Will Clementine Turn 'Evil'?
If there's one prevalent struggle in the TWD-verse that occurs more frequently than the struggle against the zombies, its the struggle among characters to keep their humanity.
All the major antagonists in the Walking Dead are humans who through the most unfortunate circumstances facilitated through the zombie apocalypse, are individuals who have lost much of the tenets of their humanity - especially empathy, probably due to how they must become numb to the constant influx of death and violence around them.
The apocalypse brings out the worst in people, charging up their core primal instincts to survive, in the process unsheathing many other layers of their personality that made them 'human'. Remember the Stranger from Season 1? He was probably once just an ordinary family man who coached a baseball team and would have continued living his unremarkable but socially secure life for the rest of his days if the dead hadn't started walking around.
In Season 1 Clementine acts as the protagonist's last true connection to humanity and the characters world view is quite optimistic. Of course in Season 2 everything goes wrong and Clementine loses everyone except for this infant plot device named AJ, granted she can determinately keep Kenny or Jane but of course their already doomed to die in the premier of Season 3. We the player control Clem's behavior and personality (perhaps a little too much to the point it weakened her character...) and we can either try to retain as much of her original personality as we can and hope that things will get better because optimism is apparently good for your mental health or we can harden her heart and force her to mentally mature at an accelerated rate and adopt a more pessimistic outlook (and question the greater meaning of Lee's sacrifice).
In the Season 1 finale we play as a convicted felon struggling to keep living long enough to earn his final redemption by saving Clementine - to whom he projects his humanity, to save means that he's not a cold blooded killer with nothing to live or die for - Clementine's innocence is our connection not just to the old times before the apocalypse but also our hope that such innocence can carry over and persevere in the new zombie world.
In Season 2 that's what we have the opportunity to attempt - but the brutal hardships Clementine faces means she must adapt to protect herself - which mandates a degree of ruthlessness - killing having practically become a necessity. And Carver tries to instill his Darwinist social values into Clementine - which we can choose to accept or reject - they do make logical sense and could at least in theory work - the Strong required to lead the Weak, otherwise it being death for everyone because society can't coddle those too mentally incompetent to survive - remember Sarah?
But is it really really amoral? Morality is technically just a set of conventions crafted by an organized civilization, therefore it can be rewritten if civilization itself is reformed - like it is the process of doing so in TWD. In the post-apocalyptic world survival should be the utmost priority of all living humans - should morality adapt to the harsh realities of survival or should humanity's means to survival adapt to pre-apocalyptic humanity?
This did seem to be an underlying theme that popped up a few times in Season 2 - to euthanize the starving dog or not to euthanize the starving dog that tried to maul you out of its own desperation for survival), to care about the over-sheltered Sarah whose innocence might have been symbolic of Season 1 Clementine, even if her naivety was ultimately a liability to the group's survival, to steal medicine from Arvo for the survival of your own group member and potentially deprive his apparently sick sister, etc.
Throughout Season 2 the choices we make force us to reflect on finding a balance between pre-apocalyptic moral values and compromising them post-apocalyptic survival instinct. Without our complex layers of morality, if stripped down to just our bare instincts, are humans truly any different from animals or even the Walkers?
Hoping that Clem remains the protagonist in Season 3, she will no doubt be a slightly older version of her previous self. Do you think the necessities of survival - namely a lot of killing - of both people and walkers - have numbed her to what we normal people consider depraved. In essence will Clem not necessarily be 'evil' like the Governor who relished in his amorality - rather is Clem doomed to gradually have her humanity peeled away until she is a shell of her Season 1 self?
Even the final choice in Season 1 is reflective of this - to shoot and kill Lee to spare him from turning into a zombie, despite how emotionally painful it is - or to refuse to accept this new outlook and simply leave Lee to naturally die and resurrect as a zombie because you can't bring yourself to kill someone you care about.
Or will she retain her pre-apocalyptic morals and strive to remain human no matter how illogical or difficult it may seem?
Most likely she will try to maintain a balance, but can that last? Will instinct ultimately tip over morality or vice versa?
What do you think? What does Clementine's character transformation insinuate for the greater meaning of Lee's sacrifice in Season 1 - Lee who gave his life to preserve Clementine's - she was his humanity. But realistically speaking, is Clementine doomed to lose her own connection to humanity? Sure there is AJ, whom as a plot device may serve as Clem's own connection to humanity but he's just a baby driven purely by the pleasure principle with no moral outlook on life.
Comments
You bring up a lot of good points here. I don't really know if Clem's going to outright turn "evil" or not, because it largely depends on the choices that we as the players make. Maybe we'll be forced into making some choices that, in a walker-free lifetime, would be considered to be really awful and even criminal in certain cases.
But that's often what makes this game so fascinating. Seeing what other people think is right or wrong sparks a lot of great discussions like these. I hope, though, that our choices as Clementine can have some real impact on what others think of us for the next time around. Maybe making her a little bit older would allow for something like that to happen.