On 5/15/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Mmm. There are certainly people around who define
"spoiler" as "any
information which remotely pertains to the fiction that isn't in the
cover art", which does tend to mean that even if we wanted such
tagging, we'd get some very sloppy application.
Yeah, well I suspect that the anti-spoiler people probably have an
unnecessarily broad definition of "spoiler". A plot outline is
generally not a spoiler, but dramatic events in say the last third or
quarter of the plot could well be. If someone dies at the start, and
that's the setting for the novel, that's obviously not a spoiler. If
the hero tragically dies in the last few pages from an unexpected
cause, that could well be.
Now, if a book is famous *because* the hero dies (perhaps violating
the norms of books at the time), then the issue of how to address that
fact becomes more complex and subtle. However, complexity and subtlety
are not generally present in the pro-spoiler/anti-spoiler debates we
see on Wikipedia.
Steve