I like seeing the previews. I want to get some hints, and that’s a you get is hints.
Do you get all upset about movie trailers too?
There’s such a thing as carrying spoiler-phobia a little too far you, you know. There’s a difference between not wanting plot points or reveals spoiled and clapping your hands over your ears at every minor thing.
“It says that House is baffled by a patient with a strange set of symptoms tonight.”
“Auugghhh!! Don’t tell me, don’t tell me.”
There’s a point at which that kind of thing just starts becoming self-important and even rude. It’s just a TV show, after all. Nobody killed your dog.
You accuse me of overreacting by overreacting yourself. Nice.
Some shows give you teasers or previews. Other shows give you genuine spoilers. I’m obviously annoyed at the ones that give you spoilers (without asking you if you wanted them). I know I can turn over or mute. I wasn’t complaining about being forced to watch them. I wasn’t really complaining at all if I’m being pedantic about it - my OP asked why they do it and who wants them to do it.
What pisses me off is the TV shows on DVD that have spoilers (House, Law and Order), where, when you select an episode to watch, it displays a synopsis of that episode (sometimes describing plot points that only happen halfway through) before you can watch the episode. WTF!?!
24 on DVD is bad about that. When you go to select an episode to watch, they have one of the scenes playing in the background, and it’s often the most dramatic scene, which means it might be one of the most spoiler-y scenes. For those of us who had to watch the season after it aired and therefore the DVDs are the first time watching, it’s annoying.
But there is a difference between reading a book once through for the first time, and then again later, and simply looking at the end first. If you read the end first it’s like you’re starting out on that second read without having had that first pleasure of reading without knowing what will happen. It’s that mindset that I can’t understand.
I watched all three seasons of Arrested Development through Netflix a few years ago.
When I was almost finished with season three, I just happened to mention to a friend that I always have to scramble for the remote so the next episode wasn’t spoiled by “On the next Arrested Development…”
My friend stared at me in horror.
“You haven’t been watching those?” he asked.
“What? Of course not. I never do. I hate having shows ruined by what’s coming on the next episode.”
Turns out that AD makes fun of this device. They never showed what was going to happen on the next episode. It was always some weird twist on a scene from the current episode.
A few years later I went back and watched it all again…and never skipped them. They were sometimes the funniest part of the show.
I actually get more annoyed my movie trailers, since they are harder to avoid, and seem to be made by stupider people. They tend to give a bit more away. In mystery movies, this is particularly devastating since it ruins the suspense and detective work of the audience. Although this can sometimes be helpful with comedy movies, because you know they put all the funniest jokes in the trailer, so if the trailer isn’t stellar, you know that they used up all of the good jokes already and there are no fresh ones left for the rest of the movie.
There’s more to novels than just the suspense of who lives and who dies. Sometimes people want to enjoy the story itself but don’t really want the anxiety of investing in characters who die. My Mom, for example, doesn’t like to see movies where a child dies, and she’ll ask me to look up that specific spoiler for movies with child characters. There are quite a few people who don’t want to read a book unless they know that any animals/pets are safe.
I actually did that today, reading Duma Key, to see if a particular character was going to die (I was clever enough with my skimming to be able to find out that specific fact without spoiling anything else), because things were getting just a little bit too intense.
I used to have a habit of reading the very last page only, because it usually made absolutely no sense outside of the context of the rest of the novel, and it lead to double satisfaction at the end, both for getting the ending in context, and also in solving the mystery of what context made that ending make sense.
I love “next week” teasers, if they are done well, building anticipation without really revealing anything important or that was supposed to be a surprise.
Oh geez. I didn’t bother to read through the entire thread (what was the final ruling? or is that a spoiler? lol). But the answer seems really frigging obvious to me. What constitutes a spoiler for a particular thread should be explicitly stated in the OP. If a poster objects, they can start another thread with different spoiler rules.
I hate movie trailers that show jokes. Jokes are best the first time they’re shown and I want to experience them in the context of the movie, not have the experience wasted on a preview.
I also hate movie trailers that reveal significant plot points that in the context of the story are supposed to be surprises.
If only. I’d love previews this vague.
Anxiety or other strong emotions are tools of a writer. You’re essentially robbing the writer of a significant portion of the impact of a story.
I never thought that a Harry Potter book could have a strong emotional impact on me, but when one of the Weasley twins was killed, it had a strong emotional effect, one that I would have missed out on if I had known about it in advance.
I get pissed at the announcement after every Rubicon episode-“In exactly one minute you will see excerpts from next week’s episode.” Then almost two minutes later, they flash the player credits on the bottom 40% of the screen and show excerpts in the upper right 25% corner.
Like in life, it’s the journey, not the final destination that counts. I look forward to the “On the next…” at the end of TV shows; it gives me something to anticipate.