The Walking Dead: 5 Ways Negan Was The Biggest Villain (& 5 Ways It Was The Governor)
The Walking Dead have had a lot of really evil villains, but none matched The Governor and Negan. However, which of the two were actually worse?
There have been a lot of bad guys in The Walking Dead. While the Walkers are what most people fear, it is the living that causes the most trouble and hurts the most people. With everyone trying to hurt the survivors season after season, there were two villains who stood above the rest.
The Governor was the first genuinely evil villain on The Walking Dead, a man who ruled over an entire society before targeting Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors. However, he has remained a part of the past thanks to the arrival of Negan, who led his own group of survivors, and killed people without remorse. Both were great villains, but they ruled in very different ways.
His Relationship With Rick
A great hero is never great without a masterful villain. In the case of The Walking Dead, the relationship between Rick Grimes and Negan is what makes both men greater heroes and villains. Negan is what Rick could become if he is not careful, someone who has given up on the ideas right and wrong.
Rick led his people to safety, and he honestly became more like Negan than he ever might have expected before he left. On the other hand, Negan also led his people to safety, and eventually became more heroic in the end. These two men’s stories made each other great.
He Was A Masterful Leader
The Governor did a great job when it came to keeping his community alive and making sure they had what they took for survival. However, that never once matched what Negan was able to do with the Saviors. Negan was able to protect his people at all costs.
Even when Rick showed up, the people Negan protected and watched over stood by their leader. He was a killer and was brutal, but the Saviors and the people they protected knew that Negan would keep them alive and he was the best leader possible, honestly even better so than Rick.
He Rules By Fear
While The Governor worked as a villain with people trusting him, Negan ruled by fear. Negan protected the people in his camp and he ruled the Saviors, all of whom respected him. However, Negan also knew that he had to work with other survivors to get what he needed.
He didn’t ask for permission, though. He killed someone from the other survivor’s groups to prove he was in charge. This meant that the groups that the Saviors needed to deal understood from the start that Negan was someone they could never cross.
His Redemption
When a villain finds redemption, it goes a long way to show how great he really is as a character. For a long time on The Walking Dead, Negan was a powerful villain, a strong leader, and a stone-cold killer. However, after a time, the show revealed his past and the losses he experienced.
While Negan received some sort of redemption on the show, he is not a good person. He killed Alpha in cold blood to save the survivors, and he is still a man who does very bad things for what he considers to be good reasons.
He Killed Glenn
Negan seemed like a real bad guy from the first time he showed his face on The Walking Dead. However, there was one moment where just about every fan of the show turned on him. He went from cool to despicable and hated when he killed Glenn in cold blood.
Glenn was a good man. He was kindhearted and helped people. He was the most relatable member of the survivors and was the only one who proved that people could still find love. Then Negan smashed his head in with Lucille and left him dead in front of his own pregnant wife.
The Governor Was The Bigger Villain
He Was Truly Evil
The first major villain on The Walking Dead that Rick Grimes and company met was The Governor. By this time, Rick faced an ultimate betrayal from his best friend Shane and had led his companions to a prison, where they lived relatively safely. That was before the Governor arrived.
The Governor then ruined that sense of safety, and roared into the story to tear down everything Rick had built. He sacrificed people to Walkers for amusement purposes, tortured and killed anyone who crossed him, and was more evil than Negan every dreamed of being.
He Makes People Believe In Him
Everyone that Negan led in the Saviors knew he was there to protect them. However, when it came to serving as a community leader, no one can deny how great The Governor was. He ran his town like a well-oiled machine and everyone in the town believed in him.
He did this like a true bureaucratic leader, a very intelligent villain on The Walking Dead. He set up gladiatorial battles between Walkers and humans and his people loved it. When he caused his people to die, he would find a way to turn it in his tide and come out looking better than ever. He was a politician and that made him a very dangerous villain.
He Tried To Control The Walkers
Negan had one main goal in mind. He was there to protect the Saviors, so while he was a villain, he at least was doing things that he thought was right. The Governor also had some motives that he felt put him on the right side of history. He was trying to find a way to domesticate the Walkers in his community of Woodbury.
This was partially because his own daughter turned and he kept her chained up in his apartment and tried to care for her. However, his experimentations on Walkers, and on living humans, veered into immoral actions and made him a scary villain with dark motives.
He Has No Boundaries
Negan killed people for one of two reasons. He did it to protect either himself or his people or he did it to prove a point. However, The Governor was someone who didn’t care about protecting people or proving points. The Governor killed because he enjoyed it.
The Governor led outsiders into his home and then betrayed them, feeding them to Walkers in gladiatorial games for his amusement. He went to the prison and opened fire on the people there just because he wanted what they had. He killed without remorse and was the ultimate Walking Dead villain.
He Killed Hershel
Before Negan killed Glenn, the most heartbreaking and despicable murder came at the hands of The Governor. The survivors had found a relatively safe home inside the walls of a prison. The Walkers couldn’t get to them and they all had beds indoors to sleep on. Then The Governor showed up and ruined everything.
It was what The Governor did next that made him one of the worst villains on The Walking Dead. He killed the most honest, honorable, and kind character on the entire show in Hershel. He did it in front of his family and kids. The Governor ever got redemption either, shot in the back and left to die after this ultimate act of brutality.
