Why The Walking Dead 1018 upset shippers
By Dawn Glen
Retconning stories is not a popular TV trick
There is a consensus that the reveal of Daryl’s sexuality should be given the same time and importance as the size of the mystery about it, and “Find Me” doesn’t do that for many fans, nor does it show how Daryl overcame the issues that have held him back in the past with intimacy, and why Leah was the special one to help him through that. It also fails to reveal a complex or minority sexuality on the spectrum, which many fans hoped Daryl would be the representative for. He’s just a straight guy who doesn’t have many relationships.
On top of that, viewers are generally not fans of shows retconning anything, ever. When The X-Files revealed in a flashback that Scully was pregnant from IVF and not from a sexual relationship with Mulder (possibly, it’s complicated) and that Mulder had a secret brain tumor during a previous season, fans were furious.
Creating a story in the past in this way changes scenes to which the audience has already watched, digested, and ascribed meaning to. When they see the additional information created by this backstory, it changes the meaning of these scenes, and fans feel cheated out of them, as though they’ve been snatched from their hands.
A promo for the episode said this week said, “How well do you know Daryl? Think again.” Fans who have followed and loved Daryl for 10 years don’t want to feel that they don’t know him, that there are aspects of him they aren’t aware of. That kind of revelation tends to make the audience feel foolish or duped that they have loved, fought over, and defended a character who isn’t exactly who they thought it was. Whether the revelation about the character is a negative one or not, the resulting feeling of him not being who they thought is the same.