chance to live a happy life. Maggie, exercising her own agency, believes Negan has changed and chooses to let it go for her own benefit, not his.
But believing that someone can change doesn’t mean we should minimize their crimes. Like Negan, a murderer can spend the rest of their life trying to atone for something they can never truly make right. Fans have every right to hate Negan and object to the franchise’s continued focus on him, but for others, his journey remains compelling. It’s just that some of the reasons it remains compelling are more complex and problematic than others.
Negan Smith vs. the Fandom
Straight off the bat (no pun intended), we have to accept that some fans find Negan to be a hugely charismatic and unpredictable character, and that can be a lot of fun to watch! Indeed, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance has been consistently fantastic as Negan has moved away from being a more two-dimensional villain. Morgan also wouldn’t still be playing Negan almost a decade later if people weren’t interested in seeing him remain on their screens.
Admittedly, The Walking Dead could have killed Negan off years ago, but why should the character get an easy way out when we can see him forced to live with the consequences of his own actions? While that’s a capital-punishment argument for another day, watching Negan navigate the irreversibility of his crimes gives his story an emotional complexity that many redemption arcs simply lack. We typically see the baddie locked up and forgotten, or killed for their crimes. The Walking Dead wants us to see there is another option, at least narratively.
However, Negan’s innate humor and swagger can make him so entertaining that some fans glom onto him, and that’s often fairly viewed as a real problem. His victims’ suffering can fade into the background. Our cultural fascination with the idea that a charismatic man who behaves monstrously can still be “fixed,” especially when he has a sympathetic backstory, has also proved problematic in the character’s development. Who cares why Negan became a monster when the people he victimized aren’t getting the same amount of attention?
