A bit of a first world problem rant.
I started reading indie/trad published English books back in 2020 going from online only fiction and manga and it was great. Found books I love, books I hate, discovered some good non fiction. I was glad to find other things I could enjoy.
Except, one thing. Spoilers. And I don’t mean the spoilers themselves. I hate how people treated spoilers.
As a lover of lore intensive manga and translated works I’m very used to looking up lore or things in stories that I don’t understand. A lot of times it was easy to find other people having the same questions as me online, the answers in online forums and google searches helped. Especially without mentioning major series ending spoilers.
Idk what’s with English reading community but the way everyone acts with spoilers that is very annoying. Gatekeeping treatment with spoilers even when someone asks for them or doesn’t mind them and they get attacked. Incompleted wikis with unspoilered tagged series ending info. Book ending reveals especially on a topic that isn’t even related to the ending!
Plus, so many fictional readers I found were extremely obnoxious and juvenile. I wanted to know if my theory about a character in Lies of Locke by Scott Lynch was right and the suspense was killing me, the reader I made the mistake of asking kept mocking me saying, “haha, not gonna tell you, go read till the end.”
The incomplete wikis didn’t help either and since I didn’t wanna be spoiled about the actual ending I couldn’t even look it up. I wasn’t on reddit at the time so I didn’t know I could make a post on r/fantasy and ask there.
My frustrations mainly are why it’s so hard to look up things in a book without being completely spoiled about something you weren’t even looking for when it comes to english books.
by Lost-Yoghurt4111
1 Comment
I don’t really know how to respond to this comment. I’m someone who generally doesn’t care about spoilers. For me, it’s more about the journey than the destination. If there’s a “twist” ending, I want to know if it was earned and see how the author got there; it makes otherwise anodyne stories more interesting.
That said, it tends to be fairly all or nothing. You can find out what happens, or you can keep yourself in suspense. I don’t think there’s much middle ground, and I’m not sure why you’d expect one. For me personally, I feel like I can appreciate the craft more when I have a general sense of the story arc. I care less about what happens than how it happens.