The Official Guide to Spoilers
Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. The Narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person. Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
You know all this, either because you’ve seen the movies to which I’m referring or because you heard about these twists from secondary sources. And because you’re (presumably) not an insane person, you’re certainly not quaking with anger right now that I didn’t write “**SPOILER WARNING**” before I communicated this information.
This is slightly hyperbolic, I’ll admit – I don’t really expect anybody to be upset that I ruined the twist in movies that are 20-plus years old. That said, however, I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if someone got very mad that I spoiled Fight Club for them. There is an expectation among some people that the world around them ought to refrain from discussing certain media (mostly TV shows and movies) until they’ve had a chance to experience it. By extension, anyone who neglects to do so in the presence of a spoiler-averse individual is intentionally ruining someone else’s potential enjoyment of a thing and, as such, deserves to be chastised.
Complaining about spoilers has become a pet gripe for a lot of people. In fact, it’s become such a popular source of outrage that media outlets have changed the way they present information about a show or a movie: most articles note in the headline that there are spoilers contained within, and more often than not also have a second warning within the article itself when readers are about to reach a section that contains spoilers. Even a movie’s trivia section on IMDb is organized in such a way that any tidbits that might spoil the plot of the film are at the bottom of the page, with red text informing the reader that spoilers abound beyond a certain point.
Generally speaking, this is fine. I don’t like having big plot points revealed to me before I see a film or a show, because part of being a viewer is experiencing those events in the context of the story. If I know Major Character A is going to die or double-cross someone before I watch the thing, the whole point of watching it becomes moot. I understand why people were mad at Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy for ruining the ending to Avengers: Endgame on his Twitter feed. That said, however, there is a point at which complaining about spoilers goes from a polite request to an absurd demand of everyone else to modify their behavior in order to suit you.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to create a set of rules regarding spoilers. These rules will serve as a guideline for when to get mad about spoilers and, more importantly, how mad you can get about them. Off we go.
Rule #1: Spoilers Aren’t Spoilers Forever
Snape kills Dumbledore at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. If this post was written in July 2009, you would have every right to be angry with me; being that it’s April 2019, sorry, you missed your chance.
A spoiler isn’t a spoiler for all eternity. Within a certain time frame, the responsibility rests with early adopters and media outlets to avoid divulging important plot points for those who haven’t had a chance to see or read the thing in question, but after that, it’s fair game. Here are the timeframes:
Movies: One Month
Most of us (well, most of you) have jobs and other responsibilities, and not everybody can go see a movie on its opening weekend. But assuming you get paid every other Friday, it shouldn’t take more than one month to get to a movie theater. (I’m assuming that one paycheck goes mostly towards rent and bills, the other is your spending money.)
If two pay periods go by and you haven’t had a chance to see the movie in question, you can’t have wanted to see it that badly.
TV Shows: Three Days (Websites), One Week (People)
With certain exceptions (like Game of Thrones), it’s easy to miss a week of a TV show you enjoy watching. But, as with movies, if you really enjoy a show you’ll find a way to watch it. One week is the maximum amount of time you can expect your friends, coworkers and family to avoid talking about the show in your presence.
If you frequent sites that discuss TV shows, it is reasonable to expect them to include spoiler warnings about the show in question for up to three days after the episode has aired. After that, it’s your responsibility to decide if you really want to click on that article about your favorite show without having seen the most recent episode, because there may be spoilers.
Books: Three Months
While a movie or TV show takes the same amount of time for everyone to watch, the standard for book spoilers should be a little more lenient. Everybody reads at a different pace, and how much someone can read in one sitting depends largely on what else they have going on.
The average person reads 200-250 words per minute, and the average 400-page novel is about 100,000 words; therefore, it would take the average reader 8 hours and 20 minutes to finish a 400-page novel. A 2008 study suggests that the average person gets only 63 minutes of “peace and quiet” per day (which seems low and also very difficult to quantify, but whatever); therefore, an average person with an average amount of prime reading time and a reading speed on the low end of average should be able to finish a 400-page book in eight days.
Of course, shit happens, and books are meant to be enjoyed at your leisure, so taking all that into account, you have a three-month window in which you should be able to read the book everyone is talking about without fear of someone spoiling the ending for you.
Rule #2: Not Everything Qualifies as a “Spoiler”
By definition, a “spoiler” is any information that, uh, spoils your experience of a movie, show, or book. Which means the information itself has to be significant to the overall plot and/or unexpected enough that it changes the tone or outcome of the story.
Let’s take The Usual Suspects. Someone telling you that Verbal Kint is actually Keyser Söze is a spoiler (assuming they did so between August 16th and September 16th, 1995). That’s a significant plot twist, and once you know that information, it’s impossible to experience the movie the same way. By contrast, someone telling you that Fenster (Benicio del Toro’s character) dies in The Usual Suspects is not a spoiler: it’s a plot point, but not an earth-shattering one, and you can still experience the movie the same way even if you know Fenster dies.
Which leads me to Rule #3:
Rule #3: Some Things Can’t Be Spoiled
When it comes to TV and film, we tend to use the term “spoiler” as a universal catch-all for “information I learned before I was ready to learn it.” But there are some movies or shows that, by their very nature, can’t really be spoiled, such as:
Biopics/Historical Dramas
The Fighter is about the boxer Micky Ward’s road to the championship. Anybody with a passing interest in boxing knows how the story turns out; even if you don’t care about boxing, the information is readily available, so the story itself can’t be spoiled. Similarly, The King’s Speech is spoiler-proof, because we know that the king stuttered and then didn’t. (Or something; that movie looks boring as hell.)
The point of biopics and historical dramas isn’t to tell a new story, it’s to give more depth to a story that already exists. It’s about the journey, which is not something that can be spoiled.
War Movies
Like historical dramas, we already know how war movies will turn out. Knowing ahead of time that they save Private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan and that Tom Hanks’ character dies isn’t going to ruin your enjoyment of the movie. If anything, it enhances it: the expectation in a war flick is that every character is going to die, so it’s just a matter of when and how noble their death scene is.
Romantic Comedies
She’s either going to fall for the friend who was under her nose the whole time, end up with the person she’s been chasing the whole flick, or realize the person she was chasing was the wrong person and end up with someone else. There aren’t a lot of places for these kinds of movies to go, is what I’m saying. You can still enjoy While You Were Sleeping even if you know ahead of time that Sandra Bullock ends up with Bill Pullman instead of Peter Gallagher.
Rule #4: You Have To Make An Effort To Avoid Spoilers
It takes me a while to get around to watching movies or shows on my list – even ones I’m really excited to see. My lackadaisical approach to entertainment has, on occasion, led to me reading or hearing something that spoils the movie or show. And sure, it’s annoying when it happens, but it comes with the territory. What I’ve also learned, however, is that it’s not that difficult to avoid spoilers if you put in the effort.
Some people establish complex spoiler-proofing systems so they can engage with the outside world without fear of having films ruined, including muting movie/show/character names on Twitter. (Which is what makes LeSean McCoy’s Endgame mishap on Twitter so funny: he managed to sneak past everybody’s spoiler-blocking tricks simply by misspelling a character’s name.) I don’t go that far, although I did temporarily mute one account I follow on Twitter last Sunday because I wasn’t going to be able to watch that week’s Game of Thrones until the next day and I know how he likes to discuss major plot points.
Avengers: Infinity War was released on April 27th, 2018, and I didn’t watch it until February 2019. Despite that, I was able to avoid learning anything of consequence about what happens in the movie in the 10-month gap between when it was released and when I got around to watching it. More importantly, it wasn’t even that hard to do: I just pretended not to care about Infinity War. Acting like I didn’t care meant I wasn’t going to click on an article about it or bring it up in conversation, and if someone else brought it up I just…tuned out.
Ironically, I think a lot of people have things spoiled for them because they’re too curious for their own good. They want to know as much as possible about the thing they plan on watching before they watch it, which inevitably leads to them learning something about that thing before they were ready. But you can’t have it both ways: if you’re going to observe or participate in the conversation about a show or movie, you can’t be surprised when other people assume that everyone participating or observing that conversation has already seen it. If you really care about something, just pretend like you don’t – you’ll be surprised by how easy it is to avoid spoilers.
Rule #5: Spoiling Requires Intentionality
So now we have clear criteria for when it’s acceptable to be mad at someone for spoiling a film or show, but that’s not enough. Consider the following hypotheticals.
Hypothetical 1: Let’s say it’s 2013 and you’re watching season 3 of Game of Thrones (but haven’t read the books), and you’re talking to a friend who’s read all the books and doesn’t know you’re into the show. And let’s say that friend casually mentions how excited they are to see how the show handles the upcoming Red Wedding massacre.
Hypothetical 2: It’s April 26th, 2019 and Avengers: Endgame has finally been released. You plan on seeing the movie within the next month and have implemented all the necessary failsafes to avoid accidentally coming across any spoilers. You go on Instagram and scroll through your feed, only to see that an account you follow – one that normally only posts memes making fun of conservative boomers – has posted major spoilers for Endgame.
In the first hypothetical, sure, it’s understandable that you’d be bummed and maybe a little irritated that your friend ruined the upcoming Red Wedding massacre, but a Hatfield-&-McCoy-style blood feud is probably an overreaction. They didn’t mean to do it, and besides, you’ll still enjoy seeing the Red Wedding massacre almost as much as you would have if they hadn’t told you.
The second hypothetical – which isn’t really hypothetical, since an Instagram account did precisely that last week – is something else entirely. They intentionally ruined the experience by posting key information about the movie, using a medium that no reasonably spoiler-averse person would think to avoid. And they did so on the day of the movie’s release, to ensure that almost everybody who saw the spoilers would not have yet had a chance to see the movie. It was an unequivocal act of trolling, deserving of whatever vitriol they received. (Short of doxxing or physical violence, of course; we are, after all, discussing a movie aimed at children.)
Point being, there are spoilers and there are spoilers. The difference between the two – and, therefore, the limit to how angry you can justifiably get about them – is in their intentions. Now that these rules have been established, it is my hope that we’ll all abide by them, thus restoring some sense of harmony to our media consumption.
Spoiler alert: we won’t.