Emily Edwards: You know how white women love true crime? True crime to white men is easter egg media…True crime instills in white women […] the myth that hypervigilance can save you. That if you’re always on the lookout for, like, the murderer who is [going to] bring you into his van […] that if you notice him, you won’t be that person. But easter egg media to white dudes also instills hypervigilance but the worst thing you have to worry about is someone thinking you don’t get a Star Wars reference […] I think that’s one of the reasons people hate spoilers so much now on like twitter and things like that. I don’t care. I love spoilers. Personally, because I was not allowed to read comic books, watch Star Wars, like anything when I was a kid […] just flat out anything that’s referenced in [Ready Player One] I was not allowed to experience, so I love spoilers because I don’t know what is f*cking happening in a movie unless someone tells me what is happening. And also, I love spoilers because I’m a writer and I like to see how things build on top of one another. So, I enjoy watching how writers put together a story in order to build to this huge climax like End Game-level sh*t, where, like, these huge catastrophic things are happening. I never would have known and I like watching how it gets built to be there. It’s awesome.
Thom Dunn: I love watching all those pieces come together. […] If a story is completely contingent upon the surprise of the spoiler and if it’s just a surprise that’s just a surprise or a just a twist that’s just a twist, then it’s f*cking meaningless anyway. There’s no value in that. [So if] I go into something knowing, like, ‘I know that this is how it ends,’ I [still] don’t know how we’re gonna get there, [that actually] helps me almost turn my brain off […and] know what to focus on.”
[…]
EE: But I also feel like there’s a purity aspect to it too where, like, there’s a large chunk of geek media people who want to be ‘the first’ to experience something and also if there’s spoilers and you’re not also the first person to discover the easter egg it gets into this really weird MRA aspect…
–18:27 Fuckbois of Literature podcast, 40: Ready Player One – Thom Dunn