Speak To Me Of Spoilers

[alicorn24]

I'm going to relaunch Elcenia soon. By my estimates, unless I cut out a decent chunk of content, the material already written will (when condensed and rewritten) comprise 7 (possibly 8) novels, 7 series of novellas/shorts, 12 standalone novellas, and 6 individual short stories

Comments

[lienne]

Advantages of web content: you can tuck spoilery information away under a button or black-on-black text or some similar trick. I'm spoiler-averse in some contexts, and I'd be happy with a page on Sister that had something like "Siblings: So-and-So, Other Dude, Brother."

Alternately, for people even less fond of spoilers than I am, have an entire "Spoilers" section at the end of every character page that lists all the information about that character that is explicitly concealed from the reader at the time of their introduction. Maybe even broken down by when it is revealed.

(And of course LJ decides to strip formatting in the comment, but not in the preview. Lovely.)

[alicorn24]

So it's not a problem for spoiler-hater to be able to see that there *exists* a secret about Sister's siblings?

[lienne]

I can see how it might be for someone who hates spoilers a lot more than I do, but for me and people whose spoiler-aversion is on roughly my level, it isn't.

[tremensdelirium]

Hmm... I'd say that knowing there is a secret is not a problem, unless knowing that there is a secret makes it trivially guessable.

If you said there was a secret about Sister's siblings, I'd assume that she had a sibling that she did not know about. If that's what you're worried about "spoiling," then I'd suggest getting more general; perhaps you can say that there is a secret about Sister's relatives.

[mantic_angel]

With a bit of JavaScript, it would be pretty easy to make a webpage that has a description and a "click to reveal spoilers". With even less programming, you could do what TV Tropes does and just put the spoilers as white text on a white background.

You could also just put the spoilers on a separate page, and thus have the "spoiler free" and "spoiler-ific" cast pages.

While I'm spoiler-adverse, I also basically never use reference material and can't track a cast of more than about a dozen, so I'm unfortunately not ideal for providing actual advice, just some suggestions of what I've seen :)

[adelenedawner]

Thirding the idea of harnessing the power of the internet to make information available in a modular way. Knowing that you don't code, though, I'd suggest having separate lists, either on a per-work or per-chapter basis.

[thepokeduck]

I find that when a story has a ton of characters a character reference is very useful.

As a spoiler averse person, I occasionally do receive spoilers from the indexes, and may be upset, but still find the story enjoyable, and certainly don't fault the author for wanting to write a helpful guide.

[tremensdelirium]

The idea of putting a reference online with expandable spoilers makes a lot of sense - there's no reason you couldn't do that and put just one version in the book itself.

Another unconventional technique you might consider is using something like Homeric epithets. For example, in the Iliad, there are two characters named Aias: The first, who is really big and from Telamon, is often called something like Telamonian Aias or Giant Aias. The second is called Aias son of Oïleus, Oïlean Aias, or Locrian Aias.

While once we've learned that Telamonian Aias is big, calling him Giant Aias doesn't give any new information, it does help us remember which Aias is in this battle scene, by giving a trait that's relevant to the action