Cultural Corner - Spoilers

For whatever reason the chatter about spoilers  has increased significantly, so I figured I'd throw my two cents into matters. For the people that just joined us here on planet earth, a spoiler is the term used to indicate a bit of information about a story or event that reveals some major detail before a person has had a chance to experience said event or story.  For example this is a spoiler:

This clip was taken from a movie called "The Happening", and it tells you exactly what is going on before you have any chance of figuring it out yourself. Normally spoilers are found outside of the movie, book, game, or event you are about to watch or read. With the internet spoilers are widely available to any who seek them, and somewhat hard to avoid for those that are trying to stay pure.

So I pose the simple question of do spoilers affect your reading experience as much as they do say watching a movie? My answer is a simple no. I just do not think that spoilers are as devastating to books as they are movies. In fact I think spoilers are actually helpful in terms of books rather than being devastating.

If you make a point you got to back it up so I'll start making my case by identifying the differences between the two mediums. Movies are usually not a serious investment in time compared to books. Also movies tend focus more on the events taking place than the characters that the event revolve around.

When it comes down to it a movie may take you about 90 to 120 minutes to watch while a novel can take upwards of a month to finish.  If a movie sucks and has a terrible ending it can feel like you’ve wasted your evening, but when a book sucks it feels like you have just wasted your life. Well not really, but you get the idea. Having a few spoilers for a book can save you from this terrible experience.

Since books are usually written around the characters and not the events having a few events spoiled doesn’t necessarily ruin your experience. In one of my favorite books (I won't mention the title) a little girl dies at the end. Now It was shocking to finally read about her demise, but there was enough foreshadowing and common sense to pretty much assume she wasn't going to make it. So with each passing scene she was in I was just filled with the dread of knowing she was going to die. Now had I known she was going to die even before I read the book, I would've felt every one of those moments until the end. Even the shock of her death would still felt dramatic too me. The reason for this is that the story isn't written around the event like it would've in the movie, but it was written around the process leading to the event. Her purpose was make you experience her suffering and the suffering of her family as they struggled to stay alive. In movies you really just don’t get the time to connect with the characters on a level like this, so knowing she was going to die would've sucked all meaning out of her character.

So sure maybe hearing "Straight Snape kills gay Dumbledore" might have invoked some nerd rage while standing in line waiting to get my hands on the next Harry Potter book, but did it ruin the story for me? Not really. I was still more interested in the world and people than that one plot twist.