The Walking Dead: Would Negan be the same with a different name?
By Susie Graham
Would the bat wielding villain of The Walking Dead have the same effect and cachet that he has now if his name were not Negan?
What’s the Shakespearean quote that we all know from Romeo and Juliet? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Would Romeo still be Romeo? Would Shakespeare be the same if he were William Smith who wrote Hamlet?
We know the point, the rose is a rose; it doesn’t matter what name we’ve given it. If you call it a rose in another language, it’s still a rose. But is there more to a name than that? Is it a chicken and egg thing? Is Cher, Cher because that’s what her parents named her and if they named her Matilda, Matilda would signify everything that Cher means when you think of the name Cher?
Okay, back to The Walking Dead. We’ve had some name changes in the world of The Walking Dead and we’ve adjusted whether we knew it or not. Alex, the woman who survived Flight 462 and was being towed on the raft by Abigail before Strand so rudely cut the rope, was originally named Charlie in the webisode.
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Paul “Jesus” Rovia was Paul Monroe in the comics. His name change likely stemmed from the desire not to field a million questions from viewers about whether or not he was related to Deanna, Spencer and Aiden. Apparently, Monroe is just a common southern surname and they are no relation.
According to Robert Kirkman, Negan was going to be named Nagus.
I’ll let that sit in its own paragraph. Kirkman let this news out at a Skybound panel at San Diego Comic-Con.
"“Every now and then I just make up a word and then I look it up and it’s a name….So he was Nagus for a long time, and then I realized that the Ferengi high commander on Deep Space Nine was called the Grand Nagus. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s where I got that! Oh, okay. Uhh, maybe he’s Negan.’ So that’s how that happened.”"
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Tell us what you think of Nagus! If he were called Nagus, would that name have become synonymous with the black leather jacket and red bandana,-wearing, cussing, soliloquy-making, fear-inspiring man with a barbed-wire-baseball bat named….perhaps, Matilda?