| Current mood: |  thoughtful |
Good Stuff!
I've come to the conclusion that the main barrier for me writing epic positive reviews compared to the leviathanic pieces I compose to highlight how little I like something is the utter disdain I wind up having for those series I view negatively. Once I deem a series shite, I stop giving a fuck about 'ruining' people's experience of the series or contexts themselves, since if they're listening to me, they're not going to watch or read the thing in question, no?
I don't mind telling you about how rotten Death Note is, talking about Misa, or L, or Near, or Mello, or whatever, because I quite frankly do not give even half of a shit about the way the unfolding and development of these characters plays into your enjoyment of the series. Like watching an elaborate oragami presentation where the gossamer passes by the rose by the turqoise and they fold out past one another with the eventual revelation of the gold ring within, these events in-series do not actually hide some brilliant centrepiece, but rather are just the bothersome dance of feathers and lights attempting to subvert attention away from the eventual revelation that the story is nothing but an empty husk within.
At the same time, when I encounter a series I really enjoy, I find these developmental layers to be vital to my enjoyment of the series. Not necessarily twists, but moments that resonate in the path of a character tend to be cornerstones of things that matter to me. They're the things that really echo through my mind, things that are important. To start to dismantle them is too much, and I have realised that my enthusiasm boils over too aggressively, that I often mention things that merely by their mentioning are spoilers. Rather than destroy something in a series I like, I instead find my reviews that are positive to be quiet and sedate, with an almost 'please like thise series,' note at the end.
There has to be a threshold, though. After all, reviews that don't touch on the actual events within a series can be very dry and yes, short. If you read the Equilibrium review and jump the extensive bitching I do about the movie, you wind up with something like three paragraphs. On the other hand, events that occur within the first ten minutes of the story seem to me to be pretty much fair game, right? The first fifteen? The first thirty? What about events that are well-established? If I were to talk about Avatar, there are characters who are central to whole seasons of the series, of whom yet mention can constitute pretty wild spoilers.
Now, what makes this more funny, really, is that I'm writing this blog to an audience of about nine people, most of whom I know in real life, and of them, each of them are the kind of people who will respond to a spoiler with Oh, that was so obvious. It's kinda jarring, since I know on a conceptual level that spoilers for major events are a bad idea and will diminish the reader's eventual experience of the subject matter... and they don't seem to make a damn difference to the people around me, who are the kind of people who upon seeing the conclusion of The Usual Suspects will turn to me and claim they saw the twist coming miles off. What makes it worse is they probably do, but it doesn't seem to me to be ever born of an in-universe savvy, but rather from knowing how stories work.
Leaving aside these social concerns, I have found - thanks to the miracle of Fox - that I can generate spoiler tags. I'm not sure how useful they are, or will be - but I do find the idea intriguing, of being able to force you, the reader, some complicity in stepping past your enjoyment of something you might not yet know. If you want to read the text in the tags - yes, tags like these - you have to highlight them with your mouse, revealing to you the dread secret that lays beneath. This may see some workout in the near future. If you want an entirely spoiler-free opinion from me at the moment, though?
Paranoia Agent is fucking awesome.
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