The Walking Dead Villains: Who ISN’T The Worst? Part 10C

2) Mays

Mays’s story is a sad one: After risking his life to protect his twin brother, his sister-in-law, and his niece in the apocalypse, he was betrayed by that very same twin brother over a can of food.

This caused him to see only the worst in people and believe that they’re all inherently selfish. When push came to shove, they’d kill anyone, regardless of how close that person was to them, to save their own skin. Something he sought to prove with everyone he came across.

We later learned that the first set of people he tested this theory on were his brother (Despite him telling Aaron and Father Gabriel that he killed his brother), his sister-in-law, and his niece. He forced them to play Russian Roulette, which resulted in the latter two being killed, and his brother left alive to slowly go mad.

What’s most sad about Mays’s story was from what we can tell that he doesn’t seem like a man who wanted to kill people despite his cruel tests. He seemed like a man who was depressed by the results of his tests. It wasn’t that he wanted people to prove him right; he wanted people to prove him wrong. He became more saddened and angry when people didn’t because it confirmed for him his worst expectations. When you fear that everyone is selfish, that everyone is bad, how awful must it be to have that fear affirmed over and over and over again?

You can see it when Aaron and Gabriel pass his test; he’s relieved, he’s happy to have hope in people again, to see that not everyone is as selfish as he thought. I think, had Gabriel not killed him and had he seen what Alexandria was like, the community that they’d built, and learning about Deanna, and Reg, and Rick, and Carl, he’d have been happy to see that there’s a whole community of people still being human.

On top of that, despite his brother betraying him, he didn’t kill him as he could have. Instead, he gave his brother a chance to prove that he wasn’t a selfish backstabber by choosing to sacrifice himself rather than kill his wife and daughter, a test that he failed. Mays, unwilling to kill his own brother, kept him in the attic, with the bodies of his family, to make him think about his selfishness.

Does this absolve him for forcing who knows how many people to choose between themselves and friends, companions, maybe even loved ones? No, but I don’t think he did it out of bloodlust, but rather, in the hope that someone, anyone would prove to him that not everyone in the world had gone rotten. That’s why he kept doing it, in the hope that someone would finally do the selfless thing.