"Spoilers" and "Speculation"

[jack]

There is always a continuum when people warn that something contain spoilers. Most of the time, I default to a stance of "I care about important stuff, but normally minor details and general plot outlines are ok". That reflects how I like to read/watch something: normally I'm happy to know that level of detail beforehand.

And for some things, I'm likely never going to read it, so the risk that I'll later want to, and regret hearing about it, is very low.

Conversely, for latest episodes of things I've been avidly following, I really really don't want to know. Not even not-spoilers like "there's a big twist at the end but I'm not telling you what it is" or "Hey, the previous comment was a spoiler, wasn't it? :)" Yeah, normally those don't matter, but if you're following something carefully and know the writing style that's often enough to give away something major early.

Of course, the trouble is that although sometimes these categories are the same for different people (eg. many people care about something newly released, few people care about something really old unless it has a very specific twist), sometimes they're not, and it's too much hassle to have SEVERAL levels of warnings for "OK, this bit has MINOR spoilers, this bit has MAJOR MAJOR spoilers, etc, etc" and people don't always guess right. I think it's probably still best to take the best guess you can (generally avoiding BIG BLATANT SPOILERS in eg. headlines, but sometimes making spoiler-free posts and sometimes making minor-spoiler posts depending on context) rather than be maximally paranoid all the time.[1]

But...?

A related category is "speculation". I think the trouble here is that people are unfamiliar with the range it may encompass.

"Speculation" based on leaks from the creator(s) is clearly spoilers, though it depends how common those are, and whether they're specifically leaks about upcoming stuff, or public comments about previous stuff. We maybe need a separate word for the latter, which some people like but some people would want to avoid.

"Speculation" based solely on widely available facts in the source. I think this is normally not spoilers, though a few people still don't like it. Basically, it's normally more about wish-fulfilment from the speculator than any actual information to me.

However, I think there's a category I hadn't previously realised was distinct, which is "Speculation" based on things in the source that are easily missed and/or writing style of the author, where it is likely to reveal new information to the reader, even if that was already implicit in the books they've already seen.

I wonder, do we need another word for that category? It seems like something people who avoid actual spoilers may or may not be happy with. The trouble is, it's hard for the person saying it to tell the difference between "Hey, I just spotted X in the book and now it seems certain" and "Hey, character X and character Y are going to get together in Luv and that's for certain because I really really want it to be true" because both seem certain to them.

[1] *thinks* Didn't someone say there was a book they wanted to recommend to me when I'd forgotten what inspired them to suggest it, because that itself was a spoiler? If so, I've forgotten, so... :)

Comments

[naath]

[1] I think may have been an Egan short story (there's at least one where I've done that to people before) you should read them all anyway because they are all fab (but possibly not all at ONCE some of them are depressing).

I once made an LJ post that was entirely co-incidentally spoilerific for something completely other than what it was actually about. Which was kinda hilarious to me at the time, and I did wonder whether I should tag it as such or not (tagging it as such would mean that people who had already read it but not known about it's spoilerness would now be spoiled).

I think speculation and/or analysis do fine for the things you are talking about. I know some people like to avoid them entirely but other people do like to read them as they go along. Not exactly a spoiler though.

I think I'd generally LJ-cut or spoiler-warn anything that even might be spoilers (if I knew that), with an attempt to say what sort of spoilers. To allow people to make up their own minds about whether to read it.

[lokifan]

In the "just spotted x..." type, I think it's speculation, still. That said, my first fandom was Harry Potter, where speculation was most often that type, and very much what you expected.