What books/shows/movies etc did you watch already knowing huge spoilers?

[understatement]

And not the "Luke, I'm your father" kind - more of a genuine "surprise" spoiler that isn't known to people who hadn't watched/read the media.

I'll toss in a few off the top of my head:

Spoiler: Breaking Bad

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Knew Walter, Gus, and Hank were going to die. That's what I get for watching review channels.

Spoiler: ASOIAF

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Knew the Red Wedding was going to happen (not that it wasn't foreshadowed). That's what I get for reading ahead on Wikipedia.

Spoiler: Firefly

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I mean, I haven't even WATCHED the show but I know some guy named Wash is going to die. I blame Peelee for this for exposing a nearly-two-decades-old spoiler on a nearly-decade-old thread.

[Velaryon]

Well, there's various prequels where the "twist" is already known if you've seen the original. For example, knowing Senator Palpatine is Darth Sidious, and that Anakin Skywalker falls to the dark side in Revenge of the Sith. But I suppose that's not what we're looking for here.

I accidentally spoiled a few ASOIAF things for myself (including the Red Wedding) by reading on Wikipedia. I was trying to sort out something I was confused about in the story and ran into several big spoilers for the 3rd book.

I knew Aeris died (I don't care what Square Enix says, she's Aeris not Aerith) before playing Final Fantasy 7.

My friend and I knew Sheik was Zelda in Ocarina of Time, but that's less "I had it spoiled for me" and more "it's so obvious I don't understand why it's even treated as a surprise reveal."

There are numerous things in pro wrestling that I knew about (heel turns, etc.) before I ever actually saw them, including:
-Hulk Hogan betraying Macho Man and forming the NWO
-Vince McMahon being the "higher power" behind the Ministry of Darkness
-Bret Hart being screwed out of the WWF Championship in Montreal

to name a few.

[Lord Raziere]

Warrior Cats, my mother got me the sixth book before the first five. read the entire series from there.

hard to say what else? I might've gotten into Watchmen comic book because of its spoilers, I don't exactly remember. like its hard to say because I don't remember how I got into much of the stuff I'm interested for some reason, because while I do look stuff up to see what storytelling I'm interested in for my own works, and do decide to check something out based on things that have been said about it, whether I get spoiled on it isn't the most deciding factor of whether I see it, because I could look at say tvtropes or wikipedia page on something years ago then decide to finally see it much later and by then I wouldn't remember the summary of the plot or anything and often I find summaries to not really do any actual justice in the first place for things I like, so I could technically spoil myself on something but its on a piece of media I don't really care about until I find a reason to see it and thus when I do, I might not be spoiled anyways because it gets lost in various other information and thoughts going through my head.

like whether I spoil myself on something is dependent on how much I care, and if its something I don't care about I'll read spoilers to get what I can to decide whether I want to, and if the summary is something I like or am interested in its probably better than I think it is, and if sounds bad, its probably even worse than it sounds. like no matter how you describe something, words can't really encapsulate the actual moment and set up and all the little details that make it what it is.

I will say however that the bigger and more popular the thing, the more likely spoilers are going to happen by accident, and that it wouldn't surprise me if I've been spoiled on those in some way. you want to be surprised, you find something indie or not well known and watch/read that, because there is less likely to be people putting stuff online about it, as there is less scrutiny, while big companies they spill the beans about their plots all the time for hype and fans of them will speculate and analyze what they spill to death to make content or fill their wikis so chances are I have gone in with spoilers but there is so much information I just can't clearly remember the times. like technically I sometimes read MHA spoilers but often there is a little context for what they say so when I finally get to see them I just don't remember the spoiler because I have so many other things to think between those two times.

[Dire_Flumph]

Citizen Kane is the big one, by the time I actually got around to seeing it I had been flooded with so many references, analyses and comparisons my whole life that actually watching the movie seemed superfluous and a bit of a letdown.

And in completely the other direction, would it kill gaming sites to just link the new Smash Bros reveal trailers without spoiling who the new character is? I mean really, watching those without knowing is half the fun and I almost can never watch the announcements as soon as they air.

[Sapphire Guard]

The Mandalorian. I knew everything that happened before I watched it, didn't like it, but decided to give the show a chance to prove me wrong. It didn't.

[CharonsHelper]

On Firefly - I saw Serenity in theaters before I ever watched the show - so I don't know if that counts.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I can only really think of one at the moment, but I'm sure there's plenty of times I've done this.

Spoiler: Madoka Magica

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I knew the whole living-dead status of the magical girls, but not their life cycle, nor the sisyphean background of Homura. In retrospect, those later reveals makes the whole lich status thing kind of feel like a minor spoiler. But before I watched it I had thought it was a major spoiler.

[Velaryon]

Don't know how I forgot about this one, but I knew the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, line for line, before I saw it. My friend spent weeks quoting every single scene to me before finally having me over to see it.

[Rodin]

I was introduced to the Honor Harrington novels when I found Ashes of Victory in a grocery cart someone had left behind while I was a bagboy/cart attendant. I managed to read it despite it being book 9.

This gave me all sorts of spoilers about what happened earlier, but without context it was vague enough to not ruin the rest of the series when I went back to the beginning.

[trust]

It happens to me quite often as i love to watch interviews with the actors and sometimes they talk about the final season or something... so now i became quite causious and make sure to always watch the show till the end till i get to know the actors and background stories and so on...

[Tyrant]

Warrior Cats, my mother got me the sixth book before the first five. read the entire series from there.

I had something very similar happen to me with the Star Wars Thrawn trilogy. A relative bought the third book for me when I was much younger because they knew I liked Star Wars. I somehow didn't notice it was part 3 of 3 and read it anyway. It wasn't until well over a decade later that I bought the other two books and read them (and reread the third). So I knew how it all turned out well before I read the start.

I knew the big twist in Watchmen well before I read the story, which I did before I watched the movie. I started a few years ago going back and reading older X-Men stories as I have been able to get physical copies of them. So everything from before roughly the Phalanx Covenant storyline (which is where I started reading the X-Men back in the 90s) is what I am trying to make my way through. I already know how a great number of these storylines unfold. I would say, for comics in general, if it is an older comic there is a reasonable probability that I know the twists and turns and that might even be why I am choosing to read it now.

[Manga Shoggoth]

This is almost normal for me - by the time I get round to almost any media I've at least picked up the gist of what is going on from other places. It's very rare for me to go into something clean.

Frankly, it isn't a big deal. The sudden twist is only ever good once, but a good story will hold you time and time again.

[wilurulu]

game of thrones of course

[Peelee]

Spoiler: Firefly

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I mean, I haven't even WATCHED the show but I know some guy named Wash is going to die. I blame Peelee for this for exposing a nearly-two-decades-old spoiler on a nearly-decade-old thread.

Spoiler

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LIES AND FALSEHOODS! Wash does not die. He lands the ship, the screen fades to black, and nothing else happened ever again in that universe THAT IS HOW THE MOVIE ENDED AND YOU WILL NOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE.

Anyway, you should watch the show.

[Bunny Commando]

The Expanse tv series; the show follows quite closely the plot of the books.

[WinterKnight404]

Yeah Game of Thrones I knew about the big spoilers ahead of time with Ned Stark and the Red Wedding but things were still played out a bit differently in the show as compared with the books (especially with the Wedding). I was never overly pleased with the directions that the show runners took the show in, contrasting from the books, and of course the last season was horrible. I hope to one day read G.R.R.M.'s final version of events.

I did the reverse with Dune where I saw the mini-series before reading the books. It kind of sucks doing that because then when I read about the characters I had the actors and environments in the series pictured in my mind instead of relying on the book's description to create my own mental images. The books were still much better.

I sometimes spoil things in TV series for myself slightly by looking up actors in IMDB. IMDB tells you how long or what years the actor worked on a show which can tell you that their characters do not die for "X" amount of seasons so you know they'll survive whatever dramatic situation presented to them.

[Tyrant]

I did the reverse with Dune where I saw the mini-series before reading the books. It kind of sucks doing that because then when I read about the characters I had the actors and environments in the series pictured in my mind instead of relying on the book's description to create my own mental images. The books were still much better.

I had the same issue only it was the 80's Dune movie.

I also recalled another instance of being spoiled only it was more like as I was reading. I bought the annotated versions of the first and second Dragonlance trilogies and read the annotations as I read the story. I don't recall major, late series spoilers in the first trilogy but the second trilogy very early on talks about foreshadowing events in the first part of the first book that take place towards the finale of the trilogy. In fairness, the books warned new readers to not read the notes because they were going to openly talk about spoilers but I rarely reread books so I figured it was now or never. So in the second trilogy I had a pretty good idea how things were going to go long before they did so. As a side note, while I won't claim Weis and Hickman are literary masters, seeing an insight into the writing process was pretty interesting. Especially with how the first book was largely based on them playing the first Dragonlance module and how they quickly realized they were going to have to depart from that to write a better story.

[Kitten Champion]

I just happened to have watched the newer movie recently, but Murder on the Orient Express. A work that stands out in its genre for its creative conclusion, so much so that I don't even know when or where I heard about it first but it was definitely before either reading it or seeing the movie. Very entertaining regardless, but I don't know how much better it would've been had I gone in cold.

Oh, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects and Fight Club were spoiled for me as well. Granted, I didn't exactly understand Fight Club's twist going in until I saw it actually play out. I don't think the pre-knowledge ruined any of them as such, but I still couldn't watch them the same way.

Personally, I generally don't care about spoilers and kind of resent the... J.J Abram-ification of media discussion where the productions heavily play up the mystery aspect of a work and then you can't really talk of anything significant about their work without layers of spoiler tags which feed the FOMO mystery box around it. It's one of the many reasons Star Trek Into Darkness pissed me off, as Bob Chipman said in his review it becomes tedious to talk around some central plot points but they're a large reason why the movie kind of sucks and saying "I can't discuss my chief criticisms of this work except in vaguest terms" feels kind of weenie.

Still, like with the above examples of spoiled books/movies, a well-constructed twist conclusion can be really cool. I don't care if I know Snape killed Dumbledore, but I'm not going to read the back pages of a mystery and I do want thrillers to be thrilling in that respect... so, I dunno.

[Velaryon]

Personally, I generally don't care about spoilers and kind of resent the... J.J Abram-ification of media discussion where the productions heavily play up the mystery aspect of a work and then you can't really talk of anything significant about their work without layers of spoiler tags which feed the FOMO mystery box around it. It's one of the many reasons Star Trek Into Darkness pissed me off, as Bob Chipman said in his review it becomes tedious to talk around some central plot points but they're a large reason why the movie kind of sucks and saying "I can't discuss my chief criticisms of this work except in vaguest terms" feels kind of weenie.

I agree with this, although Star Trek Into Darkness seems like kind of an odd example to use. I thought the "big twist" in that film was so obvious it could be seen from space, and once that was revealed the entire rest of the plot became totally predictable. I haven't watched it again since seeing it in theaters, but I think I remember everyone being pretty sure they knew what to expect from that particular film, almost as surely as they knew going into Revenge of the Sith that Anakin was going to fall and become Darth Vader.

[Kitten Champion]

I agree with this, although Star Trek Into Darkness seems like kind of an odd example to use. I thought the "big twist" in that film was so obvious it could be seen from space, and once that was revealed the entire rest of the plot became totally predictable. I haven't watched it again since seeing it in theaters, but I think I remember everyone being pretty sure they knew what to expect from that particular film, almost as surely as they knew going into Revenge of the Sith that Anakin was going to fall and become Darth Vader.

The movie is really predictable once you've actually started watching it and see the flags they're raising - especially near the end - but the trailers and various ads were much more cryptic and full of imagery meant to suggest a kind of... depth of possibilities that the movie's writing didn't really try to live up to.

Personally, I went into Into Darkness largely unaware of those salient plot points based on a broad recommendation from critics I generally like. Maybe said plot points didn't bother them or they enjoyed them even? I don't know, they weren't discussed 'cause spoilers.

[Velaryon]

The movie is really predictable once you've actually started watching it and see the flags they're raising - especially near the end - but the trailers and various ads were much more cryptic and full of imagery meant to suggest a kind of... depth of possibilities that the movie's writing didn't really try to live up to.

Personally, I went into Into Darkness largely unaware of those salient plot points based on a broad recommendation from critics I generally like. Maybe said plot points didn't bother them or they enjoyed them even? I don't know, they weren't discussed 'cause spoilers.

I honestly don't remember anything about the official marketing for the movie or the trailer. All I remember is that every single news piece on the film I saw was some variation of "Is Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan? We think he's Khan, but be might not be Khan because J.J. Abrams says he's not Khan, but he's probably Khan" ad infinitum. And Abrams being Abrams, it seemed a safe bet what the answer was to that.

[Traab]

I was introduced to the Honor Harrington novels when I found Ashes of Victory in a grocery cart someone had left behind while I was a bagboy/cart attendant. I managed to read it despite it being book 9.

This gave me all sorts of spoilers about what happened earlier, but without context it was vague enough to not ruin the rest of the series when I went back to the beginning.

This happened to me all the freaking time growing up. I kept reading a book without realizing it was mid to end of series then going back to read the rest. The biggest case of this was I read the Chaos Curse, which was book 5 of the Cleric Quintet series. I read that ALL out of order. I went 5,1,3,4,2 because I couldnt find all the books in the series and this was early days of the internet so it was barnes and noble/waldenbooks or not at all. It was YEARS before I got to read book 2. I only got to read it because they reprinted the series.

As for me, I would have to say the classic Half Blood Prince spoiler. You couldnt be on the internet and not have that spoiled when someone got ahold of it early and posted the big spoiler everywhere followed by the rest of the internet thinking this was the funniest thing since never gonna give you up.

[Velaryon]

This happened to me all the freaking time growing up. I kept reading a book without realizing it was mid to end of series then going back to read the rest. The biggest case of this was I read the Chaos Curse, which was book 5 of the Cleric Quintet series. I read that ALL out of order. I went 5,1,3,4,2 because I couldnt find all the books in the series and this was early days of the internet so it was barnes and noble/waldenbooks or not at all. It was YEARS before I got to read book 2. I only got to read it because they reprinted the series.

I think I read the X-Wing books all out of order for this same reason. I think I went something like 2, 3, 6, 5, 1, 4, 9, 7, 8 more or less, with several rereads in between to help straighten everything out. I definitely read 2 and 3 first - those were the books that established my love for the Star Wars EU even before I went back and read the Thrawn books.

[Dire_Flumph]

Ugh. Can add the Shining to the list. Rented it from Netflix (yes, I am one of their 3 remaining disc by mail customers) for Halloween and didn't get to it until last night, and it was just a bore. Turns out I knew the whole plot and twists going in due to decades of references and parodies. And I hate to tick off the movies' many fans, but this was not one of Nicholson's better performances IMO and the child actor was unintentionally hilarious. It was, however, very well filmed, and had I gone into it cold the overall sense of dread might have pulled me in more.

Special Shoutout to the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror for making it even less possible to take this movie seriously. I had quotes from that running through my head way too often.

[Rodin]

Ugh. Can add the Shining to the list. Rented it from Netflix (yes, I am one of their 3 remaining disc by mail customers) for Halloween and didn't get to it until last night, and it was just a bore. Turns out I knew the whole plot and twists going in due to decades of references and parodies. And I hate to tick off the movies' many fans, but this was not one of Nicholson's better performances IMO and the child actor was unintentionally hilarious. It was, however, very well filmed, and had I gone into it cold the overall sense of dread might have pulled me in more.

Special Shoutout to the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror for making it even less possible to take this movie seriously. I had quotes from that running through my head way too often.

The movie version of The Shining was spoiled for me by reading the book first. I generally like adaptations of King's work but The Shining wasn't one of them. The book was way creepier and the totally different ending was lame.

I mean, they left out the hedge monsters. How do you leave out the hedge monsters!? They scared the crap out of me WAY before Doctor Who copied the idea with the Weeping Angels.

On the other hand, reading Dr. Sleep first let me appreciate the movie version more. Since Kubrick's version never dealt with the Overlook, a lot of the plot points in Dr. Sleep wouldn't make sense for the movie version. So they did their own ending that pulled from Kubrick's movie instead. I still like the King ending better, but the movie version is just as good in its own way.

[Peelee]

The movie version of The Shining was spoiled for me by reading the book first.

IIRC King feels the same way. Or someone important to the story IRL does.

In a similar vein, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest hates the movie, to the point he vowed to never see it. Sometime in the 90s he was flipping through channels at night, saw something that looked interesting, realized it was OFOtCN in about half a minute, and immediately changed the channel. He has so much hate that he tells that story in interviews.

Me, though, I loved it.

[Velaryon]

I'm pleasantly surprised to find more people who aren't overly fond of the film version of The Shining. I didn't care for it either, largely for the reasons Dire_Flumph mentioned. And I also have read that King did not like the film adaptation either.

[monomer]

I stopped reading The Wheel of Time series between books 9 and 10, mostly because I just kinda forgot about it while waiting. I finally got around to finishing the series when a few of the later plot points got spoiled for me and knew it was only matter of time before I would be exposed to the whole ending.

[Traab]

IIRC King feels the same way. Or someone important to the story IRL does.

In a similar vein, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest hates the movie, to the point he vowed to never see it. Sometime in the 90s he was flipping through channels at night, saw something that looked interesting, realized it was OFOtCN in about half a minute, and immediately changed the channel. He has so much hate that he tells that story in interviews.

Me, though, I loved it.

Its amazing how many authors despise the movie adaptation of their work. Mary Poppins? Oh my god the author was in TEARS over how awful they treated her work. Charlie and the chocolate factory? Im talking original gene wilder version? Author hated it so much he had it included in his will that they would NEVER get the rights to the sequel to turn into a movie. Thats barely even scratching the surface.

[Velaryon]

Its amazing how many authors despise the movie adaptation of their work. Mary Poppins? Oh my god the author was in TEARS over how awful they treated her work. Charlie and the chocolate factory? Im talking original gene wilder version? Author hated it so much he had it included in his will that they would NEVER get the rights to the sequel to turn into a movie. Thats barely even scratching the surface.

And then of course there's Alan Moore...