T w e n t y S i d e d
DISCLAIMER: I will not be spoiling anything for anyone in this post. This is a post whining about spoilers and I try not to be THAT big of a hypocrite. So feel free to read without worry.
Recently the first part of the final season of “Stranger Things” came out and I was excited to watch it, but I’ve been sick for a month now. I wanted to enjoy the watch and trying to enjoy a show while I’m mostly deaf from a bad double ear infection and sniffling the whole time kind of takes away from a viewing experience. So I waited. I waited and I waited and I waited until I made a mistake that I make pretty much every day. I got on TikTok. Only this time there were greater consequences than brainrot.
Unlike YouTube, where you can see a title and a thumbnail, TikTok just autoplays each video as you scroll through. That means you don’t really get much chance to avoid spoilers. Because of that limitation, at one point I accidentally happened upon spoilers for the last episode of the new season and I got very very upset. “Stranger Things” isn’t my favorite thing in the world but I think it is a really well done, really interesting show. I had anticipated the final season since the finale of the last season just like every other fan. And now some rando on TikTok posting a video about how excited they were for the last 4 episodes ruined a major plot point for me. I was furious. This happened 2 days ago. The question is, though, “Was it fair for me to even be upset at this point?”
What’s the cut off on spoilers? I had waited 2 weeks for my watch of “Stranger Things” Season 5. Is it really that fair to ask someone to hold off on talking about something they love for the sake of keeping things fresh for strangers? My standard on spoilers is to wait for a year before openly discussing something that has come out. I feel like at that point it can’t be that important to you or you’d have gotten to it already. But even then I like to tip toe around the plot of something to let everyone have their own first experience of a show or movie.
The thing is though, I’m weird about spoilers. I avoid trailers because I love horror movies. Horror movie trailers have a bad track record when it comes to spoiling the best parts of the film. My best example of this is the movie “Abigail.” All I knew about it was that it’s a horror movie about a crew of criminals kidnapping a girl and things get weird. I knew that from a quick little post about the move on The Artist Formerly Known As Twitter. I didn’t watch the trailer. If you haven’t seen it and like weird quirky horror movies, go watch it without spoiling yourself with the trailer because it gives away everything. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s really fun, especially when you go in blind. I also try to avoid watching anime opening montages too closely because spoiler culture in the east is FAR less strict. They don’t really care as much if they know what’s coming.
I’ve since seen the new episodes of “Stanger Things” and really enjoyed them despite knowing some of the plot details ahead of time. The spoilers I saw didn’t have too strong of a negative impact on me this time. However I still don’t really know when enough time is really enough. So honestly, I guess this whole article is one big prompt. What do you consider a long enough amount of time from the release of a media that you feel it’s okay to openly discuss plot elements or character developments? Please refrain from spoilers in your answers. Best practices here are to just avoid examples unless it’s a well known spoiler like the Sixth Sense example.
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I would put the blame on TikTok here and not on the person, because when you get into things like Youtube videos, TikTok videos, blog posts and so on there will be content that is aimed at analysis as opposed to simple, say, gushing, and to analyze stuff you often need to talk about things in detail to make a point. As you note, on Youtube videos and blog posts you can say that the content contains spoilers — or take a general stance that you are going to potentially spoil works — so that people can skip the content if they are worried about that sort of thing. TikTok doesn’t allow that, so one can come across them inadvertently no matter how clearly they mark them. So I wouldn’t put a timeline on spoilers in general. You can put that on CASUAL spoilers — inadvertently spoiling things in casual conversation — but on the sort of thing you hit I wouldn’t.
Then again, I moved on my own posts on media from being careful about spoilers to pretty much giving away the entire plots of everything, including horror movies and other series. But then again most of the stuff I talk about is quite old so it’s not much of an issue (and a lot of it was spoiled already — in a different way — by the writers).
Ironically, I inadvertently spoiled the plots to “The Sixth Sense” and “The Others” without ever having seen them. I just thought of the stupidest plot twist for those sorts of movies that I could think of, and then was told that I was right. For “The Sixth Sense”, it was literally my saying it, having the person who had seen it say that they figured that I had seen it, only for me to answer “No. You mean I was RIGHT?!?”
^This. It’s not the length of time, it’s the lack of warning. You can talk about any spoiler you want as soon as you want, as long as you don’t go shoving it at people without asking. But to make a gross generalization, the sort of people on Tik Tok are not the sort of people I would expect to have that level of nuance: they’re all-in on algorithm autoplay all the time and probably blame other people for not having watched whatever immediately. And in their Tik Tok bubble, they’re not wrong. I had a friend once who complained about getting spoiled on anime by looking at anime threads on Reddit, well gee what did you expect?
Because it would never be possible to actually get those people to keep it in their pants, as it were, the only solution is to stay off of unfiltered platforms, sticking to those with spoiler tags and within communities that respect them.
The only place where the “statue of limitations” comes up is for verbally discussing things in public where people you’re not talking to can overhear. For that I’d say a year is probably appropriate, though there are plenty of people that take more than a year to get around to even things they’re very interested in, and I think 6 months is probably more common, as an upper bound that most people will balk at. Syal’s point about quality also matters, as people that really care about something will usually make a point of not spoiling it and emphasize that further the better it is, and the length of a thing matters. While I might spoil say, something from the first book of the Stormlight Archives (equivalent to the first few episodes), I’m flat-out never going to assume any given person is fully caught up because those are multiple thick books.
Really, the shortest answer to the question is: you just don’t spoil the ending of anything, ever. Again, you’d think the people who eagerly rush to watch stuff as soon as it comes out because they want to see it as soon as possible would realize that immediately spoiling that rush for someone else is a dick move, but who needs empathy right?
Spoilers are complicated. I tend to go by quality of show rather than length of time. I watched Vertigo, like, two years ago, and I’m very happy to have gone into it without any knowledge of the plot other than what the word “Vertigo” implies.
There’s also the bit of how important the mystery is to the story. Can you spoil The Shining? Not really, that movie’s all about the atmosphere. Can you spoil Boogiepop Phantom? Sort of, but it’s not the biggest deal, the mystery is ingrained in the strangeness of the setting. Can you spoil Perfect Blue? I’d say yes, that whole movie’s about losing more and more control, and knowing the ending would re-establish control for the viewer.
(I have not seen Abigail, but scrolling past the thumbnail on the streaming sites, I feel like I’ve seen Abigail.)
I make a point of avoiding spoilers for anything I think I’d be interested in experiencing myself… but then again, I also make a point of avoiding TikTok, Youtube Shorts, “Twitter,” and all of the other slopshovels-formerly-known-as-social-media, which makes the task of spoiler avoidance pretty easy overall. (That said, I do have a bit of a backlog, in my carefully-curated Watch Later playlist on YT, of video essays about various films and games that I’ll get around to some day when I have the time I promise. …On the other hand, it’s not all doom and gloom: just this last year I actually got around to finally watching the fourth Rebuild of Evangelion movie, then after I’d recovered and ruminated a bit I had the great pleasure of watching through the essays about that and then the equally great catharsis of taking them off the list.)
My own personal rules for the “statute of limitations” regarding spoilers is as follows:
1. For books, the spoiler-free period is typically a year, maximum 3-4 years for the case of older or more obscure texts/authors that people simply may not have come across. (Possibly add another 1-2 years for foreign language authors, which further increases the obscurity.)
2. For movies, the spoiler-free period is 2 weeks to 1 month, but this largely applies to old-school theatre movies. With the rise of streaming movies, and the ability for people to watch whatever they want when they want it, I would extend the period to 1-3 months.
3. For TV shows, the spoiler-free period is 1-2 weeks (per episode). With the exception of cases like yours, for TV shows I would say that anyone not watching a particular episode that’s been out for longer than 2 weeks is probably not invested enough in the series to truly care about spoilers.
4. For video games, the spoiler-free period is 3-6 months, depending on the game. RPGs, being longer and more story-heavy, typically need more time to get through, so they fall on the higher end of the scale. For MMOs, however, the spoiler-free period is typically only 1 week; any longer than that and you’re very likely to get spoiled by some a-hole just yelling out spoilers in map chat. (In addition, I consider any information that was revealed in a trailer or a dev post to not be spoiler-worthy and can be freely discussed.)
Now, obviously if we’re talking about a fresh fan coming to an established creative body of work that’s been out for years, these rules are suspended and the timer starts anew, not from when the works were originally released.
My policy is: could the next episode reasonably be out?
That’s a week for TV, and a year for movies, games, and books.
Also as pointed out above, for some things spoilers are irrelevant. Is it a plotty thing or an atmosphere thing?
What doesn’t help is the paid meme-factories hitting the social media on launch day to generate interest with stuff that often contains spoilers.
The flood of spoiler memes hitting facebook exactly one hour after the release of the first Mandalorian episode was fascinating, and also a bit off putting to be honest.
It is of course in the interest of the publishers/streamers/distributors/etc for a fear of spoilers to exist. That makes seeing/reading/playing everything on release day more desirable, which drives up the ratings.
The only defence against that is to eschew any communications channels that contain such memes, which feels like it is getting harder.
I don’t mind spoilers at all. I watched the Josh Strife Hayes video on Expedition 33 in full before even considering buying this game. Also one of the best testing articles for games was on Metal Gear Solid, were the plot until the DARPA chief was retold. But at that point I was hooked to the story and wanted to play this game. Unfortunately I lacked a PS one and it was another nine month until the PC version got released.
For horror it might be slightly different, but I’m not great into horror anyway. Often times it just bores me and the good horror movies (Halloween 1, Poltergeist) are still good horror movies, even though I watched them multiple times and couldn’t be spoiled more.
Firstly, my stance is that spoilers are significant in perpetuity and based on likelihood of knowledge, not just length of time. Just because I haven’t read every significant book from the last 5000 years doesn’t mean that the endings ought to be spoilt for everyone due to their having been available of a long time, just because they’re 6 weeks old, 6 years old, or 600 years old. If there were only 50 books and films in existence and we now got a single new one every year, so everyone was caught up by the time they were 12, then I can imagine spoilers for all past media would be reasonable because they wouldn’t be spoilers. There would be no spoilers and nothing to spoil other than the latest thing to come out. But in a world with so much media, I think it’s worthwhile being sensitive to spoilers, even ones about Skywalkers, if the person might conceivably have not watched the Star Wars. So if it’s a ‘spoiler’, it’s worth guarding against spoiling it for people, in my view. But of course the responsibility may lie with the reader/listener to not go into places where such things have a high likelihood of being discussed in the open! I.e. don’t go into the Star Wars subreddit if you don’t want basic or even more nuanced spoilers.
But most importantly, never mind discussions online and the necessary self-imposed internet blackouts… Netflix itself always spoils episodes with the little blurb they have that comes up when you pause, or before you select the Episode!! They’re horrendous for it!!!