actually having a piece of media "spoiled" is not a big deal CMV
In retrospect, history has vindicated the people driving past the Harry Potter premier screaming "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDOR"
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Caring about spoilers is low media literacy bazinga behavior
Totally depends on the specific book and what the author had in mind with the plot imo
Knowing the ending spoils the fun of trying to guess what it will be as the media progresses.
Come now I'm sure there's an excellent chance Moby Dick has a happy ending where everything turns out great
Memory is fuzzy but I think I remember a study where people did that having the ending spoiled didn't ruin the fun for people. I think I remember whole ass news segments in the 80's spoiling Empire Strikes Back's "I am your father" scene.
I've never gotten spoilers perversion. If the journey isn't worthwhile knowing the destination then there's some major issues with the movie or book or whatever. I'm a rewatcher to an extreme degree and usually the first time I see something I enjoy and am being surprised by it is the shallower viewing I have. I read the script for mgs2 years before i played the game cause I couldn't get a ps2 for a while. Knowing everything ahead of time helped me to absorb it and not just be confused the whole first play
My favorite shows and movies, Twin Peaks, Dark, and Mulbolland Drive, are all media that could be completely spoiled to you and you could still have an entirely new experience watching them. I know because I appreciated each of them more on the rewatch.
"Who killed Laura Palmer?" is barely even the point of the show past the first few episodes. It's one thread in a tangled up spiders web
My only aim is to spoil many shows
The more, the better I feel
I wouldn't even know how to go about spoiling Twin Peaks honestly.
You could say that they're actually living in a fake world, but that's obviously meaningless because of course they are, it's fiction. And diegetically it doesn't really change a thing that they live in a Donnie Darko style tangent world, so much so I'm not even gonna spoiler tag this comment.
Outer Wilds can only be played once.
I still need to go back and play the expansion, so I at least have that going for me.
Story spoilers are fine, but puzzle spoilers actually ruin the activity.
Being spoiled ruins the intended experience of the piece and while it may not be a negative depending on the story, it's probably rare for spoilers to add anything
I don't think I've ever stopped because of a spoiler though that's kinda dumb
I'll defend not-spoiling things like Outer Wilds, where the process of discovery is literally the entire point of it.
That blurs the line between spoiling plot details, and telling you puzzle solutions to be fair.
The plot and the puzzles are so intertwined, it's definitely hard to talk too much about the story without giving a new player 'puzzle clues'.
Lol dude the book came out like 150 years ago and is widely referenced in culture all the time, I'm more surprised that this person started to read Moby Dick without having some idea of how it ends already.
Depends on the piece of media. I think there are scenes and scenarios that really benefit from approaching them organically without foreknowledge so they can really hit with unexpected twists etc.
There is plenty of media that’s been out for so long it’s just weird to get mad about though - the OP image for example.
Some of my favorite ~~slop~~ media is the kind of story that can’t really get spoiled because either the journey is the entire point, or the spoilers would be so esoteric and incomprehensible out of context that they’re meaningless - see JoJo for both.
Yeah. Sometimes even when I hear "MC dies" I wanna know how. But sometimes the spoiled plot was all that tied the whole thing together.
Hell, I’ll frequently purposefully spoil myself on media in those “does X character die” situations
idk if a story was only held together by its ending, it probably wasn't worth the time, imo. so I love spoilers and can't get enough of them. like if spoilers are so bad, how can you possibly reread/whatever the work?
Not just ending spoilers - I was recently watching the anime HunterXHunter with my gf. In the series a major plot development
spoiler
is a ruthless inhuman “villain” figure learning empathy over the course of the arc, forming a human friendship, and after surviving certain death, giving up his dreams of conquest and supremacy to die alone with the only human connection he’s ever formed.
Over the arc we see the antagonists portrayed as more human over time and the previous protagonists and designated heroes, your typical shonen hero types, proving more selfish and brutal than the supposedly monstrous antagonists
By the time of the designated villain’s absolutely heartbreaking death my partner was taken off guard at how the plot turned and was crying at the end
-
In that case it’s not spoiling the ending necessarily since the series continues for a good while. The gradual experience over time builds understanding of the characters though, and while it doesn’t ruin the story to have foreknowledge I prefer to have this kind of story unfold at the pace it intended yknow?
On one hand - I get this. I am the type of person who gets annoyed whenever god-forbid I'm watching an episode of a show or a movie that I've never seen before with friends (I tend to avoid watching shit with them for the first time unless we're going to like, a movie theater, because my friends love doing this) & one of them pulls up their phone and looks up the entire synopsis and plot of the film 15 minutes into it.
On the other hand - even when I've been spoiled on something personally, I've never been the type to go "oh well guess I'll NEVER finish it now since I know". There's a whole 100 chapters between where that dude stopped and the ending of Moby Dick lol - he arguably could've forgotten the finer details of what was spoiled for him by the time he got to it.
I had the end of Red Dead Redemption 2 spoiled for me, by myself because I'm a nosy bitch that can't stop digging for info, and it honestly made me enjoy the game more. All the way up to the point where the gang goes to Cuba I had been more or less rushing through the game, not really taking time to sit down and listen to folks, touring the countryside with my horse, or separating random townsfolk from their cash in a good game of blackjack.
After Arthur officially got the sniffles, I began to tour the entire map just to find all the little points of interests so Arthur can take his time sketching them, hunting down every Lemoyne klansman and dragging as many of them to death with my lasso, and going around to pay a visit to every grave of every person that rode with us. That by the time it came to go on one last ride, I wasn't so much sad at how things ended up but satisfied that I did everything I could to do right by the folks Arthur cared about.
Spoiling the end for myself actually made me enjoy the story more.
i want to know what's coming so i can know if it's worth my time.
Ishmael and Quequeg get married and live happily ever after.
lol what a nerd, i normally just end up spoiling media to myself just to see if i would have liked it, like reading the wikis or watching the clips. thats how i got into chainsawman
Moby Dick was Kane’s sled.
The ending of Moby Dick is my white whale
I remember reading a study that showed spoilers actually made media more enjoyable. Removes stresss
some people are masochists and enjoy the stress though
Not all stress is bad! There's a reason thriller is a genre.
Found an article about the study https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/spoiler-alert-spoilers-make-you-enjoy-stories-more
I remember this study, but I do question the solid conclusions, as there are a lot of caveats - these are about generic, short books, not long ones, not ones that take more than one sitting to finish, nor are they classics, nor movies, the study isn't double-blind, they cover only three very similar genres, the sample size seems tiny (4?) and given that, I wonder if the results are even statistically significant.
I also wonder if 'enjoyment of story' is the be-all and end-all metric when it comes to the value of a story, narratives are about invoking a whole range of emotions and mental journeys, not just enjoyment. Some of the best works I've experienced, I would struggle to rate as 'highly enjoyed', because I sobbed for half of it.
It's an interesting study, whatever the case.
Yeah it's definitely flawed, but I think it's really interesting. I don't think there's any conclusive answer, but when the broad narrative is anti-spoiler, it's interesting to me to see the other side of it. It also helped me understand why I seemed to enjoy movies more when I knew what was coming. It took the stress of worrying for the characters away, so I could just enjoy the beats and scenes in their own.
Very fair. I absolutely also concede to enjoying some movies more when I know the plot, or even moreso when I know the film intimately well.
I don't think it's right to make sweeping statements about humanity over some studies where a few hundred college students read a short story. Even in those studies, the difference in enjoyment between spoiled/not spoiled isn't much.
Like, it's really douchey to upset people and then point to a research paper as if that proves you know more about their feelings than them. Real reddit energy :smuglord:
My intention wasn't to make sweeping statements about humanity or to shame people for not enjoying spoilers, and I'm struggling to see where you got that. The thread was having a discussion about spoilers, I remembered that article from a while ago and thought it would be a good addition.
Tbh it's strikes me as rude to accuse me of being some smuglord for joining a chat in good faith. Chill out please.
Ah fair, I didn't mean to come off that way. It's just that I've seen those studies used as justification for being rude and I'm seeing a lot of that attitude in this thread. Y'know the "ackshually I'm scientifically making your life better by spoiling everything" kind of people.
I want to clarify that I'm not saying you do that, but that people do do that. Sorry egon
Ah I see, I left that comment in the thread while there was very few comments overall, so I didn't think much of it. I can see how my comments could come off in the other way, if there's suddenly a bunch arguing in that other way elsewhere in the thread.
Thank you for the apology.
Only time I spoiled something was when I was big mad that Pacific Rim hyped up the cooler Jaegers just to trash them in their first fight.
Not only is Moby Dick of all things distinctly not a book that can be ruined in the slightest by being "spoiled," and in fact is the kind of ending that is foreshadowed and almost said outright by the narrator throughout the book from the beginning on, but it's such a shitty way to view media. Does nobody rewatch anything? Every time I reread one of my favorite books I get something else out of it. Repeated rewatches of my favorite films bring me such delight on each viewing. Pursuing this spoiler-obsessed plot lens by which all stories should be viewed is so exhausting and boring. Moby Dick is the kind of book that rewards rereads. It grows in your mind, it blooms like a flower. To stop reading it because you "know how it ends" is to rob yourself of one of the great books, perhaps the greatest USAmerican book of all time.
Moby Dick is overrated. Too much story, not enough chapters about how whales are fish.