The Walking Dead's new monster is a shameless ripoff of Last Of Us' Rat King

I’m known around these parts for being a major fan of The Last of Us, but I’m also known for being a fan of The Walking Dead. While the two franchises have always shared similarities, namely being set amidst a ‘zombie’ apocalypse, they’ve always felt distinctively different to me.

The Walking Dead has its Walkers. The Last of Us has its Infected. The Walking Dead raised the intensity by introducing its semi-sentient ‘Variant Walkers’, while The Last of Us has its Shamblers and Stalkers to add variety into the mix. Sure, both projects have distinctive survivor factions and government baddies, but they’re just the ingredients of a good post-apocalyptic drama. It’s never felt as if one is ripping off the other … until now. The Walking Dead’s latest Maggie and Negan centric spin-off Dead City just shamelessly copied The Last of Us Part II’s most terrifying creature, the Rat King, and they weren’t subtle about it.

Take a look at the trailer for Dead City below.

I’ll admit. I’m yet to watch Dead City seeing as it hasn’t actually aired in the UK, but as a The Walking Dead fan, I simply can’t avoid the chatter generated on social media by US viewers watching the show. Just yesterday, my Twitter scrolling came to a stop when I stumbled across the Walker King - a new variant introduced by The Walking Dead: Dead City that’s essentially several Walkers fused together. Yeah, that sounds just like The Last of Us Part II’s Rat King which similarly consists of several Infected fused together.

Content creator DomTheBomb made the comparison, writing, “Looks awfully familiar,” alongside side-by-side images of the two creatures. It’s not just a visual similarity. The Walker King … The Rat King … That’s not subtle. Maggie actress Lauren Cohen spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the new threat, saying, “It's the Walker King because it's based on an idea of how rats sort of tangle their tails and become a rat king. So we have this monster Walker King and we had three people puppeteering it.”

Now you know why The Last of Us Part II simply just called it the Rat King. “They definitely copied The Last of Us,” one fan wrote. “So definitely ripped off TLOU,” another added. It is exciting to see Dead City up the intensity for The Walking Dead franchise but this is a bold move - especially when you consider that we’ll likely see the Rat King in season two of the HBO The Last of Us show. I guess, if anything, this gives us some idea of what to expect.