With Sherlock, those little details can be quite spoilery indeed because we're dealing with a show that's based on a series of books that many of the fans know quite well. For instance, (and SPOILERS...) if I told someone that Amanda Abbington had been cast to play Mary Morstan, if you know your Doyle canon it's no great leap to think that Watson's about to get a love interest which could be quite spoilerish. On the other hand, being told that Martin Freeman had been cast to play Bilbo reveals nothing more than the face that will be playing the character, because the people who know who Bilbo is have probably already read the book. We're dealing with an adaptation, but it's not a straight adaptation, so there's still a question of when certain elements of the Doyle books will come into play.
That said, I really, really agree with you about the responsibility of people to avoid spoilers if they want it. It's like warnings for stories. I have a past history with suicide and so am very sensitive to stories depicting it. More often it's not suicide per se but the way it's so often done spectacularly badly. And I appreciate warnings so I can give a story extra scrutiny before deciding to read it (some authors I trust to handle it well; others I'll probably take a pass on.) But if an author doesn't warn for suicide and I come across it, I may be upset but I'd hardly blame the author. Just as I wouldn't blame Rowlings for playing with that theme in Deathly Hallows (more martyrdom than suicide, and she did it very well, but I had to set the book down and continue it the next day). Because that's the risk we run when we engage a fictional world, just like when we engage reality. It's the same with spoilers. It's the cost of taking part in the lead-up to a film.
Another point: so much of the discussion of cultural phenomena occurs before the phenomena itself. We anticipate The Hobbit for months, react a bit, write fanfic making sense of the parts that annoy us maybe, and then move on to anticipating movie #3. Sherlock is a bit different because there's such a dearth of new material, everything gets over-analyzed. But I think that if we're anticipating more than reacting, engaging in spoilers makes a lot more sense and will always be a lot more common. Doesn't mean we shouldn't warn for them when we can, but I do think there's a good reason why some people might choose to do them.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-12-30 06:09 pm (UTC)That said, I really, really agree with you about the responsibility of people to avoid spoilers if they want it. It's like warnings for stories. I have a past history with suicide and so am very sensitive to stories depicting it. More often it's not suicide per se but the way it's so often done spectacularly badly. And I appreciate warnings so I can give a story extra scrutiny before deciding to read it (some authors I trust to handle it well; others I'll probably take a pass on.) But if an author doesn't warn for suicide and I come across it, I may be upset but I'd hardly blame the author. Just as I wouldn't blame Rowlings for playing with that theme in Deathly Hallows (more martyrdom than suicide, and she did it very well, but I had to set the book down and continue it the next day). Because that's the risk we run when we engage a fictional world, just like when we engage reality. It's the same with spoilers. It's the cost of taking part in the lead-up to a film.
Another point: so much of the discussion of cultural phenomena occurs before the phenomena itself. We anticipate The Hobbit for months, react a bit, write fanfic making sense of the parts that annoy us maybe, and then move on to anticipating movie #3. Sherlock is a bit different because there's such a dearth of new material, everything gets over-analyzed. But I think that if we're anticipating more than reacting, engaging in spoilers makes a lot more sense and will always be a lot more common. Doesn't mean we shouldn't warn for them when we can, but I do think there's a good reason why some people might choose to do them.