Book Alby In General Was Just A Poor Kid Who Was Traumatized And Scared Out Of His Mind - Tumblr Posts

I feel like we don't talk enough about the actual depth of the changes that happened to Alby when passing from the book to the movie. Like sure, he was mean in the books and nice in the movies, but it goes much deeper than that. In the book he represented the universal issue of trying to measure up to someone's standards and inevitably failing, and then in the movie he was just... there.

Because in the book we have that first scene the "if you ain't scared you ain't human" scene, where Alby progressively makes everything worse and worse and worse with every word that come out of his mouth. But the thing is, he's trying to fulfil the expectations that everyone places on him the moment he becomes a leader. He's genuinely trying and I'm too lazy to get the book and quote actual fragments that you can analyse (I might do it later if anyone wants me to), but he tries a bunch of stuff to put Thomas at ease, only he has a short temper and doesn't think before he speaks and it's been under a month since one of the people closest to him died (because Alby had to have been the second in command before and there's no way he wasn't close to Nick).

But in the movie, he has no reason to not be an exemplary leader and role model, so all the complexity and representation of a constant part of being human is erased and we're just left with a cookie-cutter archetype of the leader who's little more than a plot device and I find that sad.