
Clementine is a fictional African American/Asian character in The Walking Dead episodic adventure video game series and Clementine, a spin-off of the Robert Kirkman comic of the same name and developed by Telltale Games. An original character developed by Telltale for the video game series, she is one of the series' protagonists and playable characters. She is voiced by Melissa Hutchison and was written by several people, including Gary Whitta.
Clementine is introduced in the The Walking Dead: The Game as a young girl, left in care of a her babysitter Sandra while her parents out of town, at the start of the zombie apocalypse. She is found and cared for by Lee Everett, another survivor, who tries to help her find her parents, and becomes a father-figure to her, teaching her how to survive. Lee is eventually bitten, and after a tearful goodbye, Clementine travels with other groups. Over several years, she becomes a guardian to Alvin Jr. (AJ for short), a child whose parents died in the apocalypse, and comes to raise him as Lee did with her.
Clementine was considered an emotional centerpiece of The Walking Dead game, and several journalists expressed caring for her fate in a way that few other games have been able to capture. Following Telltale's sudden closure in the midst of releasing The Walking Dead: The Final Season, Kirkman acquired the game's assets and brought some of the Telltale staff on to finish the season within his company Skybound Entertainment, as he felt it was necessary to give closure to Clementine's story. The character subsequently appeared in the 2021 series Skybound X and scheduled to appear in the comic of the same name by Tillie Walden in 2022.
Video Games[]
The Walking Dead: Season One[]
Clementine is introduced when Lee Everett takes shelter in her suburban home in Georgia to find refuge from zombies (referred to in-universe as walkers). She is revealed to be hiding from the walkers alone in a tree house as her parents had left for Savannah some time before the apocalypse. Lee offers to take and protect Clementine, hoping that they will be able to find her parents.
They eventually join a small group of survivors, which include Kenny, his wife Katjaa and his son Kenny, Jr. Following several weeks struggling to survive, the survivors decide to head to Savannah, believing that if they can find a boat, they can find safety away from the mainland. En route, Kenny and Lee are forced to euthanize Duck or leave him to re-animate after he is bitten by a walker, causing Katjaa to kill herself. Lee starts to help Clementine learn survival skills such as how to use a gun and why she needs to keep her hair short. As they near Savannah, Clementine's walkie-talkie goes off, and an unknown man tells her to come to meet him at the hotel downtown, the same hotel her parents would have been at.
The survivors meet other people still alive in Savannah and eventually they find a boat. The group prepares to leave but Clementine and the boat go missing, and Lee in his haste to find her is bitten by a walker. Lee convinces the remaining survivors, including Kenny and friends Omid and Christa, to help locate Clementine. Kenny is lost during a walker attack, while Lee ends up separated from Omid and Christa. Lee goes to the hotel to find Clementine held hostage by an insane man who blames Lee for his family's death. They work together to kill the man and escape. Lee covers Clementine and himself in walker guts to mask their scent and as they walk through a horde they find Clementine's parents, both turned. Lee passes out and Clementine drags him into a nearby shelter. Knowing he is about to turn, Lee gives Clementine some last pieces of advice and tells her to meet Omid and Christa. He then asks her to kill him or leave him (a choice left to the player). Later, Clementine has safely left the city, and she sees two figures on the horizon who notice her.
The Walking Dead: Season Two[]
Season Two starts some months after the end of the first season. Clementine has regrouped with Omid and Christa, but her carelessness at a rest stop causes Omid to be killed by a scavenger. Sixteen months later, she and Christa are separated by another scavenger attack, and Clementine joins another group of survivors living in a cabin. She learns that this group is being tracked by a man named William Carver, who believes that one member of the group, Rebecca, is carrying his child.
The cabin survivors move north, hoping to reach the rumored safe place called Wellington. They find a ski lodge inhabited by another group, where Clementine finds Kenny alive. During a walker attack, the combined groups are saved by the sudden appearance of Carver and his minions, who take the survivors as their prisoners to a well-fortified department store. Seeing Carver's ruthlessness leads three other survivors, Jane, Mike, and Bonnie, to join Clementine and the others in plotting an escape before the store is overrun by a mass of walkers. Clementine aids in their escape, and Kenny kills Carver.
As they flee, Kenny's girlfriend Sarita is bit by a walker and dies. When they regroup, Kenny is distraught and refuses to talk to anyone, but he is convinced to help Rebecca give birth to her baby, which is later named Alvin, Jr. or AJ. Jane takes interest in Clementine, and like Lee before, helps to teach her some survival skills. The group continues northward despite Rebecca's worsening health. They are ambushed by a group of Russian immigrants, leading to a Mexican standoff. Clementine sees that Rebecca has succumbed to exhaustion and blood loss from the birth, has died but is now re-animating as a walker, and she or Kenny are forced to shoot her to save AJ. This sets off the gunfight, but the group manages to kill the other Russians, and they force the sole Russian survivor, named Arvo, to take them to shelter. As they cross a frozen lake, their added weight causes the ice to break and one of their members, Luke, to fall through and drown.
Later that evening, Clementine discovers Arvo and others attempting to sneak away, due to being afraid of Kenny's rage, which leads to Arvo shooting Clementine, causing her to faint. When she wakes she finds herself with Kenny, Jane, and AJ heading north in a truck. They are forced to stop as a snowstorm approaches with the road blocked ahead, and Kenny goes to look for a way around; while he is gone, a walker horde appears, and Clementine is separated from Jane and AJ but finds shelter in a nearby rest stop where she finds Kenny. Jane appears and implies that AJ has been killed, causing Kenny to attack her. The two struggle and Clementine are forced to have one or both of them die. After the fight, she finds AJ safely hidden in a nearby car as part of Jane's plan to expose Kenny's temperament and convince Clementine to abandon him with her. The player can either decide for Clementine to leave with AJ alone or be accompanied by the survivor of the fight. If Kenny is chosen the player may either chose to have Clementine enter Wellington with AJ alone or to continue traveling with Kenny. If Jane is chosen the pair return to the department store.
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier[]
Clementine is one of the two playable characters in the third season of the series A New Frontier. The game takes place a few years after the second season, where several events have occurred to her depending of which ending the player chooses in it. She will have a scar on her forehead, a scar on her left cheek, a "AJ" brand on her left hand or a missing left ringfinger depending on which of the events occur. She currently tends to AJ, now a toddler.
Clementine's history since the end of Season Two is told in flashbacks throughout A New Frontier. If she and AJ had gone with Kenny, she would spend the next two years together with Kenny, who would take care of both of them and became a father-figure for the two, and in one day after two years, Clementine accidentally crashes a car while being taught how to drive by Kenny who is subsequently paralyzed from the waist down. He sacrifices himself to walkers as Clementine and AJ flee from the crash site. If Clementine had gone with Jane, she lives with her at the department store for a short time until Jane commits suicide after finding out she is pregnant. If Clementine stayed at Wellington, she and AJ will be cared for by their guardian Edith for the next two years, and when a hostile group attacks Wellington, Clementine is grazed by a bullet escaping from Wellington's destruction by the same hostile group, with her losing Edith. If traveling alone with AJ her finger is broken in a car door and she is forced to amputate it. No matter what the player chooses she will eventually end up tending for AJ alone. She encounters Ava, a woman who tells her about joining a group called the New Frontier.
Within the present of A New Frontier, Clementine had become a member of the New Frontier, but was exiled after stealing medicine from the group's doctor in an attempt to save a deathly ill AJ, a history she keeps quiet from others. She rescues Javier while trying to acquire a working vehicle and stays with him to help rescue his family at a nearby junkyard. They get into a conflict with other members of the New Frontier, and ultimately Clementine and Javier are forced to travel to Richmond, a fortified town that has been taken over by the New Frontier. Clementine helps Javier to assure his family's well-being and defuse the issues with the New Frontier and other survivor outposts. She learns that AJ is being kept at a ranch outside of town, and takes her leave to recover him.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season[]
The Final Season is the closure of Clementine's narrative arc in the series. Some years after the events of A New Frontier, Clementine and AJ, who is now a young boy, are traveling on their own. After stumbling into a walker horde, they are rescued by Marlon, the leader of a group of children from the abandoned Ericson boarding school. Clementine uses her time in the school to get to know the other children while helping them for sustainability and protection. Eventually, Clementine finds out that Marlon traded two of the school's residents, twin sisters Minerva and Sophie, to a group of raiders that threatened the school in exchange for safety and intends to do the same with her and AJ should they return. Clementine pressures Marlon to reveal the truth to the other kids, only for him to be shot and killed by AJ. Some of the other kids vote for Clementine and AJ to leave the school, where in its outskirts they run into the raiders, one of them being Lilly, an old acquaintance of Clementine from their survivor group in the first season. Lilly threatens Clementine to return to the school and convince the rest of the children to join her group. Clementine and AJ escape with the help of James, a former member of the Whisperers, although AJ is shot and wounded. Clementine takes AJ back to Ericson for medical treatment and warns the kids of Lilly's incoming attack, helping them prepare by fortifying the school. Two weeks later, the raiders arrive. Despite the children's efforts to fight back, the raiders manage to kidnap some of them.
Clementine interrogates a captured raider and learns that his group has set up base on a riverboat west of the school. She scouts the place and decides that in order to sneak in and rescue the captured kids undetected, a horde of walkers need to be lured in to distract the raiders. Clementine enlists the help of James to do this, and obtains a homemade bomb to destroy the boat after they rescue the others. Clementine and her group infiltrate the boat when James draws the walkers towards it. Inside, they plant the bomb in the ship's boiler and encounter Minerva, now loyal to the raiders. She imprisons them with the other children and Clementine is confronted by Lilly, who reveals that Minerva killed Sophie when she tried to escape from their group. Lilly takes AJ away, and Clementine subdues Minerva and frees the kids. She fights and defeats Lilly, and is forced to tell AJ to shoot her or spare her life, the latter choice resulting in Lilly killing James. As this happens, the bomb goes off and the boat explodes.
Clementine and AJ escape the ship before it sinks. Clementine, AJ, and Tenn escape from the walker horde and find either Violet or Louis, who helps them make their way back to the school. They reach a bridge, but are attacked by a dying Minerva, who wounds Clementine's left leg. Clementine and AJ cross the bridge, and are forced to leave Tenn, Violet, or Louis to die to escape the walkers. Clementine is bitten by a walker on her wounded leg, and she and AJ take shelter inside a barn. Surrounded by walkers, Clementine tells AJ to make his way out through the roof, and to kill her to prevent re-animation or leave her behind to turn. In the game's ending, it is revealed that Clementine survived the bite after AJ amputated her infected leg. She is also shown to have assumed leadership of Ericson, finally having found a home.
Skybound X[]
Sometime after The Final Season, Clementine decides to leave Ericson's Boarding School. She goes into the fishing cabin and finds a map. After she hears rustling from a walker and kill it, She begins to pack supplies until she hears creaking at the door. She goes to attack, only to discover it's AJ. He assuming Clementine is only going on a trip, confronts her about leaving without him and demands to go with her, however she refuse to let him come with her and tells him she's not going on a trip. AJ lashes out at her for breaking her promise, Clementine tearfully tells him she feels safer with him at Ericson's with The Coalition around, but it's not home for her and she is unhappy and not even AJ can make her happy. Clementine tells AJ that she will go north and the two share a tearful departure as Clementine journeys north alone.