So...close...

[trinityvixen]

I went to drop off laundry this morning that probably should have been done a lot earlier. (It was exercise stuff, mostly, that had been soaked through when I rode home from work last Friday, and it smelled...unpleasant.) As I was waiting to get my receipt, another customer in the store saw that I was reading A Game of Thrones and started freaking out about how great the TV show was, and was I watching it? I told him, no, I wanted to read the book first. He thought that sounded like a great idea until I told him was 800 pages.

I'm now 700+ pages in, and I've just hit the scene that was the spoiler heard around the world. MY GOD IT TOOK 700 PAGES TO GET TO THIS, NO WONDER EVERYONE IS JUST WATCHING THE SHOW. I just want to be done. Of course, they start filming the next season in a month, and it'll be on before I've got time to read the second book if I don't push on. HELP ME.

On the spoiler issue: I talked about with my roommates about it last night. It's really not something I could help coming across. It was a spoiler so large the internet exploded. It wasn't careless people on Twitter (which I mostly ignore anyway) or reviews of the show itself on geek websites that got me. It was things like Entertainment Weekly not caring for anyone so lazy and poor as not to have both HBO and a TiVo that they could catch up on the show within a week that spoiled me. I'm not even a huge spoiler-hater person. I mentioned to my roommates how little I care to read reviews for anything I'm excited about because I tend to like some seriously crap stuff. And it has been my experience that the less a given film/show/book is esteemed, the less reviewers give a shit about spoiling important things. I agree with moonlightalice that basic plot outlines are not especially spoiler-y, but when you're talking about the difference between The King's Speech and something like Priest, a reviewer will, despite the formulaic and historical nature of the former, spare it and spoil the latter in a review. I do not care that I called the "surprise reveal" in Priest two seconds in--even if it's obvious, don't give it away, okay?

But, yes, I'm about to finish A Game of Thrones, and I've quite enjoyed it. I hope it manages, in the next 70 pages or so, to resolve enough that I don't have to tax my already exhausted reserves to finish the book after in order to feel any sense of closure. (This is where you don't tell me whether I do or not, okay? Save it for when I do a full review.)

Comments

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

I've read all four books before, so I knew what was coming, but I'm 3-4 episodes behind on the show right now and I still haven't seen the spoiler posted everywhere online. Certainly nothing like the Harry Potter nonsense. Granted, I haven't been looking up anything about the show, so I'm largely avoiding exposure. Or maybe it's because I don't watch EW. Maybe people who use DVRs or care about spoilers aren't the target audience for that show?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The worst spoiler faux pas I ever saw was Publishers Lunch, which is a daily email that goes to almost everyone in publishing. The day of the release of Book Seven, one of the news items was headlined "Harry Potter Lives!" They were talking about the sales, and hadn't actually seen the book, but given the fact that there is a high percentage of Potter fans in the industry, they must have gotten FLAMED. There was a very sincere apology a few hours later.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Entertainment Weekly is a magazine. They have spoiled me for many, many things. They give about three words lead on spoilers, like, "This is a spoiler, turn away now, Harry Potter Lives." There's no way not to see the end of the sentence before realizing that they're about to spoil you. Worse, they have this bullet-point list of awesome stuff each week, and they'll throw out developments in shows on there.

But the internet was positively aflame with the Game of Thrones spoiler. I didn't go looking for it, it found me. Maybe you just got lucky.

[lnbw.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, because I (who knew what was coming!) mostly saw variations on "that shocking event in last night's episode" on the internets. Certainly enough chatter that even the most oblivious would have known something had happened, but no details.

I'm sad that we were not as good about keeping the secret as I thought we were. :(

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The spoilers came after the explosion, to be sure. I remember your tweeting about the beginning of the series and how you were waiting to see how people, already wrapped up in the show, were going to react to SPOILER. And react they did.