Spoilers are unique people. My name is Rachael Clemmons, and I’m a spoiler hound. I am definitively pro-spoiler. It may be an unpopular opinion, but whatever — I’m finna start a movement.
Somewhere between graduating college and moving to New York with just enough dollar bills to sustain a week’s worth of ramen for every meal, I became a wee bit high-strung. Well, it started out as a wee bit at first, and then like, a wee lot, and now it’s back to a wee bit. At first, there was little that I could take comfort in, since I generally had to know how everything was going to turn out, all the time, and I spent a lot of my time binging on Netflix. Some movies and television shows and books were basically unbearable. I still actually get so anxious and terrified for fictional characters sometimes that my heart gets to palpitatin’. And so spoilers have become, for me, a way to stay sane.
I’m not a scientist, but I feel like spoilers are good for the soul. And not just for us extremely nervous types — I think the Interwebs has gotten a tad dramatic over what is considered a spoiler (everything) and whether or not spoilers have a place in society (they do! I promise they do). I actively seek spoilers out, particularly when I’m getting ready to binge watch a show, just so I can get a vague idea of what to expect. I want to know, ahead of time, that I’m regrettably going to be able to memorize Adam’s come face on “Girls,” that Belle picked the Beast and not Gaston, despite the latter’s superior decorating skills, that the most beautiful boy in Westeros, Robb Stark, would meet an untimely demise, and that Logan’s father killed Veronica Mars’s best friend, Lilly. I mean, I only recently started watching the aforementioned “Veronica Mars,” and I reveled in the fact that I could access spoilers whenever I wanted, so as to quiet down my rampant heart palpitations — I mean, Veronica had it rough, y’all. Remember when she got roofied and was apparently raped? My 30-day Amazon Prime trial ended before I found out that she and Duncan Kane actually had consensual, we’ve-both-been-roofied sex. But it’s like, I know that now, and I don’t need an Amazon Prime subscription to get that very important information.
And yet, I don’t really understand why the people of the Internet demand bolded asterisks and a stern spoiler alert warning precede basically everything. If you haven’t seen last night’s episode of “True Blood,” you can’t get mad at the rest of the Internet for having had seen it. It’s like, why read the article at all? Why be on the Internet at all? I mean, the Interwebs is basically its own spoilery spoilerverse. If you are thereby adverse, wouldn’t it be best to stay off the Internet until you’ve seen that episode of “True Blood?” Or, maybe until you’ve watched every episode of every show that you could possibly ever care about? It’s not fair to expect people to reel in their conversation about a show just because you have a job and a husband, and presumably a child, and maybe a bunch of responsibilities to juggle, and therefore missed last night’s episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” or better yet, an episode that came on two years ago.
I guess what I’m saying is that the whole spoiler thing has become a little extreme. I read a post last week containing what it referred to as light spoilers — the subject in question? Events that occurred in the final book of the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The book was published in 2007. Part two of the corresponding movie came out in 2011. So it’s been four years, at best, and yet we’re still cautioning spoilers? Is there something I’m missing? This is chicanery, and it needs to stop.
I get it: not everyone feels this way. But unless we can condemn spoilers to only a certain time frame, I say we do away with them. Showrunners can keep their secrets, but the Internet can’t, and shouldn’t. No matter what it is, I still like my spoilers.
