Spoilers Aren't the Crime You Think They Are

Two things, to start. If you don’t want to hear spoilers about anything, this isn’t the post for you. Spoilers don’t bother me, and I’m going to say that even though it gets me in trouble every time it comes up. I’ve had endings ruined for books I hadn’t read yet, movies, once a whole board game campaign’s final twist, and it has never once cost me the experience the way people insist it will. If a story only works because you didn’t see the ending coming, that’s a structural problem with the story, not a crime committed by whoever mentioned it to me in the break room.

What actually gets under my skin is the opposite instinct, the idea that withholding information is automatically good craft. I read a chunk of The Fifth Season not knowing where three separate timelines were headed and loved every page of not knowing, but that wasn’t because Jemisin was hiding the ball from me for its own sake, it was because the not knowing was doing real work, building dread and connection at the same time. Compare that to a book that’s just sitting on a twist for two hundred pages because somebody told the author twists are what readers want. I can usually tell the difference by page fifty, and if it’s the second kind I’d honestly rather someone just tell me and save me the two hundred pages.

Same instinct applies at the game table, oddly. I don’t mind if somebody tells me the endgame condition of a game before I’ve played it, in fact I prefer it, because knowing where a game is headed lets me actually engage with the decisions instead of fumbling around blind for the first half hour figuring out what even matters. Marcus is the one at our table who looks stuff up on his phone mid game instead of letting the argument drag on, and I used to find that mildly annoying until I noticed it was the same instinct. He wants the actual information so we can get back to playing instead of guessing. That’s not cheating. That’s efficient.

The people this actually bothers, the ones who go quiet and grim if you mention a plot point from a book that came out a decade ago, I think are protecting something other than the story itself. They want the specific experience of discovery, which is a real thing to want, I’m not saying it isn’t. But treating that want as a universal rule everyone else has to observe, treating a passing mention in a break room as an offense on par with actual rudeness, is where I get off the train. You can want the surprise for yourself without deciding the rest of us owe it to you to stay silent forever.

I’ve started just asking people up front now. Working nights teaches you to ask instead of guess, mostly because guessing wrong costs you time you don’t get back. Do you want to know how this ends or not. Most people say no and I respect that completely, I just wait for them to leave the room before I keep talking. But every so often somebody says go ahead, and those conversations are always better, because we’re actually discussing the thing instead of circling it like it’s live ordnance.