Problems With Pop Culture: Weapons, Women And The Walking Dead

Look at Rick in the above Argentinian poster for season two of the show:

You’re telling me that’s not some dominant, Fifty Shades of Grey-style imagery? The gun is bigger than most of the zombies in the background, for chrissakes. It’s huge!

Another thing: have you ever noticed how dirty people get in The Walking Dead, but how clean their guns are? How shiny they remain? Remember Otis? The fat guy who tried to keep up with Shane on a reconnaissance mission, only to sacrifice himself to a herd of zombies? Remember how dirty he was? Look at how clean he kept his gun:

That is gleaming. He couldn’t wash his face or shave while he was cleaning his gun? Really?

It could be that the message the team want to get across is how desperate and weak Rick and his band of survivors are. Maybe they want to make it clear that without these weapons, they simply would not survive, but at what point does that become fetishism? Did you ever wonder what the weird, subconscious nauseousness was when you were watching the men with the guns and the women and children being left to tend to their wounds and slowly go insane? Someone needs to read stories to the children, right?

Lucky for 50% of the audience then that The Walking Dead would go on to address its issues with women in quite an interesting way.