Re: The Adventures of Peaches, Part Twelve

[rynling]

I want to add that I very much appreciate when people spoil things for me. I only have so many days on this earth, and I need people to tell me when something is worth my time. For example:

Me: I am not watching an entire movie about Bruce Willis being a father figure.
Friend: Actually Bruce Willis is dead, and the kid is the only one who can see his ghost.
Me: That sounds fucking awesome, let's go!

Me: I'm kind of sick of the Harry Potter books. The last one was absolute shit.
Friend: But Dumbledore dies at the end of the newest one, you'll love it.
Me: You know what, I would love that actually!

I think this is even more necessary with video games, especially ones that take 50+ hours to finish. To give an example, I would never have played more than a few hours of Bravely Default if someone hadn't told me what was going on with the character Airy, and it ended up being one of my top ten favorite games of all time.

The same goes for Final Fantasy XII. FFXII is another of my favorite games, but it's undeniable that the first three or four hours are extremely awkward. I didn't play FFXII for years until I read an essay about how Ashe's story arc develops.

I write a fair number of reviews, and I think about this issue a lot in very concrete and practical terms. There's always going to be a delicate balance between explaining what's interesting and compelling about a piece of media and allowing your reader the space to experience it for themselves, but I sometimes feel that the hand-wringing over "posting spoilers on the internet" may have gone a bit overboard.

Comments

[lassarina]

My take on spoilers is absolutely that I want to know that's what I'm hitting. Just tag them and, ideally, give me a method (such as clear space so I can click away without seeing, or a cut tag, or highlight-to-read) to avoid the spoiler if that's what I want to do. Sometimes I want spoilers! Sometimes it really impacts my enjoyment of the material to have been unwillingly spoiled. IDK. Is it weird to use the phrase "Informed consent" for spoilers?

[rynling]

That's a really apt way of putting it!

If I have to choose, I tend to prioritize informed consent regarding story content over informed consent regarding spoilers. This is usually the case when the "spoiler" is so central to the premise that it's meaningless to write about the work without discussing it, and I think this is especially the case for work with strong elements of horror.

To give a concrete example, Sayaka Murata's novel Earthlings is about how a girl creates a fantasy of being a magical girl in order to justify her murder of the middle-school teacher who brutally raped her. The assault and the harassment leading up to it is described in horrifying detail, so it's not fair to anyone to try to write about (or market) the story as an amusing and lighthearted portrait of a cute twelve-year-old girl pretending to be Sailor Moon.

Also, although I understand the difficulties of gaming journalism (in which reviewers are often expected to work from demo copies that aren't representative of the actual game content), I think it's a worthwhile project to provide accurate descriptions of video games, even if it does "spoil" the story a bit.

For example: "Final Fantasy XII is a story about Ashe, a self-exiled princess who seeks to reclaim the right to the throne of her kingdom. The player witnesses Ashe's decisions and character development through the eyes of Vaan, a commoner who gradually comes to understand that the struggle over Ashe's kingdom is linked to the fate of all humankind."

Is much more interesting than: "Final Fantasy XII is a story about the adventures of Vaan, a teenage orphan who aspires to become a sky pirate and inadvertently rescues a beautiful but imperiled princess named Ashe from the clutches of an evil empire."

I guess what I'm saying is that, while I understand that not everyone shares my stance on wanting to know interesting plot details before investing time in a piece of media, I think treating everything as a "spoiler" that needs to be warned for or hidden behind a cut often doesn't serve a meaningful purpose. In most cases, the reviewer's good judgment will suffice, and it bothers me how a lot of online entertainment journalism outlets cater to the lowest common denominator of "people who enjoy getting angry and leaving bad-faith comments."

I'm guessing you probably agree with me about this. Still, this is something I've been thinking about for a while now, and I really appreciate you giving me an opportunity to articulate my thoughts!

[lassarina]

I think the first description is much more accurate (and interesting!) a pitch for FFXII, and I also don't think it has any spoilers in it, or at least not anything I'd consider a spoiler.

In a romance reading/reviewing Discord that I joined, people will say "content notes" and then the brief summary (e.g. loss of parent, grief, stalking, assault, etc.) will be behind one set of spoiler bars and the more detailed discussion will be behind another. I think that's an appropriate way of letting people choose what they want to see - sometimes I just need to know that a book will, broadly, have a Nope Topic (or confirm that the topics on offer are not my personal Nope.) I don't think that something that's the definition of a whole twist - like for example discussing a Shyamalan movie by explaining the twist at the end, or a murder mystery by naming the culprit - belongs outside the cut.

But like - I had the ending of FFXIII-2 spoiled for me in a top level comment and that really impacted my enjoyment of the game because I sat there dreading that ending the whole time and couldn't engage with the story as much. And that, I dislike.

[rynling]

I had the ending of FFXIII-2 spoiled for me in a top level comment and that really impacted my enjoyment of the game

I hear you and completely understand where you're coming from. At the same time, I will be forever grateful to the person who spoiled the endgame plot developments of XIII-2 in an epic rant post. To hell that stupid game and all of its stupid endings.

When it comes to online fan forums, though, I agree that using spoiler tags in posts and comments is just good etiquette. The system on your Discord server sounds ideal tbh. Thanks for sharing that!

[lassarina]

I am so mad about XIII-series (and all of the Nova Crystallis Fabula games in different ways - I have a rant post I've been meaning to write for literal years) for that, yeah. And like - I genuinely don't know if I'd be less angry if I had experienced it "organically"? I feel like that particular spoiler stripped me of the ability to engage with the game on its own terms and be angry with it (because I would have been angry) because I was invested rather than because I never got the chance to think about it without that shadow hanging over my head. But mostly I am mad because I didn't get to choose.

(I likewise had a huge plot twist for an FFXIV expansion--and there are twists and they're often very good--spoiled for me not because I went looking, but because someone shared their fic post from AO3, and someone had made character tags into synned spoilers, less than 3 weeks after a 60-hour game came out. That also angered me, though more at AO3 for "what the fuck are you doing making that reveal public in tags by synning character names" than for the writer, who hadn't realized what had happened.)

anyway just. let people choose whether or not to be spoiled, I am begging the internet to consider.