If you're reading this, then you have watched the dreaded episode (or you just have access to the Internet and have seen the massive amounts of uproar over it). Yes, "The Walking Dead" season 7 premiere saw Abraham taken away from us violently. But did the show stop there? No, they did not. They also decided to kill off one of the show's most beloved and long-running characters: Glenn. Comic book fans were angry, fans of the show were angry and die-hard Glenn fans were outraged. Many people have been asking, "Why?" Why are people so heartbroken and outraged at this death? There have been plenty of deaths in the series, many just as surprising to the audience.
The issue lies within this very confusion. There have been other deaths as surprising as Glenn's, and they have all followed a pattern.
"The Walking Dead" has a major trend of killing off their POC and LGBTQ+ characters.
Glenn was the show's only Asian-American representation in the entirety of the show's run. Despite this lack of representation within the show, Glenn was an Asian-American character that destroyed nearly every single stereotype for Asian-American characters. He was not forced into being the quirky sidekick or the stuck-up group genius. He was a dynamic, honest, strong, believable, and absolutely amazing character, and a breathtaking example of what the media and Hollywood can do for Asian-American representation. He was every bit a main character as the white and African-American characters. Instead of taking this beautifully created character and giving him a glowing backstory, character arc, and allowing "The Walking Dead" to have 'ownership' to arguably one of the most amazing characters in modern TV, they brutally and savagely killed him off.
In plain writing, they could have killed off literally anyone else. "The Walking Dead" prides itself on being unpredictable and not allowing anyone to be safe (except for our wonderful white protagonist who is protected because he is so), and it's not as if they have strictly followed the comic thus far. If this was the case, Carol would be dead, Andrea would be alive, Abraham would have died weeks before the Negan storyline, and people's beloved Daryl would not even exist. So the argument that "they were just following the comic" is null and void, because they haven't been for the entirety of the show's run.
In fact, the very statement "they could have killed off literally anyone else" is ridiculous. Negan does not kill two people in the comic. He sends one "message," and while in the comics it was Glenn that died, Abraham dying could have been it. Abraham's sudden death was shock enough to fans, but Glenn's death following was completely barbaric and unneeded to progress the story.
"The Walking Dead" has a track record with killing their POC characters. And these characters' deaths have, as far as I can remember, always been more brutal than needed. For the most part, save for Dale in season 2 and Hershel in season 4, any white character's death has been relatively respectful to their character. We did not have to watch Andrea end her own life. Shane's death in season 2 was far from graphic or overly violent. What I'm saying is, along with the fact that approximately 19 POC and only a handful of white characters (I'm talking about main characters) have died, POC character deaths are almost always violent or sacrificial for another (white) character's sake...I'm looking at you, Carol and T-Dog.
For those who want to take this argument and say, "But Abraham died the same way Glenn did!," that's very true -- but it was not shown in the same way. After one blow to the head, all we saw of Abraham was a bit of blood trickling down his face. After that, we only saw the swing of the bat. With Glenn, after one hit, we were subjected to the horror of his head practically caved all the way in and his eye literally popped out from the socket. They dragged out his death so unnecessarily and so horrifically, even I was disturbed (and I love gore and horror).
It doesn't even end there. "The Walking Dead" has shown us only five openly and clearly stated gay characters. As of now, two of them have died. Both of the gay characters that have been killed have both been gay women, thus throwing the Lesbian Death Trope onto a pile of things wrong with "The Walking Dead". Denise, one of the women who is now on the endless list of dead gay women, was not even supposed to die in the way that she did on the show. In the comic, she dies from a good old fashioned zombie bite, and way later in the comic. On the show, she is murdered by one of Negan's men, who shoots an arrow through her eye. Guess whose death that was supposed to have been? Abraham's! Instead, the show continues to choose to kill off their very limited selection of characters that don't fit into the categories of "straight" or "white."
"The Walking Dead" is one of the most popular shows in modern television. I'm not trying to hate on the show, I'm as much of a fan as I am a critic. However, I believe that there are some major issues that absolutely need to be addressed. We live in a society that is incredibly diverse. We can no longer accept shows having one black character as "diversity in the media." We must understand that to change people's perception of culture and diversity, we must also see it reflected in the media. The character of Glenn did such a gorgeous job giving us a little peek at what Hollywood and media can do in terms of representation of the human beings we live with. When you take away that representation, it is only showing how much they don't matter. It is not shock value. It is not a "twist." It is blatant racism, and it needs to end. It needed to end before the one character who represented an entire population of human beings in our country was ripped from us.
Glenn will be missed in more ways than one.
