''Arvo Shot 'My' Clem, Even After She Was Nice!" : The Reasoning of the TWDG Fan Base.
Okay, I just saw a post on Reedit where people--joking or not--were comparing Arvo to Hitler so this shit needs to be said here and now.
I know it’s just a video game and all but, the great thing about those is, when it involves human characters—who are modeled and written to be people just like the rest of us—you can pretty much use logic to understand why they do what they do in lieu of not being able to feel the character’s emotion. It’s a good tactic to use—too bad people only seem to use it on the characters they care about. No one ever tries it on the ‘villain’ or the unlikable characters—in order to shed light on the shitty decisions those characters make. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re looking for something to pity about that character—you’re just trying to understand the how and why, and with those answers in mind you can sooner make a judgement on whether the character is actually as shitty as the content creator seemingly made them, or it was just circumstance that led them down the ‘wrong road’, so to speak.
Firstly, let me just put this right here. Stop using the ''he shot a little girl'' argument, because it's the most idiotic argument I've ever heard for this situation
Look, age doesn't matter. Arvo is at most 18 and, the youngest I've seen speculated is 15. It's not like he's Lee's age--the fact that she's a child means nothing to him because he's a child too. Also, the whole point of him doing it in the first place was exacting revenge for the sister he thought Clementine shot dead.
Kenny said it best; ''You think just because you're a little girl you can just get people killed?'' There's no passes for Clementine just because she's a kid. There's no room for passes in the apocalypse.
Now, with that in mind; let me all ask you a question—it’s common sense so it shouldn’t be something you have to think about for long, alright? I want to you put yourself into this scenario:
Say the apocalypse actually happens and you, like everyone, have to adapt to a world where there’s man-eating monsters roaming around and, when it comes down to it, it’s literally kill or be killed. You’re just a teenager—hardly able to take care of yourself in normal circumstances, let alone now. Something or another happened and—whether it was before the world went to shit or after—you are physically impaired. The leg brace that you have to wear, just in order for you to walk, makes movement awkward; it makes you slower—so slow, in fact, that if one of the dead were chasing you, you wouldn’t be able to get away from it—and if you tripped, forget it; you’d barely be able to crawl away.
*You’re able to survive thanks to one person: your older sister. She’s family, so you trust her with your life and you know no matter what she’ll keep you safe. You’re all each other have now, so you develop an strong attachment to her and a dependence on her protection. You follow her for the next two years, like a dependent little duckling, and suddenly—due to your own impulsive stupidity—you put her in danger. You put her in danger and she gets shot point blank. You give her CPR and try desperately to stop the bleeding, and get yanked away by the opposing side as a hostage to draw out a man on your own side. You don’t care—you’re disoriented as is and need just to get back to her. You see her start to move out the corner of your eye and think to yourself that it worked—she’d be okay! Seconds later, she gets shot right in front of you. *
*To save your own life, you beg and barter the one thing you have left: your group’s hideout and all of the supplies that come with it. You’re taken as a guide—or as a prisoner, more like—tied up as a precaution for the people who you led your group to ambush. One of them—a loud man with a beard and an eyepatch—doesn’t think this is enough, though; he abuses you both verbally and physically, and treats you no different than an animal. That night he has you tied to a telephone pole to freeze and stew in your own self-pity and grieving thoughts. The girl who shot your sister—she’s younger than even you, but at this point you feel her age doesn’t matter—tells you she’s ‘sorry’. Clearly, she’s sorry, right? She’s probably just mocking you, right? You ask to be left alone—just let me grieve by myself! you think. But they don’t leave you alone, and the next person who speaks to you gets your full wrath. It was that man, Mike—one of the few who actually stood up for you against the mistreatment, despite your actions getting him shot. And you blew up at him—but, oddly enough, he doesn’t strike you; just the opposite, in fact: he comforts you, and tries to ease your pain with simple words. You don’t understand it, but you can see the care on his face. Or, was it another trick? *
That next morning the girl takes a spill into the frozen lake. You don’t care—after all, she killed your sister; her death would be retribution enough in your mind. The ice you brazenly volunteered (and had yourself volunteered) to walk across couldn’t take the weight—and you getting scared by the walkers who stumbled onto the ice—scared enough to bolt your way to the other side—didn’t help the situation in the slightest. A person died—but not who you wished it to be. Ultimately, it was combination of Mother Nature and the entire group of survivors that was at fault—but it was blamed solely on you. How could you have known? You’d trekked across that same lake dozens of times—it was the quickest way to get to side—and it had never been an issue. It was their fault as much yours. The one-eyed man starts to belittle you again, hurling that last racial slur that makes you snap. Defiance. You defied him and are rewarded with a right hook to the face forceful enough to knock you to the floor. He doesn’t stop there, and continues punching you. Again. And again. And again. Until you’re beaten and bruised and out of breath. Then he ties you up again and continues to tend to your sister’s murderer. Mike doesn’t talk to you again until the one-eyed man leaves, but you’re thankful all the same when he does. He treats your wounds—and you—with concern, you feel you can trust him. He’s kind to you—maybe even cares about you.
Later that night, he unties you and asks if you’d like to come with him and another woman—Bonnie, you think her name is. Stuck in between a choice of staying with an abusive mad man and going with people who treat him with kindness—like a human being—of course you choose to go with them. They may not be your sister, but they would take care of you. You trusted that much.
And then she of all people stumbles out and confronts you three just as you’re fixing to leave, and you’re conflicted. Part of you was angry, part of you was scared—if she tells the one-eyed man, you’d get an even fiercer beating than earlier—he may as well kill you next chance he gets! You aren’t having that. You aren’t going back to that man, no matter what. You see a gun—there, on the front seat—and without a second thought, you grab it and point it at her. If she makes a move—if she makes one move—you wouldn’t hesitate. She wasn’t a little girl—she… she killed her. She killed your sister. She was just as much of a monster as any one of them. It was justified, right? This was justified. She was trying to keep you—your new friends—she was trying to keep you all from leaving. But you knew what would happen if you stayed. You just.. had to… pull.. the trigger. Pull.. the trigger.. The next move she makes, you immediately construe as a threat, and shoot out of a combination of fear and spite. That moment, the little girl hits the snow and both of your new friends show immediate concern. Mike looks to you and immediately… you regret it. It shows on your face. You aren’t angry any longer, and what you did doesn’t make you proud—you shot someone. You shot someone. You just kept repeating it to your self and, before you knew it, you ran out of there.
If any of you say you’d be completely and one-hundred percent okay with that, I call bullshit. You would not forgive Clementine—certainly not in the space of two days. Emotions don’t work like that.
In closing; everything is a matter of circumstances—whether it be bad or good is what fuels every thought and action of the people they affect. Thinking from a logical standpoint, but sometimes our emotions refuse to listen to reason, and the younger you are the harder it is—and the younger someone is, the more I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I gave Arvo that benefit because, when it comes down to it, he’s a teenager—he’s got a lot of room for screwing up. It doesn’t mean you have to forgive him, you just have to accept that shit happens and resenting a kid for simply being human and making a mistake—when plenty of Walking Dead characters have made similar bad choices—is ridiculous when you think about it. It’s a natural reaction, yeah, but an unneeded one.
To bring up similar instances where a character screws up:
Nick almost shot Clementine point blank in Episode One; Nick then, later, shot an innocent man, who then fell off the side of the bridge and most likely drowned in the lake below in the beginning of Episode Two; in Episode Four, Jane threatens a crippled boy when she already disarmed him—on the excuse that she didn’t want him to come back—as if he wouldn’t want to seek revenge on those who embarrassed him; in Episode Five, Kenny beats the same teenager, who is defenseless and bound to a pole, because he didn’t want him “hurting anyone”—so he hurts him, and knocks him straight into unconsciousness (determinant scene.)
You as a person forgave all of these people—because you saw them grow as characters as saw their redeemable qualities. They cared about the people they protected. As did Arvo. He’s not some… monster. Watching the gunfight scene, hearing the amount of emotion that was written into his voice, you can tell that he had a heart—and that heart was for his sister.
The point here is, everyone makes mistakes—though, it is true that repeat offenses are a lot tougher to forgive than a one-time screw up. When you see the human side of a character, and you begin to understand why they do what they do, you’re more inclined to take a deep breath when they make the wrong choice, because they’re trying to protect the ones they love. Arvo was trying to protect his sister and survive like everyone else. He lost all his people in one fell swoop—that’s the ultimate ‘lesson learned’ for him.
He deserves to take responsibility for his actions, but he was hardly given the chance to by the way he was treated. It was the Clementine’s group’s actions—most notably Kenny—that pushed him over the edge. And people here are going around cheering Kenny for tolling out cruel punishment and abuse to a teenage boy—treatment that most prisoners aren’t even subjected to because its seen as constitutionally and morally wrong—becoming what it is that you hate, an abuser. I’ve seen Let’s Plays of it—dozens, just to gaze a reaction—and I saw one person start laughing and giving Kenny a verbal pat on the back. What the hell. Abuse is no rite of passage.
Again, I ain’t asking you to forgive the kid—just give him a break. If you have any humanity at all, you’d give him a break.
Comments
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Okay?
Might as well call this the 'Arvo Defense Masterpost', because that was amazing.
I agree with some of your points, but I still think the writers should have had Arvo respond to Clem differently in some capacity depending on how she treated him. The fact that nothing we did for him or against him changes his attitude of us was annoying and although this is a recurring problem for the season, it's much harder to accept when this lack of change in attitude results in Clem getting shot out of nowhere by someone she was clearly trying to help. And it wasn't even clear whether he felt regret for his actions or just realized that he just alerted Kenny and Jane to what he was doing and fucked up his relationship with his "new friends" by shooting the little girl in their group.
Bless you, stranger. I was half-expecting someone to compare me to Satan for 'defending' someone "who would dare shoot Clem."
He still shot a little girl. Fuck him. If Clementine killed my brother I'd despise her but I'd never want to cause her harm.
Telltale's treatment of him was, by far, my biggest issue with EP5. Not only could they have done so much more with his character as a whole, maybe even pull a Ben and do something selfless and redeemable to guarantee the safety of the baby, what little time he did have in the episode meant nothing. He was there as a plot device and that was it.
He was there to serve as a punching bag for Kenny, to foreshadow how ''crazy'' he was becoming.
He was there because Telltale is moral enough to not kill off a defenseless, sniveling boy but they aren't above having him be verbally and physically abused the rest of the episode
He was there as a final ''fuck you for thinking that'', having him act submissive and hurt the entire episode until he suddenly shoots you.
You get to have one playable interaction with him. One. And it doesn't even matter. Not if you say 'sorry', not if you leave, not if you tell him that 'I've lost people too'. There's no ''(?) Arvo will remember that.'' to be hard because Telltale could give two shits about him.
I don't care what he thought about Clementine or anyone really. It's just messed up to shoot a little girl. There isn't an excuse.
You say that now but--god forbid--if that were to happen, you might think differently. You never know how you'll truly feel unless it happens to you.
This is pretty much why I think the writers drop the ball on the conflict between Kenny and Arvo.
It almost as if they're trying to say "Hey, guys! It's okay to spout racial slurs, push around, and beat a defenceless and crippled young man in a few occasions, one to the point of near death...so as long as the same man eventually shoots a child in the shoulder as a response, which make everything bad you've done to him justified after all!"
Nick shoots at Clem. Christa shoots and kills Michelle. Neither of them get as much flak as Arvo does.
Who said I was making any sort of excuse? It's messed up to shoot anyone, plain and simple. I'm just explaining to people the 'why'. Because a lot of people just think he did it for no reason.
I like to think I'm way above that. You're right, perhaps my emotions would be different if I was actually put in that situation and maybe I'd hurt her. Who knows? But after seeing her regret and the way in which she tried to comfort me I highly doubt I'd resort to violence.
I doubt that so much though
Telltale's treatment of him was, by far, my biggest issue with EP5. Not only could they have done so much more with his character as a whole, maybe even pull a Ben and do something selfless and redeemable to guarantee the safety of the baby, what little time he did have in the episode meant nothing. He was there as a plot device and that was it.
He was there to serve as a punching bag for Kenny, to foreshadow how ''crazy'' he was becoming. He was there because Telltale is moral enough to not kill off a defenseless, sniveling boy but they aren't above having him be verbally and physically abused the rest of the episode He was there as a final ''fuck you for thinking that'', having him act submissive and hurt the entire episode until he suddenly shoots you.
You get to have one playable interaction with him. One. And it doesn't even matter. Not if you say 'sorry', not if you leave, not if you tell him that 'I've lost people too'. There's no ''(?) Arvo will remember that.'' to be hard because Telltale could give two shits about him.
Because she was bitten.
Because Michelle had just killed Omid.
You know, people kind of liked him.
Love makes people do crazy things, that's for certain.
Also, at the state he was in, I honestly don't think Arvo thought she was trying to repent--and that's if you choose to talk to him the one time you get to in-game, proving that Telltale could give two shits about him as a character. He was broken up, hysteric and paranoid--remember, he has a mini breakdown minutes after that when Mike talks to him--I honestly... felt like he would have thought she was mocking him.
Yes, and Arvo wishes harm on and eventually brings harm to Clem because he thought she had killed his sister.
We can go back and forth reasoning the unreasonable all day--the point is everyone does screwed up things.
Then why did she constantly protect him from Kenny? The fact she did that numerous times should have made it clear to Arvo that she was being genuine.
I know. It was just explaining the reasons they don´t really get flak for doing that. Also, is much easier for people to forgive Nick or Christa, who were actual characters, that Arvo, who was just a plot device.
EDIT: Also, I don´t really think that what Christa did was screwed up, but I get what you are saying.
Well, it's understandable. We doubt what we don't know.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that Arvo also "kind of liked" his sister.
Thank god--I thought I was the only one who thought so! He served no purpose in EP5 other than just to be a plot device.
As a sufferer of paranoid schizophrenia, I can attest to certain things; when a person has a mental episode, logic rarely can get through to them. You doubt people, you suspect people, and trust is something hard for you to give. Certainly in his condition, being constantly both berated and abused. I can't ever know for certain, but it's just my guess.
Look, like I have already said I was just explaining the reasons they don´t really get flak for doing that. But still, the Arvo situation was very different that what happened with Omid. That Michelle begged didn´t mean anything to Christa, not only because she had just killed Omid, but because she couldn´t know that Michelle shot Omid accidentally.
Its purely because were clementine and we see it from her view.
Sorta. Kinda.
Because he was trigger happy and thought she was going to come back as a walker. Its not the same thing as what Arvo did by any means.
Michelle wasn't really a child.
Well, I dunno what I'd do if I were him. But I could never live knowing that I'd stooped so low to the point of shooting a kid. I'd at least immediately regret my decision and face my rightful punishment or run off into the forest and commit suicide.
Exactly! I'm trying to get people to see it from the opposite view--not to sympathize, but to understand.
I've got another gem of the fanbase
SEASON 2 WAS JUST AS GOOD AS SEASON 1 AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES JUST HAS THEIR BAR SET TOO HIGH
Keep trying silly billy's
You mean that Clem (determinat) kidness didn´t mean anything to Arvo because he didn´t know Clem shot is sister because she had reanimated as a walker? I know that.
EDIT: Is still different.
And Arvo didn't know that Clem shot Natasha because she had already turned. I get that people don't care about Natasha and that they did care about Omid, but I would think that they could at least somewhat empathized with Arvo's resentment for what happened with his sister.
If you are looking for me to pity Arvo for his actions, you're barking up the wrong tree...I can say I understand them but I still wanna get rid of him, no matter how good or misunderstood a light you paint him in.
Arvo's actions are what caused everything bad to occur to him. His group being killed, sister being shot by Clem and him assuming that she was still alive somehow(?), also having a volatile one eyed man beat him when he knew standing up to him was a bad idea. All this was on him and it shows where his mentality is....he likes to get even and hurt anything if he gets hurt. When I saw that look on his face after Clem shot his walker-sister, I knew what he was going to do and I really don't think he regrets it because he hurt Clementine personally but rather because he realized that Mike disapproved and he never shot anyone before. That takes a ghastly amount of hate and anger to do...as shown by the fact that Clem wouldn't even pull the trigger on Mike, even though he was leaving her and AJ to die.
Arvo is not a monster but he is someone who likes to lash out if he feels threatened or hurt by anything.... and him justifying shooting a little girl? That's just crazy and messed up no matter how you spin it.
I like the analysis from Arvo's viewpoint though.
Yeah, but people are kind of thick, and that Arvo didn´t know is sister had turned is easy to miss. You know, except for Russians.
Weird, considering you were asking for us to "give him a break". If there are no excuses for his actions, then why would we give him a break? Were you just trying to give us a "FYI" here?
This is asking for people to understand why he did what he did, not excuse his actions.
There's apologists for everything.
Maybe Arvo is also "trigger happy" (I'm not sure why this is an excuse) and saw Clem as a threat to his and his group. I mean, she was pointing a gun at them and he's seen before that she's not afraid to shoot.
No...she was still a child. And what does it matter? Is executing a 15 year old really so much better than executing an 11 year old?
Yes, and Arvo wishes harm on and eventually brings harm to Clem because he thought she had killed his sister.
We can go back and forth reasoning the unreasonable all day--the point is everyone does screwed up things. Nick was protecting his friends, Christa was exacting revenge for Omid--it's all justified to them. Just like it was to Arvo.
Look, age doesn't matter. Arvo is at most 18 and, the youngest I've seen speculated is 15. It's not like he's Lee's age--the fact that she's a child means nothing to him because he's a child too. Also, the whole point of him doing it in the first place was exacting revenge for the sister he thought Clementine shot dead.
Kenny said it best; ''You think just because you're a little girl you can just get people killed?'' There's no passes for Clementine just because she's a kid. There's no room for passes in the apocalypse.