I wrote this morning’s top story at Wired.com: “The New Spoiler Culture: Game of Thrones and the Fight to Live Uninformed.” I spoke with critics Alyssa Rosenberg, Alan Sepinwall, and Maureen Ryan, and fansite honchos Elio García Jr. of Westeros, Phil Bicking of Winter Is Coming, and John Jasmin of Tower of the Hand [plus Mindset from the wonderful tumblr Nobody Suspects the Butterfly, though that ended up on the cutting room floor 🙁 ] about the complex interplay of books, show, DVRs, DVDs, streaming, readers vs. non-readers, social media, forums, Tumblr, Twitter, etc etc in keeping people free of information they don’t want to know about a given work of fiction. Thanks very much to editor Laura Hudson for making it happen.
How great is that banner image, by the way?
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, alan sepinwall, alyssa rosenberg, Elio García Jr., fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, John Jasmin, Laura Hudson, maureen ryan, Phil Bicking, Tower of the Hand, TV, Westeros.org, Winter Is Coming, Wired
Good article – but I think you missed the bigger (if that’s the right word?) question: best exemplified (maybe?) in that Alyssa Rosenberg comment about how she says she doesn’t care about spoilers: like – basically – how some people (particularly in the media it seems) have this need to be the first to report on something and say: “oh yeah – Rosebud is his sled.” etc and they take pleasure from being the people to report it as if (somehow) by being the person who tells you what the twist is they manage to put themselves on the same level as the people who made the film/book/tv show whatever (which makes me think of this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/person-one-season-ahead-in-tv-show-doling-out-coun,31340/ )
That Sepinwall quote about: “everyone seems to think that what they’re about to write will somehow not give anything away, when it always, always does.” really touched home: and maybe it’s just the person doing the spoiling wants the attention or the prestige or the power and – yeah – ok: (going deeper) it just seems to be a really good example (or is this going overboard) of a total lack of empathy and seeing things from other people’s point of view.
“Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan takes a Hippocratic “first, do no harm” approach to revealing plot information without warning: “I generally work from the principle, ‘Try not to ruin someone else’s TV-watching experience whenever possible.’” = YES.
““There’s a slightly wearying expectation,” says anti-spoiler advocate Ryan, “that we should always protect everyone’s experience all the time. I’ve been yelled at for writing or tweeting about certain developments three days after the show in question aired. I try to be really careful about not spilling major things without warning, but hey, it’s three days later!” = NO
I guess – what I’m trying to say: is that I would have liked to read about you getting a little bit deeper under these differing points of view and showing how really the connect to two total different world-views: it’s not that one person likes oranges and the other likes apples: it’s that one is more concerned with other people and their pleasure and the other is only concerned with their own (too harsh?)