Gukumatz Mod Note:
This was moved from the non-spoiler Game of Thrones thread in Cafe Society in order to let it rest and avoid Warning people. If anyone wants to fight it out, you can do it here, but keep it within the rules of ATMB. Anyone wants to go further, take it to the Pit.
All posts from #2-14 were made in another context. Please keep ATMB rules with regards to language and civilty in mind.
Gukumatz
[Everything past this point belongs to quixotic78]
Which episode was it where King Joffrey meets Tyrion, the stand-in for the Hand of the King? Have you guys seen second season episodes? How?
Please, let’s respect the reasonable and repeated request of the OP and only discuss what has been shown on the screen. I know some of you are only speculating, but if you happen to be right in what you’ve speculated, then the whole interaction between Joff and Tyrion is spoiled for us all. And even those of you saying that such-and-such couldn’t possibly happen, that could potentially be a spoiler, too.
So, once again (and N.B. the emphasis was in the original):
You know in all the threads filled with ridiculous spoiler complaints this has to be the most idiotic. Speculation and guesses are never spoilers even if they happen to come true. If i tell you Dany ends up on the Iron Throne and that is what happens at the end of the series that is not a spoiler, that is a good guess.
I thought I was pretty clear. Even quoted the OP. Here, I’ll quote the OP again for you:
This is ONLY a thread for first-season discussion, NOT for speculation about second season. For example:
“Man, that Sansa sure can take a slap! A forehand AND a backhand from a Kingsguard’s gauntlet, and she’s still standing!” – ACCEPTABLE
“I wonder if Sansa will plot against that Kingsguard knight – you know, the one who slapped her – in the second season.” – This is about the second season, ergo, not appropriate here.
I’ve been on the anti-spoiler side of the argument and this is obviously silly. Speculating about where we go from here isn’t inappropriate, it’s a natural part of the discussion. People who have actual foreknowledge should avoid it - they shouldn’t be hinting at us or telling us how cute our guesses are or whatever - but for people who have only seen the series, speculating about the future based on what we’ve seen is totally normal and acceptable, it’s a big part of discussing a show at all.
quixotic78, stop arguing about the rules. This thread is for discussion of the show, not your opinions about moderating and what a spoiler is. Start a thread in ATMB if you absolutely have to continue arguing about this.
quixotic is mocking the “spoiler Nazis” to rile people up, just so we’re all clear on that. He’s making fun of people who don’t want to see spoilers, not making a real request.
I thought that might be the case, but then I thought - no, after ruining several threads, and having the moderator create a new thread just so it wouldn’t devolve into that - would someone really come in within the first few posts and threadshit and try to derail this one already? No, I didn’t think anyone would.
If you’re right, then he’s being a pretty huge jerk.
Edit: Checking back, you’re right, he was one of the people threadshitting in the last thread, and now he’s trying to do it again. If it were up to me, he’d be banned from these threads, because he’s deliberately trying to be a jerk, threadshit, and derail them. It’s a really fucking lame satire too, if that’s what he’s going for, because “hey, this never happens by book 4” really is a spoiler, and speculation by people who don’t know what will happen is obviously a non-spoiler, so to conflate the two is really just stupid.
SenorBeef, while I certainly sympathize - I would - please tone down the vitriol. Marley23 already admonished quixotic78 a few posts ago; don’t have a go at him when he’s already down and put him in a position where he gets insulted, but can’t fire back.
To everyone: To make myself perfectly, redundantly and abundantly clear, speculation about the future based solely on knowledge derived from the first season as shown on television is, of course, okay.
To address a point less clear, TV-guides, websites, blogs and so on are also out of limits - although that’s more of a grey area. This thread is designed to be a lowest-common-denominator only thread, which means what’s been televised. If there’s a consensus against this, I will of course revise this.
I regret having to codify the rules to such an extent, but history has shown that apparently with this show it’s been needed. Now, at least, there’s enough rope.
</Mod Hat>
On a on-topic note, I wonder how the show progression is going to be for the youngest actors? Like the child playing Rickon, Art Parkinson, who’ll be 24 by the time the series ends if it keeps the bi-annual schedule? May this be why he’s been kept so off-screen, so we won’t get too attached to the actor?
Fair enough, but I thought Marley23 might’ve actually moderated him for the wrong reason. The initial reactions were treating him as if he were serious, including my own. Marley may have actually warned him as if his (facetious) attempt at junior modding a ridiculous point was his real goal, if he didn’t recognize the name for his … contributions to the last thread that got locked. When actually the his infraction was a much more blatant violation of the don’t be a jerk rule, rather than a potentially misguided but well intentioned bit of junior modding.
Hmm. I wasn’t going to come back here, because Marley23 said to stop the argument and I respect him and was content to leave someone else with the last word. But you’ve twice now (once post Mod note, even) accused me of threadshitting (and trolling, essentially, even if you didn’t use that word) and I’ve got to call bullshit on it because you’re wrong (and baselessly so!) and yet so insistent.
The OP was – to me – very clear.
So I quoted posts that violated that clear statement. Gukumatz has since added clarification (that wasn’t in the OP) allowing speculation, but you can’t with a straight face tell me that a literal reading of the OP said speculation is OK. That was my point. Not threadshitting, not trolling, not dickitude. I will cop to junior modding, if you insist; I suppose in retrospect the thing to do would be to report the six or so posts in a row that seemed to me to violate the OP, but that seemed excessive. Meh.
Your intent then was not to mock those who you consider to be “spoiler nazis” by blowing up over an overly strict interpretation of the rules by advocating a position that no honest, rational person would actually hold? You were just doing what you thought was right and proper to try to maintain order in the thread?
Bullshit. There is no possible way post #15 in this thread was made in earnest. You dropped spoilers in the last thread. When people politely asked you to not drop spoilers, you said “but if I’m saying something doesn’t happen in the next few books, it’s not really a spoiler then is it?!” but were unable to offer a credible defense as to why that actually made sense but instead just went off on rants about how us “spoiler nazis” are “insane”. The last thread was closed pretty much by the efforts of your threadshitting and efforts to derail it, and a new thread was created specifically basically to keep you and others like you - but mostly you - from derailing the thread again.
And now you come in here trying to mock people with an exaggerated version of what you felt people’s positions were, and now you’re claiming that it wasn’t mocking at all - that you actually meant that because you were suddenly very concerned about the rules, even taking them to an absurd, illogical position that no one would actually have.
Your position is ridiculous. I’m probably going to get in trouble for even letting you troll me again, so this is the last of it. I just felt it necesary to make it absolutely clear how full of shit you are, and how you’re willfully trying to turn these threads into trainwrecks.
Thank you for moving this extraneous silliness out of the new thread. But with the direction that the content and tone of this conversation was headed, I think The Pit would have been the more appropriate venue. In fact, the posts already existing in this new thread belong there, and I don’t see any likelihood of that somehow improving into an ATMB-appropriate conversation. There’s not even anything ATMB-related to discuss here, I don’t think. Either the conversation just dies, (which might just be a good thing, and maybe what you’re hoping for ;)) or it will naturally head directly into Pit territory.
We’re enforcing spoilers now? Or is it this series which gets such special protection? Are there really going to be warnings given over this? We’ve talked about tons of things that might be made into movies or tv series in the past and never been warned about it. Whenever a new Superman movie is on the horizon, or a new Spiderman, or Green Lantern, X-Men, whatever there are always threads where people talk about the kind of villains they fought, powers they had, etc. Those could all be potential spoilers for a movie or television adaptation. When someone announces that the Sandman will be one of the villains in the new Spiderman there are tons of geeks who re-hash Spidey-Sandman plotlines from the comics. Is there something which makes those spoilers unworthy of moderator intervention but GRRM/HBO’s work sacrosanct?
It’s not like people are popping up in a lolcats thread saying “They killed Ned!” You can’t even be sure it’s a spoiler at all at this point when you say something. If people had “spoiled” the Bourne Supremacy or The Bourne Ultimatum with book info during the hype for The Bourne Identity they’d have been fantastically wrong because the movies went a completely different direction. Why is it suddenly the job of the posters on the SDMB, and the moderators apparently, to protect posters from hearing about what happened in a twelve year old book(A Clash of Kings)?
Are people so invested in this adaptation of this series that we’re willing to carve out some sort of special rules for making sure people don’t talk about its previous incarnations? We haven’t ever done this for Superman, Spiderman, Jason Bourne, Frodo Baggins, James Bond, et al. So what gives?
Is it really asking for special rules if the OP creates a thread specifically to discuss what’s been in the show, especially when there are spoiler threads to talk about? This seems standard to me. Your comic book comparisons are general enough that it’d be hard to spoil a superman movie by guessing at the dozens of villains - can you think of a situation in which a series of novels is open game to be spoiled in a thread specifically set up to prevent that?
The TV show has from what people are saying followed the books pretty closely. It’s very clear that revealing future plot details from the book would be the most obvious, clearest definition of spoilers that you can have.
Yeah. This is a bunch of people hanging out in special “non-spoiler please” threads so they can talk about the TV storyline as it unfolds. Many of us know exactly how it is going to unfold. It’s obvious that this is a different situation from speculation about who Spider Man is going to kick in the face. This is like, here’s who is going to be the surprise villain of movie two, here’s who’s definitely going to be around for at least four movies, here’s who is probably going to die in the next one, here’s what’s going to end up being the big mystery of the whole thing.
Going into those threads and providing information that those people don’t want is kind of being a jerk. It’s not like there are TV show watchers going around in all the spoiled discussion threads and yelling at people for talking about it. They just complain, apparently, when somebody who knows what’s going to happen says in the TV show only thread “No, that’s not going to happen” or something in response to their own unspoiled speculation, even on what we might consider minor points. Only, as it turns out, most of the people in the no spoiler threads are also the same people posting in the spoiler threads, and it’s a big inconvenience to them to have to abstain from commenting on particular things. So they kind of freak the hell out about it. “Well if I can’t say what I want to say in these threads, I guess I just won’t say anything in them.” Which, well… yeah. And that’s what the big clusterfuck is about. But that really isn’t the TV people’s faults. They’re in the same position as anybody else watching something brand new - they really don’t want it spoiled.
As to the idea that this is a once in a lifetime special snowflake spoiler policy, I remember a sticky thread from the administration entitled “Harry Potter - A Warning Shot Across the Bow.” It said listen assholes, don’t spoil the fucking Harry Potter book. Somebody tested it, and he got banned. That person was being a jerk. That’s not really “Harry Potter is so awesome” special treatment. It’s just the same old rule about try not to ruin everybody’s fucking party, applied to a situation where a fuckbarrel of people didn’t want somebody to come in and say this dude got killed by this other dude.
The Bourne series is one example. I did a search for those threads and I didn’t find one where the OP had requested no spoilers, and there was crosstalk between the film versions and book versions, but those were several years ago. Rules tend to grow over time and while it was fine back then to talk about the books while talking about or anticipating the movies it seems.
The Harry Potter series is another example. Find me a single thread about the films where people are expected to “pretend the books don’t exist” or even one where that would be a reasonable request. There aren’t any because it isn’t. I see on preview that Jimmy Chitwood also thought of the Harry Potter series, but the moderator instructions there were regarding the release of the books, where no one knew how anything would turn out, and the instructions were not to put major spoilers in places people couldn’t avoid them, like thread titles. No one is retroactively saying “now that HP7.5 is about to come out, pretend Deathly Hallows doesn’t exist because I wanna be surprised.” Such a request would be laughed out of CS, and I’d happily start a test thread if you don’t believe me.
I also thought the LotR series might be fruitful, but searching LotR on the SDMB is like finding a needle in a haystack. I did find a couple of old threads from 2000 and 2001 where they were talking about the upcoming film(Fellowship of the Ring) and it’s chock-full of comparisons between the films and books including stuff like the dropping of the Scouring of the Shire and Tom Bombadil, and even whether the Balrog will have wings. There wasn’t the explicit admonition from the OP to avoid book topics, but since when have moderators been responsible for keeping a thread on the track the OP intended? We’ve had OPs who specified all sorts of things about what they wanted to limit the discussion to, from the lovable trainwrecks who say things like “I’m having an affair but I don’t want people to judge me” to the morons in GD who say things like “I only want opinions from conservative Republicans who have experience in international finance”. None of this was ever binding on the moderators. Why all of a sudden is this series entitled to have moderator-enforced spoiler-free discussions, even to the point of calling in a pinch hitter moderator who can more accurately and easily rule on which comments fall into which incarnation of the storyline?
It just seems excessive and puts a large burden, which is clearly already causing issues, on the participants and the staff. If you don’t want a spoiler, then don’t read threads about the series. If it’s an ongoing series then either accept that you might get spoiled on some details if you want to jump into the ongoing conversation or stay out of the conversations. In discussions of the upcoming “Hobbit” movie, are we going to have to pretend the book, and LotR, which could be considered a spoiler for The Hobbit, doesn’t exist? Is this reasonable?