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

[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...

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

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.