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What is a spoiler? A miserable pile of secrets.
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
From the Streaming thread, a bunch of people seem to disagree on what constitutes spoiling something in a movie/show.
Is telling someone the basic concept of a show a spoiler, if they don’t want to know anything at all about it?
What about something that happens in the first 15 minutes of the pilot episode?
I think it’s probably mostly subjective. If somebody doesn’t want to know something, then it’s a spoiler. I feel like there are very few people for whom the concept of a show or movie is spoiling things, but if you know ahead of time that they feel this way, then telling them isn’t just spoiling them, it’s being a dick.
If you don’t know how someone feels about it, telling them the premise is almost never a spoiler unless knowing the very nature of the media is going to reduce someone’s enjoyment of it.
I said it in the other thread: if the director meant for you to know it going in, it’s not a spoiler. If they didn’t, it is. It’s a general guideline but I think it works well.
And obviously telling somebody who dies in Game of Thrones is a spoiler.
Do you want things, even public knowledge, to be kept secret? Do you want to know if a favorite character will die going in so you don’t get too attached? How badly do Netflix auto-playing previews suck (so bad)?
Talk is restricted to what is or is not fair game when discussing media, whether or not publishers and streaming services should be more careful about ruining things for late-comers (they should) and related subjects.
The thread is not a general Netflix whining thread, nor a place to post unlabeled spoilers for popular shows or movies. If you’re using some movie or show to illustrate your point, clearly mark your spoiler tags and don’t be a dick.
Is telling someone the basic concept of a show a spoiler, if they don’t want to know anything at all about it?
What about something that happens in the first 15 minutes of the pilot episode?
I think it’s probably mostly subjective. If somebody doesn’t want to know something, then it’s a spoiler. I feel like there are very few people for whom the concept of a show or movie is spoiling things, but if you know ahead of time that they feel this way, then telling them isn’t just spoiling them, it’s being a dick.
If you don’t know how someone feels about it, telling them the premise is almost never a spoiler unless knowing the very nature of the media is going to reduce someone’s enjoyment of it.
I said it in the other thread: if the director meant for you to know it going in, it’s not a spoiler. If they didn’t, it is. It’s a general guideline but I think it works well.
And obviously telling somebody who dies in Game of Thrones is a spoiler.
Do you want things, even public knowledge, to be kept secret? Do you want to know if a favorite character will die going in so you don’t get too attached? How badly do Netflix auto-playing previews suck (so bad)?
Talk is restricted to what is or is not fair game when discussing media, whether or not publishers and streaming services should be more careful about ruining things for late-comers (they should) and related subjects.
The thread is not a general Netflix whining thread, nor a place to post unlabeled spoilers for popular shows or movies. If you’re using some movie or show to illustrate your point, clearly mark your spoiler tags and don’t be a dick.
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And Deadpool might die in Deadpool! He just might get resurrected as well.
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How about spoilers from books vs. spoilers from movies/TV?
Say that there's a popular book or book series. Say that the book or book series is wildly popular, a cornerstone of the genre. Is it a spoiler to talk about what happens in the book before the movie/TV series is released? I think that most people would say yes. But what about the other way around - say that the show or the movie series gets ahead of the books. Is it a spoiler to talk openly about the events of the show or movie while the book is still progressing? I would say yes, but most people tend to feel that the limits on those spoilers tend to be no more than two or three weeks.
I suppose a sequel in a lesser-known series can ruin the ending to the original for the same reason. The Ring 2 ruins The Ring just by existing.
Yes, it is a spoiler if it is in a trailer. Many people avoid trailers because trailers often put certain things in them that are intended to draw you in by revealing maybe a bit too much!
Talking about the show in an unrelated thread? Probably not.
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I feel like there's a certain level of cultural osmosis that removes the "spoiler" at that point. Like, is it really a spoiler to say that (warning: Victorian fiction spoiler!)
I imagine that virtually everyone is aware of that twist, even though it's meant to be a serious surprise in the novel. I would argue that those Star Wars "spoilers" are approaching a similar level.
Trailers can absolutely spoil something, though. Velvet Buzzsaw is a particularly bad recent example.
Because one of those things negatively impacts someone’s enjoyment if surprise and discovery are part of why they consume media, and the other does not (at least, not as much)
Research shows that spoilers do not reduce enjoyment of media, and can in fact enhance it:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797611417007
http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Publications_files/Fluency of Spoilers.pdf ( A white-paper follow up to the above research)
Oh and also research shows that spoilers DO reduce the enjoyment of media depending on personality traits and preferences:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093650214564051
Science!
Sure, but why is it that the bomb exploding (which is a binary conclusion---it explodes or it doesn't, and it's something that happens in many films and many stories) is more surprising or gratifying to a sense of discovery than the long crane shot (something that rarely happens in films---especially of its era, and is inexpressible in other formats)? You've qualified your response with an if and parenthesis showing it ultimately comes down to subjectivity, which is the right answer in all of this. I guess the larger question is why is plot valued that much more than form?
I think moreso that it is subconscious, rather than conscious. Even if you know that Wizard of Oz is going from black and white to color, the signal to your brain from your eyes will be the same even when you know it is coming. I think the movie The Ring would make a better example here. The psychological effect of the jarring camera angles and bright flashes still messes with your head, but reaching a plot spoiler makes you say "Oh right, that's what Bob told me about" and then you aren't in suspended disbelief anymore.
Because a spoiler is ultimately just "information that I didn't want to have yet" and most of the audience just doesn't really (consciously) care about form.
Also, conveying visual information verbally just doesn't have much impact; hearing "there's a really cool tracking shot in Goodfellas" doesn't blunt actually seeing it for the first time.
But I would imagine that for certain viewers, it is actually possible for there to be spoilers regarding form, times they'd rather go in blind and discover everything for themselves.
I also think there are people who have been taught to view spoilers as a form of personal insult and react accordingly. Like, the "spoiler freakout" really didn't exist in the same way before the 00s. People still understood that doing something like spoiling "Luke, I am your father" before seeing Empire was a dick move, but it didn't come from the same all-encompassing reactionary stance against being told something about a work of art.
It's an Internet-induced mindset.
The Six Sense reveal was great because I did not know it going in. It completely made me re-evaluate the movie up until that point and was kind of a revelation even though I was cool on the movie till that point.
Even the fact that the movie has a "twist" probably would have ruined that feeling.
Similarly with The Ring, the ending starting off like a normal movie ending and then slowly revealing the actual results came with a sense of dread that wouldn't have been possible with knowing about it before hand.
Unfortunately those feelings only really happen once, and only really when I was younger. As I become more aware of tropes I subconsciously look out for them when I'm watching something. "Oh, this is an MNS move, lets find the twist" etc.
Information about the setting or events that aren't part of the main narrative, or some detail I probably wouldn't have noticed in the moment I don't mind, and might actually be fun knowing about it before hand.
edit: also, in a forum specific idea, as Bogart said, if I'm in the thread for the show/movie I don't mind getting spoiled, but if I'm reading some random political thread and someone posts "that's just like in that new movie where <event> happens", I am more likely to get annoyed.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
it's very distracting!
It's bolded that I'm most interested in, and I think what my question was most directed towards; perhaps because I am closer to that certain viewer (though I don't care about spoilers really). I understand that people are more invested in the recognizable, illustrated what (not the formal what or how or why). That's an interesting bias to me, because I think film has, at its most fundamental level, most in common with recorded music (recorded waves of light over time/recorded waves of sound over time), and almost everyone doesn't have problems listening to music that illustrates nothing but its own form---ie. music without lyrics; no story. Film doesn't get that privilege, and maybe that speaks to how we differently perceive visual and aural pleasure, but I think that a kind of cultural bias or understanding of what 'film should be' or is at least understood to be is a big part of it as well.
It's a bit off topic, so I'll stop here, but it's something that I think about when spoilers are brought up, because of how what audiences prioritize is so foregrounded in any discussion of spoilers.
This is a big reason I try not to watch trailers—they are typically built from the most distinctive moments and shots in the movie and I will spend the whole film going “well he can’t die yet because there was that shot of him under the big tree and we haven’t gotten to the big tree scene yet.”
Also because my brain is super good at seeing a shot in the trailer and extrapolating half the plot from it. “Oh, that big tree shot probably has to do with this particular theme, so it must be the climax of that subplot which would only make sense if...” and now I’ve taken all the surprise out of a film.
You know, it may be quite true that knowing a lot about the movie you’re going to watch can improve the experience. I’ve seen films that I enjoyed more the second time, once I knew what the movie was trying to do, or once I was familiar enough with the story to notice smaller details, subtler shadings, more of the craft.
But I can have that AND the spoiler free, totally blind viewing, just by watching it twice. I only give up one of those experiences if I get spoiled.
I also think that a lot of films are not constructed for people who know a lot about the story. A filmmaker tries to guide your attention and emotions throughout, and often even the premise of the story is supposed to be something you engage with for the first time as it’s happening in the movie. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, filmmakers plan to pace your attention with the film’s release of information, not in anticipation of it. Most movies would like the audience to be cresting on the Now of each moment, not waiting for the funny joke or the big dramatic line from the trailer.
Pretty much the only thing I can do with a piece of media is experience it for myself. Somebody telling me what happened during their experience robs me of some of the joy or satisfaction from experiencing it firsthand.
There is more media to consume on even one streaming service than any one person can consume in a lifetime. Cut that down to “content I potentially care about” and it’s still a huge list. You can’t expect everybody to watch every single thing they might ever want to go into fresh within your arbitrary time frame.
I just started Battlestar Galactica recently. I don’t know how I’ve avoided spoilers, but I have. If somebody told me back in the day that it was a good watch, I probably would have seen it sooner. But it wasn’t until recently that the people whose opinions I trusted recommended it. And yet, if any of them had said, “You should totally watch it, but just know going in that ____ is a Cylon!” I would have been very cross.
Well now you've lightly spoiled the show, spilling the beans that someone is a Cylon. Spoilers happen. References happen. So I figure the cutoff should be to not spoil anything hotly anticipated or unforeseen twists; to expect more when we use the internet every day is expecting too much.
But can you expect people to never mention it or use BSG memes because someone might not have seen it? That is fundamentally not how society uses media and it is unreasonable to expect all of society to bend over backwards over spoiler concerns for a decades old show.
Spoiler tags detract from my enjoyment of threads.
I don't say this to be difficult or contrarian. It's simply true. If I go into a thread and it's full of spoiler tags to the degree that I can't easily figure out what people are talking about, or it's hard to follow conversations, I'm probably not going to enjoy that conversation or bother contributing to it.
Sometimes the ethos of "spoiler tag all the things!" does feel like somebody saying "fuck me reasonably accommodating your preference, I get to decide how you engage in conversation."
Ultimately, like most forms of etiquette, this is going to require a balance between two extremes. There has to be a compromise here. I can agree that spoiler tagging is often necessary, and I will try to spoiler tag major plot points. But every once in a while you're going to be spoiled on something and it can't be helped. If it's a minor point, or something that is already widely known, or a very old creative work, then that isn't a moral failure on the part of the person who just wants to have a conversation about media without walking on eggshells for the last person on Earth who doesn't know that Luke Skywalker is Darth Vader's son.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
For example, say I want to compare the theme of 'masculinity in a capitalist society' in Fight Club vs American Beauty.
Well, I just spoiled that this is a theme in both movies. If you didn't know that American Beauty was about masculinity in capitalism, and then this knowledge has screwed up your hypothetical eventual enjoyment of American Beauty, then I just have to shrug and give a half-hearted "sorry, I guess"
Hell, there is an exact conversation I wanted to have recently that I literally could not productively have because it would have required comparing two movies' treatments of a particular plot trope. I can't even tell you what the movies were without spoiling one of them.
It's easy to spoiler tag a single movie's plot twist and I'm happy to do it as a courtesy.
It's literally impossible to spoiler tag a comparison of two movies in a productive way without revealing something about either one of them.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I specifically wrote it to minimize the chance of spoilers. It was a absolute bare minimum review to try to engage anybody reading to go an watch it. It was barely two lines long. I didn't want anybody going in with their enjoyment spoiled by me revealing too much about the story beyond basic premise. I didn't reveal where the story was headed. I didn't name any of the actors beyond the lead. My mini-review was shorter then the episode description and way less spoilery then certain review headlines I have seen. This description? Longer then my original review.
Yet I still got called out for potential spoilers. That is actually kind of fucked up.
Also note that this post contains no actual spoilers to Russian Doll beyond its eksistens, but there are probably people that think i reveals to much.
This is the major reason I rarely participate in on-topic threads on entertainment.
I also think it leads to people talking in circles. Well, more often than normal.
Every thread has a problem where after about 10 pages, people just start repeating themselves and each other. But it's worse in threads where you're disincentivized from skimming the first several pages because you have to open multiple spoiler buttons in each post.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah. In a similar vein, when The Force Awakens was new, there was a rash of trolls using social media to spoil an enormous plot point for people. Fuck those guys.
On the other extreme, we had a forumer (who I will not name, out of respect) who got upset when somebody posted a picture of one of the bird-like creatures ("porgs") from The Last Jedi during TLJ's opening week.
There's a middle ground between maliciously spoiling a dramatic plot twist, vs expecting that nobody's going to talk about a mascot that's been plastered across all of a movie's marketing and merchandising.
Regarding the latter, I think there should be general agreement that if something clearly appears in marketing, it isn't a spoiler. Porgs were everywhere for two months around TLJ's release. They were on billboards!
I recognize it can be controversial over what is considered "marketing " in this regard. Some people consider, for example, interviews conducted by creators on YouTube to be "marketing." While that's strictly true, they are, I don't think they count in this context.
The real question is: is there an overwhelming probability that you have encountered this information without seeking it out?
I'm happy to assume that you skip any YouTube video or magazine article about upcoming media until after you've consumed it.
However, if something appears on billboards, in television commercials, on movie posters, or on the book cover, it's not a spoiler.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.