The Walking Dead: Can A Story Evolve Despite Stereotypes?
Recently, I’ve been re-watching The Walking Dead with my family, and back in back in Season 1, my mother made an observation that I hadn’t noticed before: “Why are all the women doing the domestic work? It’s the apocalypse!”
Anyone who watched the show for a few seasons will be far more likely to remember a group of people forged from very tough stock, men and women splitting heads and domestic work alike, just trying to scrape by. So, what happened? How did we go from the traditional gender roles of the men going out to risk life-and-limb to gather resources while women tended camp transform into the show’s new norm where people simply fall into whatever role they need to?
A good microcosm for this trend in the show would be the character of Carol. We first see her with the other women in the show’s first camp, washing everyone’s clothes while her husband, Ed, watches them all disapprovingly. After the women share some jokes at the men’s expense, Ed comes over to bully his wife into coming with him, which she meekly accepts, and we find out through the other women’s protests that Ed beats her.
Flash forward several seasons, and we’ve watched Carol guarantee her husband won’t come back as a zombie with a good swing of the pickaxe, then several more after that. We’ve also seen her lose her daughter, secretly teach groups of children how to use guns and knives for defense, gain the trust of a new group by playing the role of a kindly mother while simultaneously threatening various members of that group, and defend their group against a band of raiders with more cold-hearted killing than anyone else was able to muster.
Over time, Carol survived, and Carol moved from being meek and under the thumb of her abusive husband to being strong and a survivor, and that’s how the show continuously treats stereotypes. We see plenty of people throughout the show who are themselves a stereotype, stereotype others, or both. However, as time progresses, these people either change, or die. It turns out, the world doesn’t care much if you’re man or woman, just strong or not, because the gender breakdown of the starring cast moves from a 2/5 female/male split in Season 1 to a more reasonable 8/10 female/male split in Season 6 (which is the point at which we’ve seen Carol do all of the above).
So, with a bit of context out of the way, can a story still evolve despite stereotypes? Well, while it may not be true that every show does, The Walking Dead makes it clear that shows can.
Just because the show starts out with gender-role stereotypes (and racial ones. Looking at you, white-supremacist Merle Dixon!) doesn’t mean that it has to stick with them, and it also doesn’t mean that those stereotypes serve no purpose. Without watching Carol go from the abused, incredibly “domestic” wife to the stone-cold killer she became, we wouldn’t know why she does what she does. Without seeing Maggie, a farmer’s daughter, lose that family along with their land, and fall in love with someone who she was able to show a vision of a future for their world, we wouldn’t understand her steely resolve.
The Walking Dead is by no means without flaws when it comes to stereotyping: a frequent pitfall, especially in the earlier seasons, was a tendency for any African American survivor who joined the group dying soon after. Despite this, however, the show does still manage to display a host of well-developed characters from many backgrounds, few of whom still fit into a common stereotype. While there are many harmful effects to portraying people as oversimplifications, it seems that sometimes those portrayals can also be used to highlight precisely how wrong those same stereotypes are. Next time a show rubs you the wrong way with how it’s handling some characters and their backgrounds, take a moment to consider: is this portrayal harmful, or is it serving an important purpose to the story? You might just find more stereotypes serving to subvert themselves than you expect.
