"You've killed a lot of people." A case for Clem, the ultimate serial murderer/thief.
S4E2 SPOILERS
This quote from AJ really touched me. I wonder if those who tried to shame AJ felt a little bit of hypocrisy when he said that line?
Regardless of your Clem, she's killed plenty people. Clem regardless of your personal headcanon is a hardened survivor who's never settled in one place at a time. All canon. How people think Clem can survive all these years on the road WITHOUT being an instinctive killer is beyond me. It's one thing to be safeguarded in a community like the Ericson kids or places like Richmond; you don't really kill or steal from people part of your community too often. But what about strangers out in the wild?
In-game and on-screen the amount of notable characters we can see Clem kill personally are five (Stranger, Lee, Kenny, Eli, and Lingard. If there's more correct me). If you count randoms she kills PLENTY in ANF, often with a personal desire ( e.g. "we should kill these guys" during the junkyard shootout) and indiscriminately. Safe to say she's killed a dozen people from what we visually see just on-screen.
(And then there's the McCaroll Ranch which is being hinted quite heavily as being a total bloodbath, but which we haven't seen yet.)
Now I think what is the most interesting space of time for Clem's kill count is -- and what I'm really curious about -- os the time BETWEEN Season 2 and ANF, and the time after ANF and before S4.
The timeskips.
These are long timeskips, too. And a lot of things can happen in a 2 months, let alone a year or four years. There is where I like to have an imagination.
We actually don't even know the bulk of Clem's life despite what we have gone through with her interactively. She's spent more time alone than she's had with us.
The timeskip between season 2 and ANF is 2 years. Going by the wiki timeline, it's atleast one year in where Clem is fending with AJ beside herself in the wild. If you played the alone ending (like I did), Clem spends the entire two years raising and defending AJ by herself. Regardless, this is Clem at her most vulnerable. A preteen going on 12 and 13 with a baby are absolute targets in the apocalyptic world.
Unless Clem is avoiding people for 2 years, she's HAD to have come across a situation at the very least in which both her and AJ's life are at such risk and that she has no choice but to kill. We see in the ANF flashbacks she has a gun and this is likely what's kept her and AJ from danger. People often say it's unrealistic that Clem could have survived with AJ alone out in the world. Well, a gun helps.
Now the biggest timeskip of all is the time between the end of ANF and the beginning of S4. This is roughly 4 or 5 years after which Clem rescues AJ and they get on the road. Only thing is I'm not sure how long Clem stayed at the ranch with AJ. Was it a couple months? A year?
But let's just go with them being on the road for 3-4 years. At this point AJ is growing and becoming more capable of providing his own safety. We see clearly in S4 that Clem has long ago taught AJ the essentials of survival and at at this point is merely reminding him the tips she's given to sharpen his memory.
I have a feeling Marlon is not AJ's first human kill. Clem didn't teach AJ monsters were just walkers, they're people too. AJ is not slow. He can distinguish between enemies like Marlon and regular survivors like Tenn or Louis.
We don't know how long they've had the car but it's implied they were lucky when they got it. Overall, walking and driving all over the southeastern United States over the course of 3-4 years again with no settling down whatsoever has to mean this was the peak of survival for the both of them. That's fucking hard living.
Constant scavenging and sheltering, and ultimately killing. For food and for protection. And maybe even killing out of gain. In ANF it's implied Clem has no problem robbing people and causing truck crashes. And we see upfront that Clem's number one priority is AJ and his well-being and not much else.
Weirdly this is an element of Clementine that is never mentioned. To be a harden survivor in the apocalypse, you have to not only merely defend yourself, you must also at times take; seize opportunities, cheat, steal. How does Clem care for a a baby unless she's able to scrounge stuff from places where things that would help the baby would exist? No way AJ lived off rabbit meat for the entire duration of his life. Clem would have to do whatever keep AJ a healthy child.
We see exactly in the beginning of S4 that Clem and AJ have mastered the art of casing a place out. Breaking in, entering, and escaping.
It's safe to say Clem in the near decade she's had to fend not only for her self but also a mere toddler -- that more likely than not she's robbed plenty of people of their possession and killed people, sometimes not under the guise of self-defense but instead opportunity. And she would be antisocial to the point where it wouldn't bother her mentality for more than two seconds.
Like pre-ANF Clem coming across a place that's stashed with milk. AJ needs it. But some random guy is in guard of the stuff. AJ needs it. Clem more than likely at this point is going stick up the guy and rob him of the milk, and killl him if need be.
Or post-ANF Clem and and AJ coming across a survivor who has car fuel and both of them need to drive where they have to. AJ and Clem would have no problem robbing them in order to get their car running. Or maybe the other way around happens and they both get sticked up by robbers and they retaliate by murdering them to get their stuff back. Or even just a random heated confrontation that ends up with AJ and Clem killing the other party.
Just an interesting headcanon I have. Am i off the mark? I can't think of any other realistic path in which a teenager would survive on the road in an apocalyptic world full of danger, both undead and alive.
I just find it funny for people to have this angelic, unrealistic perception of Clem forgetting she is just another member of the zombie apocalypse where the margins between life and death is very little. Life is not fun in TWD.
Lily and Abel even note how improbable Clementine has survived this long. And more than likely Clem hasn't achieved it so successfully purely through the goodness of her heart. You don't survive this long by luck.
Comments
maybe she went full Morgan
Hypocrite? Me? ?
Whether you survive in the apocolypse is a lottery though. There is no way you can be sure 100% of the time that you will not be shot out of nowhere by a sniper.
To much words.
In this world: kill or be killed..
"You do what you have to do in order to survive"
The way I've always seen it: Clem did whatever she had to do to find AJ and take care of him until he started growing more, then she switched to her more soft side in order to raise AJ to be a good kid, based on what we've seen in TFS.
I could be entirely wrong though
Read the first two or three paragraphs, but then gave up.
I wouldn't call her a serial murderer. She was nearly always justified. Lee wanted to get shot to prevent reanimation, Clem shot Kenny because the person choosing that is retarded because she had to choose between two(fuck Jane tho) friends, Eli one was an accident, people at the junkyard headshot Mariana etc. We can't tell about off screen instances but more than likely nearly all of them were similarly justified. Clem is supposed to be a good, rational and righteous protagonist.
She kills when she needs to. If you get bit, she’ll put you down. If you try to hurt her or someone she loves, clementine will put you down.
So she’s not a serial killer by any means.
Is a serial killer even a thing in the apocalypse as it is now? To me that suggests that Clementine would just kill every one and everything till she was the last person alive irregardless of the situation.
I interpret Clementine as someone who is not afraid of killing so much as she is afraid of losing people close to her. Everyone in TWD world has to get used to defending themselves from walkers, humans, animals etc. after a while you just get used to it. Some go out of their way to ruin life, like The Governor or The Whisperers or even Negan. But Clementine?
Nah. She is a survivor in every sense of the word.
I almost feel like comparing this to Joel and Ellie in TLOU. During the Winter chapter especially, when you encounter that community of cannibals, the men are treated as enemies for you to kill or be killed by (or sneak past them, whatever) but there are women and children in that community; and maybe not all of them were evil. Is there a moral dilemma to that situation? Are you the evil serial killer for trying to survive in a hostile environment?
Think about it.
The Joel and Ellie example reminds me of the Howe's herd choice. Carver is the evil one ,but Clem's group have to do what they had to do to escape.
In the walking dead world its kill or be killed
I'm the worst person to ask about these kinds of dilemmas because I naturally default to black and white arguments:
Those who I perceive as bad can either die or have bad things happen to them and I'll be happier for it. Like the Jane/Kenny debate; Jane can die in a hole every time because I couldn't stand her actions. Kenny isn't perfect, but I would choose him over her any day.
On the flip side; Lee killed someone out of anger before the world went to shit. But is he defined by it? No. Does he regret it? Seemingly yes. Does he seem like a bad person? No. Therefore I wanted nothing but good things to happen to Lee.
It's hard for me to see the grey area of certain characters (like Joel in TLOU) but eventually the good intentions can outweigh the bad and vice versa.
Lee has been cheated on . It's a crime of passion.
Indeed, but I don't think he intended to kill the guy. From what we hear during his nightmare it sounded like a beat down by Lee and the guy died from his injuries. Manslaughter, but still, a man died. But like I said, Lee doesn't let that incident define him and he'll only bring it up if the player wants him to.
I absolutely think she murdered a shit ton of people at the ranch.
I call it, having the mother's heart for someone.
I imagine one of the reasons people might tell AJ he was wrong for shooting Marlon is more of attempting to stop history from repeating itself. It's true, Clementine has killed a lot of people; in some cases, it was purely self-defense. Other times, it was motivated by loss/anger/fear. And at the end of the day, no matter the kind of person you are, killing is never something that should lose its weight entirely. The day you become completely numb to the concept of snuffing out another human being's life, that's when you start crossing an existential line; at that point, about the only difference between you and the zombies is a pulse-- you're both just wandering shells of a person, whose original form is long lost, killing anything living you come across without regard until someone else finally puts a bullet or knife through your head.
If I was in that situation, I would rather try to avoid that happening to someone else, someone younger than me that still has the capacity to bring something positive to a world full of shit. By this point, most people still alive are relatively feral and animalistic. Fair enough. But even for animals, the concepts of family and community are not forgotten. No species survives solely by killing and pillaging everything it comes across. Every living being throughout history has survived by coming together on some basic level, grouping together and working together in order to ensure mutual survival.
By the time people forget the concepts that once formed the basic pillars of a functioning society, you might as well just give up and die. My perspective on the situation is that what AJ did to Marlon is an opportunity presenting itself, a moral/ethical fork in the road. Even if it's not his first kill, it's still a stand-out example purely given the circumstances. He shot someone he presumed was a monster-- someone that still had the capacity to be a threat, but not ostensibly a threat in the moment that he shot him. And beyond that, AJ is at a point where he doesn't know how to feel about what he just did: whether or not he should feel some form of emotion (regret, guilt, etc) over what he did, or if he should justify it to himself and suppress whatever conscience/moral compass he may have. And for someone his age, choosing the latter has the potential to be an extremely dangerous and dark path.
AJ's at the crossroads where you can either choose to look at the world in black and white, or accept it as fundamentally grey. Putting him on a path where he accepts the former in a world that is almost entirely governed by grey-area decisions is a recipe for disaster if you ask me, and runs the risk of setting the foundation for genuine sociopathy in the future. It might sound like the people saying "you are potentially raising a psychopath" is an exaggeration or misunderstanding of the situation at hand, but I think it is a very valid concern to be having. Especially for a young boy that has seemingly had little social integration or experiences, nor memories of the previous world that help to form a baseline for his personal moral/ethical boundaries.
Of course, all of this basically hitches on whether or not you're actually looking at the game as a whole on a more philosophical level, and the ethical ramifications and moral/existential questions it poses. But if I'm being honest, I actually like looking at things way deeper than I probably should be, because this is actually kinda fun. It's easy to just look at the surface level of everything; it is a game, it's based around choices that ultimately seem to come down to "do you try to be the good guy or the bad guy", and many of those decisions don't have the payoff or consequences you'd expect (if they have any at all, as much as I hate to say that). Hell, I don't blame anyone that does because that sort of is the truth. But anything can have depth depending on how you look at it. Everything in life's a matter of perspective.
Fucking Nerd!! But good points.
read the first letter, but then I gave up
I wrote it as an essay on purpose. Just had to get it out. No one has to read it.
I don't mean serial killer in the usual sense. I mean in the literal 'she's killed a bunch of people' sense.
"Clem is supposed to be a good, rational and righteous protagonist.".
Like with Lee this is only because we play as her and our perspective becomes blurred and very biased. Which is fine, but it's not honest. I don't play TWD to play as a virtuous soul.
Oh ok I see what you mean. Her kill count isn’t as high when you think about how her actions got people killed as opposed to her directly doing the killing.
Abel will love smoking this bible page xD
Nah, you're pretty much right. Clem is hardened at her core as we see in ANF, but I'm guessing overtime as AJ grew she realized she needs to be vulnerable and human to him in order to properly raise him as a loving parent and not as a stoic guardian. She wants AJ to be like how she was when she was similar in age, and mimic Lee in how he treated her.
It's sort of contradictory in a way? Clem wants him to be a stonecold survivor but she also wants him to resemble what other normal children functioned like before the apocalypse. But it's not 100 percent possible because the old world doesn't exist anymore. I feel like Clem is not even aware of what she's doing.
You make good points.
I think my issue still is Marlon being the subject and focus of his "atonement". To me Marlon is not worth atoning over. It would make more sense if it was a truly innocent or decent person that Aj goes berserk over. Then I could see the issue through and through.
But I also think TT purposely made AJ kill Marlon because it's so divisive and it stirs up arguments.
Makes me think a little bit differently but I still haven't budged in my belief that AJ's justified.
As you say, choosing this "seems" to have the potential to go down a dark path, but I wonder what shaming and guilting him does to his behavior as well? Or telling him he can't have dibs on Abel?
Will he hesitate to shoot the next person that endangers Clementine's life? Will his reluctance for bloodlust result in someone dying when he has the chance to save them but he doesn't do it because he believes himself to be a murderer and that he isn't allowed to murder?
Killing is wrong is way too simpleminded.