#i literally never saw that as shippy until y'all started freaking out

[waynedunlaptheorgandonor]

on carol/caryl and why i trust angela kang

first and foremost, i think it should be noted that gimple handed over a complete clusterfuck to kang, and instead of following his shitstorm of a vision, she completely revamped and revived an almost dead show (lol walking dead, zombies, resurrection, #nice), so that alone should show that she’s up to snuff in terms of talent, but lemme tell you my feelings in regards to my girl, carol.

like most carylers, i was like, “ew, no, stop,” when it came to the carzekiel news, and was feeling really downtrodden about it, that is until the whole season came out, and i was able to look back and see how clear it was, from the very beginning, that the relationship was never supposed to be a real relationship.

let’s pick it apart, shall we? 

the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that carol never once tells zeke she loves him, and tbh, barely shows more affection to him than she did to tobin, to whom she all but said, “yeah, no, the stuff between us was hella fake,” so that alone is enough for me to go -thinking emoji-.

but wait! there’s more! it is a theme throughout the whole season that carol 1. adamantly rejects the title of queen, and 2. hides aspects of her real self from zeke. she is always visibly annoyed whenever someone calls her queen, only saying it once to placate zeke after he had a no good, horrible, terrible, very bad day. (because she’s not a monster--she does care about zeke. she just doesn’t love him romantically)

my favorite part is #2, where kang sets the precedent real fast in the time skip that murder!carol is alive and well, when she straight up burns a bunch of saviors alive. also, the line, “the ring i could have gone without,” or whatever it was, could have easily been a throwaway line, except i’ve come to realize that kang doesn’t do throwaway lines. that was definitely on purpose. 

massive lol, btw, at how everyone kept being like, “oh no, there might still be saviors out there! we gotta be careful!” and carol was just:

next, carol’s appearance! remember the uproar about her hair and how fucking atrocious it was? deliberate af. with how hard makeup and design went in on s9, there’s no way they would have fucked carol up that badly. and we /know/ they know how to make her look stunning and badass at the same time, bc look:

(i stole your gif @mywalkingdeadsideblog, forgive me plz)

carol’s whole look up until henry dies made me go, “why does she look like some fairy tale queen who does nothing but sit in a castle all day?” and then i was like, “oh. duh.” because /that was the point/. she wasn’t supposed to look like herself, because she wasn’t living like herself, because she was living this escapist, fairy tale adventure. look at her in the “the storm”. waaaaay different look, because she’s finally herself again.

then, there’s just the straight up admission from carol that the whole thing wasn’t real. she literally says, “i’ll never regret the fairy tale.” it was never anything more than that. she had her kingdom, her king, and their son, and then she lost henry, and was forced to remember that, oh shit, running from my problems /never actually does shit/. and she promptly ends it, and goes back to daryl.

so yes, now relating it back to daryl. daryl is the only person alive on the planet who truly knows who carol is. she’s who she literally sneaks out of the house to go visit in the woods, just to be herself again for a while. he gets why she’s doing it, it’s why he never objected to her getting married in the first place. (even tho his face when she tells him zeke proposed was so laughably, “what? ew.”)

carol doesn’t show zeke her scars. he knows about the abuse, but he doesn’t /know/ about it. he doesn’t know that she lights people on fire in her downtime. he doesn’t know how far gone she really got. when she was losing her mind in her creepy little solitude house, smoking herself to death and making tally marks of how many people she’s murdered, zeke responded by giving her fruit. he doesn’t understand, and to that end, he doesn’t know she doesn’t believe in the fairy tale the way he does. he thinks it’s life, and she thinks it’s a place to hide. she tells daryl that zeke is an idealist. she doesn’t think he’s grounded in reality at all, but that’s why she sticks around, because reality fucking sucks, and plus she has a kid to take care of, but i think there is a marked difference in how carol acts around daryl vs. zeke. she looks so much more relaxed and open, and talks more flippantly and earnestly.

there is no one but daryl left that knows her. michonne is the second closest, and even she never spent all that much time with her. i think the only other person besides daryl that really gets how truly terrifying carol is would be rick, and even then, he’s kind of just afraid of her lmao.

so taking that and moving it into s10, i think what we’re getting set up for is carol finally (finally!) having to face her demons, and she is gonna be Mad Bonkers over it, and daryl, being the only one who understands, is gonna be the one who has to help her through that. 

think about the s9 opening credits. i’ve said this before, but having melissa mcbride’s name over the crossbow, pike, and cherokee roses was hella foreshadowing to the fact that her fantasy was gonna break, and daryl was gonna be the one to pick her up, not zeke.

so we got carol going on a ptsd revenge rampage of insanity, and poor daryl is over here reeling from the fact that he suddenly has a daughter on top of the fact that his girl is finally single but is crazy crackers and trying to get herself killed, so of course he’s gonna be like, “you’re my best friend and definitely not the love of my life, haha, are you still hallucinating your dead children?” because they’re not at that point yet.

kang says they’re going to address daryl’s lack of love life. none of the cast members have said anything that negates the possibility of caryl (i would argue the contrary, tbh), and the trailer shows that the two of them are finally in this together again.

looking back at s9, every drop of carol’s story was symbolic and deliberate, and that makes me believe that we finally have a showrunner who knows how to tell a story, and knows how to read characters, and, most importantly, understands not only carol, but how she and daryl are intertwined and desperately important to one another.

i trust her. i have hope that, whether we get the naked pretzel by the end of the season or not, kang is not going to do our babies dirty like gimple did. she gets it. 

we’ve been burned, but caryl is no longer in the hands of the person who burned us. i think that means that for once it’s not too out there to have a little hope.

thanks for coming to my TedTalk,

-diz