The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Keep Your Wits About You
By Liam O'Leary
Tales of the Walking Dead
The Walking Dead can make you go crazy. Don’t let it.
At the climax of this week’s Tales of TWD, we discovered that Amanda’s son, Arnaud, was the one responsible for the disappearance of many of their town’s children, as he had been murdering them.
His reason? He had come to the belief that living in the apocalypse had made him “twisted”, and he sought to spare the children that fate the only way he could think of: Preventing them from living long enough to see and do the things he’d had to. As his mother was fond of saying “Sometimes, murder is a mercy”.
Crazy though he was, Arnaud was right about one thing: Surviving in a zombie apocalypse can damage you psychologically. Between seeing corpses come back to life and eat people, watching civilization break down, having to be forced to fight other people just to survive, and the constant threat of attack by either the dead or the living, it’s easy to see why that damage can happen.
Whether that damage does happen (Or, at the very least, whether it changes you) is up to you. You can’t very well change most of the things I’ve mentioned, but you can change how you react to it. You don’t have to let the horrors you see and experience turn you into a monster. You can learn to brace for and deal with zombies. You can learn to maintain your humanity, even when dealing with hostiles, and save violence only for those who truly pose a threat to you and your group, and you can learn to adjust to the apocalypse without mentally breaking. People across much of Europe and Japan were subject to immense horrors during World War II, and they didn’t all become a bunch of psychos afterward. If they could do it then you could do it in a zombie apocalypse.
Next. The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: It's Always People. dark
And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! As important as having a strong body will be in a zombie apocalypse, it will be practically useless if you don’t have a sharp mind holding it all together. If you don’t use your brain, you might fail to notice clues about dangers around the corner. If you fail to hang onto who you are, you might wind up becoming an even bigger monster than the dead. And, if you can’t cope with the apocalypse, it might just cause you to snap and go down a road you can never go back from. If you want to keep your mind sharp in preparation for a zombie outbreak, why not pick up my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!