I had no clue that Tara was going to die. I like to know casting information in advance, but never plot points. I love surprise!

I did ask Plei to provide me with some Angel spoilers this year because my interest was waning and I needed to get enthused. I had to know there was hope for the future. It helped. I was very successful at avoiding Buffy spoilers and was thrilled. Now I am very enthusiastic about Angel next year and will bolt from the Spoiler thread when real info starts to happen.

I understand the creators views, but it is a personal preference really.

As for it being less effort to be unspoiled. You do have to be careful with your browsing, but that is not much effort. When I was spoiled I spent way more time searching searching for details. It's like crack.

It's least effort to be "eh, whatever". I'm the sort of viewer who likes to be surprised when Giles shows up, not how, so I don't count how many shows ASH is signed for. But other people do, well meaningly, and stuff gets mentioned even here (which is where most of my spoilage comes from, though it wasn't much). I'd have to turn off the computer to stay honestly unspoiled.

I'm like Cindy in that the emotions I feel with any great art (which Buffy certainly is imo) are as real for me as the emotions I feel in real life. (The scoobies are far more real to me than say, an obviously fictional character like George W. Bush.) But for that reason I don't want to be spoiled on major events-I want to feel the shock and pain the other characters are feeling when Joyce or Tara dies, because that (speaking only for myself) is part of "living" the Buffyverse.

I find that, because I'm (shoot me and remind me to start watching TV like a normal person, and not like I've been doing it for the last few years) watching TV more for analysis than entertainment, spoilers help me look at an episode in terms of how it is setting the ground for events. Now, in things like that weird OOC Angel in End of Days, this sort of sucks, because I know that yep, that's Really Actually Angel and Not a Trick. But that also means I'm not pissed when it turns out to have just been less-than-perfect writing rather than a huge plot point, and that I wasn't falling for the cheap Spike misdirect at the end. So there are trade offs.

I was totally spoiled for both shows this year. It made Angel much better for me (knowing where they were going, the path made sense, if that makes sense), Buffy, not as much (knowing where they were going, the path made no sense and required more logic leaps for me than Angel did.)

For me, being unspoiled was work. I had to pick and choose where I was looking and what I was reading. Non-fandom TV viewers don't understand this whole "spoiler" concept, and would say things like "man, I can't wait for Faith to come back!"

I have to know if someone I love is going to die. It will ruin the show for me if I don't know.

Cindy is very much me in this regard. Oddly enough, if I know that something horrible is going to happen to a character I love, I can actually enjoy the pain in a sort of cathartic manner. The death (or maiming) becomes an element of tragedy rather than shock.

I don't think of those official-release things as spoilers either (I mean I know they are spoilers *here*, but they're not spoilers as I define them).

Exactly. I figure that a)ME, generally speaking, dislikes spoilers. b)ME routinely releases actor information. c)Therefore, actor information is not spoilerage.

Besides, I've never been able to successfully predict a plot by knowing who's involved.

Cindy is very much me in this regard. Oddly enough, if I know that something horrible is going to happen to a character I love, I can actually enjoy the pain in a sort of cathartic manner. The death (or maiming) becomes an element of tragedy rather than shock.

Cindy is me, too.

Besides, I've never been able to successfully predict a plot by knowing who's involved.

Heck, sometimes I hear detailed plot points and am still surprised by the way they play out onscreen.

I am looking forward to having all seven seasons on DVD.

What I'm really looking forward to is having my dad--who is almost completely unspoiled--watch through them for the first time. From the little I've told him about the show, he's intrigued by the whole idea. It'll be fascinating to see the reactions of someone who goes into Season One not knowing that Angel is a vampire, who gets to see Becoming 1/2 for the first time, the first emergence of Ripper, Willow's forays into magic, "Hush", "Restless", "Once More With Feeling" (Dad loves musicals), Spike's rough road from villain to hero, Willow's descent into darkness, and so on. What will really be neat about this, however, is that unlike the rest of us, he'll be seeing the whole story in a much more compressed time-frame. Knowing him (and how he snarfed down the entire Sharpe series in one go), it'll take him about two months, tops, to get through the whole series. It'll be interesting to hear how he reacts to things.

I was totally spoiled for both shows this year. It made Angel much better for me (knowing where they were going, the path made sense, if that makes sense), Buffy, not as much (knowing where they were going, the path made no sense and required more logic leaps for me than Angel did.)

Of course the key is whether the writing, acting, directing are sufficiently good to allow you to suspend disbelief (because on a purely logical basis every episode of BTVS could be shredded, as Keith Topping demonstrates in his "Logic Let Me Introduce You To This Window" section of his "Slayer") and there we all have different needs.

If the fictional reality really grabs me, "making sense" stops being an issue (unless the main appeal is the "puzzle" as with your average mystery, rather than the characters). That exception aside, if I'm really pulled in I'm not observing from the outside, but from the inside-and from the inside I find Life never really makes sense (or really always does, which is the same thing).

It is very difficult to draw me into a fictional reality-in that sense my standards are quite high. But once drawn in it is very difficult to send me back outside, and in that sense I'm easy. People act of character in my life all the time (including me) so when Giles (for example) who has become "real" to me acts out of character, I don't think, "they've forgot how to write Giles" but "this is a side of Giles that is unexpected." In a way, if the characters do not sometimes act out of character, if they are not sometimes inconsistent and contradictory, that is more likely to break the reality for me. I find people ultimately inexplicable in reality, so too much understanding makes fictional characters (for me) less real.

So, for example, while I understand and even agree with those who would have enjoyed a different use of Giles this season more, because of the above, my reaction always tended towards "Giles must be freaked" rather than "that's NOT Giles." The latter is something I probably would never have considered but for the Buffistas. (And if it had turned out not to be Giles after all? Well, then I would have had a high HSQ moment.)

Again, hard to get me to suspend disbelief in the first place, but once I have, hard to get me to stop suspending it. Others are hard/easy, easy/easy, or easy/hard. No right or wrong, but I think it might explain a lot about our subjective reactions. (Or maybe not. I could be making no sense at all.)

Does anyone else feel kinda bad about the Summers house? There's not a copper pipe refit in the world that can fix that kind of damage.

Joss, for several years, to the City Council of Wherever It Is They Filmed the Summers' House: "We're sorry we made that loud explosion please let us come back and film please please please."

Mayor of Wherever: "Okay, okay, you can come back!"

Joss: "Great! Now, in this scene, all of Sunnydale is sucked into a mammoth sinkhole."

Mayor of Wherever: ". . ."

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I just realized that Buffy was truly a gross production. Heehee.