The Walking Dead Villains: Who’s The Worst? Part 10C

2 AND 3) Mays And His Brother

I decided to lump this pair of brothers into one entry. Why? Let me explain.

You see, in his only appearance, Mays, while attempting to force Father Gabriel and Aaron to play Russian Roulette, explained that, despite protecting his brother, his sister-in-law, and his niece throughout the outbreak, he was betrayed by his brother for some scraps of food. For this, Mays told the pair, he killed his twin brother.

This convinced Mays that people were inherently selfish, and when push came to shove, they would kill anyone, regardless of how close that person was to them, to spare their own lives, which he sought to prove with Gabriel and Aaron.

This is where things get interesting. After failing to prove his theory and being killed by Father Gabriel (Who reasoned that Mays was too unstable to trust at Alexandria), it was discovered that Mays had not killed his brother after all, but instead, had kept him chained up inside the attic of the warehouse they had been living out of the whole time…along with his wife and his daughter, both of whom had been shot in the head.

According to showrunner Angela Kang, Mays had forced his brother, his sister-in-law, and his niece to play Russian Roulette. When I heard this, I started to wonder whether everything Mays told us was true.

This is why I have both Mays and his brother here because, realistically, we don’t know which one was actually the backstabber. It is entirely possible that Mays was lying, that he had betrayed his brother, not the other way around, and had been killing people for no good reason with his twisted games of Russian Roulette.

Assuming this is true, it means that Mays was a very warped man. He betrayed his twin brother and held him hostage, along with his wife and daughter, and forced them to play Russian Roulette, wherein his brother, rather than let his family suffer, killed them, forcing himself to go on living as his brother’s prisoner for years.

How can someone do that to their own family? How could Mays betray his twin brother and force him to kill his own family, then keep doing it to strangers? What kind of person does that? Even if Mays was honest, he still chose to force his sister-in-law and niece to play his cruel game when, according to him, only his brother betrayed him. Mays might not have betrayed his brother, but considering him “innocent” would be a lie.

Meanwhile, if we assume that Mays was telling the truth, it means that his brother, in the act of desperation, betrayed his own twin for their last can of food. This despite the fact his brother had been the one protecting him and his family throughout the apocalypse. This betrayal would ultimately cost him his family and the lives of countless others, as he sent his brother down a path that caused him to see only the worst in everyone else and seek to have his beliefs confirmed again and again and again.

Mays and his brother are a textbook example of how bad people can get in a zombie apocalypse or any desperate situation. One of them had, perhaps even literally, tried to stab their twin brother in the back in the act of desperation and selfishness, causing a chain reaction that led to countless more deaths. If Mays was lying about who the betrayer was, it means that he killed who knows how many people either because he became detached from what he had done to his brother’s family or because he’d simply believed everyone else was as self-serving as he was and wanted to prove it.