My most brutally honest thoughts about Fear the Walking Dead
By Susie Graham
Fear the Walking Dead has faced some hurdles with fans in its quest to be a companion to the original zombie megahit series The Walking Dead.
First of all, I’m a blogger. I’m not a critic or a reviewer. I see my role as two-fold. First, I share news about the show with the readers such as dates of premieres and DVD releases, recaps of episodes, and quotes from actors in interviews and things like that.
Secondly, I share my opinions about character development and things I wonder about. The second part is my favorite part. I love sharing my thoughts about the stories and the characters. My thoughts are not always the same as other fans’ thoughts, but sometimes I’ve had people say that they enjoy hearing my point of view. .
Fear the Walking Dead has been a challenge for me as a blogger. There is so much fan reaction to absorb as I try to form my own honest opinions. There are people who really love Fear and those who hate it.
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Those 2 groups tend to bicker on our comments section on Facebook. The ones who love it want to be left alone to enjoy it. And the ones who don’t like it seem to feel the need to leave comments about how it was boring or it stinks or something leading the fans to defend themselves and tell the haters that they just aren’t patient.
I think the hater commenters are just disappointed and can’t help themselves from getting in little digs every time they see a Fear post. I think they had such high hopes and they just don’t dig it.
Fear has been a challenge for me as a blogger because everything about it has been a paradox, a huge barrel of great expectations. Everyone had ideas of what it should be. What it could be. Where it was going. How fast it was going. How slow it was going.
The comparisons were inevitable. Yet in order to enjoy it we must force ourselves to stop comparing and yet still allow ourselves to compare it when it works. I think the idea was a good one. Sometimes great ideas just don’t work.
There are things I loved about the first season and things I didn’t love. I think the idea they wanted to do was to explore getting to know a family first and then see how the apocalypse would affect them. It’s a great idea. But I think the success of the show and knowing that people are going to die relies on people not knowing each other in the group we follow.
Writing about what I like and don’t like about the show as a whole has been a challenge for me because it doesn’t really make sense and I can’t express it properly. I don’t know that any of my ideas are any better than what they’ve done.
When Nick woke up in La Colonia, I thought the series actually could have started right there. We could have learned about their pasts some other way. We didn’t need the whole 1st season with the school or the beginning of the apocalypse. But other people may have loved that.
Or maybe they could have started on Strand’s boat? Or with Travis barging into Daniel’s shop. Then I stop myself and say, “Who do I think I am?” Those are things that are now part of the Fear story. Tobias and Patrick and Matt and Susan.
I find many things fascinating about the characters and the stories. There are artistic and poetic elements that I love. There are some parts that don’t grab me. But I was bored with parts of the road to Terminus and I didn’t care for Grady Memorial.
I’m known to be pretty positive and forgiving of character flaws. I enjoy describing behavior, even if I’m not necessarily defending it. I like to explore why characters behave the way they do. Every week now when I watch
Fear
, I find I think about the characters during the week and I want to write about them.
That must mean it is affecting me. I want to defend Chris and Travis. I’m looking forward to Alicia becoming a leader and standing up to her mother. Madison gets on my nerves. I still love Strand even though I think they took away his mystery for now. I know that people have room to change and grow in the apocalypse. Ofelia-Carol is coming soon!
I really like the Mexican culture and mysticism and the risks they are taking. I applaud them for trying. I think there’s still hope. People always talk about no risk, no reward. That doesn’t mean that risk is always rewarded in the way you want, but it’s rewarded because you risked!
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Something that has occurred to me since writing about Fear is that if we want to separate it from The Walking Dead, maybe one way we need to separate it is not the story, but the way we watch the story.
Something that is part of The Walking Dead is that it is gripping in a way that is like nothing else that many of us have experienced. It has a reputation for being a show that is binge-watched and moreover, re-watched. Fans can watch The Walking Dead over and over and not get tired of it. We can discover new things every time we watch it.
Maybe not everything is meant to be watched over and over. Maybe Fear is meant to be watched and enjoyed once (or twice). Does that make it any less valid? If I read a book and enjoy it, do I have to want to read it 10 times to make it a good book?
Perhaps our obsession with The Walking Dead is just too much for anything to measure up. Khaled Housseini has written 3 books: “The Kite Runner”, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and, “And the Mountains Echoed”. “The Kite Runner” is his masterpiece.
I loved the “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, but I couldn’t finish “And the Mountains Echoed” It was okay; it just didn’t do it for me. It got lots of good reviews though on Amazon. Fear is “And The Mountains Echoed ‘for some people. It’s not “The Kite Runner”. Even people who like it will always say that it was good–not as good as “The Kite Runner”, but it was good.