Negan

• 1. Introduction

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  Negan is a fictional survivor in The Walking Dead, a man who carries a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire and calls it Lucille. He first appears as the leader of the Saviors, a group that forces neighboring communities to hand over tribute. That makes him the great villain of the comic book series and of its television adaptation. He also returns in the spin-off miniseries Dead City, where his role has changed completely. Few characters in the franchise are as hated at the start and as argued over at the end. Who was Negan before the world ended? Why did critics divide over him? And what does a story do with a tyrant that its hero chooses not to kill?

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• 2. A Discarded Idea

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  Robert Kirkman built Negan from a plot he abandoned. He had been considering a story where Rick Grimes is forced to protect his son Carl by killing the fellow survivor Glenn Rhee. Kirkman dropped that idea and conceived Negan instead. The artist Charlie Adlard has confirmed that the comic version is drawn to resemble Henry Rollins. In the television series, the character also carries a full name, Negan Smith. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was cast in 2015. Matthew Lillard and Henry Rollins both auditioned first, and the choice came down to Lillard and Morgan. Morgan accepted at once, since he was already a fan of the comic. His television debut came in the sixth-season finale, which ends with Negan choosing a victim whom the audience never sees.

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• 3. Two Lucilles

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  At a high school in Reston, Virginia, a gym teacher keeps drawing complaints for his vulgar language. That teacher is Negan, in the comic's account of his life before the outbreak. He is happily married to Lucille, yet he keeps a mistress who does not know he has a wife. When Lucille collapses during an argument, he rushes her to the hospital and learns she has cancer. His mistress leaves the moment he tells her the truth. After the apocalypse starts, hospital staff must evacuate. Negan refuses to abandon Lucille, who depends on life-support machines. She dies during a power outage and returns as a zombie. Negan flees, rescues a boy from zombies, and asks the boy to kill the undead Lucille for him. The boy does it, and Negan begins giving him life advice, until a zombie kills the boy. Afterward, Negan travels alone and then with small groups. Each group is eventually killed by zombies, and he is left emotionally numb. He kills zombies with a baseball bat he had admired. Later he argues with the leader of a group that prostitutes its women. When the man provokes him physically, Negan kills him with the bat. Seeing the shock around him, he encourages the fear. He wraps the bat in barbed wire and names it Lucille, and he names his followers the Saviors. The television series tells the story differently, in the tenth-season episode titled Here's Negan. There, Carol exiles him to a cabin in the woods, where he digs up his buried bat. Flashbacks show him twelve years earlier, with a wife played by Hilarie Burton. Her chemotherapy drugs are ruined when their generator breaks, so Negan sets out to find help. He finds a doctor named Franklin and his daughter Laura, and Laura gives him a baseball bat for protection. A biker gang captures him on the way home and forces him to reveal where the two can be found. He returns to find that Lucille has taken her own life and reanimated. He wraps Laura's bat in barbed wire from his fence and burns the house down with her inside. Then he rescues Franklin and Laura, and kills the gang's leader, Craven, with the bat. In the cabin, the old bat finally breaks, and Negan burns it in the fireplace as a goodbye.

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• 4. Tribute and Terror

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  Half of everything is what the Hilltop Colony owes the Saviors. In the comic, the colony accepts the deal in return for help killing nearby zombies. The Saviors take half of its livestock and crops. Negan punishes even the smallest infraction with brutal violence. He orders the death of Hilltop's leader, Gregory, for not being loyal enough. The television series adds a grim detail from the past. Negan's men beat a 16-year-old resident named Rory to death with a bat, and Gregory submitted. A man known as the Croat was one of Negan's first lieutenants and served as his torturer. He called Negan buraz, meaning brother. Then the Croat tortured and killed a young woman against orders. Negan disfigured the Croat's right ear and called him a monster. The Croat fled and formed his own group in Manhattan. At the Sanctuary, Negan runs a cult-like domain. In the comic, many followers live on a point system. Women in his so-called harem are known as his wives. Carl hides in a Savior truck, rides into that world, and kills six Saviors before they surround him. Dwight is about to kill the boy when Negan stops him with a sarcastic line: "Is that any way to treat our new guest?" Negan gives Carl a tour and asks him to unwrap the bandages over the eye he lost. Negan mocks the injury, Carl breaks down, and Negan apologizes. Next comes a ritual with call-and-response chanting. Negan presses a hot iron to the face of a man named Mark, who has displeased him. Carl watches. Negan then returns Carl to Rick unharmed, a favor he later cites when he kills Spencer.

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• 5. The Rules He Kept

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  A Savior named David tried to rape a captive, and Negan killed him for it. In the comic, the captive is Holly, and Negan stabs David in the neck. He reminds him that the Saviors do not rape, and he tells Holly the Saviors are not monsters. The television series stages a similar moment with Sasha. There, Negan pushes a knife through David's throat, says he does not accept the apology, and replaces the shirt David tore. This is the same man who beats Glenn to death, and in the series, Abraham as well. He picks his victim with a rhyme, "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe", pointing his bat at each person in turn. Yet he tells Rick that he respects the nerve it took to threaten him. When Spencer Monroe asks to be put in charge of Alexandria, Negan calls him a coward. He then cuts open Spencer's stomach. In the series, he jokes that Spencer did have guts after all. The lieutenant Simon once suggests destroying an entire community. Negan answers angrily that people are critical to what the Saviors are building. He wants Rick, Maggie and Ezekiel captured and publicly executed instead. Later Negan finds that Simon has taken over in his absence. He challenges him to a fight and kills him with his bare hands. After Spencer's death, his girlfriend Rosita fires at Negan. The shot misses and hits only Lucille. The man who made that bullet was Eugene Porter.

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• 6. War and a Cell

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  Eugene Porter's sabotage leaves the Saviors' guns useless in the final battle. In the television series, Negan orders his men to open fire and discovers that Eugene has tampered with the weapons. Rick cuts Negan's throat open in the last fight, but spares his life because he believes Carl would have wanted it. Carl had died earlier, and his last wish was for the communities to make peace. Rick passed the news to Negan by walkie-talkie. Genuinely saddened, Negan offered his condolences but refused to surrender. Michonne later read him a letter Carl had written, and he still swore to kill Rick. Eighteen months after the war, Negan is in a basement cell. He warns Rick that the peace will not last. He goes on a hunger strike, and Michonne finally persuades him to eat. Six years after that, he has befriended Rick's young daughter Judith. He helps with her homework and tells her stories about her family that nobody else has told her. When a winter storm threatens, Negan is the first to notice that something is wrong. Judith runs into the storm after hearing Daryl's dog, and Negan follows the barking to find her. Flying debris injures his leg, but he carries both the girl and the dog to shelter. The comic stages the war's ending at Hilltop. Negan agrees to Rick's offer to pool resources and trade by barter, and Rick answers by slashing his throat. Negan tackles Rick, breaks his leg and laughs, then passes out. When he wakes, Rick tells him he will live in jail and watch a new civilization thrive without him. Two years later, Carl visits the basement cell. Carl still wants him dead, while Negan calls them friends. After routine maintenance, the cell door is left unlocked, and Negan chooses to stay inside as a sign of good faith. Soon Rick comes to that cell to ask for his help against a new enemy.

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• 7. Alpha and Exile

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  A young Hilltop resident named Brandon Rose offers to free Negan from his cell in the comic. His grudge is against Rick, Carl, Sophia and the Whisperers. Rick killed his father in self-defense. Carl assaulted him after he attacked Sophia. Alpha beheaded his mother. He wants Negan to turn Rick and the Whisperers against each other. Negan stabs him in the chest and goes on alone. A group of Whisperers led by Beta ambushes him and brings him to their leader, Alpha. Negan declares his love for her and starts living among them. When he stops two Whisperers from raping a woman, Beta knocks him down. Alpha explains that the Whisperers allow such things so women can prove their strength. That night Negan tells Alpha the world has made him dead inside, and that she is only pretending to have no emotions. She breaks down, and he slits her throat and decapitates her. He carries the head to Alexandria and asks for trust. Rick agrees to let him live free in an outpost, alone, with only enough to survive. The television series gives Alpha a different ending. In season 10, a second Brandon, the son of a former Savior, helps Negan escape. Negan beats him to death after Brandon kills a woman and her son to impress him. Negan then joins the Whisperers and becomes Alpha's lover. Later he hides Lydia elsewhere to lure Alpha into a trap, then slits her throat. Daryl accepts him as a tentative ally. Later in the comic, Maggie confronts him at gunpoint. He apologizes for Glenn's death and begs her to shoot. She refuses and tells him he must live with what he has done. Kirkman confirmed in the letters page for Issue 182 that Negan would not return. He added that if he did, he would be surprised to see a bat. A one-issue story, Negan Lives!, fills the gap before the end. A young woman named Lucy lures Negan into a trap for her group. After a zombie attack kills her companions, Negan invites Lucy to help him lay Lucille to rest. In the final issue, set 20 years later, Negan lives alone on food parcels left by Carl. The television series gives him a very different future.

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• 8. A Second Life

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  In season 11, Maggie takes Negan along to reclaim her old village, Meridian, from a violent group called the Reapers. Negan suspects she means to kill him. When she threatens him, he lets her fall from a train car into a horde of zombies. She survives. Later he tells her that, if he could do it all again, he would have killed everyone in Rick's group. Six months after leaving, he meets and marries a woman named Annie, and she becomes pregnant with his child. They live in the Riverbend community. When Commonwealth troopers threaten the town, Negan saves Maggie's son Hershel. Hershel pulls a gun on him, relenting only when Negan admits to killing his father and apologizes. Later, a sadistic warden at the Commonwealth labor camp singles Negan out. When the warden threatens Annie, Negan pleads for her life. In the series finale, he tells Maggie he finally understands what he did to her, after nearly losing his wife and unborn child. Maggie replies that she will never forgive him. She says she will try to move past her anger for her own sake and her son's. In Dead City, Maggie recruits him to rescue her son from Manhattan. Negan agrees on the condition that her community takes in Ginny, a mute young woman under his protection. In the second season, he leads the Burazi and shocks a rival named Christos with an electric prod built into his custom bat. Critics were not united at first. Some called the main antagonist of seasons 7 and 8 "ridiculous". His redemption arc changed that, and many now rank him among the series' most developed characters. Morgan won a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Guest Performer in a Drama Series. He also won the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain and the Saturn Award for Best Guest Starring Role on Television. Game director Katsuhiro Harada first thought Negan too weak. Even so, Negan became a playable guest in Tekken 7. He was added on the 28th of February 2019, as the final part of the second season pass.

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