My sister likes to tell me that spoilers (that moment when you overhear your coworkers talking about Bruno or, as seems to happen to me every day, you’re scrolling through your Discover feed and see an article with a title like “My Hero Academia: Class 1-A Traitor Revealed to be [redacted]”) do not actually “spoil” stories. The argument is that knowing the creator’s intent allows you to more fully experience the story—the same reason why some media properties are better on rewatch or reread. Despite a smattering of evidence in her favor, she’s wrong about this, and I will never be convinced otherwise.
Or at least I wouldn’t be until I started reading Guy Gavriel Kay.
Guy Gavriel Kay is this Canadian guy (heh) who writes massive historical fantasy novels with an emphasis on the historical (and the massive). They come with a generally two- to three-page character list which is absolutely necessary if you want to have a dog’s chance in a fireworks factory of following the story and an equally necessary map of whatever historical nation has been fantastified for this one. This fantastification is not a subtle substitution; the map in the front of The Lions of Al-Rassan is just Spain but after the city names have gone through Google Translate five or six times. Kay’s worlds are often painstaking recreations of past times and places, just divorced from their contexts enough that he can play around in their political landscapes and add a portentous ghost or two.
This approach to worldbuilding means Kay can write epic, twisty political dramas inspired by real history without having to worry about some nerd pushing up their glasses and “well actually”-ing his representation of court politics in Renaissance Italy.
And the other thing about Guy Gavriel Kay is that he is constantly spoiling his own stories.
Imagine this: you’re reading along in some chapter about some warlord who’s making some alliance that’s really going to be a problem for our protagonists. Or maybe he’s just having a wee show of force up in the steppe and even though you don’t know how or why, you’re sure he’s going to end up invading whatever land our heroes live in and even though he might not be directly responsible for their troubles, he is going to be a driving factor in whatever crucible of the soul that they’re going to get caught up in. And then, at the end of the chapter, after the warlord has killed some dude’s son or forced someone to cut off their own hands or whatever, you come to the last paragraph and it says something like, “within a brief span, the warlord would find himself buried to his neck in dry grass at midday, while a nearby hill of fire ants reduced his screaming head to a skull.”
And then you go, “What.”
Sometimes this is just jobbing (i.e. if this guy was so threatening imagine how much worse the guy that fed him to the ants must be) but more often than not, it’s something else entirely. Kay throws out dramatic, world-altering twists as easily as your ex-roommate spoils the new Spiderman on Twitter. Matter-of-fact statements sprinkled into his prose—like “when she looked back on this decision as an old woman”—key the reader into who survives all this and who might not and what inconsequential thing turns out to be a big deal and what choice was actually the wrong one, all without making us wait for the slow consequences of those actions. It’s absolutely maddening, and it’s also one of the reasons why Kay’s books are as good as they are.
To be fair, this isn’t an innovation. Remember that “a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life” is the sixth line of Romeo and Juliet, and even twenty-first-century retellings like Hadestown take the time to explain why we bother to tell our myths and legends over and over (especially the tragedies) when we know how they’re going to end.
But Orpheus and Eurydice and Romeo and Juliet are hardly even fiction to us anymore—they’re history, and history isn’t constrained by the same rules. You can’t spoil history because we’re all living in the epilogue. If you want to be dramatic about it, we are the spoiler. That inevitability is the tragedy and the beauty.
Every one of Kay’s books knows this and every one is thematically obsessed with the weight of it. The things that happen can never be changed or avoided, because they have already happened. Which is, of course, an obvious statement. Historiography is nothing but dramatic irony made real and distilled; Kay’s books succeed so well because they are the rare novels that understand the melancholy of that fact and aren’t afraid to buck the conventions of narrative in order to create it. And they couldn’t do that if they weren’t so instant on telling me what’s going to happen next.
I still don’t buy that spoilers make books better, but I guess I’ll concede that they can.
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I never did get why some people read the last chapter of a book first. I like to experience the journey of the story without knowing the destination. No spoilers for me.
No spoilers for me, either, or I’ll spend the whole watching/reading experience fixating on the spoiled info. That said, I’m a fan of rewatching/rereading with the full knowledge of what’s coming.