On 5/15/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@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