What's the worst spoiler you've ever uttered? (There may be spoilers in this thread.)

Cafe Society
1

My delightful wife has started reading the book that I just finished, and it has reminded me of an incident that lives in infamy at our house.

On that grim occasion, my wife was reading a book that I had read much earlier, while I was reading a different book. (No, I’ve learned my lesson - if nobody knows what books I’m talking about, nothin’s spoiled for nobody!) I was suddenly struck by the notion that the protagonist of my book might have been named for someone important to her book. Looking over, I asked her where she was in the book. She casually looked and said “Oh, about halfway.” I said “So has he tried to get the writer out of Germany yet?”, as my hunch was that the guy in my book was named for the writer. I knew instantly, pinned by her withering glance, that I had committed an unforgivable outrage. In case I hadn’t realized it yet, she said, in a tone that froze the potted herbs by the kitchen sink, "No, he’s just booked a train ticket to Switzerland - nobody’s said anything about Germany YET!

You see, it was the way in which I had said ‘tried’ - the next two hundred pages of her book were ruined by the knowledge that her protagonist would hear about a writer, end up going to Germany and worst of all, the use of the word ‘try’ carried with it the connotation of effort and failure. Almost hourly, I was smacked with that rather thick tome until she was past the moment where the writer was not got out of Germany. That was over twenty years ago, and it still gets mentioned anytime I try to discuss a book that I’ve read and she hasn’t.

The very worst of it was that I was completely and utterly wrong - there wasn’t the remotest similarity of the name of the German writer unsuccessfully rescued and the protagonist of the novel I was reading. I don’t even think they were the same number of syllables.

How about you - have you ever accidentally spoiled a book, movie, play for someone in the course of discussing it? Please share…

2

I wasn’t the guilty party here; I was the victim.

Several years ago, I had requested a copy of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain for Christmas, and my brother obliged.

My evil stepmother stepped in and said "Oh, that’s just the best book. But wasn’t it sad at the end, when he’d travelled all that way to get back to Ada and then got killed?

3

Once I was participating in a Civil War thread in GD, and I let slip that the Union won.

This came as a great shock to all those Rebel enthusiasts who are still fighting the war.

4

I’m going through Season 1 of House again with my wife, who’s never seen it, and last night we watched an episode with Sarah Clarke as the POTW. When she was all sympathetic-looking in the hospital bed, I muttered “Bitch!” (Haw, haw, haw!)

Wife asks, “Why?” and I say, “Oh, just can’t help seeing her as Nina Meyers.”

Did I mention that we’re also about half-way through the first season of 24, too? I feel awful about it.

5

Years back, My mom was reading Beach Music -P. Conroy.

My Aunt, her sister bought a copy some time after

Aunt: Did you get to the part where

The mom dies?

Mom: I did now, thanks!

6

I was on a first date with a girl back in high school, and we went to see Malice. I had never seen the movie before, nor did I know how the movie ended, but about a minute or two before it was revealed I whispered to my date:

Watch, the kid’s blind.

I apparently said this loud enough for a few other people to hear, and they were not pleased at all. Obviously they thought I was trying to ruin the movie. Funny thing, that was the first and last date I had with that girl. :frowning:

7

I introduced a bunch of my friends to the TV show Lost (apparently I wasn’t the only one who got the impression that Lost was a lame reality show with one of the hobbits), and it was very hard to discuss the show with them without letting things slip left and right. It wasn’t intentional, but so much stuff happens on that show that I had a hard time remembering what they have and hadn’t seen yet. However, one of my friends got the maddest at me when I actually fed her a false spoiler that

Claire gets killed by the Others

leaving out the part that she gets better a couple episodes later. Although, in retrospect, maybe that was the truth afterall?
When Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince was leaked online about a week before it hit stores, it was posted to the usenet ebooks group under the subject

Snape Kills Dumbledore! Read all about it here!

sure enough, the subject was telling the truth, and the whole book was there.

8

My brother and I sat down to watch Fight Club. I had never seen it. Toward the beginning, I saw a human looking flash on the screen. I thought I was going nuts. “Did I just see a person flash on the screen? What the hell was that?”

And my brother goes

“Oh, that’s just Tyler Durden being created in the narrator’s mind. Watch.”

:smack:

9

So are we extending the intent of the OP to include being a victim instead of the revealer now? Many of the posters here seem to be doing so.

That’s not what the OP asked to begin with.

:smiley:

10

A few years ago I got reprimanded here for revealing the end of The Usual Suspects.

11

I caught the last five minutes of The Usual Suspects, where the cop is looking around his office putting all the “clues” together and Kevin Spacey is sauntering out the door. There’s no point in watching the rest of the movie after seeing that.

My girlfriend got spoiled on an excellent Dollhouse reveal:

[spoiler]She of course recognizes Alan Tudyk as Wash from Firefly. But we hadn’t gotten to the reveal of him as Alpha just yet. In that episode (Briar Rose) he first appears as Stephen Kepler, an architect who worked on the Dollhouse. He’s agoraphobic, grows weed, drinks recycled urine (also has Pom!) and is generally a wonderful living example of Alan Tudyk’s amazing comedic skills. But near the end of the episode he takes a scalpel and slashes the shit out of Victor, thus revealing him as badass super-killer Alpha. It’s an awesome reveal.

Unfortunately I mentioned one night that a new episode of Dollhouse was going to be on. My girlfriend caught a part of it, recognized Alan Tudyk immediately and saw a scene where he is clearly identified as Alpha. So unfortunately when we got to Briar Rose there was absolutely no surprise in the reveal.

However, she remains unspoiled about Senator Perrin. And of course no one could have imagined Boyd…[/spoiler]

12

Am I the only one who really doesn’t care if I know the plot of books? There is no way to “spoil” a book for me. In fact, I’ve been known to skip ahead and find the resolution to certain plot elements if they’re intriguing enough that they interfere with me reading the book (as in: I want to know X enough that I find myself speed reading or skipping over bits of the book that don’t involve X.) The fun in a book is the reading itself; the plot is important, but not the only aspect of it.

Movies, it bothers me a little bit more, but not horribly.

13

I spoiled Little Women for someone, and will never forgive myself. I feel guilty every time I think about it.

14

My mom had seen The Crying Game. I hadn’t.
Me: “Don’t tell me about it. There’s supposed to be a big surprise ending and I’m trying not to find out what it is.”

RobotMom: “You mean that the woman turns out to be a man?”

(pause)

Me: “Yeah, that was probably it.”

15

Some time ago, the US beat Mexico 2-0 in soccer. I posted about it here under the title “US 2, Mexico 0” not realizing that others had recorded but not yet watched the game.

16

Similar for me … I had complained in a Pit thread that Sportcenter kept announcing World Cup results immediately before showing the match … as in, “Upper Volta beat Asscrackistan 1 - Nil. Now stay tuned for Upper Volta versus Asscrackistan.”

At the end of it I complained that I knew that the US had lost before I even watched the match (or whatever the result was) … but it hadn’t been shown on the west coast yet. Oops.

17

My wife loves spoilers, and I don’t mind them much at all, so it really didn’t occur to me to spoiler tag the fact that

Wesley dies in the last episode of Angel when we were discussing it here the next day. Ditto Wash biting it in Serenity. I was taken to task for these oversights. Now I spoiler tag everything!

18

My husband and I were watching Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, with Leonardo DeCaprio and Claire Danes. Near the end, I said to SpouseO, “that’s a little different in the play.” He was curious, and asked what made it different. So I went on and on about how

Paris killed Mercutio, then Romeo kills Paris at the crypt, but drinks the poison and on and on and there’s basically bodies strewn everwhere, in addition to those of our two lovers. Not only did my husband not know that Paris was left out of the movie entirely, he didn’t know that Romeo and Juliet kill themselves.

SpouseO was pretty mad - “guess I don’t have to watch the ending anymore.” I was all, “what? It’s Romeo and Juliet! You read this in high school! Everyone knows how it ends!”

Apparently he didn’t.

19

It depends for me on how integral the “spoiler” is to the plot. If it’s the sort of thing that smashes into a decent existence, ruins the relationships and turns everyone’s lives on their head, and is really near the end of the work, I’d rather not know at all. Same with a “whodunnit” - if it doesn’t matter who did it, then I’d prefer to watch a Columbo episode where that’s the conceit of the work, that you know in the first 5 minutes who did it and how, and you watch Columbo doggedly pursue that suspect throughout the episode until he traps the person into tripping up.

I guess it also depends on how well-written the book is - if it’s light fare where the mystery is the thing, don’t spoil me, that’s the pleasure of it!

If it’s just something more minor like who a character ends up with romantically or where they go or whatever, then I have no problem. Same with something that happens partway through and isn’t that surprising once you consider the options. Like in House of Leaves:

The house ends up to not only have mysterious extra-dimensional spaces, but also sort of a sentience of its own - and it’s very malevolent.

I don’t remember my worst spoilage, but I’ll give that of a friend when we were walking out of Highlander 2 (aka, “There should have been only one!”). We were in college and went opening weekend, so there were decent crowds to see this followup to a cult classic. We walked out of the theater, with a line ready to enter for the next showing after the space was cleaned up, and she burst out with:

“I can’t believe they killed Sean Connery!”

There were a lot of disappointed-looking people after that outburst. (Probably even more after they sat through that film!)

20

Athena I can only speak for myself, but you are unusual, if not unique, in your nonchalance about spoilers. For me, how the author, director, poet, composer has chosen to unveil the plot is a massive part of my appreciation of the work. Plus, when I am away from the piece, (this is more for books than anything else; I don’t like to watch films, plays or experience music in bits and pieces here and there.) if the work is at all engaging, I will daydream about the characters and their actions, and imagine how the whole thing will turn out. Rather like a labyrinth, it is the relationship between me as observer/participant, the journey and the destination that stimulates me.

It matters enough to me that I take great care to avoid finding out about plot matters. I no longer read the backs of/inside covers of books - there was an edition of a Raymond Chandler where the excerpt chosen for the inside cover came from the second last page of the book. As of about halfway into the book, I realized there was only one way that combination of people could come about, and the only remaining question was what would happen after. Sweet F.A. was the answer to that question.

Classics and Great Works of Literature are particularly prone to being spoiled by people who can’t seem to remember that there is a first experience for everyone. Yes, most folks in our culture know how R&J ends, but imagine the pleasure for someone who didn’t know that ending. What would it be like to experience a masterpiece fresh? We can still experience that freshness with lesser know Shakespeare, but I’m always conscious that “Hmm, there’s a reason Timon of Athens isn’t done that often…”

I have a copy of a Great Work of Russian Literature where the cover painting is ‘The Death of {a major character in this work}’. It wasn’t only the fact that the character dies that was revealed, the fact that the painting revealed where he died gave the game away when you were supposed to be thinking he died somewhere outside 150 pages into the book.

I have the same problem with series fiction, which is why I try to read an author’s work in sequence. When I read a certain mystery series, I read the fourth book first - much later, when I tracked down the first book in the series, the detective was engaged in investigating the death of someone who helped him in the fourth book. I spent the whole time reading the first book saying to myself “Yep, he’s got a good balance between revealing and concealing clues here. Too bad I already know where this is going, 'cause this would have totally taken me by surprise.”