Why I Don't Care About Spoilers (And Neither Should You)

Spoilers: This is a discussion of Spoilers and the nature of Spoilers, so there will be Spoilers.

Many of my friends take notice of the fact that I don't care about spoilers when it comes to the ending of movies, games, TV show seasons, or basically any other narrative that has a beginning, a middle, and an end (maybe not necessarily in that order). I imagine they sometimes wonder why it doesn't bother me when spoilers seem to irk everyone else, that it's the pinnacle of rudeness to talk about the end of the movie right when you're leaving the theater, and I've been thinking about it a lot, too.

Then along came Madoka Magicka, a show that I was told was basically what would happen if David Lynch wrote a Magical Girl Anime. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Most of what I heard was that there was this really misleading promotional campaign that gave you the idea that it was a pretty typical Magical Girl Anime, and then when it comes out, everyone's amazed that it actually turned out to be pretty dark and everyone was super shocked at the fact that it happened.

By the spoilers logic, it had already been ruined for me.

I watched it anyway.

When I did, I was pretty disappointed at what I saw. The characters weren't all that memorable, I didn't really care about their conflict, I just thought the Witch sequences were confusing and disjointed, the ending was very meh and the fact that a lot of this was a character meatgrinder made it difficult for me to get invested.

Now, you may be saying “It just sounds like the spoilers ruined the show for you,” but then I thought about other stories that I really liked that I saw when I already knew how they ended when a big chunk of them was the twist. Two things come to mind immediately-- The Twilight Zone and The Others.

The Others had the twist that Nicole Kiddmann and her kids were actually the ghosts haunting the house the whole time, and the titular others were actually alive. I already knew this when I watched the movie, but when I watched it, I sympathized with the characters. I felt bad for the fact that they had no idea what had happened to them, their struggle resonated with me, their terror felt true, even though I already knew how it ended, that I already knew what the big reveal was going to be. What was once a twist ending became a really compelling use of Dramatic Irony, in which the audience knows something the characters don't.

The Twilight Zone practically codified the twist ending, and virtually everyone already knows most of them. “To Serve Man” was about aliens who helped humanity, but the reason they were so generous and benevolent was to farm people for food. One of my favorite episodes, “The Passersby,” was about a man at the end of the Civil War who stopped by a woman's house for a rest while he walked down a road, and it turned out that everyone on that road was someone who died during the war. “The Passersby,” however, doesn't bother me with the spoilers and is actually one I can watch over and over again because I love the character interaction and the dialogue, and the ending when Abraham Lincoln comes down the road makes me tear up every time.

Suddenly, it seems like knowing the twists shouldn't hurt the story all that much.

When I watched Madoka Magicka, though, it fell apart almost immediately because it relied completely on the shock value. It, for one, required the audience to have a preconception of what a Magical Girl anime should be like, and for another, required you to not expect that it would be dark. When the big twist about the soul gems came up, it felt so flat. It fell flat because I saw it coming. It's Shock Art, and Shock Art's value dies along with the initial surprise. After that point, it's just... Nothing.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that, to make a good short story, your audience should know what's going to happen right from the beginning. The story should be enjoyable because it and the characters were compelling, not because of a twist, flashy effects, or because of this outdated fascination with shock value that has died now that nothing is shocking anymore.

If you're tempted to be upset at someone for giving spoilers, consider this: if you know the beginning and the end of a story, and have no interest in how they got from one to the other, then maybe it's not worth your time.

Timere Defectum.

Note: I probably won't be talking about Madoka Magicka at length because I said everything I can think of that's worth saying already.