Predicting "The Gingerdead Man"

I know what’s going to happen!  … wait a minute, why did they die?!

This is what I am thinking when reading a book or watching a film. I start off thinking I am an expert at reading, just like Foster, who gave off a condescending attitude when he said it was obvious to any reader that such and such happened... spoiler alert, I was the one who did not figure that out.

In my book club book: Where the Crawdads Sing, I am at a point where I expect everyone to leave Kya by the end because she lives alone and everyone in her life has left her at some point. I don’t know what that will entail, will she be alone for the entirety of her life? Or will someone come into her life and then leave after a good amount of time? I have my predictions that the color red will be important because it is the only prominent color that appears when the novel discusses Kya and Chase. I may be completely wrong, but I just have to read to find out.

In other forms of literature, I was taken aback by how wrong my predictions were. It didn’t help that my sister has read tons of books and knew exactly what was going to happen because she – like Foster – has the gift of knowing every outcome of situations and the ability to recognize them. 

One time, we watched The Gingerdead Man and no one could predict what could happen there. 

The amount of times we had to pause and try to comprehend what we just watched was insane. I mean look at this face… 

The storyline is that a man dies and then his blood is used in a recipe accidentally to make gingerbread cookies. Now, this part I did predict – the gingerbread man becomes a person and starts terrorizing the family. One thing leads to another and someone gets stuck in an oven and then they spend the movie trying to rescue them. I would not recommend watching it unless you want to be left confused, slightly terrified, and did I mention confused?

I feel better about not picking up on small subtleties in the text when I remember that bad movies like that exist. I still want to work on reading more books to increase my ability to predict, but a small cleanser of bad movies is good to reset the spectrum of feeling like I other people are picking up on I am not.