The Walking Dead #167

[cyberghostface]

Andrea is dying after being bitten. Rick tells her he can't go on without her.







Rick can't bring himself to shoot her and instead lies down next to her. Andrea reanimates and attacks him.



Kirkman wrote the following afterword (I'll remove if this violates the rules.)

Comments

[caivu]

Kirkman has 100% control over the story. If killing Andrea upset him so much and was something he didn't want, as he claims, he could've just... not killed her. But he did. He even says he doesn't know why he did it.

[cyberghostface]

Not wanting to kill off a character he likes because it upsets him and realizing that killing off said character is what needs to happen story-wise aren't contradictions.

[caivu]

But it wasn't for a story reason. "I don't know why this had to happen... but I know it did," he writes. That doesn't sound like having a plan in place to me.

So he killed her off... just because. Even without wanting to. That's bizarre to me.

[cyberghostface]

He planned it months ahead of time, that's pretty much having a plan in place.

[caivu]

A plan to kill her, yes. But not the why of it. Right now it's completely gratuitous and made all the worse by the fact that he could've easily not done it, and didn't want to, but did. Yeah, kill off a long-running, fan-favorite character for no damn reason. That makes sense.

But then again, gratuitous deaths are par for the course for Kirkman, so I guess it's not surprising.

[wizardru]

I get what you're saying, but some writers 'follow the story' and I think that's what Kirkman's saying happened here. He doesn't know why he felt compelled to write the story he did, but his instincts (which presumably are what brought him the success he's had so far) told him this was a good choice, so he did it.

If this were a limited series or a novel, I think your objection would be more valid to me; since this is an unending story, I'm not sure the requirement that it be more specific to a long-term goal makes as much sense to me. YMMV.