Who ACTUALLY Needs To Care About Spoilers

A while back the New York Times wrote an article about Aerith, a character who dies about midway through the 1996 game Final Fantasy 7.

A bunch of gamers got up in arms about it, as gamers are wont to do, and the common response is that, frankly, this happened in 1996, it’s one of the biggest memes on the internet, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth pretty much assumes you already know it happened.

While I agree that it’s stupid to complain about this spoiler, I’m going to go a step further and point out that the New York Times absolutely intended to spoil the original game.

The Paper of Record has a particular audience and that audience does not, traditionally, include people who grew up seeing Final Fantasy 7 memes online. This article is for their parents, who didn’t know or care about the game, and explains why people are so excited for Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, a remake of the original game that has the potential to change that pivotal death.

To wit, the New York Times intentionally spoiled their audience on this game, and that is fine too.

When Is It Bad To Spoil?

It’s not that no one should ever care about spoilers, but the reasons to avoid spoiling people aren’t because knowing a plot point ahead of time invariable ruins an experience.

Spoilers are bad because it is rude to spoil something you know someone is excited about. If by some miracle a friend is excitedly talking about The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, the fact that the movie is old doesn’t matter. You’re still a jerk if you tell them that Luke loses his hand.

However, frankly, it’s rude to demand the whole world cater to you. In fact, I think that’s more rude than spoiling someone. Yes, it is fun to go into something and be surprised. It is also fun to discuss the events of things online with other people. 

If the thing being discussed is:

• Properly tagged

• Over six months old

Then you don’t even have a right to complain. Hell, if someone didn’t tag their spoilers properly and carelessly posted about how Padme is Luke’s mom, that’s rude but it’s not “go yell at them for posting spoilers” rude. Block and move on. 

Yes, it is nice to go into something and be surprised. It is also nice to discuss something and sometimes discussing something requires that it be spoiled. You don’t get to police what other people talk about just because you haven’t gotten around to seeing it and you demand to never know the plot of something in advance, ever.

You are mostly responsible for your own media experience and there’s a limit to how much you can expect someone to change their habits for you.

In short:

Imagine you’re on a bus and someone is listening to a podcast. If they’re loudly listening to something without headphones, you can ask them to stop but if you get up and start yelling at them on the bus, you’ll start getting some strange looks and people will consider you more of a problem than the person listening without headphones, even if that other person is acting rather gauche.

If they’re listening with headphones and you lean in close to hear what their podcast or look over at their phone, then you are unequivocally in the wrong, and people will happily tell you so.

Context matters, and I do think while there are people who care way too much about spoilers and go out of their way to get mad at people for talking about a thing they enjoy, it’s inaccurate to say spoilers never matter.

When Don’t Spoilers Matter?

I’m of the opinion that on the creator side, spoilers are something that purely exists in the realm of marketing.

If you’re creating a show or a movie, you should make it for people who already know what’s going to happen for a simple reason: Someone can only experience something for the first time once, so you have an infinitely larger audience that already knows what happens.

That isn’t to say people shouldn’t be upset when their hard work is leaked, or be excited about fans speculating, I just think that shock is, by definition, an emotion that loses its effectiveness over time and therefore you shouldn’t be focusing on evoking that specifically.

Also, this is just a general piece of advice: once your work is out there for the love of all that is good and holy don’t spend energy on what fans are doing and talking about. It tends to end poorly for everyone involved.

Spoilers and spoiler culture get too much attention for all the wrong reasons, and we’d all be better off if we paid what other people did a little less mind.