Eye Heart Romance & YA, Spoiler Alerts: When Is It Okay to Talk About It? It's a really interesting that asks after how long is it finally ok to talk about major spoilers. Her title, however, had me thinking about types of spoilers - is it ever ok to discuss spoilers publicly, or should you always be spoiler free or keep them hidden?
It's something that I really have a bit of an issue with when it comes to books featuring LGBTQ* characters. Quite a number of people had a problem with the blurb of Pantomime by Laura Lam when it first came out back in 2013, when it was published by Strange Chemistry. There was no mention at all the Micah and Gene were the same person; that Micah is intersex, raised in their aristocratic family as Gene, and later became Micah when they ran away (I'm using plural pronouns here, because Micah is also genderfluid, and I can't quite remember what pronouns they use.). So, yes, I've just said that Micah is intersex, but Micah being intersex is actually pivotal to their story. It's important for readers - especially possible intersex readers - to know about Micah's intersexuality. It's important that people know about books with characters they can identify with. Hiding the fact, no-one's going to know until they read it, and with our attitude to not spoiling books, if we don't talk about, still people aren't going to know. Thankfully, with people getting annoyed at how Pantomime was published, people did talk about it, and it became known. Fortunately, now Pantomime has been re-published (as Strange Chemistry are no more) by Tor, the blurb has also been updated.
