Lori Grimes, overlooked and misunderstood wife to protagonist Rick Grimes, is often mischaracterized as annoying, ungrateful and ill-fit to be a mother. She remains on multiple ranked lists of “most hated characters in tv”, coming in the top twenty of several, but the question is, why? Lori has her faults, but so do all the other characters in The Walking Dead, and for much worse reasons than the ones that condemn her. Does Lori Grimes truly deserve the hate she receives?
Lori Grimes isn’t perfect. The elephant in the room is that she slept with her husband’s best friend, Shane, near the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. Timeline-wise, Rick finds Shane and Lori’s group between a month to two months after the apocalypse starts, meaning that Shane and Lori started a relationship presumably shortly before that. While it may seem as though Lori’s loyalty was put to question, most overlook the conditions she was dealing with. Before the apocalypse begins, Shane informs Lori while she is picking Carl up from school that her husband had been shot during a police chase and was in the hospital recovering. Already she had to deal with the intense emotions that go along with being informed her husband had been wounded, not to mention, had to compose herself enough to be able to inform her child about it moments later. Lori went into the apocalypse alone, without the protection of her police officer husband. As a woman who seemingly had no training regarding shooting a gun or defending herself, it is only natural that she should rely so heavily on Shane in her husband’s absence. Considering Shane confesses he got Lori and Carl out and on the road when the apocalypse started, it makes sense that Lori would immediately emotionally and physically depend on him, especially since he was friends with Rick for years and she trusted him, not to mention he quite literally saved her and her child from death. Lori and Rick’s relationship is revealed to be rocky pre-apocalypse, which Rick later admits in the first season. Though this doesn’t give her the right to forget about Rick and start a new relationship, it provides a reason as to why she latched onto Shane so quickly and found safety where he went. Shane told her Rick was dead. Shane did not know for sure whether Rick died or not, and even though it was the most likely scenario given the circumstances he left Rick in, he should never have given her false closure when he did not know for certain what had happened. If Lori had a shred of hope that Rick had still been alive, she would never have started a relationship with Shane. Lori is a woman who will do anything for her family, so if she had known Rick was possibly still alive, she wouldn’t have taken her and Shane’s relationship to the next level if she thought Rick was still alive.Â
Lori may have had a relationship with Shane, but as soon as Rick is brought back to the camp after saving Glenn and the rest of the group in Atlanta from walkers, she shuts Shane down and rushes to her husband. She says something along the lines of “this is over” to Shane, who is not as willing to relinquish what they had. She is enraged at Shane for lying to her, which, though not a lie exactly, was a half-truth. She tells Rick soon after he returns about her and Shane, showing her loyalty to her husband and her regret about her actions. It is easy to be manipulated into a relationship with someone in light of trauma and dangerous and threatening circumstances.Â
Lori is not a bad mother. So many viewers like to argue that she was always losing Carl or not paying attention to him, when in reality, Carl was disobedient and wandered off more times than one could count. Whether it was due to the trauma inflicted on him from being in the middle of a zombie apocalypse or not, it doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t listen to her when it was important. Lori had other tasks around the camp than simply watching Carl all day. She was expected to help cook and clean so she had to be able to trust her child to listen and have common sense not to wander off when flesh-eating monsters were roaming around. She constantly impressed on him the seriousness of their situation and is not solely responsible for him getting lost every time.Â
In the second season, Lori finds out she is pregnant. She does not know if the baby is Rick or Shane’s, which creates several issues in the show. She tries to keep it a secret and asks Glenn to get her a pregnancy test from the store so she can find out for sure. She discovers she is pregnant, tells Glenn, who cannot keep a secret and tells Dale. Already she feels guilty because they know before Rick which is what she was trying to avoid. She is already faced with a difficult choice and issue that she tries to carry the burden of alone. Instead of being supportive of her choices, Rick immediately blames her for wanting to abort the child and yells at her for thinking rationally about a very hard situation. She is surrounded by people who shame her for wanting to not keep the child, including her own husband and Maggie, who spats at her, “here’s your abortion pills” and throws them on the ground. It is obvious that the Greene’s are very religious and Rick perhaps is too, so they do not approve of abortion, but given the circumstances, they were in the wrong to shame her and blame her for something like that. In a zombie apocalypse, it is a huge risk to bring a child into the world, which is the argument that Lori makes as her husband yells at her. Not to mention, they do not know any doctors so the risk of her birthing a child is immense and would mean she would have an extremely painful unmedicated delivery and any complications during that time would be nearly impossible to fix. Not only is her point of view entirely cast aside and invalidated, but Shane finds out and suddenly becomes obsessed with Lori because he thinks that the child is his. This then leads to him going insane, his lust for killing Rick grows, and his need for Lori to accept him as the father and protector of her child, which she makes very evident she does not want.Â
People blame Lori for being upset when Rick actually kills Shane, after she told him to kill him. They do not take into account that after getting to the CDC, Shane corners Lori in a room and tries to sexually assault her despite her telling him no multiple times. She is stuck in an impossible situation with Shane’s strange obsession with her growing, and no one is on her side when it comes to what she will have to endure if she keeps the child. It is true that Lori told Rick that Shane is dangerous, and that Rick has to do something about it. She give Rick the idea to kill Shane, but does not ever explicitly state that Rick should kill him. Lori most likely wanted Rick to confront Shane and get him to back off of her considering what he did to her, but did not fully expect Rick to kill him. In “Better Angels”, when Rick does eventually kill Shane and informs Lori and the group about it, she is devastated, which one cannot fault her for. While Shane did assault her, mislead her and act possessive towards her, he was still a figure of safety and security when she needed it most previously. Their relationship was complex and cannot be chalked up to “Lori slept with her husband’s best friend and got mad when Rick killed Shane.” Though he did awful things to her, it is unreasonable to expect her to get over what they had in the short period of time that they had it. The stakes were very high when they were together, and after they were together. She may have trauma bonded to him which is very difficult to get over, despite her husband coming back and being the protector she needed. She most likely didn’t think Rick would go that far either, and though he hurt her, still some part of her wanted him around and thought he could come around and be better. In some twisted way, she probably felt more support from Shane regarding the child than from Rick. Rick made it clear he would view her as an awful person if she aborted the child, which only resulted in negativity and blame. Shane, despite wanting her to keep it, flooded her with ideas of the protector and provider he could be, eliciting positivity and light in a dark situation. Though he wasn’t good for her and his words came from a selfish place, that is wanting to take over Rick’s role and be the sole provider for her, it still would’ve messed with her heart and head enough that she probably didn’t want him to die in the end.Â
In the third season, Rick does not speak to her much at all, as he is still upset at her for her previous actions and blame she placed on him in season two, which I’ve already explained why some of that is warranted. In the time jump from season two to season three, it is explained Rick does not hardly say a word to her and gives her the cold shoulder up until her birth of Judith. When they are separated trying to take the prison in the third episode, Lori is stuck with Carl and Maggie, ends up giving birth to Judith and dying in the process, thinking Rick still hates her. I’m not saying Lori was the most likeable character, but she was complex which is why most people dislike her, because she was realistic for her position and age in an apocalypse. She dies from the very thing she is scared about in season two, the thing that everyone was shaming her for. If she had aborted Judith, she wouldn’t have died in season three. While she did have a choice in the matter, she was made to feel as though she didn’t. If she had aborted Judith, everyone would’ve hated her for it and who knows what would have happened. But because she didn’t due to the pressure she felt from the Greenes and her own family, she died just like she knew she would. Lori wasn’t perfect, but to villainize her is a misstep. Lori did everything for Carl and to try and preserve her family yet that is overlooked all because of a mistake she made in sleeping with Shane. Lori is not at fault for Shane’s descent into madness or his actions following that. Stop Lori Grimes hate and realize she’s complex and her actions reflect those of what most people would do were they put in that situation.