This week's poll was suggested by Viki.kdrama. Do you try to look up spoilers? Would you flip to the end of a book and read the last chapter first? Do you look up movie summaries on Wikipedia before watching it? A paper by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan D. Leavitt actually found that people tend to enjoy stories more with spoilers (some caveats, so read the paper yourself)

You can submit poll ideas here: https://www.mangaupdates.com/topic/kilkdnn/site-manga-poll-suggestions

Previous Poll Results:

Question: When do you rate a series?

Choices:

• After looking at the cover - votes: 17 (0.8%)
• After reading the first few chapters - votes: 211 (10.2%)
• About halfway through - votes: 227 (10.9%)
• After I finish reading it (e.g., series completion, catching up to translations, or deciding to drop it) - votes: 1292 (62.2%)
• I don't rate anything - votes: 330 (15.9%)

There were 2077 total votes. The poll ended: April 5, 2025

Would you change your initial rating after some time?

A just ruler amongst tyrants

When there's a romance I sometimes look for a yes/no answer of whether or not they end up together, or who ends up with who. I never look up plot spoilers, I love a twist and a great twist can be ruined that way.

I don't generally like plot spoilers, but there are a few specific things that I do want spoilers about and will regularly look up spoilers for.

Mostly it's "who's the ML" since I primarily read rofan, and I really hate getting 2nd ML syndrome or even just spending the whole story feeling really anxious about whether or not the guy I'm rooting for will be endgame even if eventually it's revealed that he is. The relief I feel isn't outweighed by the months of anxiety I felt before then, and if the ML isn't the one I was hoping for, I don't want to get all emotionally invested and then feel super disappointed.

In either case, I don't really like the endgame pairing in a romance being a surprise, so if it isn't obvious from the beginning and spoilers are available, I'll happily look them up.

The other main situations I want spoilers for is if it has a tragic ending, the ending is really bad, or it's an abrupt axed non-ending, or if there are novel spoilers out there warning about some really horrible twist that would put me off of reading it, like the adoptive father being the ML (although I guess that also counts as ML spoilers), the FL being raped by the ML and still forgiving him and staying with him, or the FL just being an irredeemably horrible person but the narrative isn't self-aware of how terrible she is and frames her as completely blameless/justified even when she's harming innocent people.

Basically, I want to know who the ML is, and I want to know if there's a good reason I should stay away and avoid reading the story in the first place. I don't want any other spoilers, and I can't stand when people who do have spoilers sit in the comments smugly hinting at spoilers or sharing them unsolicited without covering them in spoiler formatting.

I only look up spoilers for something I KNOW I won't finish.

If it's something I know I actively want to read/watch, I try to avoid all spoilers. I will actually avoid reading any general summaries/reviews as I feel like they can bias my experience. My general preference is to go into something as cold and no-perceptions as possible.

✨~* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~✨

You can't trust every author. There are some that will write a story that betrays the readers' expectations (in a bad way).

If I find something that I'm confident I'll enjoy, I'll just start reading right away and not look for spoilers.

If the synopsis and/or first few chapters haven't provided me with enough information to have the confidence that the author is actually committed to taking the story in a direction that I'd enjoy, then I will go look up spoilers before investing any more of my time.

If the plot starts to get boring or frustrating, I'll likely put it on hold and then go look up spoilers to see if it actually gets better again or just keeps getting worse before deciding to continue reading. I have also dropped stories that apparently do get better again but the boring bit in the middle just lasts too long for me to be willing to read through it.

It certainly is a sometimes thing for me. Usually it's when I'm unsure of what characters the main romance ends up being, because manga like Air Gear and just about anything by the author of Freezing (I think there was one exception) have traumatized me by betraying my expectations in bad ways, and I definitely know what I hate.

Ikki deserved better... and so does every male lead of the Freezing author (his artist needs to find a better writer). But I digress.

Really, it depends on what ultimately drives the main character.

To give an example of where my personal line is (and this lines up with other recently asked poll questions):

Had I known how it was going to end up, I'd have dropped Air Gear early instead of reading it to completion. Or rather, I predicted the ending a bit early, waited for the series to end 10 or 30 chapters/weeks later, and then spoiled myself and both got angry and was glad I didn't keep wasting my time. No writing can undo the damage that had already been done to their future relationship in that series, up to the point I had dropped it, because a line had already been crossed that, at the time, I felt couldn't be fixed. Now, with further knowledge and real life statistics and scientific research, I know I was right.

You can't fix her, Ikki. The author forced you to throw away a much better woman who cared about you more than the girl you were chasing ever did.

I hated the ending of Bleach, but not enough to stop reading it because the story wasn't about learning life lessons while chasing a girl. Ichigo really did what he did because of a sense of honor and stoicism. The author just didn't foreshadow Ichigo as being interested in who he ended up with after the final time skip, so it felt entirely undeserved and unlikely. The other pairing people complain about I was fine with. But, again, romance was never a driving factor for the story so I would have kept reading to the end.

In Naruto, similarly to Bleach, I don't care who Naruto ends up with, because that ultimately isn't what drives Naruto. However, unlike with Bleach, I saw some foreshadowing and was not upset nor surprised with who Naruto ended up with. Unlike seemingly most of the other Naruto fans, who, for reasons I do not understand, ended up completely blindsided.

But I digress, as Koneko_Nyaa said, "You can't trust every author."

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

Never! Why would I intentionally ruin something for myself?

There's been plenty of instances where I accidentally stumbled upon a spoiler, but I've never once seeked one out for myself. You only get to experience something first once, so I make sure my first experience is a good one.

But even if there's a question about a series I'm dropping, I still don't look up any spoilers, because if I'm not finishing the series, it doesn't really matter anyhow. I don't really care one way or the other about what happens. At that point, it's just some fiction that I couldn't care less about.

Visit my scanning blog: Jammin' Scans

::End of Transmission::

Sometimes when I was really curious about the story I would look up for any spoilers I could find.

For example, how's the ending? What's the plot twist? What happened to the MC, or the villain, or other characters? If there's a mystery/problem inside the story, what's the revelation? And usually, most importantly, at what point will I get to read the scenes I want to read or am waiting for?

I don't hate spoilers, instead spoilers usually encourage me to be patient to reach the point I've been waiting for.

I tend to be more lax with this for anime/manga, but I always look up spoilers for basically any other shows/movies/books I'm interested in. With my constantly increasing backlog, I basically never watch or read anything without knowing exactly what happens anymore.

I'm a firm believer in a series being good not just owing to what happens in it but also due to how it manages to convey its events. And I often find myself enjoying a series more on subsequent rewatches since I'm better able to appreciate its technical merits without the worry about what'll come next getting in the way.

I'm also that type of person who flips to the end of the book before reading it and reads the last page first. This tactic, ironically, often leads to more confusion and less spoilers, since these pages often make sense only in context.

Always! It's only natural .. well, at least for me?

💾 | ⚙️ | Nerd. Netizen. Engineer. Wanderer. Hydra. オタク。ネット民。技術者。放浪者。大蛇。