“If Daryl dies, we riot.”
This was the rallying cry from fans during the early days of “The Walking Dead” on the way to an 11-season run, as Norman Reedus’ character, Daryl Dixon, quickly rose to the forefront of the expansive ensemble and became a favorite.
And it’s not hard to see why.
Dixon was a wholly original creation absent from Robert Kirkman’s comic book source material. Thanks to his characterization as a taciturn badass with a slowly-revealed heart of gold (a sturdy archetype in pop culture if ever there was one) coupled with Reedus’ multi-layered portrayal, fans proclaimed loudly and passionately that, while the “Walking Dead” cast was famously expendable from the start, Daryl was not.
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