Spoilers

How do you feel about spoilers? You know, when you're told what's going to happen before you get a chance to figure it out for yourself?

For myself, my feelings are mixed. There are certain things which I very much want to know up front - because then I don't want to read/watch/listen to the story. The first book I never finished was The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. It was part of the assigned reading in a Novel class I took in high school. I was at the front of the class with a girl named Rebecka. We read the books in a day or two while the rest of the class got a week, and most failed to complete the reading. Then came The Jungle. I understood from the first what Mr. Sinclair's point was, and that is what caused me more and more unease as the book progressed. Like any book I read I chose two characters with which to identify. If they could surive what was happening then I could read the book. But as I read I began more and more to fear they would not, so I read slower. Rebecka had no problem. She read on and on, so when it came time to discuss portions only she knew what was going on. When she confirmed my worst fears - that my hero character (Jurgis Rudkus) would lose his wife and be eaten by rats, and my heroine (Ona Lukoszaite) would be forced to have sex with her boss in order to keep her job - I was done. I couldn't read about my characters being destroyed. I put the book down and have never picked it up again. That spoiler was good - to me. It spared me the ordeal of having to read it.

I had a similar thing happen when I read J.R.R.Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. There were really only nine characters to choose from as identity characters: the Nine Walkers. And they were all male. I liked Galadriel (I took one of those 'Which LOTR Character are You' tests and found that I am Galadriel. Cool.), but she wasn't in it much. So Gandalf and Legolas became my characters. I know I was supposed to identify with Frodo, or maybe Aragorn, but with the exception of Bilbo and Sam (and Farmer Cotten), Hobbits were annoying, and I just didn't click with Aragorn. Well, of course what happens during The Fellowship of the Ring? Gandalf is lost in the Mines of Moria. Same old same old. True, I had Legolas, but just as Ona was my primary identity character in The Jungle, so was Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. I put the book down and quit reading. Then, after a week, a thought occured to me. Unlike The Jungle, Lord of the Rings was not about realism. The ideas and messages were real, but the manner in which those ideas and messages were being communicated was fantasy. What if Gandalf wasn't really dead? The book hadn't explicitly said so, had it? It just said he fell. He was a wizard. Maybe, he didn't die! So I grabbed Return of the King and began flipping through pages until I saw his name associated with dialog. I confirmed the dialog was taking place later than the Mines of Moria incident and put Return of the King down. I picked up Fellowship of the Ring and began reading where I left off. My primary character was coming back. That was all I needed to go on.

Spoilers can help me, because when I involve myself in a story I so identify with one or two characters that I cannot bear to have them destroyed. No matter what the story is telling me, and no matter how much I have enjoyed it to that point, once my main characters are gone, I feel I have been taken out of the story. It no longer holds any meaning for me and I no longer take any message from it. That's just the way it is. I'm sorry.

However, that does not mean Main Characters can never be destroyed. I don't always identify with the Main Character. Many times I find the Main Character annoying, and I will choose a minor character - with character - as my identity focus. If that character survives, grows, what have you, I don't really care what happens to the Main Character.

That's why I liked the movie, The Poseidon Adventure. All of my characters survived. I had no doubt from the beginning that Gene Hackman's character would die at the end. Shelly Winters, too. So I didn't bother to identify with either of them, although Shelly Winters made that difficult. No, it wasn't a great movie, but Shelly Winters could act. But I loved the kids, Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea. I figured the little boy would survive, but I wasn't sure about his sister. Then there was Red Buttons, who I've liked in everything he's been in. I didn't want him dying. And finally, there was the very vulnerable Carol Lynley who, because she was so vulnerable, became my primary character. Oh, and don't make fun of me - and Ernest Borgnine. He was vulnerable, too, but in a different kind of way. We saw it at the end, and he actually was the one who made me feel like crying (good crying). If they could survive, it didn't matter what happened to the others. So, bad as the movie was, my characters suriving made it a good movie for me.

So, why all of the rambling, bambling about spoilers, books not finished, bad movies and such?

I'm considering making a series of posts in which I present the synopsis to Book I. If I do, then anyone who reads it would have significant events 'spoiled' before actually reading the book.

So what do you think? Is it a good idea, or am I just succumbing to the fear Book I (and Swords of Fire in general) will never be published anyway?

Should I just hold off?