Oddly controversial statements

[womzilla]

Here's one I still consider to be innocuous: "I like to encounter stories in the order that their authors intended them to be told." When I said this in the comics shop yesterday, everyone laughed and agreed.

Okay, phrased that way, it doesn't seem particularly controversial. But if you rephrase it as "I don't like spoilers", it apparently attracts the type of asshole who then reels off as many spoilers as possible before you shut them up. Back in Usenet days, I killfiled at least one person whose posts I otherwise enjoyed once he made it clear that he actively enjoyed spoiling stories for people who hate spoilers.

You can re-read a work many times. But you can only read it the first time, once. And surprise is a valid reaction to artistic works that, unlike most responses, can be taken away.

(Have I mentioned recently that I have seen Kevin Spacey more times on stage than on film? By which I mean, I've never seen The Usual Suspects, but I've had it spoiled for me at least a dozen times. Which reminds me of the time I was talking with supergee and he revealed that he knew that Spacey was gay but didn't know he was an actor. Now that's a different way of slicing the information of the world.)

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

When I was writing jacket copy for Tor, I would deliberately stop reading the book once I had enough of a sense of it to write enough copy, so that I couldn't accidentally spoil anything. (The catalog copy for one of the books gave away the hidden nature of one of the minor characters, which is a delightful surprise when encountered in the proper sequence.)

The hardest book to not spoil was Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes, because *every* detail of the setting from the beginning to the end is something of a puzzle to be decoded. I was happy with the job I did, and then they ended up using almost none of it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I once read an SF novel which had a spoiler delivered by the cover illustration.

I've found that people who don't believe in spoiler warnings are really scornful and abusive of those who do.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

As I recall, Jumping off the Planet had a blurb that was simultaneously a spoiler and inaccurate, a difficult thing to achieve, but that I had seen done once before by the blurb on the back of Daggerspell.