Game of spoilers

Spoiler alert: This column on spoilers is full of spoilers.

To this day, I haven’t fully forgiven my sister for ruining The Sixth Sense for me. It was late 1999 and we were just chilling in front of the TV, not really watching anything (because that’s the sort of thing people did before the turn of the century), when a behind-the-scenes featurette of the movie came on. Without warning, she blurted out how mind-blowing it was that Bruce Willis’ character was dead the whole time. I don’t know if she assumed that I had already watched The Sixth Sense because I was still enjoying post-college life too much to get a job or if she didn’t and just wanted to be mean. All I know is that I was robbed of that “holy sh**!” moment and instead watched the whole movie going: “Bruce Willis is totally a ghost right now.” If you haven’t seen The Sixth Sense yet (it’s been 17 years, come on), then I’m dragging you down with me. It’s 2016 and the world has become one big spoiler.

From mere periodic inconveniences, spoilers have become a pestilence over the last few weeks, now that Game of Thrones is back in our lives, dropping spoiler-worthy twists almost every episode. No other show in history has turned advanced knowledge of plot points into an urgent ethical question: Does your right to talk about it trump other people’s enjoyment? Ever since protagonist Ned Stark got his head chopped off in season one, all bets were off and the resulting chaos seemed to intensify as each succeeding season saw a world increasingly entrenched in the ever-conscious realm of social media. Game of Thrones, a show best enjoyed when knowing nothing, found itself in a world where people know so much. The Internet is teeming with spoilers — from people who’ve seen the episodes right away and from people who’ve read the books. To follow the show in the social media age is to tread carefully in mine-infested territory. Even HBO couldn’t lie about Jon Snow’s fate properly, with the Internet’s all-seeing eye on the case the minute actor Kit Harrington set foot at an airport.

Of course, there will be people who’ll argue that there’s nothing wrong with spoilers or that, at this point when every kind of story structure has been used and re-used, there are really no fictional surprises left. Just this week, Salon.com rehashed a 2011 study that supposedly debunks the “spoiler” as a concept. Based on an experiment conducted at the University of California, San Diego, subjects who read short stories with embedded spoilers enjoyed them more than those who read the spoiler-free versions. The explanation given: Once the plot is revealed, people tend to appreciate the storytelling more.

Knowing The Ending

I don’t think we need a study to prove the existence of boring people who like things pre-explained to them. Knowing the ending of a mystery story that already has an implicit twist in the ending is one thing. But Game of Thrones is a medieval fantasy epic that doesn’t even care about the rules of medieval fantasy. The pleasure of watching Game of Thrones, especially in the early seasons, is that you didn’t even know these twists exist, let alone expect them mid-season. But with subversion comes its own set of rules, and now that we expect the insane to happen, we want to simulate that season-one innocence. We know by now that characters will lose their lives, their organs, or their direwolves. But we still want to be shocked, knowing that the storytelling doesn’t suffer from the unknown.

Unfortunately, it’s harder to un-know things these days. Although the Internet has become more considerate of late watchers, prefacing posts with all-caps warnings can only do so much. Ostensibly spoiler-free posts can now become spoilers. All it takes are expressions of sadness and the preponderance of a character’s picture in one’s timeline to come to the conclusion: “Yup, he’s dead.” That’s pretty much what happened this week when it became too easy to connect the dots to Hodor’s demise, with added clues provided by everyone who tweeted “hold the door.” Thanks, you guys.

It’s easier to avoid spoilers IRL (provided your sister has become more cautious with age). By now, you’re likely surrounded by people who know how to ask “have you watched it yet?” first. Of course, there will be times when complete strangers become a**holes right before your eyes, like when I found out about Jon Snow’s death from some loud dude at the gym. But incidents like this are generally rare. Social media, on the other hand, is like one big gym full of loud a**holes. Except they’re really not a**holes; they’re just natural consequences of a platform that encourages free expression.

Unplug

So now that we know that people will never shut up and that spoilers are unavoidable on the Internet, the solution to this problem is simple and obvious: Unplug. Can’t watch Game of Thrones until Tuesday? Then avoid all forms of social media until Tuesday. All of us know that prevention is the only real cure to the spoiler epidemic, but almost none of us actually have the stomach for it. We love Game of Thrones. But it turns out we love social media more.

So it looks like we’re not optimally enjoying Game of Thrones as long as we’re constantly tethered to the social network. It’s just a fact we have to live with. You know who’s enjoying Game of Thrones more than anyone in the world right now? My mother. She’s not on Facebook. She’s not on Twitter. She doesn’t own a smart phone. All she knows about the Internet is that it’s being run by criminals. And she loves Game of Thrones. But I don’t think she fully appreciates how lucky she is to be untainted by the vomit of information out there because every time we’re about to watch an episode, she asks me for spoilers. These entitled septuagenarians!

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Tweet the author @ColonialMental.