Surprise! That Utopia Was Actually A Festering Hellhole

If you consume anything fictional—movie, TV show, book, video game—you’ll know that if you come across any situation in the story that’s too good to be true for the protagonists, the situation is probably based on a lie from the pit of one of the lower circles of hell. After a few episodes of The Walking Dead‘s third season, I was probing TV Tropes, looking past the clunky design to see if there was an entry for this phenomenon. Behold the False Utopia.

It happens a lot when writers want to mess with their protagonists, and it’s accomplished by building false expectations in both the characters and the audience, and then pouring buckets of demon vomit all over it. Although the Governor (TWD‘s false utopia leader) didn’t seem all that bad at first blush, the fact that he looked rather benign was a sure tip off that he’s Satan’s toejam. His toejam-status is confirmed once we find out about the severed heads he keeps in aquariums, and all kidnapping and incarceration, forced disrobing, and killing other people for their stuff that he does.

Interesting that he’s named the Governor, because his town is the most governmental out of what is shown on the series. Instead of cooperating or trading peacefully with others, like moral people, the initiation of force is used to acquire resources from the outside. Disperse the Governor’s power among a few more people and it becomes the mafia. Increase the size of the land and charter a ruling document and you’ve got yourself a bonafide modern-day nation.

It’s not an absolute comparison. People in TWD aren’t producing wealth so much as appropriating abandoned property in little bands that act much like families, pooling and sharing of resources within, and squatting land and buildings. There’s not the hard division of labor and power that characterizes markets and nations, so we’re left with what looks like variations on primitive communism that marked pre-modern-technology tribal structures.