FearTWD, Survival Rule Of The Week: The devil you don’t know

2) Recognize The Difference Between Someone “Bad” And Someone Evil

When talking about ideas like “The devil you know vs. The devil you don’t know” or “The lesser of two evils”, it’s important to be able to tell which of the people in question are truly the worst people.

I think the best way to do this is to assess the groups in question, and determine which one is going to treat you better, even if “better” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”.

I feel like using examples from the Walking Dead universe is probably the best way to illustrate this point, as I imagine the tactics some of the hostile groups used in those shows are not that different from the sort of things you could expect from hostiles in a real zombie apocalypse.

Let’s start with the Saviors. Bad as they were, at the end of the day, they were extortionists. They weren’t “good” by any means, but, for the most part, if you were to come onto their radar, there’s a good chance you’d still live to complain about them the next day, even the next year. Compare that to the Whisperers, and, the choice is fairly obvious. Sure, you may not like Negan, and want to throw Simon off the nearest cliff, but, the Whisperers, simply by you living in some kind makeshift community, would deem you as someone worthy of being turned into a walker.

In the case of the Pioneers, they suck, they’re ultra pragmatic, and, if you run afoul of them, they’re likely to give you the sh*t jobs (As we saw with Strand and Alicia at the beginning of “Welcome To The Club”, who were literally doing the “sh*t job”), but, let’s compare that to what we know of The Beginners. From what we’ve seen, they’re devoted to this idea of “The End Is The Beginning”, and, presumably, they seek to ensure “The End” comes, so as to usher in “The Beginning”, this is backed up by their plague attack on the skyscraper group, as well as their sabotage of Tank Town, including the apparent murder of a couple dozen of the workers to sic on Virginia and June as walkers. Between the two, as bad as Virginia is, she’s not a death-obsessed maniac.

And, this is the sort of assessment you’d need to do in a zombie apocalypse. You would need to look at what you know of the hostiles in question, and determine which one you’d likelier be able to live with, or…live at all.