Star Wars VII - Seen ItFollow

Then she'd rightfully wonder why you are having such a childish reaction to a superficial and self-created problem. A story whose value exists largely in an initial surprise is such a shallow and ephemeral one. It wasn't even a new twist for the series.

I'm not saying it's ok for someone to deliberately try to ruin anything for you, but this fad of expecting normal people to tiptoe around normal discussion about popular media has festered a little too long.

Edited, Jan 15th 2016 8:03am by Allegory

I guess I don't see fad and a natural reaction being contradictory descriptions.

If you want to talk about the factors that contribute to it, there's plenty more beyond the ambient dosage of web 2.0. Media consumption is up overall, and so more people have more of a stake in it. The way media is consumed is changing, where everyone cares about Friends saw last week's episode at the same time, you now have binge fans at vastly different points in the same show.

Clearly I used a pejorative because wanted to communicate condescension, but I don' think it's inaccurate. It's arguably a widespread phenomenon. I also think those people who care generally do have intense feelings about it (see the disproportionate threat to show pictures of dead children here, or I can recall the threat to ban anyone talking about book 7 harry Potter spoilers on Allah some years ago). It's a bit out of hand, as when I look back at the anime/manga/comic thread there was at least a time where people would spoiler a post about the latest chapter, which lead to nearly the entire thread being hidden from view.

I see the care about spoilers as unsustainable and that it will be short lived, because the factors contributing to the feelings it aren't going to stop increasing, and there is zero way to police it. Ultimately, people are just going to have to learn to deal with the fact that sometimes they might learn something about a piece of media they were interested in before having viewed it, and that maybe that's not so terrible.

And when people stop pretending a one time revelation is crucial to their viewing enjoyment, jerks will stop making an effort to spoil it for them.

Edited, Jan 15th 2016 6:22pm by Allegory

Oh. And I meant to mention this earlier, but forgot. I don't normally watch films in 3D (just not worth it normally, and it's frankly annoying in most cases), but the person who arranged for tickets got us a 3D version, so that's what I watched. The good thing is that it wasn't annoying. I suspect that since it wasn't filmed specifically for 3D, it didn't have the typical "let's make a point of aiming stuff at the audience" junk that usually shows up in 3D films. It was just... there. Noticeable, but not distracting. Which I actually liked. And I have to admit that the star destroyer looked pretty darn awesome in 3D. There's a couple scenes where you're seeing it kinda edge on, with one side trailing away and off the screen. And it looked *huge*. Like it was hanging out over the audience. Very very cool. The rest of the scenes just had the usual "stuff in the foreground pops out at you a bit" effect, but that one bit just looked great.

3D movies never work for me and, yeah, wearing the special glasses over prescription lenses is a big pain in the ***. I can't see the stereoscopic "Magic Eye" pictures either so I'm willing to put the blame on my own peepers, aside from the glasses-over-glasses hassle.

Fortunately the overall filming tech seems to have gotten better. Early in the 3D boom, movies shot for 3D looked muddled and dark in the 2D versions. That didn't seem to be the case here.

I ended up watching the movie in 3D; I have prescription glasses, and It didn't significantly hinder my viewing, but I had a middle-center seat at a decent 3D theater.

Sadly, just about the time the tech got cool one eye quit working.

Those never worked for me, either; even with two working eyes. And despite mall lore, smoking a fatty-boombatty blunt didn't help, like at all.

I saw Ant-Man in 3d, only because I got to the theater late and didn't want to wait around for like an hour for the next regular showing. It was pretty well done with all the shrinking and growing and such, but it didn't really sell me on the technology and I'd still rather watch movies without the layers.