Do you miss not having everything spoiled for you?

Dogasu

Dogasu

ロケット団よ永遠
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Does anyone remember a time when we didn't know so much about the episodes before they aired? When we didn't have episode titles and summaries and cast lists and plushies and evolutions in the opening themes to piece together what was going to happen in future episodes? A time when we could actually watch this show and be genuinely surprised at what's going to happen?

Am I the only one who misses that time?
 
I miss the time when I had to wait till the actual episode aired to see what would happen. But now that there are episode previews/reviews and pictures, I feel that the suspense has disappeared somehow.
 
What's so surprising about Ash winning every gym eventually, not winning the main Leagues, and meeting some COTDs from the games.

I think the deeper spoilers (like battle outcomes, new pokemon, etc) are nice because its fun to piece together the clues. Finding out the latest news or spoilers from Japanese sources made the show more interesting than just getting everything from the dubs.
 
Well, take the recent Grand Festival, for example. I, for one, would have liked going into the thing not knowing that Hikari was going to face off against Nozomi in the finals and that, therefore, everyone else was going to lose.

And I'm not really talking about the dub here. I think it would be nice to be able to watch a Japanese episode without knowing what's going to happen before I sit down to watch it.
 
I used to hate spoilers... and was often annoyed at how it's IMPOSSIBLE to avoid spoilers if you want to read Pokémon fansites or talk in Poké forums... no matter how hard you'll try, you can't avoid it

Now I'm watching the Japanese version... so it doesn't bother me as much as when I used to follow the Hebrew version only
Of course, even for watching the Japanese, we still get tons of spoilers as you explained... but I don't know, I'm not THAT bothered by them
I think that now these spoilers actually help me to get more excited for the upcoming eps and then when I watch the eps themselves, despite the spoielrs, I often get surprised (for example, we have no idea how the Ash VS Kenny battle will end, despite all the other spoilers we did get about it), and after all most of the eps are really fun to watch, wether you were spoiled or not
I'm just trying to avoid spoilers about every ep that aired before I actualyl watch it... other than that, I just don't care... I do hope they'd spoil us a little less often, but these spoilers really makes me excited for the next eps... so I don't complain, I enjoy both the spoilers and the eps themselves
 
You know, I remember the times when I watched Pokemon on TV and suddenly one of Ash's Pokemon evolved and I would be like "WTF?" while gasping in surprise. But now it is all 'meh' to me.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the episodes but still, at least I'd like to know the titles but not the info. But I have gotten so used to the spoilers and the fact Pokemon isn't even airing anymore in my country, makes it all far worse. (besides the German dub)

So yeah, of course I miss it. But isn't it also fun when you know some little bits of the upcoming episode and then big speculations pursue followed by flame wars between the members, don't you just love it?
 
In most cases I'm usually fine with being spoiled in most fandoms I've been in. That said, the element of surprise in Pokemon would be nice to come across more often since pretty much every capture (except for maybe Gligar?) has been spoiled in advance in some form, be it a new opening or movie posters/trailers or new toys being released around episode airdates.

And yeah, it was a downer when the Japanese titles spoiled the GF finals, though unless I'm mistaken this seems to be an issue for a lot of anime series. Dragon Ball Z immediately comes to mind; I think they had episode titles that state outright a specific character is going to die. Come to think of it, a lot of major series are prone to having episode titles that give crucial plot twists away. Just seems like a bad move from a business point of view... makes me wonder why they insist on doing that so often.

Not like much can be done about it due to the way the media's grown over the years. Advent of the internet and whatnot can pretty much spoil anything and everything (stands out to me with wrestling when backstage gossip is spread about the 'net so often that it makes it pretty easy to determine what the match results will be before the match even starts). But that's really just an internet sort of thing; episode titles that give everything away upfront could be fixed with just, y'know, a little more subtlety.

Yeah, now I'm stuck pondering this matter.
 
SPOILERS_by_ryuutakeshi.jpg

felt it appropriate.

I don't miss it. I can still get excited about upcoming events and be surprised even without watching the episode.

"Dawn lost to Zoey? Well, I didn't see that coming. I wonder what happened." Cue watching episode.
 
I remember back when the pokemon G/S ROM was uploaded on the second release day in Japan. It's not like back then people were innocent of spoilers and those kind of things.
We knew about the Porygon episode even before the series came to the west. It doesnt matter anyway, the main kid audience of the anime will not be searching for pokemon news online, they just wait for episodes to air.
 
Shinneth said:
unless I'm mistaken this seems to be an issue for a lot of anime series. Dragon Ball Z immediately comes to mind; I think they had episode titles that state outright a specific character is going to die. Come to think of it, a lot of major series are prone to having episode titles that give crucial plot twists away. Just seems like a bad move from a business point of view... makes me wonder why they insist on doing that so often.
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Most of these series are just animated adaptions of a currently running comic, though. I'd assume the majority of watchers were already aware of these plot points ahead of time.

As for the topic at hand, the "spoilers" we're getting are rarely that major, new Pokemon and evolutions aside (and this is hardly something new. Kanto aside, Pokemon and evolutions have almost always debuted in the OP or ED ahead of time). Titles and summaries usually don't tell us more than the setting and/or main Pokemon of the episode, and cast lists, plushies and the like are honestly quite easy to avoid learning about if you don't want to. I don't see too much of a problem here.

Ryuutakeshi said:
"Dawn lost to Zoey? Well, I didn't see that coming. I wonder what happened." Cue watching episode.
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That wasn't spoiled ahead of time, so I'm not sure why you're using that as an example.
 
People are acting like the spoilers come to them, that is just not the case as long as you dont seek them out. Also openings dont count because they are universal in telling you whats ahead in the show for many episodes into the future.
 
Adamant said:
Most of these series are just animated adaptions of a currently running comic, though. I'd assume the majority of watchers were already aware of these plot points ahead of time.
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True in most cases, though there were certain series that deviated from their manga counterparts in varying degrees, in which case they weren't following the story bit-by-bit. Sailor Moon's last anime series comes to mind, where in the manga equivalent a lot of the main cast was killed off pretty early on in the story, but the anime didn't start that slaughterfest until the final four or five episodes. Then there were characters who died in the manga who didn't die in the anime... guess that's really not as much of an issue nowadays with modern series, but still, even then when the adaptions were vastly different from the original story, the episode titles still ran to the same tune of "Rocks fall! Everybody dies!!".

Like I said, spoilers don't necessarily bug me since I'm usually interested in seeing how spoiled events play out anyway after hearing about them. The complete lack of subtlety in the anime's episode titles is almost humorous, really.
 
Adamant said:
That wasn't spoiled ahead of time, so I'm not sure why you're using that as an example.
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Sure it was. I'm an American. The episode has already happened in Japan. Therefore, I was spoiled.
 
That's not "getting spoilers ahead of time". That's "reading a discussion on an episode of a TV show that's aired, but you haven't watched yet". That's not the topic at hand.
 
Shinneth said:
True in most cases, though there were certain series that deviated from their manga counterparts in varying degrees, in which case they weren't following the story bit-by-bit. Sailor Moon's last anime series comes to mind, where in the manga equivalent a lot of the main cast was killed off pretty early on in the story, but the anime didn't start that slaughterfest until the final four or five episodes. Then there were characters who died in the manga who didn't die in the anime... guess that's really not as much of an issue nowadays with modern series, but still, even then when the adaptions were vastly different from the original story, the episode titles still ran to the same tune of "Rocks fall! Everybody dies!!".
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Well, yeah, but in that specific case, you still assumed these people were probably going to die in the anime, too. It was more a "ah, so they'll die here after all" situation than a "holy crap, they get killed here TOO!!?" one.
 
That's also true. Of course, I'm 90% sure the anime was ahead of the manga most of the time for that series (the manga definitely ended after the anime did; then there was that large lead in the beginning that necessitated a filler mini-series so the manga could catch up). Not sure how the chapters correlated with the episodes precisely, but the fact that the anime deviated so much to the point of ommitting certain characters, completely changing the backstories of the ones who did make it in, and the murders of the manga getting killed off in the anime without killing anyone at all beforehand probably left at least a little room for reasonable doubt. The way episode 196 was set up, there was really no way to tell four main characters were going to get picked off literally until the moment it happened... except the title explicitly said they were going to die, so there went that. It still remained to be a jolting and chilling scene regardless, but probably would have been even more powerful without super happy spoiler episode title. I dunno, there probably are way better examples of this, but it's morning so nothing's coming to mind at the moment. And I veered way off the topic, though since the Pokemon anime has no manga equivalent to follow, getting spoiled via the titles is a bit more disappointing since there's no reason for it.

This led me to wonder why so many companies insisted on running an anime adaptation right alongside the manga back then since, well, keeping things fresh and popular is important, but it's almost impossible to coherently keep the story straight in the anime version since the manga's almost always much slower-paced. Then again, even with a 4-year lead over the anime, Inuyasha's manga still got matched in pace to the point where they just had to hold off the series until recently. But maybe that's just because the nature of Rumiko Takahashi mandates that every major story of hers must take absolutely forever to complete regardless of not having enough fulfilling substance to stretch things out for so long.

And there I go off-topic again. At least Pokemon's anime has a pretty legitimate excuse for having a lot of filler, and even then D/P's been pretty awesome about making the best of filler time in most cases. Still, I wonder if the League is going to be spoiled like this. Didn't give much of a crap for the GF anyway, but I'm counting on the League to leave a lot of room for suspense. But that's just me trying to be optimistic.
 
I do (moreso with Yu Gi Oh rather than Pokemon) but I mostly see animes like Bakugan giving us spoilers for the next episode
 
yeah, I'd say a lot of it has to do with Japan just having spoilery titles in general (but I can agree, they could stand to be more subtle about some things). It also seems that, traditionally, a lot of anime episodes (generally shounen series) will have a title composed of two completely different sentences (thus, even more chances to spoil). Prior to late Jouto, wasn't this actually not the case with most Pocket Monsters episodes?

Anyway, I don't see the situation now being any more different than Advanced Generation, where we'd still get titles in advance and know things like that the Saiyuu Tournament's getting cut short and the Battle Frontier's getting adapted after all. And yeah, the current opening kinda blew it on the spoilers, but openings that actually refrained from spoiling us much are relatively new, and though I don't know why Saikou Everyday! couldn't have gotten the updating treatment as well, it's still not quite as bad as it was a few year's back [cough]Haruka's Wakashamo[cough]. Besides, Satoshi's Dodaitose (and I guess the appearance of his reserves, not that it actually amounted to anything in Spurt!!... there's also Kouhei turning out to be a league rival) was the last of the spoilers, so from here on, anything goes.
 
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