Spoiler Discussion - (spoiler free)

[andrewducker]

In the last couple of days I've been in discussion with a couple of different people about spoilers. One of them about BSG season 2 (now two years old) and the other about HP:Half Blood Prince (now four years old), with them considering that as they'd experienced them years ago, they couldn't possibly be considered spoilers.

Which is the exact opposite of how I feel about it. Because there are movies I still haven't seen fronm the 1950s, where discussion of the twist in the tale would spoil the movie for me. And I'm very aware that the majority of people who go to see the new HP movie won't have read the book.

To me, spoilers are all about politeness. If you tell someone the end/twist of something they didn't know, and will possibly experience in the future, when they didn't want to know, then you've spoiled that experience for them. I remember the feeling of watching Empire Strikes Back and discovering that Han and Chewied were lovers. The shock and surprise at the moment of reveal was an integral part of the experience for me, and taking it away from people that haven't seen the movie yet is just plain rude.

Now, you can argue that it being years old, the chances that people on your friends list haven't seen Empire Strikes Back is low. Which is true if you're posting friends-only and have nobody under the age of 20 on your friends list. But it's not like the olden days, when a movie would appear, and then vanish again, when TV that had made the rounds was lost. Nowadays I can go out and buy box sets for TV made before I was born, and watch it entirely fresh. There are more hours of TV and movies out there than I have time to watch in my whole life, and the chances are that some will be watched years out of synch with their original release. And I'd really appreciate you not telling me the details before I do!

Obviously I consider all of the following to be spoilers. I'm curious whether you do too. If you don't then I'd love to know why...

[Poll #1430090]

Also: NO SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS!

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Have a look at this poll from three years ago.

[matgb]

Is exactly what came to mind to me as well.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Revealing the end of Empire would be a spoiler; but it would be a spoiler that I am certain everyone would already have heard due to the ubiquity of the phrase in question. So, I don't consider mentioning it in an unfiltered post to be a problem, which I think was the spirit of your question?

[andrewducker]

If I hadn't seen the movie then I would be very upset with you. And the fact that you hang out with SF geeks who quote old movies a lot doesn't mean that everyone has been thus spoiled...

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

I think they are all spoilers, but there comes a point when you can't discuss anything you've seen or heard without a warning, which seems daft. I tend to cut things just for simplicity anyway, but it should always be apparent that if you are reading someone's review/thoughts of something - it may be a spoiler! I think it's down to the person avoiding spoilers to not click on cuts etc containing that title.

I also think people who deliberately spoil people are horrible.

[erindubitably.livejournal.com]

I agree, to a point, but then it gets to the place where you can't read anything for fear of being spoiled, and that can ruin your search for discussion/speculation/whatever, which is part of the fun of watching new media and stuff. I think putting spoiler warnings for things is just polite, and not that much of a hassle, so why not?

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Han and Chewie are lovers?

That's not sarcasm. I've never seen the movie. I didn't know. :/

[andrewducker]

No. I deliberately chose an example that wasn't even slightly true.

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

I tend to have a ten year rule about spoilers, even though I know what happens in Harry Potter despite the fact that I have never read a single book and only watched the first two movies. If it's been more than ten years old, I probably should be spoiled...

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Empire and Hamlet are pop culture common knowledge - Rosebud less so (for some reason), but I think all are acceptable spoilers. The others are specialised knowledge and so forbidden spoilers. (I think explaining the identity of Rosebud is kind of mean though.)

[andrewducker]

Julie hasn't seen Hamlet. I didn't cover it in school, and didn't know the ending until I was in my mid/late twenties, when I finally saw it.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

My yardstick for possible spoilers is that if they're things that are referenced as in-jokes in The Simpsons or Family Guy (or contemporary with or earlier than things that are referenced as in-jokes), then it's reasonable not to give spoiler warnings.

[andrewducker]

An attitude that would have lead to me knowing the ending of various films that I'm rather glad I got to see unspoiled.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It depends on your audience really, but as a general rule of thumb, if something has been widely available for 6 months then I don't see the need to conceal it. In the age of the internet, if you managed to avoid all possible spoilers about something you have an interest in, for that length of time, then you probably live in a cave.

The difficulty lies in something like Harry Potter, because whilst the book is now almost 5 years old, many people (myself included) have watched the films avidly, but never read the books. That said, I wouldn't blame anyone for posting spoilers about the book which I ended up reading.

I think people have to take some responsibility for their own reading habits. With a little care, you can generally avoid spoilers unless the author has deliberately tried to write something designed to convey that spoiler.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I tend not to bother about spoilers, or spoiler warnings. I don't post spoilers in other people's comments, but on my blog I feel perfectly entitled to say "Kyser Sose is Rosebud" or "The Emperor Dalek is The Master in disguise" if I'm reviewing something (though if it's new and the 'spoiler' makes a genuine difference I probably won't).
It's possible to review Citizen Kane without 'spoilers', because apart from one bit at the end the plot isn't the important thing. It's less possible to review, say, Hamlet that way because even the very genre it's in is a 'spoiler' in that sense...

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Yes. I think I was probably spoilt for Hamlet when I learnt (at about the age of five?) that Shakespeare's plays were divided into three categories, which for the purpose of this discussion we will call cabbages, turnips and hedgehogs.

[accordingly.livejournal.com]

I get annoyed by spoilers too, but I think it's taking it a bit too seriously to be upset with someone for mentioning the end of a 30 year old movie, even if you haven't seen it. If you cared about watching it then you'd probably have seen it by now, if you'd never heard of it but might watch it at some point in the future then you'll probably forget it by the time you do watch it.

I just think there's more important things in life to worry about.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Sheesh, it's not difficult, the clue is in the name.

If I tell you X will happen, will it spoil the experience of you finding it out at the point where the creator wanted you to find it out? Yes? Then it is a spoiler.

It's not a spoiler to say that Romeo and Juliette die because that fact is presented within the first few lines of the play and it's a bit difficult to discuss the generics of the play without some nod to that at least. Some stuff is in the collective consciousness - I think most people, regardless of whether they've watched the source material, know about Rosebud - but it still spoils, ie detracts from, the experience if you go in ahead of time with that knowledge.

Not spoiling stuff for other people is just good manners. And that's not just "spolers" spoiling, it's about anything you might do that will detract from someone else's experience of something - talking through a film at the cinema, smoking in a restaurant. They're all things that (usually) not going to make the experience worthless or totally destroy it, but it'd be nice if you just *didn't*.

[andrewducker]

Yup. This is entirely my feeling on it.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

It all depends on context -- so I've ticked all of them. Obviously the end of Hamlet is not generally considered a spoiler -- nor yet the identity of Rosebud, for all that most people have ticked it. But if you were to wear this fantastic t-shirt (warning! Link contains many spoilers!)outside a screening of one of the movies, that would clearly be anti-social spoiling behaviour.

Anyway -- best ever comment on this was from Steven, commenting on spoiler warnings in Pepys Diary -- Rot 13 for your protection -- SVER! SVER!

Meanwhile my colleagues started to talk about Torchwood and I had to put on headphones and go Na na na na na until they stopped. A couple of days and I'll have seen it. It's downloading from iPlayer in HD as I speak; which I think means that my Virgin Broadband connection will now be throttled till Christmas.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Interesting topic.

I'm quite fussy about spoilers and have a stricter definition of them than some people I know. I try hard to avoid seeing spoilers for things I know I want to watch/read. If they come up in conversation I'll say "I haven't seen that yet, no spoilers!" (and I agree with likeneontubing that the onus is on me to do that).

I really don't understand people who deliberately read TV Tropes pages or similar discussion on things they haven't seen yet. You get some degree of spoiler-censorship there, but it's a bit patchy. And you get things like "Spoiler: XXX turns out to be XXX in disguise!" and even knowing that someone turns out to be someone in disguise is a spoiler, and if you know the characters it's often obvious who's being referred to by the length of the spoilertext box.

The difficulty is with things you don't yet know you want to watch/read. People saying "I think you'd enjoy X; it has a twist in which Y happens" is just wrong. People saying, after a movie you enjoyed, "That reminds me of the ending of X" is dubious. But expecting people not to mention any twist in any book/film/etc in any conversation, in case their interlocutors haven't yet seen it and don't yet know it's something they want to avoid spoilers for, is a bit much to expect.

And, of course, sometimes even knowing something has a major twist can be a little bit of a spoiler, so even if people are polite and say "I won't talk about X in front of you because of spoilers", you get that effect.

[simont]

And, of course, sometimes even knowing something has a major twist can be a little bit of a spoiler

Mmm. There's also the occasional problem with reverse-spoilage. I once saw some people online discussing a certain concept in speculative physics, and my immediate thought was that if they thought that was interesting then there was an SF novel I wanted to recommend them because it explored that same idea further. But unfortunately, the book introduces that particular idea as a plot twist part way through – so just saying "if you think that's a fun idea, you might enjoy reading <title>" would have been a spoiler! I never worked out a way to get my book recommendation to those people at all...

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Al Capone went to see Hamlet, and during the interval was heard to say 'I'm da only guy in da joint who don't know how it turns out'. History does not recall whether anyone spoiled it for him, but fear of baseball batting probably deterred them.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

I don't think that there's a hard and fast line, but there's a point at which you start to assume shared culture, and checking that you're not about to spoiler someone before making every reference impedes conversation, and the older and more well-known the text, the more reasonable it is to assume it's already known. Clearly if someone has said "I've not seen x, don't spoil the ending" then telling them is a rubbish thing to do, but if I'm in a conversation of Shakespeare geeking then I'm going to assume everyone knows how the major plays end.

[simont]

I think it's got to be judged on a relative-merit basis. Certainly there are cases in which the negative effect of spoiling things for people clearly outweighs the effort it would have taken to avoid it – e.g. it's not asking much at all to keep your mouth shut for two minutes when you've come out of seeing a film and are walking past all the people queuing for the next showing – but when the fiction gets old enough, the effort equation works the other way: it's not that giving away the ending of (say) Romeo and Juliet can't possibly have a negative effect on anyone, it's that the likely amount of negative effect (bearing in mind that very few people both don't know the plot already and care about seeing it unspoiled) is outweighed by the effort required to avoid it (mentally vetting any use of a quotation or passing reference to a character name, and finding more long-winded and unpoetic ways to reword things which could have been said so much more simply by appealing to shared knowledge of that particular piece of culture).

Politeness is in large part about making small efforts which have big effects on other people. A minor change in phrasing of a comment makes all the difference between somebody feeling hurt and offended or not; the small inconvenience of standing aside for somebody struggling with a heavy load saves them the much larger inconvenience of redistributing the load to get it through a smaller space. So at the point where the careful avoidance of spoilers hits diminishing returns and the cost to speakers of avoidance outweighs the (average) cost to listeners of the spoilers, the demands of politeness cease to be sufficient to require it.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I was going to say (but you phrased it a lot better than I was going to have time to :))

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

My problem is that I like knowing what happens beforehand. It doesn't spoil my experience and usually it improves it. I always read the ends of books first, for instance. So while I know that this is not true for other people, I find it really hard to understand why. And thus, I am probably not as careful about not revealing information as I could be. I would certainly not have a problem talking about the end of HBP or Hamlet (those being the only two of your examples that I know anything about) at this late stage, unless I specifically knew that I was talking to someone who didn't know and was about to see the film/play. I'd talk about both uncut on my LJ, for instance, on the basis that anyone who cared has had ample opportunity to find out for themselves.

I've never told anyone the ending of The Mousetrap, though. ;)

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

I figure quite a few fans of the Harry Potter movies won't have read any of the books.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

*maybe* the end of BSG because it's so recent, but while technically everything else is a spoiler, I'm very much of the opinion that if you haven't seen/read/heard/whatever the piece in the 2 - 400 years it's been out, really, it can't matter that much to you, can it? If you really cared, wouldn't you have made the time to have experienced the story in some way?

This may be seen as harsh, but having experienced a wide range of reactions to spoilers over the years, my tolerance for such things is extremely low.

[andrewducker]

it can't matter that much to you, can it?

Yes, it can. I have a finite amount of time to watch TV in. Julie and I just finished watching Babylon 5, and she'd never had the opportunity before, while I had seen chunks of it, but not managed to get someone to watch it all with me before. I cared a _lot_ about it, and would have been very upset to be spoiled for lots of it.

[redshira.livejournal.com]

I've never seen any of the Star Wars movies. I get some of the references because they're so ubiquitous but I know almost nothing of the story. I'm never going to watch them because I've been spoilered all over the place, what with the assumption everyone has that OMG EVERYONE'S SEEN STAR WARS. Because there are so many things I've not seen (and people are aghast when I tell them I've not seen whatever it is), I am really careful not to be spoily about things I have seen/read.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I'm never going to watch them because I've been spoilered all over the place

I find that quite an odd attitude; isn't that a bit like saying that you're not interested in travelling to Gizeh because you've already seen a picture of the pyramids?

The notion that a entire play/film/book can be effectively summarised by some subset of its parts seems overly reductive. For example, Waiting for Godot is not about whether or not Godot finally turns up, but what Vladimir and Estragon talk about while they're waiting. Similarly, the meaning of Kane's dying words in Citizen Kane is quite clearly not the sole key to understanding the life of a complex and conflicted character.

[zz]

I haven't read any of the harry potter books, because if i were going to read a book there are lots of others before them in the queue, and what's the point of reading something you know is going to be made into a film?

[andrewducker]

Because a film contains, on average, one page of script per minute of movie. If a book is more than 120 pages long (and they pretty much all are) then you're getting a drastically downsized version of it in a movie.

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

in the past few years, I saw for the first time The Sound Of Music and the original Pyscho. My enjoyment of both was huge, because no-one had told me what happens at the end of Pyscho (really! It was BRILLIANT!) and, possible even more brilliantly, no-one had told me there were Nazis in The Sound Of Music. I spent the rest of the film secretly hoping for giant robots and ninjas.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Morag has a great Sound of Music story. Ask her sometime...

[e-halmac.livejournal.com]

Having just re-read this, with the idea of completing the poll, I realised I wouln't find any of the above spoilers. More than half are relevent - I have read or seen them - and wouldn't have cared if they'd been spoiled. But (as I've said below) I'm weird like that.

Have never seen BSG though, but I'm been persuaded in to it by everyone I know going on and on about it. It must be good, and, I'm pretty sure, just my thing.

[ophelia-complex.livejournal.com]

Han and Chewied were lovers

>What!?!? how did I miss that?!? (yes have seen it several times)?

Is this some sort of slash fiction joke?

[andrewducker]

I needed a spoiler that wasn't just untrue, but patently unbelievably untrue...

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Uh, Hamlet is a Shakespearean tragedy. All Shakespearean tragedies end the same way, just like all Shakespearean comedies end the same way. It's a formula.

Fancy-pants people are welcome to substitute "Aristotelian" for "Shakespearean" in the above paragraph.

I can't think of anything about the end of Hamlet that would be a spoiler. Yes, considering the histories of the Scandinavian countries, the geopolitical situation was atypical, but it certainly wasn't the focus of the story. There was nothing surprising in the bits that Shakespeare or, at least, my high school English teachers cared about.

[andrewducker]

Hamlet is a Shakespearean tragedy. All Shakespearean tragedies end the same way

So, two facts I didn't know when I saw Hamlet. Benefits of not having studied Shakespeare in school, nor read any. I've now seen a several on the stage/cinema, and managed to not be spoiled for any of them.