Woah, I have this in my drafts since September, how did that happen? I have some ideas, but either way, I think it gathered enough dust and it is about time I post this. But first let me just mention from that start that I am not yelling at the authors here. There are a lot of different topics and genres and unless the writing is absolutely awful, anything goes as far as I am concerned. Who I am yelling at is the readers, but more accurately the ones of us (yes, me included) who write opinions or reviews on various sites after reading a book. And I am so mad at some of the reviewers. I have pretty good reasons, too, I'd say. At least me concerned.
First of all I must mention that I was never a fan of spoilers. Actually, I outright can't stand them. If it is about something I am interested in, the moment I see a spoiler my interest goes to mush. Sometimes, if enough time goes by, I completely forget about it and get interested in that particular book again, but other times I have no interest in reading it. This caused me to not discuss what I plan on reading or what I am currently reading with some people. There is this person that I know that no matter how many times I asked to not spoil me, they do it first time I mention a title. Why would someone do that?
The thing with spoilers, and what most of the reviewers overlook is that anything, and I mean ANYTHING can be a spoiler. It doesn't matter how much you deem it relevant to the plot, it doesn't matter if it was briefly mentioned at some point, or if it is related to a two page character, if it is in the book it is a spoiler to someone.
I try really hard to avoid spoilers and whenever I mention something in a review that feels even a bit revealing of the story, I insert warnings. As someone who can't enjoy a book if I know what's going to happen next, I try to avoid doing it to others as well.
I am going to admit that in my early reviews I may not have been as careful, if you go back to around 2010 and earlier, I'm sure there are some spoilers laid around that I may not have signalled out properly. That is to say I don't want to claim I am somehow exempt of what I am ranting against here, chances are we all did it at some point, intentionally or not.
The next thing might come as childish, but I am mad about two acronyms that I see pretty often in reviews, sometimes in the very first sentence of a review and that is an ugly sin. Those acronyms are HEA and HFN, meaning 'happy ever after' and 'happy for now' respectively. I have two issues with these two:
(1) with those three letters the ending of a book is spoiled which is a pretty big thing to be spoiled. Usually people are more tolerant on smaller spoilers like a clue to the plot, or revealing what happens with a character, but spoiling the ending is a fucking big no.
(2) they look so ugly. This is most likely just me, but for some reason, before I looked them up and found out what they actually stand for, I thought they are acronyms to some chemical reaction, or some STI. I don't know, that letter combo is so unappealing.
Well, since I don't actually think reviewers will magically stop putting spoilers all around, I stopped reading reviews before reading a book. I don't even scroll lower on the page so I won't accidentally see something that will make me drop the book even before I actually give it a chance.
What we learned from this rant? Spoilers are bad and if you spoil people without putting that cute lil spoiler tag around the text or warning the readers there are spoilers in your review, you should feel bad.
I also may or may not be a bit irrational about this. Dunno, call it unpopular opinion. ๑
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