Comment by pragmatick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pragmatick | Hacker News Reader

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I'm on the other side of the scale, I don't want to know anything about a book or movie. I often don't even look at the posters, never mind trailers. I just need the genre of a book and to know if it's good.

The reason is just that I want to go in surprised. Very often I've read books or watched movies that I probably wouldn't've because I thought "that story is dumb" or "that setting isn't for me". I don't want to read a book and think "When do we get there?". I've even disabled the progress display on my Kindle because I don't want to know if what I'm currently reading is still set-up or the grand finale. If I know a thriller has 100 pages left when the murder has been found I know that something is still going to happen and that affects how I read the rest.

It may have to do with how much you like being surprised and why you read a book. If it's for the prose then the surprise doesn't matter. If you enjoy a story well told then the surprise doesn't matter. But I like being surprised and going into it without any bias and as little prior knowledge as possible.

This is sorta funny to me as when I read I can sometimes skip several chapters ahead or to the end of the book, even with movies and shows I can watch them in whatever order. What happens later in a story has no impact at all on whether I will like the road to it. Most of the time I find myself not even remembering the parts ahead when I re-read them either, or just vaguely remembering them.

I've had it explained to me many many times, the thing about surprises and plot twists and whatever but really it doesn't phase me at all.

Did you go to school with me 20 years ago? :D

I had a classmate who was a voracious reader. They happily read book series with overarching plots out of order and didn't bother them the slightest bit.

"The second book was on loan, so I grabbed the third instead and read that".

Like what?

Haha, maybe. If you live in Sweden. But I'm guessing by your username that you are a few years older than me. However, I have read books in the wrong order!

Are there ever actual surprises though? I remember how amazing it was to see movies as a kid and find out about Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father, but after 40 more years of watching movies, surprises are very few and far between. I have a better understanding of the language of movies.

I agree with you though for whodunit movies where there’s a lot of misdirection and surprise is the point. But knowing a lot about Barton Fink or some James Bond movie doesn’t diminish my fun.

It is not just a matter of surprise, though - in the presence of foreknowledge, it is harder for the author to create, and the reader to feel, any sort of dramatic tension.

Absolutely. I’m “surprised” by every new plot point in every book.

There is a decline in big mind blowing conceptual shifts in media, like we experienced in Star Wars after decades of Spaghetti Westerns. Social and conceptual shifts are happening in real time, out in the world now. The big media build up to change has been reduced signficantly.

Goldeneye could have been more thrilling if the trailers withheld the reveal of Alec Trevalyn as the bad guy.

1995 was a year where most people couldn't look up movie information on the internet... going into the movie theatre blind, it would have been awesome to get the secret revealed on the big screen.

I very rarely get surprised even if I do read a book from page 1 to X and don't read ahead. Not sure why that is.

I went to see Cabin in the Woods based on nothing but the title and the 18A rating. It was quite an experience.

I really enjoyed the shock of seeing future Thor smack into the invisible barrier - his determination, the crescendoing music, the hope that _finally_ someone is going to do something... Splat.

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