Thanks, but that wasn’t what was confusing me about your post. I gathered that you didn’t, personally, read such sites, but from your post, it seemed you didn’t have a problem with other people reading those sites, but you did have a problem with people posting to those sites. Which doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, one school of thought is that how the story arrives at its ending is more important than the ending itself. There are, for example, plenty of works that spoil themselves from the outset. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet tells you explicitly that no one’s getting out alive. This achieves a specific dramatic effect of tragic inevitability. You know the characters’ love is doomed, which makes the relationship all the more poignant while its occuring. Obviously, not every work is going to want to try to achieve this specific effect, but if a particular audience member really likes that effect, they can, effectively, import it themselves by finding out how the story ends ahead of time, and then watching/reading the story with the outcome already known.
This happened to me not long ago, inadvertently. A movie was coming out, based on a TV show I really liked, and I accidentally read a spoiler about the death of a popuar character from the show. The death was supposed to be shocking and unexpected, and on one level, I regret that I didn’t experience that specific reaction. But on the other hand, knowing that he was going to die gave his other scenes a dramatic weight that would have been absent if I hadn’t expected him not to survive, plus an additional tension of wondering, “Is this going to be the scene where he dies?” Both were entirely valid, engaging ways of watching the movie, and I don’t think it’s possible to say that the movie would have been “better” if I’d gone in without knowing the outcome.
There are, of course, other reasons. Simply not being able to wait to find out what happens is probably a more common one, but there are legitimate aesthetic reasons for spoiling yourself, too.
No, I think it’s rather because some people don’t want to be spoiled, and reviewers want to write for as broad an audience as possible, so they avoid alienating a large (but not necessarily majority) portion of their potential readership. There are plenty of reviewers who do not make any such concession, and are more than willing to give away major plot points in their reviews.
The good ones, of course, let you know about it up front.
Also, Rubystreak, I expect that, coming from me, this will mean absolutely nothing to you, but you’ve completely misunderstood wring’s comments in this thread. Nothing she’s said in here has had anything to do with the appropriateness of spoiling the end of a show’s season in a thread marked as containing spoilers for a specific episode. She was using your thread as an example to make a completely unrelated point.
