On Spoiler Culture

I haven’t slept so great these past couple of nights, and I was stressed out a bit from the job fair earlier this week. Also I’m trying to figure out a weekend to go to Clemson, but that’s becoming more difficult than I expected. 

Let’s talk about Spoiler Culture, shall we?

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On Spoiler Culture

We didn’t use to be this crazy about spoilers, did we?

I always like the idea of not spoiling movies and books and shows for other people, especially if it’s a really good twist. I still refuse to spoil the ending for Here, There Be Dragons for anyone, which is why I tell them to stay away from online summaries and just wait for me to lend them the book. So I get it: people like to keep surprises for the audience, and they understand how important those are.

But I think we’ve gone a bit too far?

When I say that, I don’t mean “people are very concerned with spoilers.” That’s not new, people freaking out about plot details they don’t want to know yet so that the story can be a surprise. But the extent to which there are people care about making sure endings are unexpected are getting weird. I realize I’m probably the last person to say this, considering the backlash we’ve had against it since Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones ending, but creators have gone to truly insane lengths in order to avoid spoiling the ending of fiction for people. 

There have been multiple interviews in which Marvel’s actors have admitted that they weren’t sure what the scenes they were in were actually about, much less who else was in it. Actors didn’t act with each other; they acted in different places and were digitally inserted in the scene together. Several actors were given only partial scripts, so that they had only their parts and not some of the other performers’. Sometimes they were outright lied to; Tom Holland admitted that he didn’t know he was in a funeral scene at the end, he was told it was a wedding.

HE WAS TOLD THE FUNERAL WAS A WEDDING.

That’s the ultimate bad example of doing your best to make sure that secrets don’t get out. And I understand that maybe some actors like Tom Holland have a habit of revealing too much about movies. But being told that the event he’s supposed to be in is actually another, one that calls for pretty much the exact opposite emotion? And lying to actors? Making it unclear to them what exactly they’re doing? This isn’t “I won’t tell them how the story ends,” this is “I won't tell them how the story they are telling is going at any given moment.”

Like, I wish that the worst problems were just writers and creators lying about spoilers. Do you remember that one time when the makers of Batman: Arkham Knight claimed that the titular Arkham Knight was a completely original character, only to be revealed to be Jason Todd? That wasn’t great. But it’s even worse when you’re so worried about the twist that you distort production.

And yeah, Endgame was probably the worst example of this massive attempt to cover up spoilers, but it wasn’t the first. Game of Thrones famously decided to film multiple endings for the show so that if anyone stumbled on the shooting then they wouldn’t know if it was the real ending or not. The producers also made a point that they wanted to surprise people more than they actually cared about the integrity of the story. Then we have Westworld, a show which supposedly rewrote and re-shot an episode midseason because the makers saw that fans on Reddit had predicted what the big plot twist for that episode was going to be.

There’s a lot of discussion about how people are worrying way too much about surprising audiences that they’re making stories unintelligible in order to make them unpredictable. You can’t guess what’s being foreshadowed if the actors don’t know and the foreshadowing was all nonsense anyway, right? And yeah, that’s not great, but I think the issue is just how much importance we’re putting on fiction in general.

Because… this is all fiction. If the next Avengers movie gets spoiled for you, that sucks, but so what? It’s a movie. Get over it. Yeah, be fans, write fanfic, cosplay, do your thing, that’s all great! But let’s face the facts: it’s not that important. It’s pop culture. It has worth, but ultimately, it’s meant to entertain and make money; especially when it comes to properties being pumped out by Disney.

Furthermore, if your fiction relies on a twist or surprise in order to make it work, it was probably never that great to begin with. Twists can make things better. But if you need the spoilers unspoiled in order to like the piece of fiction in question? Then that’s not great. A story should be good on its own merits; surprises shouldn’t be the only thing that keeps you watching/reading. 

Just quit this nonsense. Let’s go back to stories we enjoy for what they are, and made without ridiculous deceit in the production process.

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