andrewducker | Spoiler Discussion

Spoiler Discussion - (spoiler free)

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!

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You'd have to have a pretty mechanistic way of consuming art if the only thing that held your interest was wanting to know what happened next. Equally if that it is all there is to it then it would be a pretty lousy work of art (for example, the work M Night Shamalyan). Don't you ever re-read/re-watch things?

Sure surprises are nice but there is lots of other stuff. I mean, I know the ending of BSG and I've only seen the first season but I don't consider the programme "spoiled". There is more to a journey than a destination.

Fear of spoilers seems to have gotten a bit out of control on the internet. Where any mention of plot - where even casting news - is considered spoilery, I think people need to take a step back.

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.

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.

I agree that some people can be over the top (and casting news is beyond my line), but a strong part of any narrative work _is_ the plot. I've seen things with little-to-no plot and I don't enjoy them nearly as much.

And, for instance, with films with a massive twist part of the joy of watching them again is seeing how it was constructed so that you got suckered in the first time.

Nobody is saying plot is the only important thing - but it's definitely a major component of the enjoyment most people get.

I've generally preferred the hedgehogs, because I like my plays prickly.

On the other hand, I loved Kenneth Branagh's musical version of Love's Labour's Lost, but I seem to be somewhat alone in this.

Indeed. Sorry again to anyone who has seen TS2, and didn't get the Buzz/Zurg thing, and I've just ruined Empire for them by comparing the two.
Though in the context of the point made about Star Wars (but it would be a spoiler that I am certain everyone would already have heard due to the ubiquity of the phrase in question), and my example, it was that way around.

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.

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. ;)

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...

I agree to an extent. There are a class of spoilers that radically reconfigure everything that have preceded them. I wouldn't want to be spoiled for, say, Use Of Weapons or Fight Club or The Prestige. However, I don't think BSG or Empire or Harry Potter fall into that category and neither do the majority of works that people cry spoiler over.

Yes, I know the feeling. There's no sensible way of protecting people from reverse spoilers. You can't say "That's like the twist at the end of ", because people don't know whether it's safe for them to un-rot it or not, in the way that they would if you said "The twist in Star Wars is ".

If the people in the discussion you mention don't read this journal and don't have very good memories, you could just randomly recommend them the book after some time has passed. But if the concept is supposed to be new and revolutionary in the book, and they've already speculated about it as a concept, the twist might have less impact anyway.

I disagree about BSG. A strong reason for me to watch it was the "What on earth is happening next?" factor, along with the "Who is a cylon?" factor. Tuning in to see what thing is happening to your beloved characters strikes me as one of the most common reasons people watch TV. Knowing that this week Baltar turns out to be an alien is taking that away from people.

I'm 33, normal-to-geeky, living in the UK, and I've never seen any part of Star Wars. Don't really want to, either.

Hmm, there's spoilers, which are everything that I didn't already know about any given story, and rude spoilers, where people would reasonably expect I might not know that thing, and tell anyway.

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

*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.

I was wondering whether to mention Bridge to Terebithia. IMO (which I recognise is stricter than some), just saying that it has a major twist and that it's something arguably unsuitable for sensitive darlings is more of a spoiler than I'd have wanted to encounter before seeing it. It's the kind of film where you almost can't have a meta-discussion about spoilers without spoiling it.

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.

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.

Is exactly what came to mind to me as well.

I agree with you, and add more to it. The end of Empire has been used as a joke on Radio 4's The Now Show more than once, and on mainstream entertainment TV shows. The line in and of itself is so well known that, while it's a plot point that was originally a reveal, is now just part of the cultural ethos. If it can be used as a joke on a mainstream comedy show it's too well known to be annoyed about.

Are you telling me what emotions I should feel?

Really?

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?

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.

Emotions aren't rational. You can be annoyed about something that it's completely irrational to be annoyed about, but recognition that it is irrational would be useful.

If it's considered well known enough for it to be usable as a joke on a flagship BBC comedy show, then it's just a generally known point.

At this point, as someone else has said, anyone that's reached 20ish that hasn't seen Empire is unlikely to want to or care. Same applies to the ending of Citizen Kane (and I watched the movie already knowing and didn't think it mattered at all, but then Kane isn't about the plot at all).

yes, but how much of a book is descriptions that aren't needed in film?
and i'm a slow reader, books take 1-2 orders of magnitude longer than films. time that could be spent on other things.

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