Aiya

[petronia]

The tally of uncut HBP spoilers posted by flisters who really should know better currently rests at three. ^^; Guys, I have the book in my purse and will probably be done with it by tonight, so really the onus is on me to flee Livejournal for the day, but just. For future reference and the record:

• "I'm disappointed that there's no [foo]!" is a spoiler.
• "Haven't read the book but haven't been spoilered either, except for the bit about [foo]." is also a spoiler.
• "Insert clever joke about [foo] involving references to other series from which the reader can draw inferences" is a spoiler too.
• Oh, and while I'm on it, joliefolie, "You said JKR said [foo] in an interview and that's not what she did! You gave me incorrect information!" is technically a spoiler as well, although not a serious one. More to the point, am I my brother's Rowling's keeper?

More instances will be added to the list no doubt. Yeah, I know I said the spoiler grace period in practice was 24 hours and that's over.


HBP Reactions by Chapter

Chapter 1: Tony Blair is the half-blood prince! Oh, wait.

Chapter 2: Have I read this fic? Maybe not, come to think of it. It's rather good.

Chapter 3: Aaaaaand the Polite Diss Award goes to Albus Dumbledore! Please approach the stage to receive your trophy, Professor Dumbledore!

Chapter 4: Horace Slughorn. Rowling deals in types but she does have a step up on 90% of the competition insofar as they tend to be satire-types rather than whitebread fantasy arche-types. That is to say, I like the Dickensian in her.

Chapter 5: Bill and Fleur? Did I miss something? (Not facetious. I forgot Lucius Malfoy was in Azkaban until my sister reminded me.) Also, sixth year warfic, ladies and gentlemen boys and girls of all ages, not fifth year, I just love how everyone was that leetle beet wrong.

It's all about Sirius, isn't it; everyone moving around the fact that Sirius isn't there.

Chapter 6: Draco still git - news at eleven!

Ginny and - oh, I see how this is going to be. Pity, if the fandom had known sooner it could've set up a proper Crack Het Pairing Pool.

...Will post more as I read, I guess.

Comments

[incandescens]

(hangs head) I know, I know. I'm sorry.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

*pats* Now I feel bad for telling off my flist. ^^;

[incandescens]

I'm sure we'll live.

(And if not, we will return as Inferi and pull your head off. Grar.)

[sesame-seed.livejournal.com]

Safest bet is to skip the flist entirely; with nine out of every ten posts circling 'round the subject, you won't be missing much anyway.

(Except of course for the fact that LEGEND OF THE GALACTIC HEROES IS BEING SUBBED. The art is more dated than I remembered, and I hate what the character design did to Reinhardt and Siegfried, but LOGH SQUEE.)

[sesame-seed.livejournal.com]

for

If only we had the option to edit comments. >_>

[petronia.livejournal.com]

...What do you mean, LoGH is being subbed? It was subbed before, I have tons of it on tape and even downloaded. o_o Or do you mean officially?

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

Nah, think she just came across the BT subs for the first time. Which aren't really *much* of an improvement over either Sue Shambaugh's or the HK's...just, well, different.

As far as anything 'official' goes, I keep on hearing rumors to the effect of a certain company dangling enough cash in front of Tokuma that they finally stopped being stupid, except then going "oh, fuck, we don't actually have any idea how to actually *market* this, do we"...but for now, those *are* just rumors, and I am entirely uninterested in actually verifying them.

[cis.livejournal.com]

'have I read this fic before' - I started the book on the plane, then finished reading it online because I am a Bad Person, and at some point I suddenly thought- er wait um if I read it online how am I going to remember that it's the real thing and canon and not a fic? ...and then I remembered that no ficcer writes in jkr's style.

[marici.livejournal.com]

I was fooled by one of the OotP fakes, so I was reading, asking myself why on Earth Hermione would wear a string bikini. Then I got the real thing and I couldn't convince myself that it wasn't just a cleverer fake. Funny how the brain works, huh?

[cis.livejournal.com]

Hermione in a string bikini? XDXD Man, I've been out of it, I didn't know there were fakes floating around. I kind of want to read them now!

[fantabulous.livejournal.com]

Yes, the diss in Chapter 3 was HILARIOUS. Score one for Dumbledore, w00t! ;-)

[dipping_sauce]

Chapter 1: Tony Blair is the half-blood prince! Oh, wait.

It's 1996 in Pottertime. That's John Major ^^;

Let the nitpicking begin

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Then Rowling screwed up because she refers to the previous PM as "he". :P

Re: Let the nitpicking begin

[marici.livejournal.com]

All the Brits on my flist have been most offended by that, actually.

Re: Let the nitpicking begin

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, to be honest has HP ever been specifically dated according to the Muggle calendar, or did people just assume the timeline began when the first book came out? ^^; I mean it's more likely she didn't want to date it specifically to 1996 than that she forgot Maggie Thatcher was a woman.

Re: Let the nitpicking begin

[dipping_sauce]

We know CoS was set in 1992, because it was the 500th anniversary of Nearly Headless Nick's death, which was in 1492.

Of course, it is entirely possible Rowling messed up the PMs thing because she is Terrible At Maths.

Re: Let the nitpicking begin

[cis.livejournal.com]

Or she forgot it was meant to be happening in 1996? She's not at her strongest on dates and such details (take the case of charlie and bill's ages for example...).

I rather assumed it was just parallel universe, you know? That she'd rather not have her Prime Minister be associable with anyone in particular, just a generic British PM. Which rather means male.

Re: Let the nitpicking begin

[re-miel.livejournal.com]

"...that she forgot Maggie Thatcher was a woman."
It is not all THAT difficult. :) I mean she did have more balls than John Major and Tony Blair put together (eww..!).
"I may have the body of a week and feeble woman..." (C)

[jantalaimon.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

yeah, i rather liked the bit with Dumbledore. it was by00tiful. XD

[helvetius.livejournal.com]

Ouch, Sabina, ouch. *GRINS*

(You call this pissy?! Ah well, I suppose this is about as pissy as Switzerland usually will get anyway. XD)

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Hmm, is the spoiler period getting shorter and shorter these days? I am actually far more vigilant about them than about any other series... I mean, by these criteria, I and nearly everyone on my flist regularly spoils the WJ chapters within a ten second grace period unless these are particulary DN ch. 50-60 spoilers we're discussing.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I think the "spoiler grace period" in any given situation is a function of how much people may be assumed to care, which is a function of a) how shocking the spoiler and b) how much effort "goes to waste" for you if you're spoilered. If you look at b), being spoilt for a 20-page WJ chapter is much less serious than being spoilt for an entire book or movie. If you look at a), even with WJ series I've noticed people are a lot better about spoiler-cutting for Death Note and Bleach than for Tenipuri. No one cares about Tenipuri spoilers, not even me. XD

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I suppose, although individual WJ chapters can correspond to the "shocking parts" of the book. People weren't spoiling the entire parts of the HP book, only a couple of lines. After all, if it's the apex of a thirty chapter arc, the situation is analoguous. Also, even if people do spoiler-cut mroe for DN and Bleach, they do the things you put as spoilers in your post all the time, but no one complains.

Hmm, if no one cares about TeniPuri spoilers, doesn't it counteract your thesis that the better written a series is the less subsceptible it is to being ruined by spoilers?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

That's not really my thesis. XD I actually think everything is ruined "equally" by spoilering, in the sense that the effect is the same - an element of surprise removed - it's just that the original surprise is more crucial to the enjoyment of certain books/series/movies than others. Tenipuri is not the best-written WJ series ever but no one's reading it to see if Seigaku will win the tournament or not, just like no one watched the latest Star Wars film to see if Anakin turns to the Dark side or not. :P

(Sometimes I daydream about what it must have been like to be an Elizabethan theatre-goer seeing Romeo and Juliet for the first time, with no idea whether the lovers would live or die at the end. It's an old story but I've heard that most popular iterations at the time had a happy ending. I wonder if Shakespeare's twist was as shocking as Hitchcock's Psycho to his audience?)

Also, I can't speak for anyone else, but how much I mind spoilers is directly correlated to the length of the work. If I'm spoilered for a big twist (ex. character death) in a 500-page novel, I will spend the entire time that I'm reading in a sort of annoying state of nagging expectation, waiting for what I'd heard was going to happen to happen, rather than in proper suspense as I should. If I'm spoilered for a WJ chapter, having already read all the chapters preceding it - well, five minutes of harm done at most. XD I actually have a lot of trouble resisting spoilers for serialised stories I care about, but I always regret clicking through afterward. However I've never been unintentionally spoilered for a big plot twist in a WJ series. I honestly think people are better about Bleach than they are currently about Harry Potter (although the statute of limitations ran out on Aizen a while ago XD).

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Nah, I was talking about your post last entry about how HP wasn't good enough. Hmm, but weren't we reading TeniPuri during the Rikkai arc full of suspense over whether Seigaku was really going to win or not? We seriously didn't know. I don't think we can really assume much about how other people read series. There may be some people reading Harry Potter for like the same reason.

I don't know... couldn't it have been billed as a tragedy? I guess I can't understand that well because I'm one of those people who has a sense of nagging expectation if I *don't* know what happens in the end and then I tend to rush if it is a book like that. If I don't know I feel like I have to read it twice and I feel that is an imposition upon me, so then I just flip towards the end. I don't know... I saw a lot of people being rather indiscreet about Bleach in icons and such. And I have been spoiled for chara deaths in some WJ series through people mourning them.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

When it comes to the new Harry Potter, another element comes into play, namely c) how many people may be assumed to have read it already vs. not. There's a not entirely unjustified assumption that if you don't read HBP the moment it comes out then clearly you don't really care one way or the other, and thus wouldn't mind being spoilered. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy as it causes people who do mind spoilers (such as me) to read the book way before we would have otherwise. :P

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Heh, exactly. If I hadn't had the book easily accessible, I would have just spoiled myself totally so I could read the f_w posts, and then just read it from the library. I suspect a similar phenomenon was in place for the last Star Wars prequel, where I didn't really care and pretty much there were spoilers all over the place, but with that one everyone knew the plot anyhow.

[serendip.livejournal.com]

I read chapter 3 and I FORGOT the diss XD I know I haven't posted any spoilers, just completely AU fic. Ah ^________^

[absenceofmind.livejournal.com]

the bill fleur thing was hinted at at the end of GoF, i know that much, where she basically starts flirting with him the second he steps on the same page. i remember very little of OoTP, so i can't say whether it was developed any further.

[joliefolie.livejournal.com]

Ahem. In case you don't recall, *Mom* brought that up, and I tried to shush her, and then you insisted, so who's to resist *slightly* spoilering her big sis? :P