Fiction Friction (#21): Spoilers!

These posts are meant to bring about some conversation, discussion, and perhaps even a debate. These discussion posts can occur at varying days of the week, mostly depending upon what's scheduled on the blog and what I feel like discussing.

(Slightly off topic, but show of hands, who read that title in River's voice? :P )

Spoilers have always been an interesting topic for me to discuss with others because I love spoilers. I live for them. I constantly go out of my way to spoil something for myself. [Edit: Due to recent drama, I want to clarify that I never spoil things for other people unless they ask me to. I know most people hate spoilers, and I'd never do that to someone who doesn't want to know. And if any of my posts contain spoilers, I always include spoiler tags so that people know.] Sometimes I regret it; most of the time, I do it shamelessly. I think it all started when I started reading Nancy Drew as a child. I always skipped to the end to see who was the culprit, often even before reading the first page. Maybe it became a habit, maybe I had always destined to love spoilers. But I never minded. I liked doing it, and I began to do that with all the books I read. Then, when I became a fangirl, I started doing the same with TV shows. I would search up spoilers/episode summaries if I didn't get to watch an episode/show live. When I was younger, I never thought it wasn't normal. I knew it wasn't necessarily a common thing, but I didn't know that people would find it wrong or whatnot.

But now I know better. People are so utterly against spoilers. I understand, I do, and sometimes, I'm glad I wasn't spoiled about something. I think that The Fault in Our Stars would have been very different and I wouldn't have experienced it the same way had I known about [***spoilers if you're really that paranoid and/or honestly don't know, but come on***] Augustus dying. But those are a few cases out of many for me. Take, for instance, Allegiant. I haven't read it yet, but I know that whole big spoiler thing, and I don't mind. 

For me, books, movies, TV shows, etc are more about the journey, about the stuff in between. Yes, as I mentioned, there are some spoilers/plot twists I'm glad I didn't hear about and some that I regretted/was sad about knowing before its time, but I'm usually okay with it. Just because you know how something ends doesn't mean that you can't fully experience the rest of it. It doesn't mean you can't still get all the feels when something big/bad happens. 

But now, at what point do I want to know vs. when I'm glad I didn't know beforehand? It's a really fine line for me and one I can only really judge afterward. With TFiOS, I read it soon after it came out and didn't feel the urge to skip to the end. That urge has gotten a lot worse lately, but there are also books like We Were Liars and Every Last Word where I was just so caught up in the story that I didn't really think about skipping ahead. And for both of those, boy am I glad I wasn't spoiled. I think that maybe sometimes, I like spoilers because they're something, a point in a book/tv show/movie/etc, that I can look forward to if I ever get bored or tired or whatever. I don't know how that twist happens, what caused it/led up to it, and so I continue reading because I want to know or because I want to know the effects of it. 

I know, however, that the majority of people hate spoilers and avoid it like it was the Plague or something. Some people just can't understand how people could like, even love, spoilers. They think that it takes away from the experience or detracts from what the creator intended. I don't know. I don't agree with that. 

How do you feel about spoilers? If you hate them/don't like them, why?