Game of Thrones spoilers are actually in this post about spoilers, needless to say.
So, after Game of Thrones finished airing this week (the episode, not the series), I saw some very funny tweets about Joffrey dying – a lot of them, including a particularly funny image-gag hashtag. I tweeted the hashtag as well as a couple of comments and got some unfollows – including some with commentary, of course. Andrew Wheeler (who I like and respect) commented thusly:
It remains my belief that a person's spoiler policy is the most reliable indicator of criminal psychopathy.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Wheeler) April 14, 2014
"Why don't you strive to place your life experiences exactly inside the bubble of my own experiences? Why does your life deviate from mine?"
— Andrew Wheeler (@Wheeler) April 14, 2014
And Andrew has a point about basic empathy there, which is quite fair to make. Of course, the problem with this argument is that, to a certain extent, it goes both ways. Someone asserting that people should not spoil is prioritizing the new reader over the existing one, prioritizing the initial experience of a work over discussion and analysis of it.1
There’s a conflict here, and the absolute end at either side of it (never spoil anything ever/never care about spoiling people) is advanced only by assholes, which is why most people address the issue with the concept of the “spoiler window” – where and when it becomes permissible to start discussing specific details of works. Of course, much like how mostly minute differences in how one practices Christianity led to a ridiculously high number of schisms over the years, the difference of opinion on when spoiling becomes permissible has led to heated discussion, at the least.
And, frankly, nobody is perfect. Not me and not anybody else. Practically everybody I follow on Twitter agrees that anti-spoiling is to some degree worthwhile, but those same people have spoiled me on all sorts of works. People get enthusiastic about things they like and post without thinking, and this happens all the time.
So my general spoiler policy is as follows:
1. One day for current TV shows. One week for current movies. Two weeks for current books. This is a fair amount of time for people who are enthusiastic about the work to find time to enjoy the work. After these time periods expire, my general feeling is that public discussion of specific elements in the work is fair game.
2. When someone spoils you, don’t be a dick about it to them (unless they were clearly spoiling for the sake of spoiling, in which case, hell with ’em). Most “spoilers” are the results of people getting Excited About A Thing and wanting to share that excitement, which is why so many spoiler-fights get so nasty: the spoiler is (probably unconsciously) trying to share a positive emotion with their friends, which is usually a good thing to do in most situations. A snide “thanks for the spoilers”-type comment only makes the spoiling individual defensive – it’s practically inevitable – and makes the spoiler far less likely to delete/retract the spoiling comment, which is the most important reason to comment at them about the spoiling.
3. If you use Twitter or Facebook, the only way to guarantee yourself unspoiled content is by avoiding Twitter or Facebook. People don’t like this because they like social media and don’t like being told that avoiding it is the only way to guarantee not being spoiled. Which is understandable but, sorry, that’s just tough. If you follow a reasonably significant number of people on Twitter – say, over two hundred – and you like the same stuff as a lot of them, spoilers are essentially impossible to avoid – not just because of individual comments but because at that level of following you can be spoiled in the aggregate. (This particularly happened to me with the final season of Breaking Bad, where I was able to figure out the plot of the episode within an hour of its airing based on comments that, individually, were probably not too spoilerish.) This is the price social media exacts. (Of course, “it’s Twitter/Facebook” is not in and of itself an excuse for an individual spoilering comment or post – and I say that with the guilt of someone who has used it.)
4. Remakes or adaptations are held to a lesser spoiling standard (AKA “the Game of Thrones rule”). This is the spoiler stance I take that is probably most controversial, and since it’s in part responsible for Joffreygate (or whatever) it’s worth addressing in full. Bluntly: I am far less concerned about spoiling an original work than I am about spoiling an adaptation. Game of Thrones is especially noteworthy with respect to this rule because it is a TV adaptation of books which have been in print literally for years; Joffrey’s death, in print, predates George W. Bush becoming President. There are other examples of it (the King Kong example made fun of by Penny Arcade in 2005 is one that I know happened to people in real life, and I’ve seen it happen in the last year with the Hobbit movies as well). And while adaptations can change elements of a story (Tauriel’s role in The Hobbit, Bronn’s expanded role in Game of Thrones, et cetera), it’s rare that they change major events within the story’s plot. Now, this should not be taken as a suggestion that spoiler protection should be abandoned entirely for adaptive works; new readers/viewers should still get a reasonable chance to enjoy the work. But I think the window for reasonable spoiler protection on an adaptive work is much smaller than it is on an original one.
- Of course, the difference here is that an existing reader has a vested interest in there being more consumers of a work because then they have more people to discuss the work with, which is why we generally all agree that some level of spoiler protection is reasonable. [↩]
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And so it was written and so rule #2 was shouted by megaphone from every rooftop for twenty days and twenty nights, and it was good.
Personally I love spoilers, because I can’t handle even the dramatic tension of a romantic comedy. If I have a heart attack and die because I don’t know if James Gandolfini and Tina Fey get together by the end of the movie, I am going to feel very bad about myself.
TV, as a delivery medium, has changed dramatically over the last decade, thanks to both HBO- and Netflix-exclusive properties, as well as to the prevalence of both PVRs and piracy.
For GoT airing at 10pm on a Sunday night, it’s very common for groups to gather for a viewing party on Monday evening.
In fact, I think I actually know more people watching GoT on Monday evenings than I know watching it on Sunday nights.
So, given a Sunday evening airing and a Monday evening viewing party, I believe the spoiler window for Joffrey’s death should have concluded when waking up on Tuesday morning.
To me, that’s a reasonable interpretation of “one day.”
I don’t think I’d agree with your timeframe – expecting folks to watch a new episode within a day or release is pretty extreme, and comes across as saying that, “Hey, you weren’t a dedicated enough fan to watch it the moment it came out, so… sucks to be you, here are some spoilers.”
But then, I also feel that the issue isn’t that spoilers can’t be discussed, just that they should be accompanied by plenty of warning. And that’s where I’m largely in disagreement with the thoughts presented here.
I don’t think the issue is “Should one side be deprived of discussion so that the other side is safe from spoilers.” Instead, I think it is, “Should one side make a relatively minor effort to provide fair warning, so that the other side is safe from spoilers.”
Now I admit, I don’t really use twitter, so I can see how the character limit might make that more of a challenge.
I also definitely agree that if someone accidently spoils something, saying, “Thanks jerk for being a jerk with spoilers. Jerk.” is not a good response. But saying, “Hey, could you maybe add a warning here about spoilers, or try to do so in the future?” isn’t an attack, it is a perfectly reasonable request.
In the end, I think Wheeler’s claims about psychopathy are pretty extreme, sure. And I won’t hold ill-will against someone for accidently spoiling something – especially since, like you say, that is often done out of excitement.
But at the same time, I think it is a very basic measure of empathy, and when someone deliberately puts forth a ‘spoiler policy’ to say, “Here are the situations in which I think it is fine for me to deliberately be a jerk to you”, it is very hard to find that reasonable. (And, yes, intentionally declaring when you find it acceptable to ruin another’s enjoyment of a work of entertainment is kinda uncool.)
I’m more along the lines of Fuck Netflix. Fuck On Demand and Fuck the Internet. Mad Men airs Sunday night. How I Met Your Mother was Mondays. That’s when you turn on the TV and watch it. After it’s over, it’s over, and we can talk about it.
I can’t stand people who miss the Super Bowl and are all “Don’t tell me! I Tivo’d it.” Fuck you. Seattle won. 43-8. Television shows have an air time. That’s the nature of the medium. Watch it, and talk about it or don’t watch and get spoiled.
The situation is very different with books and movies. These are media products intended to be consumed on one’s own time. Don’t be a dick and spoil. But television? 3 hour window just to be nice to the fine folk in British Columbia.
>1. One day for current TV shows. One week for current movies. Two weeks for current books. This is a fair amount of time for people who are enthusiastic about the work to find time to enjoy the work.
*snort* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh wait, you’re serious?
Replace every “day” in that with “month” and every “week” with “year” and you have something approaching reasonable. Very few people are so obsessed with entertainment that they consume it within the week it becomes available – or even hear about it in that timeframe.
I believe two things are true
1) People should try not to spoil people and provide warnings or heads up if they’re going to spoil things especially fairly recent things
2) Spoilers are not a big deal and anyone who complains about them vociferously or gets actually mad about them to any degree is being fundamentally ridiculous. You found out about something in advance, get over it.
Please also bear in mind that those of us in the UK don’t get GoT until the next day.
And the internet is _global_.
Personally, I’m not too bothered by spoilers. I enjoy being surprised by twists and so on, but if someone happens to have mentioned them to me already, I don’t get too stressed about it.
My wife, on the other hand, is fanatically, rabidly opposed to spoilerification of all sorts, and I occasionally have to put up with being upbraided for an unwitting spoiler for something I didn’t know she hadn’t watched/read.
(She’s not too unreasonable – for example, when things she really cares about are shown, she tries to stay off the internet until she’s seen it.)
Anyway, I therefore have a bit of a view from both sides, as it were, and as such I tend to agree particularly strongly with points 2 and 3, and to a lesser extent with point 4 (see for example arguments about whether people discussing the historical events portrayed in Argo should have tagged them with spoiler warnings).
I will however chime in with Myth to quibble somewhat with point 1. It’d be nice to live in a world where we all had legal access to the same media at the same time, but that’s sadly not the case. Those time frames are only “a fair amount of time” for someone living in the Northern American Hegemony, or people willing to resort to legally dubious means to acquire their entertainment.
(As an aside, some media channels are starting to get the point, and doing near-simultaneous releases for popular shows/films in their main territories, but it’s still very much the exception rather than the rule.)
On the gripping hand, by the time you’ve typed “Spoiler warning: ” into a tweet, that’s 12% of your space gone, and everyone’s already read the rest of it anyway.
I do think there’s something to be said for avoiding spoilers, no matter what the age of the work. But there has to be a reasonable expectation with it.
I will be quite annoyed with anyone who spoils The Empire Strikes Back for my kids before I’ve had a chance to show it to them, because they’re kids, and you shouldn’t expect them to be familiar with it.
Conversely, I hope they get to experience Romeo and Juliet without foreknowledge of the end, but given that it’s pretty much a byword for tragic love story, I won’t stress about them already knowing what’s going to happen.
In closing, I will note that one of my favourite film programs, Wittertainment on BBC 5, regularly wrestles with the issue of spoilers and the statute of limitations thereof, and has still not found a definitive answer.
There’s at least some evidence that spoilers don’t spoil and may slightly increase enjoyment of the so-called spoiled work: http://www.wired.com/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything/
“What’s the soonest I can begin blathering about stuff without having to think or care about how what I say might affect other people? Cause I want to do the absolute minimum of giving a damn about other people.”
acabaca: So, in your mind, demanding that nobody say a word about Joffrey’s death until Tuesday the 13th of May is “approaching reasonable”? Can’t talk about Captain America: Winter Soldier until Avengers 2 is already out?
You need to get yourself recalibrated.
Avoiding spoilers on twitter (and social media in general) is like saying “Hey, I’m taping the Super Bowl, so don’t tell me anything about it. Let’s go to the bar!”
The research in that Wired article claiming spoilers don’t spoil stories is basically just an opinion poll. It shows “evidence” that some people like spoilers and some people don’t. You could use the exact same methodology to argue that theaters shouldn’t show documentaries because there’s “evidence” that people like romantic comedies better.
Also, who thinks that the path to becoming a better writer is to make the maximum number of assumptions about what your readers are and aren’t familiar with? Because this list is basically a justification for, whenever possible, not having to think about what your readers have and haven’t read or seen.
But what’s one day or two weeks actually mean in respect of the international community? Spider-Man 2 comes out here in the UK Friday, 2 weeks I believe before the states. So I could be spoiling 1 week before anyone sees it over there? Note: it looks terrible, so I won’t be paying cinema prices to see it, but I could say the same about Captain America or Sherlock or even Doctor Who.
Conversely GoT isn’t aired in the UK until the Monday, and quite a bit later in other parts of the world.
Release dates are fluid. To be honest, I’ve given up on Twitter as there was too much spoilerage on there for all sorts of things. At least on blogs people have the courtesy to put SPOILERS first.
“I haven’t had a chance to watch this piece of entertainment yet, and it’s everyone else’s responsibility to avoid mentioning it in places where I might overhear it.”
in some instances, spoiling doesn’t help because some viewers are savvy enough about tropes to know when 1) a trope is gonna be played straight, 2) a trope will get subverted, and 3) that the sole surviving guy among the criminals was Keyser Soze all along.
I knew that last bit before I even saw the movie. And I still went and saw it, because knowing it did not diminish for me the enjoyment of the craftmanship of the work.
There is no universally acceptable timeframe. My spoiler policy is: if I have seen it, I might discuss it. If I haven’t seen it, I won’t bitch if you do.
But I think that should be standard for, you know, adults. Maybe I am an asshole, though.
I’ve never considered my behavior indicative of criminal psychopathy, but I refuse to stifle potential discussion of something just because some people value surprise over analysis. I would never go out of my way to ruin someone’s experience of a movie/comic/TV episode/dubstep Christmas lightshow, but if something interesting happens and I want to talk to my Facebook friends about it in a big discussion on my wall, I’m going to.
This fanboy culture where advance knowledge of a plot development is somehow a punishable crime is ridiculous. PaulW’s on the money here – I’m interested in a work of art because of the characters, the craftsmanship, and the aesthetic. Maybe if people stopped taking glorified soap operas so seriously, they could actually discuss the merits of a story rather than gossip like they’re in a sewing circle.
@thornae
On a completely random note, for ‘On the gripping hand’ you win one free internet today.
@acabaca:
While I might be willing to say that you should give it a month or two for new books, because not everyone reads at the same speed… the rest of the time frame you’re suggesting is completely untenable.
I generally don’t mind spoilers, but I have friends that do. For them I tend to put a version of spoiler control kind of similar to the suggested into place.
It’s not a matter of giving yourself carte blanche not to care about other people (as others have implied), but it’s about a reasonable expectation that if you care enough about the work that you’re going to get bent out of shape about information… then you care enough to see the media in a fairly speedy time frame.
Rule 1: I tend to assume a slightly larger window: a week for TV (until the next episode), three or so for movies, and, say, two months for books (assuming the book is something like the latest Martin or Jordan or Butcher, something that garners that kind of attention). Being in Japan right now, I haven’t watched The Winter Soldier yet–because it hasn’t opened. It opens this week. A week on movies is not quite enough time given internationalism, I find.
Rule 2: Agreed, but on the flip side, if someone says “I have not encountered this yet, I am going to, please be gentle” that should be respected and hard barriers thrown up. (If that person is greatly outnumbered that person should leave, which ties into Rule 3, but one-on-one? Nope.)
Respect for specific requests for spoiler-protection do not have an expiration date, either. I will avoid spoiling Babylon 5 if someone says “I’ve heard it’s good, but haven’t seen it yet, don’t spoil me,” twenty years be damned. (But also, I will not assume spoiler protection until they say it, so if I open with B5 spoilers I won’t be guilty. I’ll just stop when they ask. Assuming, again, they ask nicely.)
Rule 3: You are always outnumbered online by people who have seen it (unless it hasn’t been released and someone has previews, of course), so yes, the balance shifts. Filters are good, ability to know spoilers are coming and elide them is useful, hashtags are your friend, but you will not achieve complete spoiler purity if you are online.
Rule 4: Generally agreed. And yes, this is the sticky wicket, because the audience for Game of Thrones greatly exceeds the audience for A Song of Ice and Fire. So I try to be cautious, but especially if someone gets snide or angry, I will have no compunction about saying “the book was out for ten years.” Or more.
Game of Thrones spoilers aren’t really spoilers because the books have been around for a while.
Sure I intentionally stopped myself from telling my friends who don’t read comics that the Winter Soldier was Bucky because I wanted them to enjoy the story as it unfolded but I didn’t have to. Meanwhile I had the Hydra reveal spoiled before I had a chance to see it because I had to work during the film’s opening weekend.
People are busy; you really ought to wait at least a week before you spoil something.
Something that hasn’t been brought up yet I feel is deeply relevant to this discussion: the establishment of deliberate spoiler-filled or spoiler-free spaces, which are both to be respected whenever set up.
Example: the AV Club knew going into Game of Thrones that their discussion threads, a major driver of traffic to their site and thus of revenue, were going to be an absolute nightmare owing to the existence of the novels. Their solution? Two walled gardens. One thread is explicitly for people who want to discuss everything in the context of everything else, and one is for people who are only and exclusively watching the show as it airs. Problem: solved.
Don’t be the guy who parachutes into a place that is explicitly marked “Spoiler free, no, we know that the burning questions have been answered for fifteen years, we just don’t care” with a megaphone shouting “STANNIS KILLS DUMBLEDORE” at the top of your lungs. That just makes you an asshole.
Conversely, if one of your buddies has Ned Stark as both his twitter and facebook avatars and a three-quarters complete direwolf tattoo on his back, that guy is probably going to be live-tweeting stuff as it happens. Don’t whine about it. He let you know ahead of time; respect that shit.
The type of forae and it’s accessibility also makes a difference. If someone on your favorite open forum makes a thread entitled “All Avengers 2 Previews and Info” and you don’t want to be spoiled? Don’t click on that thread! There’s spoilers in there! It warned you of the spoilers. There’s gonna be spoilers in the open threads as well, because open threads are open threads. On the other hand, if someone makes a thread called “Winter Soldier Reactions” you should probably be able to head in there without seeing idiots post the latest studio leaks about the Avengers, because the thread ain’t about that. Don’t be that guy.
The nature of the forum matters. Check it. Be aware of it before you either post spoilers or bitch about spoilers.
Anyone can spoil the Winter Soldier’s identity by paying attention on IMDb, let alone looking up the story. I made the mistake of saying “seemed to die” to my date who’d only seen Avengers before realizing the movie would set up things.
It’s reasonable to ask that people who don’t want to be spoiled take certain basic steps to avoid being spoiled.
Especially since it’s now possible to filter your social media feed to avoid spoilers, whether it’s TV plot twists or sports scores or anything else:
http://www.getrather.com
(I didn’t know about rather until today, but it was actually getting spoiled on the “Purple Wedding” that led me to discover the plugin. I’ve since tried it and it works extremely well.)
My issue with this, as others have said, is that your 24 window boils down to “well, fuck anyone who doesn’t live in North America – they can just do without social media”. Or I guess, “They can just do without North American friends” which kind of removes the great thing about these systems.
Looking at North American air dates for shows I enjoy, even assuming that I *were* to download them and watch them as soon practical (ie. after work the following day), you are suggesting that i should only use Twitter on Sundays and Tuesdays (and Sundays only became free as of about a month ago), or I should simply accept that North Americans have the right to spoil my fun whenever they feel like it and shut up about it.
I’m not saying there isn’t a window after which spoilers become OK, but I think your windows are much too short – for example, using your guide, it would have been OK for me to spoil Captain America 2 before any of my US friends could possible have seen it, and I concluded that this would be a pretty unconditional dick move, and didn’t do it. If I can bear in mind the North American release dates for my friends, it’s surely reasonable to ask North American friends to do the same going the other way.
@Chris
I can’t stand people who miss the Super Bowl and are all “Don’t tell me! I Tivo’d it.” Fuck you. Seattle won. 43-8. Television shows have an air time. That’s the nature of the medium. Watch it, and talk about it or don’t watch and get spoiled.
You do realise that not everyone has equally free schedules, right? That not everyone enjoys the same amount of downtime, and that what free time they get to snatch doesn’t necessarily track with the television they’d like to watch? That not everyone can even necessarily afford to keep up with every TV show they wanted to watch when it’s actually technically first available?
For years my family wasn’t in a position where we could comfortably afford cable, so there was any number of shows I had to wait for until they reached terrestrial TV so they’d be “free” (I’m British, so we still had a licence fee to pay). And our situation was hundreds of times better than a lot of people. There are people out there on our country’s increasingly disgraceful disability benefit who both can’t afford to keep entirely up to date and who rely upon Twitter for social interaction. MGK is right that there’s no way to avoid spoilers in that situation (though “people like social media” is very much an understatement for a lot of people), but suggesting these people should just nut up and recognise how television works comes across as exceptionally ableist.
(There’s also the fact that not everyone can watch X hours worth of television in X hours, depending on various complications they may have. The idea that TV has a regular schedule that books/movies don’t is true up to a point, but it doesn’t hold for everyone.)
I’m generally a fan of labelling clearly and allowing people to choose – though it can be hard when some people have a “spoiler” standard wherein “Harry Potter is a wizard!” might be considered a spoiler. (Or, on the other end, I get frustrated recommending Frozen, as I find it impossible to even describe what the movie’s actually about without spoiling by pretty much any standard.)
But as to the Wired article, I feel like the experiment cheated: it used only Great Literature. Of COURSE a great story doesn’t rely on suspense; how could it be great if everything about it was uninteresting to re-experience? Similarly, I don’t mind spoiling rotten on the MCU movies, because I have faith that the story quality will only be enhanced by seeing how the movie pulls off its twists. However, plenty of crappy art is only interesting if it can pull off its one-trick surprise.
Meanwhile, I feel like I seriously benefited by seeing The Prestige unspoiled. I did, in fact, enjoy it far more on the second viewing, appreciating nuances which I couldn’t possibly have understood on a first viewing – but part of that enjoyment was a comparison with how I thought it had gone the first time. That first viewing was necessarily quite unlike all further viewings, which were necessarily quite alike.
It’s kind of impossible to know whether spoilers will ruin anything inherently. The only thing a person can know is whether spoilers will make them grouchy upon hearing them as spoilers.
If you go on social media, unregulated communication based systems, after something has aired, and you follow hundreds/thousands of strangers, they are under no obligation to remain spoiler-free in their tweets/statuses.
That’s just the way it is. Is it fair? No. But tough shit.
A comment about movie spoilers and accessibility, put more eloquently than I can: http://dirty-diana.dreamwidth.org/109082.html
@Alasdair Watson
Regional spoilers are an unfortunate fact of life. MGK was talking about the last Discworld book MONTHS before it came out in the USA because it was already available in the rest of the English-speaking world LAST YEAR. Brits are always ruining Doctor Who for us*. It happens.
*Luckily I’m so far behind (I wait for Netflix) that I forget by then anyway.
I’m okay with story spoilers. But there’s another kind of spoiler, which is rather common in, say, anime, where there’s details about the setting that aren’t revealed until later in, or until the last five minutes of the last episode, that put the previous content in a new light. Example: the ending of Angel Beats, which derives its dramatic weight from the fact that it arrives as a total punch to the gut that you should have seen coming but didn’t. Or the last five minutes of .hack//sign, which I accidentally spoiled myself on about halfway through the series, and which leeched a lot of fun out of the rest as I kept thinking, “man that would have been amazing to discover at the end, where I was supposed to”.
Conclusion: fuck that Wired article.
@Beacon “An unfortunate fact of life” is being used an awful lot in this conversation to excuse behaviour that could be almost entirely solved by a *little* more consideration for others – ie. extending the no-spoiler window by just a few days to a week, for time-fixed events like TV. After all, the people who complain about spoilers are people who love shows as much as the people who issue spoilers, so it’s not like it’s not reasonable to assume they’ll see the film/TV show as soon as they actually *can*.
I wouldn’t mind (too much) if I occasionally got spoiled after a reasonable window, regardless of whether I’d had the chance to see something, but it’s the insistence that the first-airing time frame is the only one that matters that I find problematic, particularly when the solution offered is a very glib “give up all the benefits of social media”. Surely it’s not unreasonable to ask for a sensible medium to be found rather than saying that spoiling after only the tiniest window is OK?
(FWIW, the British Whovians spoiling things for the North Americans are dicks too, and I can assure you I’m not among them.)
Books, I absolutely agree, are much more difficult, because the pub dates are so varied, but (cult) film and TV these days is usually just a matter of a week or two.
I was having a conversation about reading Spider-Man comics with a friend, and he asked me what “Emma Stone’s character” had done in th e issue I just read. I explained that she was mentioned twice, but she’s really best known for being dead.
He did not know that. He wasn’t upset, but I felt kind of bad spoiling him. I was pretty sure it was common knowledge, but I should have been tipped off by him not knowing Gwen’s actual name.
Ah well.
@Laurie Rich
With the danger of coming across as an uncaring asshole… I have to say I’m not sure about that post. I agree with everything she says regarding the accessibility of movie theaters in general, and I can understand the inherent problems that come with that.
But I go back to the point made earlier in the post, the position of: ‘You must use spoiler warnings and not discuss details in non-spoiler threads until years after the release because me’ is not inherently less assholic then ‘Fuck spoiler warnings, suck it up kiddo’.
Both positions are about saying: ‘Hey, this is about making my world easy to deal with, and I don’t give a shit about your worldview.’
There is a happy medium there somewhere, and trying to set a reasonable Statute of Spoilerification that at least gives a nod to remembering that other people have lives, isn’t a horrid thing.
Though in all honesty, I kind of like College Humor’s spoiler policy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8IAhI-B6UU
I was going to point out that because of variances in distribution, release, people’s lives and schedules, etc., there’s no way to construct a foolproof Spoiler Window. I was going to argue that it should probably be more about the context of where the discussion’s taking place (ie, if you’re in a fan forum, it’s probably divided up along these lines for convenience; if you’re on Facebook or Twitter, you can expect no quarter, because that’s just not possible).
But seeing how genuinely distraught people are acting over being spoiled, I think I’m now okay with being on the extreme/assholish side. Surprise over a fictional development is not an inherent human right to me, and I wish nerds would stop pretending that every hangup of their sad little subculture is a political issue or social phenomena. It’s just dorks being uptight. Second verse, same as the first, Judy is a punk, in the midst of life we are in debt, etc.
Random thought 1: When it comes to Marvel, Marvel itself will always be the worst offender where spoilers are concerned. That Winter Soldier spoiler I held onto out of respect for non-comic-readers was ruined repeatedly in promotional material. Ever since around Civil War they’re provided news outlets with spoilers for big events in the comics (often BEFORE the issues come out). I’d love a Thunderbolts movie but I doubt it could happen if only because the PR people would make sure that everyone and their grandmother knows that it is really a Masters of Evil movie long before the film is out (also Marvel kills off way too many movies villains).
Random thought 2: I remember hearing that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was actually a mystery in the first edition but the spoiler became so widespread that the later versions and translations didn’t even bother canceling Hyde’s identity.
@Alasdair Watson
I suspect that most such international spoilers are more about thoughtlessness than maliciousness though. Fandom is going to want to talk about new media when it comes out regardless of where it is currently legally available. If I stumble upon an anime community then I shouldn’t be surprised when they talk about stuff that won’t be available in the US for years. Granted when the rest of the world’s nerds are talking about Attack on Titan and I am only vaguely aware of it then I start to feel a little like the Eastern Europeans on Euro Trip who just discovered Friends or whatever.
@N/A
A friend of mine asked me about Emma Stone’s character too. My awkward attempt to dance around the issue told her all she needed to know. Opps.
PS: Rosebud is a sled.
“Concealing Hyde’s identity”, not “canceling Hyde’s identity”
Stupid Typo
Welp, accidentally got spoiled a bit for Winter Solider here, which I suppose I was asking for. My ability to go see films in the cinema has dramatically reduced since having a baby, so it does make these things more difficult for me. I don’t see why its hard to give a spoiler warning before giving spoilers. There is no human being who has seen all media, so everyone can be spoiled by someone else.
Just found this, agree with most of it.
One thing beyond spoilers for things like 70 year old books is “spoilers” about historical events. I was once scolded for spoiling the movie Argo. (And this was a good month after it came out.) People, it happened, I remember it, I was in high school. (For what it’s worth, I was still on the edge of my seat while watching at the cinema.)
A group of us would joke about spoiling Spartacus, saying, it was over 2000 years ago, they’re basically all dead now. WWII, Japan successfully bombed Pearl Harbor, allies go on to eventually win the war. Etc etc etc.