One of the most asked questions about TV this year is, "Who did Negan kill?"
That comes after the season finale of The Walking Dead where the infamous character from the comic books arrived on the live-action series and landed his spiked baseball bat, Lucille, against the head of one of the show's main characters. However, the season finale left the question of who he killed up in the air, leaving many fans of the shows not just disappointed, but angry.
Of course, that scene became one of the most talked about on social media, with fans trying to make predictions and guess which character was on the other end of that bat. One fan even looked at nearly every frame of video of the scene and came up with a few possibilities.
However, AMC is treating the death as one of its biggest secrets, so much that it doesn't even want one particular Facebook fan page, The Spoiling Dead Fans, discussing predictions of who died on the show. The network recently sent the group a cease and desist letter, banning any and all spoilers about Negan's victim. What's particularly interesting is that the letter also bans the page from even making predictions about the character death.
The group is notorious for having a good track record in accurately spoiling key plot points of the show, so AMC has threatened to sue anyone who obtains information about the character death illegally, even if that information just includes predictions.
Predictions, though, fall in a more murky area. Everyone who watches the show has studied the season finale to determine who might die, and many have made predictions. It seems that, in this case, though, this only covers information acquired by "illegal" means.
"Their stance is that making such a prediction would be considered copyright infringement," a post on the site's Facebook page reads. "AMC tells us that we made some claim somewhere that says we received 'copyright protected, trade secret information about the most critical plot information in the unreleased next season of The Walking Dead.'"
The Spoiling Dead group has asked its members to comply with AMC's request.
"Basically what it all comes down to is if we post our Lucille Victim prediction and we're right, AMC says they will sue us," the post on the group's page reads. "Whether there are grounds for it or not is not the issue, it still costs money to defend. That is the way our justice system works."
The Walking Dead returns to AMC — with an answer to the biggest TV question of the year — this fall.
