Oh my god with the fucking spoilers already!!! I do not fucking get what the big fucking deal is with The Game of Thrones and these fucking viewers who have this incessant need to be virginal in all the show entails. How did it become OMG The Show that is the Most Important Show in the History of Shows and You Just Don’t Understand!!!11
A description of what is in the fucking spoiler box so you can gauge what the percentage of spoilerage might be?? So you can decide that you don’t mind being 43% spoiled, but 71% is way too much? Here’s an idea: DON’T CLICK ON THE FUCKING SPOILER BOX IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE FUCKING SPOILED!
I don’t know why this has put me over the edge, but I want to run screaming into the GoT threads and yell out, “Tywin Lannister is really Arya’s father and she kills him in book five!!!”*
Just enjoy it for what it is, and if you find out something before it happens on-screen, then find something else about the show to enjoy. There are currently about 20 story lines going on in Game of Thrones, and I can’t believe the entire fucking world has ended just because someone spoiled the fact that Renly gets murdered**. Big fucking deal. And if I just spoiled that for you, put on your big girl pants (some bigger than others) and shut your whiny, bitchy pie hole.
(*I have no idea if that’s true.)
(**I’m only on the second book right now, so I spoiled myself by watching the show before reading it in the books. O noes, how will I ever be able to continue reading??)
I am disappointed. I verified that this was the Pit in case you were one of those spoiler virgins but it turned out that I agreed with everything you said. Except, of course, anything you said that was specific to “The Game of Thrones” because I feel that fantasy destroyed the SF/Fantasy section of the book store and anyway I’m a guy so I don’t read fiction even though George Rail Road Martin supposedly still uses Wordstar, but none of that is Pitworthy.
Hey if you’re only in book 2 then put it down right now and find something else to read. Those have to be the shittiest books I’ve ever read. I stopped midway through book 3 because I got tired of the latest “bet-you-didn’t-see-this-one-coming” plot twist.
Also, how can there be spoilers when every fucking character that’s the tiniest bit interesting gets wasted? What does it take? Maybe 2-3 iterations of this formula before the average reader catches on?
Regardless, it’s a dumb, whiny thread. It’s like Dex said in the thread:
I’m not sure adding vague descriptions to the spoiler boxes is going to help much. Some people are just going to click no matter what, and then those people are going to get upset at the poster, not at their own damn selves for clicking. Watch:
The following is a really big spoiler for Game of Thrones.
I’m absolutely not kidding.Final warning, this is not a joke. Do not click if you want your GoT experience unspoiled.Lord Frey kills Robb Stark and Lady Catelyn at Robb’s wedding. Also, Jon Snow is probably not Ned’s son, but his nephew via Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryean, which would make Jon a Targaryean. Probably. Maybe this part isn’t a spoiler, since it’s conjecture… but it’s pretty solid conjecture.
In principle, I don’t disagree, specially with what Dex said in that thread.
But like I said, that thread had little to nothing to do with GoT, and I’m pretty sure the OP of that thread has been bitching about the same thing since before the GoT series was even a twinkle in HBO’s eye.
And this thread tries to make it all about GoT.
So, if that thread was dumb and whiny, then this thread is dumb, whiny, redundant, and an extremely fucking lame excuse to engage in RO.
No, I can read. He’s a member/poster with a bitch about the board. It’s not RO, it actually bothers him. Tell me, where should he have put this thread?
Despite my inclusion of the “spoiler box needs pre-description so I can decide what percentage of spoiled I want to be”, this rant has nothing to do with the thread in ATMB. Currently, this rant IS about GoT because to me, the issue of what is a spoiler, what needs to be spoilered, and how much is spoilering has risen to such a ridiculous degree that commenting about previews becomes a debate for the ages. I have yet to see another show that has brought it to this level. (Yes, I’m sure now I’ll have people come back to tell me how I should have been here for This Show or That Movie. That’s great, but I’m talking about this specific show right now.)
Oh noes, I didn’t create a thread that didn’t meet your angry-worthy criteria! That’s gotta be 97% of the threads in this folder.
What the GoT whiners really need is a smack upside their stupid little heads. Openly discussing a piece of fiction that is more than a decade old is not a spoiler. If you don’t want to risk knowing what might have happened in an old book, then stay the fuck away from life, let alone a message board thread discussing said book.
I saw someone (not sure in which thread) get rebuked because they didn’t spoiler their speculation on what might happen next. Speculation isn’t a spoiler, you whiny fucks!
Something else that’s not a spoiler is explaining something to viewers who don’t pay close attention, or answering a background question using info from the books.
On another board, the moderator has barred all readers from a thread, for fear of spoilage. People in that thread are asking questions about characters’ histories that could be answered without spoiling anything. It would add to their enjoyment of the show, but responding is forbidden.
What a totally non-empathetic attitude this is. Who cares if it’s over a decade old? The TV show is new, and plenty of people watching it haven’t read the book. The thing about spoilers is that it’s not your place to decide for someone else what is or is not going to interfere with their enjoyment, or what they should or should not already be familiar with.
Now, there are obviously legitimate and intricate disagreements about precise details of how spoiler boxes should be used, and I’m sure there are people who are jerks about it (after all, there are people who are jerks about everything), but what you seem to be saying is that if you go into a random thread about, I dunno, dogs, and just randomly toss out, with no warning whatsoever, massive plot details from A Storm of Swords, and someone who did not read the books but is currently watching the show happens upon them and feels like the upcoming season has been in some way spoiled, that you did nothing wrong and they’re just being a whiny bitch? Because that’s what it sounds like you’re saying.
You should ALWAYS err on the side of caution when it comes to spoilers, because it’s just common courtesy and human decency to do so.
You go into some completely random dog thread and start talking about the series for no reason? Then you’re being stupid and likely a dick.
You go to a midnight release party for a book just to be first in line so you can flip to the back and yell out that Snape kills Dumbledore? Then you’re a dick, no two ways about it.
You are in a discussion of a years-old story and talk about that story? Nothing wrong there.
The onus is on the person who thinks that their enjoyment of the story will be ruined if they learn anything about it to stay away from places where that information may crop up. I mean, fuck, if it’s the other way around, then we should still be spoiler-boxing the fact that Ned stark gets beheaded at the end of the first book – after all, someone may be planning to wait until all seasons are released to watch them all together.
In what context? The fact that the immensely popular TV show is going on right now makes it a kind of a special case. It’s precisely because it’s such a special case that there are so many different threads about the TV episodes, each with their own spoiler policies.
Except that of course it’s never that cut and dried, is it? For every clear example of “boy that person was an idiot to read a thread with that extremely clear title” or “wow that was obviously a jerkish spoiler” there are plenty of examples where it’s for some reason ambiguous or arguable. Which is why the absolute cardinal rule should be to be polite and respectful and courteous and err on the side of boxing. The extra 5 seconds it takes you to put something in a spoiler box and give a meaningful comment as to why it’s spoiled is just something that as a member of a community you should do.
Another interesting conversation along these lines we had a while ago concerned the spoiling of a big twist at the end of a very well known movie that came out 15 odd years ago. Sure, it came out 15 years ago… which means that everyone’s already seen it, right? Of course not. There are people who randomly didn’t see it for whatever reason, and of course there are people who were 2 when it came out, are 17 now, and are just in the perfect target audience to see it for the first time. Does that mean that in a thread entitled “complicated question about (name of movie here)” there should be an entire conversation in spoiler boxes on all sides in case someone who hasn’t seen that movie decides to go into a thread with a title like that? Probably not. What it does mean is that the twist in that movie is NOT someting that is automatically just KNOWN by everyone as part of our shared cultural heritage, and it’s quite presumptuous to assume that it is.
You’re being weasely by saying it’s a “discussion of a years-old story” - if the discussion were simply about game of thrones in general with the assumption that everyone had read all the books, that’d be true.
But the threads in question here are specifically about a TV show which is just now airing for the first time. There are lots of people who are only experiencing the story at the pace that the new medium is taking them. Why are you all so fucking butthurt if we have a place to discuss the show?
That’s the key element in all of this. No one is asking anyone else not to discuss the whole story - there are threads in which spoilers are open and welcomed, for people who know the whole story to discuss it. There’s a very active spoiler thread discussing the TV show. So why the fuck do you all have a hardon for crushing the non-spoiler discussion? How is it hurting you?
Going to a discussion which we all agreed would be the place to go to discuss the show without spoilers for the rest of the story, and then dropping spoilers, is closer to going to the Harry Potter release and yelling SNAPE KILLED DUMBLEDORE! than how you’re trying to paint it.
I will point out that the current method has been very successful. Before we split it up this way, the discussion was an absolute trainwreck - and almost entirely due to the assholes who had the attitude of “I’ll decide what you should know and what you shouldn’t, and if you aren’t happy with that, well fuck you, you little snowflake”. Threadshitting abounded.
There’s nothing on these boards that gets people to so consistently act like petulant children than the issue of spoilers. Some people seem to take more offense at the idea of people asking not to be spoiled than they would to having their own mothers raped.
Or, you know, create a discussion with likeminded people who have the same intent and ask anyone else not to come shit in our punchbowl. Which is what happened. Which has worked for the most part.
No one can ever fucking point out to me why “never discuss this thing you’re interested in with anyone else, and avoid all possible sources of information about it” is superior to “find likeminded people who are experiencing it at the same pace you are and discuss it with them”
Yet it’s repeated over and over as if it were some self evident truth.
Why would a person who hadn’t watched an episode of the series be reading the threads about episodes in season 2? It’s not a spoiler to discuss what happened in season 1 in a season 2 thread. But there are instances where what you just said could be a spoiler - like if you were talking about another show’s thread and said “when this character died, it was like when Ned in GOT got his head chopped off” - it would indeed justify being spoiler boxed in that instance.
By the way, I almost entirely ignored this thread because I suspect one of the petulant assholes would deliberately spoil the show and yell HAHA THIS IS THE PIT, ROBB RAPES EVERYBODY or whatever major spoiler. Please don’t do that. Unambiguous dick move.