Michonne is one of my favorite characters in fiction. Beware, there be spoilers ahead.

In the comics version of The Walking Dead, she is essentially the deuteragonist (Carl bores me as a character; how does the zombie apocalypse produce a brat?). Michonne was a successful Atlanta-based black lawyer with a black ex-husband, a black boyfriend, and four black children. The most skillful melee fighter of Rick Grimes’ survivors, she cuts down zombie and human alike with her katana before retreating to solitude. Over the course of the comic’s nearly 200 issues, she has grown into a sisterly role for Rick, offering him advice, commentary, and martial prowess in times of need.

One of Michonne’s most pronounced character traits is her thirst for black men. She first stole Tyreese from his lover during his time in prison, only to lose him in the attack against Woodbury. Afterward, she took on Morgan as a lover. She flirted with Heath after Morgan’s passing at the Alexandria free zone before finding another relationship with Ezekiel, ruler of the Kingdom. Their relationship failed, with no chance of reconciliation after Ezekiel’s death in the Whisperer War. Through love and loss, Michonne’s choice in romantic partners is a passionate part of her black personhood.

Which is why I am curious to such a drastic change in her personhood as the creator, Robert Kirkman, moved the Walking Dead from comics to television.

Rather than a lawyer, Michonne is of academic stock. She still dates Mike, and they have a son together. Neither survive the early days of the end of all things. She does not initiate a romance with Tyreese at the prison; she makes no pass at Heath or Morgan when encountering them. In the most fan pleasing deviation from the comics, she ends up with Rick over Ezekiel. The general indeed ends up dating his lieutenant.

The Walking Dead, like most American mainstream television shows, are white attempts of interpreting and explaining black personhood. Black personhood is a subjective experience developed in iron political, social, economic, and historical realities. The fanboy in me (and my wife) cheered the television pairing of Rick and Michonne; love is love, and one must grasp it—in this fleeting world, and in the speculative world at the end of civilization. Especially between two badasses.

The critic in me that is interested in the concept of black personhood, however, wants to understand Kirkman’s narrative decisions. The man keeps a tight grip over his intellectual property. In this sense, his white hands shaped the development of Michonne’s black personhood in both the comics and in the TV show. What does it thus say about a white, mainstream view of black personhood that such drastic changes were made to one of the shows marquee characters? And what does said decisions say about the realities that both black folk develop their personhood in, and white people interpret said personhood?

Black personhood is the most prescient problem in speculative fiction. I devoured science fiction and fantasy growing up. I read every expanded universe Star Wars novel and empathized with Grand Admiral Thawne, the blue skinned military genius leading a human supremacist Empire. I loved Lord of the Rings. The Mass Effect series was the most consequential video games I had played since the Legend of Zelda. My inner life since childhood has been filled with swords and lasers, of fantasies filled with the fantastical where me and my bronze skin could save the world with physical might, magical powers, and a ride or die click of varying battle classes.

My personhood also had to contend with the racist blowback against John Boyega’s Finn being a central character in Star Wars; the brown skin of the Haradrim who assisted the orcs at the Battle of Pelennor Fields; that my character creation in Mass Effect gave my avatar black skin but no historical background that showed the United States remained a hegemon century in the future and that, thus, white supremacy would probably still be a potent political force.

The general flaw of speculative fiction—and a broader indictment of the American imagination— is that it looks forward to the future without adequate reckoning with the past. This almost always results in the annihilation of black personhood. Humanity, it argues, can only come together if black folk leave their things behind. Our rise from chains and the behaviors we have developed over a century and a half to avoid falling back into chains are always supplanted by various magics and technology. In the end, our striving does not matter.

Back to Michonne.

On the eve of the Walking Dead’s television debut on AMC, the comic pushed 273,700 total units. The nation was totally primed for the speculative drama of survival in a zombie wasteland. Somewhere with the showrunners, Kirkman plotted the trajectories of the comic’s characters as they made the transition to TV. They wrote treatments. His people drafted scripts. The artists drew storyboards and projected revenue in order to make sure the seasons with the larger set pieces—Woodbury, the prison, the Alexandria Safe Zone—would be as true to his vision as possible.

Amidst all the rush and money, Danai Gurira was perfectly cast as Michonne. The black woman Kirkman wrote with a rich black personhood instead became an action figure with all of it erased. Her husband, and children, and future romantic pursuits are cast aside to create a generic warrior for the living; stripping Michonne of her black personhood flattened her character. How radical would if have been on the show if she acknowledged her history and told Rick “I normally don’t date white men?” Would the show’s fans be able to grasp the truth in such a statement—that Michonne’s past mattered?

It is as the Prophet said: “It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.” And for all the workers who contributed to make the Walking Dead one of the defining franchises of the last 20 years, what the camera sees is black personhood sacrificed in the name of speculative survival and financial profit.

We’ve centuries of slavery and segregation behind us and we are still here. Black personhood will survive the zombie apocalypse. We should not wait for the American imagination to catch up with that truth.