In Walking Dead spinoff, Steven Yeun's Glenn is never forgotten— and neither is Negan's crime, says Lauren Cohan

Nearly a decade after Negan bludgeoned Glenn to death with Lucille in front of his pregnant wife, Maggie, the moment remains one of the most brutal and searing in The Walking Dead franchise's history, a scene so viscerally cruel that it reshaped how fans view every subsequent interaction between the two characters.

So when The Walking Dead: Dead City began softening the edges of Maggie and Negan's relationship, turning two sworn enemies into uneasy, even protective, allies, the fandom obviously, recoiled.

Speculation has swirled for seasons that the show might be inching Maggie and Negan toward something resembling romantic feeling, a possibility that many longtime viewers see as a betrayal of the story's emotional foundation. For a fan base that watched Maggie collapse in grief and rage at her husband's murder, the idea of her finding tenderness, let alone love, with his killer is rather unsettling.

The show's creative team, however, insists that's not the arc being told.

In the season 3 finale, Maggie is given the choice to let Negan die at the hands of an enemy faction protecting her son and their community — and she refuses, choosing instead to spare him. It's a turning point actress Lauren Cohan says has been misread by some viewers as forgiveness, or worse, romantic thaw.

"Maggie doesn't forgive Negan," Cohan told PEOPLE, stressing that the show goes out of its way to make that distinction clear on-screen. What's changed, she explained, isn't Maggie's feelings about Glenn's murder, but her exhaustion with carrying that hatred. “She sees the pain that he’s experiencing after the loss of Ginny, and the heart in her and the human in her doesn’t want anybody to be stuck in their lowest version of themselves and their lowest belief of themselves,”

Cohan compared Maggie's years-long resentment to a kind of self-inflicted wound, one that, left to fester, had already cost her a version of the joyful, open person she used to be, and had strained her bond with her own son in the process.

Cohan was careful to frame Maggie's choice as circumstantial rather than emotional. Killing Negan, she suggested, would have destabilised the fragile community they'd built together and hardened Maggie into someone unrecognisable. “By killing [Negan], I think that would’ve hardened her,” she adds. “I think it’s this rare opportunity to go back to someone who keeps their heart open in a world where you’re literally stabbing things left, right and center to stay alive," she says.

Still, for a fandom that has spent nearly ten years replaying Glenn's death as one of the show's most traumatic gut-punches, the optics of Maggie and Negan's evolving alliance remain a hard sell.