 |
harold said:
A spoiler is anything that reveals or "spoils" information for a person before they would see it naturally/ideally. For instance, you can "spoil" a surprise birthday party for someone by telling them that there are people waiting for them at home. You haven't actually told them what specifically is happening, but the surprise, when it comes, isn't really a surprise anymore.
With fiction and TV and film - really anything with a narrative - a spoiler is revealing key plot elements before someone has read/seen/heard the whole narrative leading up to those plot points. In a mystery book, a spoiler might reveal who the murderer was, or that a key character dies, or how the book ends. In a TV show or film, a spoiler might be identifying who the double-agent is, or that a given couple which has spent much of the show flirting actually kisses in a given episode, the setting of a given episode, or even particular key lines from the show. If it's something important to the story and everyone who hadn't seen the story would not be able to anticipate that the given thing would happen, then it's a spoiler.
Time does not play a role in whether something is a spoiler or not: if it's a specific important plot point, it will be a spoiler to somebody, whether the story was released a day ago or 80 years ago. I almost got into a fight in a movie theater once when a trailer for the film Citizen Kane was played as part of a revival. You may or may not know that the whole film revolves around figuring out what Kane's last words meant. This jerk in the audience yells out "It's his ___________!", thus spoiling the film for the entire audience - hundreds of people. My friends had to hold me back from dragging this guy outside by his nose hairs and beating him unconscious.
So the Fanpop staff have realized that people want to discuss these surprising plot twists, but that everybody who hasn't seen or read that far doesn't want it spoiled. Therefore, we have the "This pick is a spoiler" option, and users are encouraged to mark forum threads, articles and the like as "spoilers!" whenever there's a discussion of specific plot points. Sadly, there's no way to do this with images.
|
|
