The Walking Dead, Twilight, True Blood: How Much Change is Too Much?

All the talk over a supposedly-major twist in the final Twilight film, out this week, has amounted to a little bit of nothing in terms of how the actual story played out, but gave the series’s fans a good jolt of enjoyment and heightened the tension a bit, since most readers of the wildly popular series of novels likely went in thinking that they more or less knew what was coming.It’s also brought to the surface a long-simmering debate in the fan community of not just Twilight, but just about all of the popular serialized stories currently being adapted for television and film: How much change is too much?It’s a topic that The Walking Dead fans have been sharply divided on, especially this season; while in the past it’s been easy enough to overlook certain tweaks to the source material on the grounds that “having Shane around makes things more interesting,” this year has been totally off the rails. Characters are living and dying at different times and in different ways than they do in the comics, and the ever-present Dixons (who don’t even appear in the books) seem poised to play key roles in the way the season will eventually play itself out.