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

[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 :))