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twdmusicboxmystery · 5 years

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Outlaw Groups (Claimers, Wolves, Librarians and Highwaymen) and Their TD Connection

Okay, let’s talk about these fringe groups that come and go in the show. It’s something we’ve obviously seen many times. While many groups and communities have come and gone, my criteria here are groups that really aren’t fully explored on the show.

We generally see them for a very short time (1-3 episodes, for the most part) and we don’t find out much about who they are or were before the apocalypse happened. No details. No back story. We basically have to make judgements about them based on their interactions, or lack thereof, with TF. I’m going to divide the ones we’ve seen into “good” groups and “bad” groups. We’ll start with the baddies.

Claimers:

Daryl met them in 4x13. Right after he was separated from Beth. (Just saying.) While the Claimers were obviously not good people, they were also one big question mark. We never found out who they were or how the apocalypse went for them. We just knew that they had survived thus far and were introduced to their system (claiming).

Three episodes later, in 4x16, Rick/Daryl/Michonne wiped them out.

To be fair, we did get a little more back story for them in The Red Machete, but that was really just more of the same Important, symbolically, but it didn’t really tell us much more about them as people than we already knew. They were bad. They were bullies. Killed people when they felt like it, etc.

The Wolves:

While they were overtly much more brutal than the Claimers, their structure and function in the story is very similar. Joe Claimer pretended to be an honorable guy, while the Wolves just went all machete-happy on everyone (note the machete connection there), but both ended up being baddies. Both were only around for a few episodes.

We did see signs of the wolves in 5x09 (right after Beth was shot; just saying)

but we didn’t actually see them until 5x16, when they killed Red Poncho Guy.

(Red poncho in Beth’s cell in 4x01; again, just saying.)

So we officially met them in 5x16 and TF—mostly Carol and Rick—wiped them out only three episodes later in 6x02.

So I think you can see the parallels. In both cases, they were bad groups who weren’t fleshed out in great detail, but hurt or tried to hurt TF in some way, and had to be taken care of. (And, they both had oblique ties to Beth. Once more time, just saying. 😉)

Now a couple of “good” groups we’ve seen this with.

Let me give a disclaimer that we don’t actually know how good these groups are. Because they aren’t fleshed out well, it’s hard to know much at all about their character, because we aren’t told who they are, their back story, or what kind of deeds they’ve done. But they aren’t enemies of TF, anyway. And unless we learn something different about them, I’m calling that good enough to label them “good.”

The Librarians:

This is a big one. We probably know less about this group than any of the others, but this group had a LOT of Beth-ish symbolism around them. We only really saw them in 6x16, when at least two members were killed by the Saviors for having broken Negan’s rules.

Beth symbolism around them? A few different things come to mind that were happening in that episode.

1. The Xs for one thing, which is big. (X = Beth).

2. Carnid. I always thought the opening montage where we see the Librarian guy running from the Saviors was interesting. It’s alternated with Carl and Enid having an argument about her going with them. You can check out my analysis of it HERE, but it always smacked of a Bethyl thing to me.

3. The Librarian guy who is killed at the beginning is hung off the bridge later, while stuff burns down. So we have someone that may represent Beth (because of the X) going off the side of the bridge. And yes I get that this dude obviously doesn’t survive where others who go off bridges (Daryl, Carol, Tara, etc) do, but the motif is still there.

4. The RV. There’s an RV involved later when Negan takes Rick back to this bridge and kicks him out into the horde of walkers. Remember that per Dale’s speech in S1, the RV represents the passage of time and how it affects people. Then there’s that pesky clock in Still that read “time escapes.”

So yeah, lots of Beth symbolism going on there. Not to mention, last week I talked about the book motif a little bit. That we saw “new dawn” written on a book in 4a and Daryl had lots of books in his camp this past season. We’ve actually seen this kind of thing a lot.

Tptb use books often for symbolism, even when it doesn’t have anything to do directly with Beth. But it often does. We had the books at the veterinary college in 4a, the book store in 5x05, which was chalk full of TD symbolism (X). In 6x16 with the librarians, Carol and Morgan stopped at the library, so we saw a lot of books there. We even saw a library in FTWD this past season, amidst a lot of the same symbolism.

We even saw a book just before Coda. Remember the book Daryl picked up on victims of childhood abuse. We saw him carry that around in his arms for a while during 6a. So if the books represent Beth…

Though, to be fair, I don’t think the books represent Beth directly. I think they represent healing (Daryl was trying to heal himself before 6x06 happened and he gave up) and starting anew. Hence, the New Dawn theory being associated with the books.

So, here’s the loony part of my theory for today. In the RV sequence in 6x16, Rick is flailing in a horde of walkers and ends up jumping from the roof of the RV on the librarian guy hanging off the bridge. You know, the one with the big X spray painted on him. In a way, doing that saves Rick. It buys him some time until he can figure something else out.

So, the walker horde. (X) This is a major theme when the death fake out happens. We have evidence there was a walker horde involved in Beth’s body being left behind. There was definitely one involved in Glenn’s death fake out from 6x03 – 6x07, and obvious there was one involved with Rick’s when he went off the bridge in 9x05.

So I’m thinking that this bit in 6x16 may have foreshadowed Rick’s death fake out in a way.

But if that’s true, it also supports the idea of him ending up in the same place Beth is. Because we have the walker horde and Rick fighting to survive. Meanwhile, if the librarian represents Beth, Rick leaps onto this guy to save himself. Almost like Beth will save Rick after the bridge incident in some way.

You could also see it as the Librarian representing the helicopter that took Rick away, thus kind of saving his life. But the helicopter is a symbol of Beth as well, so it all works together.

See why the Librarian thing is kinda huge?

Highwaymen:

Okay, final group is the Highwaymen from this past season. Again, it’s hard to know much for certain about this group, but in the end they died trying to save several members of TF from the Whisperers, so I think we can safely lump them into the “good” group.

The parallels between them and the other groups are as follows: Beth symbolism (leader wore a sheriff-like hat, there was mention of romance novels around them, a few other details I pointed out in 9b), not fully fleshed out or given back story, and only stayed around for a handful of episodes, which seemed almost wasteful in terms of the story line, but obviously they’ve done this several times.

So what does this mean? What does it lead to? We think it could be a template of Beth’s return, and I’ll get to some possibilities here in the next little while, but there’s also the Outlaw Theme.

All of these groups have an outlaw theme to them. We’ve always talked about the outlaw vibe around the Claimers. They had a (stupid) code they lived by, but they just FELT like an old west gang. The kind that roles into town, robs the bank and conducts a shootout at the O.K. Corral.

The Wolves are obvious, since they were evil anyway. Definitely outlaws rather than law-abiding citizens.

The Librarians aren’t outlaws in quite as obvious a way, at least not where TF is concerned. But they got into trouble for breaking Negan’s rules, so they were living outside of his laws, at the least. And of course the Highwaymen, well, called themselves Highwaymen, which is a direct synonym for outlaws.

Also remember that in S7, Daryl and Richard argued in front of the Smokey and the Bandit trailer. They even pointed that out on TTD, which means they really wanted us to notice it.

So what does it all mean? What will it lead to? Obviously it’s hard to predict details and any such predictions are all just conjecture, but given all the Beth-ish symbolism in these groups, we think it’s a foreshadow of her return in some way.

Maybe she’ll return with a group like this, run into one, lead one? We just don’t know. But it’s a good motif to recognize and keep in mind as we move forward. I can’t help but think that the group on Fear could conceivably be a group like this. Obviously we know a lot about them, but no one else in TF does, so there’s that.

Anyway, just wanted to point out all these connections. Thanks, as always to @wdway for her heavy contributions to this theory. Thoughts?

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

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