Garoo

Warning: the link above displays a spoiler about Harry Potter 6 because people on the web are looking for nothing if not a license to print spoilers.

This is an amazingly stupid story that’s been on the web the last couple of days, and the reason why it’s stupid is in the first sentence of this paragraph:

The first thing you probably noticed is that people don’t like literary stories. (And that’s a shame, because Updike’s “Plumbing” is a masterpiece of prose: “All around us, we are outlasted….”) But you might also have noticed that almost every single story, regardless of genre, was more pleasurable when prefaced with a spoiler.

Yeah. The study showed that people who don’t particularly enjoy reading won’t enjoy it any less if they’re spoiled, and they might even be more interested in what they’re reading after being told that something’s gonna happen in the end.

That’s certainly interesting (and Hollywood seems to have completely integrated that idea, judging by how they produce trailers), but it has absolutely nothing to do with the very people who are hung up about spoilers — those of us who are actually interested in stories in the first place.

So just stop linking to this bullshit “study,” okay?