The ending was nice and all, BUT....
You all know it wouldn't take much more than a year or two before problems start creeping up at the school again.
No way Clem lives to middle age roaming around the school with complete peace.
AJ is clearly ready for the rest of life's trials. Infact, I think AJ will grow up to be a far superior survivor than Clem. I would say at his age he's actually surpassed the current Clem. Clem finished learning a long time ago.
Violet/Louis/Tenn are determinant aka irrelevant and all three might as well be dead. Especially Tongueless Louis and Blind Violet.
Lilly/James are definitively dead.
Everyone else is a toss up.
The Delta aren't defeated. Them going after the school again veers on the unlikely side for the immediate meantime, but anything's possible with whatever they do considering they're a large ever-expanding army of doom. It's pointless to fight the school kids again anytime soon, but it wouldn't be out of realm if they checked on them a few years later if they get desperate for child soldiers.
Even if you exclude the Delta, I'm sure there's many other factions and communities from the smallest to greatest that would try their hand at overtaking the school. Ultimately it's just very easy for them be overpowered. They're an easy target once they're actually discovered.
War is very very active too. Only a matter of time before they'd get caught in the crossfire. The southeast coast sounds completely fucked. And there's no end in sight from what we know.
Fully convinced everyone besides AJ would die and that it's only matter of when. The school is nothing more than a prolonging of the inevitable.
I like how on a very subtle level, if you pay real close attention, Clementine foreshadows her own death.
"If it was just you and me alone out there, [with an amputated leg] I don't know if I'd make it 2 weeks"
"If we ever have to go on the run, it wouldn't be pretty.."
I bet people overlooked that innocuous conversation due to the euphoria of the Disney ending but I have to commend TT for sticking by realism. Clem actively acknowledges this and doesn't try to paint a different outlook.
I know they can build a peg leg for her or whatever, but the difference in movement between a prosthetic and your actual foot is not something to gloss over.
Clem is essentially fucked if she's forced to survive out of the school perimeter and the adjacent safe zone. The handicapped individual just doesn't make it very long in the apocalypse. She'd only be safe if she restricted the rest of her days to living in the school and taken care of by others, which is possible but not realistic.
So the ending is nothing more than a reprieve, which isn't inherently bad. It's the only time Clem has felt it.
I think this is clever, in the midst of the fake-out and the railroaded ending, TT in a sly manner still ultimately sentenced Clementine to her death; something you would only notice in hindsight. Dooming her without actually killing her. Staying true to TWD lore and the general ethos of the post-apocalypse.
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I was also hoping she was Determinat.
Yeah I agree, Tftb is slightly better tho.
I don't think it was really intended to be this deep. Yeah she's still in a very vulnerable position and anything could happen but that's common knowledge and can be said for anyone and anything at any position in their story.
I don’t know about this. Yes, in the world of Walking Dead, a group of raiders could take the school out but it’s established that it is very difficult to find. In the twelve months before we find it, it seems they were left entirely alone. Only the Delta knew where they were. And one thing that is important to consider is that the world has been this way for eight years now. A lot of people who would have threatened them are already long dead and, out of the few who are left, a big chunk of those will just be trying to establish some sort of settled life.
Even the actions of Delta were a bit of a stretch in this season. The second they started losing people, it made no sense to keep fighting - what they could gain didn’t match what they would lose. And this is the state of the world at that point. It only makes sense to raid if those you are raiding have significantly more than you do and you can actually succeed in getting it. So only the most desperate would have anything to gain by attacking the school. But they’d have to just happen upon it which, in what is now a completely depopulated world, requires a lot of luck.
I have to admit, this is an area where the comics lost me. Once it got away from survival and revealed large communities, the stories basically rely on people doing really, really stupid things in order to break them. Like Rick himself, who failed to establish any community himself but found and broke those of others. I guess we have that in the real world too but I hit a point where I was facepalming through some stories. Really it feels like many communities have too much to lose and that most of them should be keeping to themselves.
So yeah, it’s possible the school could be attacked again but they made it eight years, they are very remote and the only people who know where they are have lost so much that to go for them again would be the height of idiocy. It’s easy enough for me to believe that the school and the world around it will settle from here.
Well I think Lily and James probably survived, they've made it on their own before, they can do it again
But yeah I agree. Just because Clem survived this ONE encounter doesn't mean that she'll just live happily ever after for all eternity.
What will AJ be like when he actually grows up? How mentally stable will he be? Will Clems teachings really effect him at all?
The Ericsons kids had a solid foundation set, but most of them didn't do anything, which sucks because I think they have potential.
Point is, I think there are a lot of places left to go with the story if Skybound wanted to.
AJ is a loose cannon.
Them surviving at the school for 7 years while somehow still being sheltered kids with basic levels of survival is also dubious writing.
It's unsure when exactly the Delta found them. I'm pretty sure the "safe zone" was confirmed to just be the zone where Marlon negotiated with the raiders. That's how Minnie and Sophie "died" and got "eaten by walkers".
There's mention of other kids dying in the same manner, no question to me that Marlon was trading off kids more longer than a year.
The Delta have to known where they were and who was Marlon for atleast a couple years.
Marlon wasn't trading kids every month, it was clearly a slow gradual thing.
So they didn't "make it" 8 years as if they were invincible, they merely held on by the skin of their teeth and were actually watched by the Delta for several years.
"it's easy enough for me to believe that the world will settle from there"
Lol, EP4 literally makes mention of a far-reaching war that engulfs that southeastern DMV area. The people who attacked the ranch are involved in that war. And by the end of the episode, it's not implied to have stopped. Delta and some other big community are having all-out war in the area where Clem resides.
Gotta know when to end it. No better place than where we ended off with Clem as a leader.
Delta is 100% a goner by this point. They were desperate enough to be kidnapping kids and they ended up losing an entire team of adults and a huge boat. Even if Lilly survives she admits that there is no longer a Delta to return home to.
Ericson's is out in the middle of nowhere, the war isn't going to find them and even if it did the kids are shown fortifying the school and preparing at the end of the game.
Nobody said they survived as if invincible. But the remaining kids did survive. As has everyone else who is still alive by that point. And everyone who is alive in the comics too. Surviving is possible and it going to hell is no guarantee. Like I say, at this point in the story of Walking Dead, not surviving usually seems to take acts of stupidity rather than being a given. The main challenge would be resources but they have few mouths to feed.
Also: it’s a story. You have to end it somewhere, as Patrickrc95 says. Take any ‘happy ever after’ ending and go far enough after it and it’s going to end less happy. Doesn’t mean the end isn’t a happy ending.
The ending is endearing but it's not optimistic.
Like I said the ending focuses more on being a moment of reprieve for Clementine.