Something I think is really important to understand about The Daryl Spoilers is that, if true, for a lot of us it’s actually not just about him ending up with a character outside our preferred ship. For me, it isn’t even mostly that. Nor is it the fact that it’s fairly OOC (and it sucks how TPTB are like “oh were you enjoying your ace rep, oh *tsk* so sorry”). Again, for me that isn’t even the majority of it.
For me, it come down to the same thing that made me lose all faith in the writers and quit the show: in my opinion, structure and pacing-wise, in terms of the basics of how stories are told, it’s an utterly inexcusable false step.
For Daryl, ending up with someone romantically or sexually or both should have always been a massive character shift. The writers and NR and basically everyone involved in the show has been explicit about this for years. It would have made the most sense—really the only sense—for it to be someone he knew well (and, more importantly, someone the audience knew well) and for it to happen gradually over a long period of both story time and visible time.
Meaning it should under no circumstances happen during a time jump, with a random character we don’t know, told via a fucking flashback.
You don’t tell a story that important with a “oh by the way this happened”, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s like they fucked up literally everything one could fuck up in terms of how this story should be told. It’s as if they made a list of important boxes to tick in how they do this and then they laughed and threw the list into the garbage disposal. It’s not just offensive, it’s baffling.
But it’s also in keeping with a pattern. Over quite a while, these writers have demonstrated a deeply weird tendency to establish things very solidly, to set things up according to classically intelligible narrative conventions, and then, for reasons best known to the gods, completely piss it down their leg.
This is what happened for me with Beth, which is something else I think many people totally fail to grasp. The difficulty in accepting her death wasn’t only that a lot of us wanted her to be alive because we loved her, and it wasn’t only that a lot of us deeply and understandably resented half our ship being summarily executed. It was that in regards to how the story was being told, they perfectly set up a fake death/surprise resurrection, and a replacement for Andrea, and then didn’t follow through.
Now, it can be cool to buck story conventions. It can be a neat trick to confound the audience’s expectations. But to paraphrase the very problematic Strunk and White, unless you’re pretty goddamn sure you’re going to get it right, it’s generally better to stick to the conventions.
They bucked the conventions and they did it for no apparent reason, according to no apparent logic, and didn’t bother to justify any of it other than “well life is just random and awful sometimes”, which as a justification is insufficient, because stories are not real life and do not work the same way. And if you’re going to confound the audience’s expectations, you better make it make sense for them. Otherwise it just feels frustratingly random.
The exact same thing appears to be happening here. They’re doing the precise opposite of all the things that would make sense and at least at this point there’s no apparent reason for doing do. Granted that none of us have seen it yet, but at least at this point it looks wildly clumsy. It comes off like flailing—probably because it is flailing.
Often when a writer does something I don’t agree with in how they’re telling their story, I can at least discern and respect their logic. I can see what they were going for. But with this show, over and over, I have no earthly fucking clue what the writers were thinking. I simply do not understand it.
And like... I always feel vaguely conceited when I say things like this but it’s still true: I’ve been constructing and analyzing stories for the majority of my life by now, and I’ve been writing professionally for about a decade. I’ve been editing professionally for roughly half of one. My major in college was almost narratology. One clearly doesn’t have to have done those things to identify a bad move and understand why it’s bad, but when I say “this story doesn’t work”, I extremely know what I’m talking about. If I was editing this as a manuscript, I’d hand it back to the author and say “you’ve got something interesting here but you have a lot of developmental work to do, my friend”.
If these spoilers are accurate, then unless there’s a major factor here that somehow justifies it, they fucked all of it up, literally everything, and I’m offended by it.
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