frontier narrative and the hero's violent quest to "civilize" the savage, primal forces both within and outside themselves. Contemplating the Terminus denizens' cannibalism as an outright abdication of civilized humanness, TWD reinforces its complex engagement with U.S. (1) Shunning the eating of other people implicitly functions as a core marker of one's humanity from the beginning of the show's run, but with the appearance of the cannibals at Terminus, seasons four and five directly address this culinary benchmark. At the same time, TWD draws much of its dramatic tension from characters' efforts, not merely to survive, but to realize the "impossible" human/zombie binary and insist upon civilizational values. More darkly still, the show stipulates "we are all infected," which is to say all living people are cannibals to the bone: as Dawn Keetley writes, "That the humans are carriers of the zombie virus means that the absolute opposition between human and zombie impossible to maintain" ("Introduction" 7). Zombie narratives confront us with the taboo horror of cannibalism, and so it is with AMC's The Walking Dead, which relentlessly depicts the threat and act of human bodies consuming other human bodies.
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