Apologies for not posting yesterday (my first missed post of the month–boo!), but I simply ran out of time. I wanted to make sure that I finished my project (which I was able to do–yay!), but in order to do it well, I just couldn’t do it and the normal blog post as well. However, today I’m back–so on with the regularly scheduled blog post.
Spoilers
In the past couple of weeks, I have seen tons of spoilers online. It as if there has been an uptick in the amount spoilers out there. No, I take that back, actually spoilers have always been online every since it became a thing, but now, it seems that people either going out of their way to spoil things or they have become less inclined to guard themselves from spoiling something.
What’s Worse than Game of Thrones for me? Spoilers, that’s What.
A case in point–I’m not a huge fan of Game of Thrones (you might even say that I’m an anti-fan of it, wishing there was a Lord of the Rings equivalent without all the exploitative sex & violence featured on the show). However, I keep myself from spoilers from the show (and others like it that I dislike, like say The Walking Dead) in the off-chance that I ever want to see the series in their entirety for school (I am a Rhetoric & Composition/Popular Culture student after all), or for some other reason. I want to able to watch them without knowing/being able to guess major plot points based on clues and hints which weren’t in the major narrative.
Yet, in the past couple of weeks, I had a major plot point spoiled and know the name of a major character who will die on the show. Now, here’s the important bit: how did I learn about this? Was I cruising GoT fan forums? No. Was I looking a Reaction Videos from the show? No. Was I on Wikipedia, IMDB, or a site where someone mentioned it in the comments section? No. No, I was watching a Let’s Play for a video game called The Last of Us on YouTube when the Youtuber dropped the spoiler at the end of the gameplay loop while discussing a surprising development in the game. There was no warning–I guessed the spoiler was coming a sentence before it was uttered, but I couldn’t get to my phone’s volume controls in time and I had a major character’s death spoiled–including when it occurs in the show’s timeline, so there’s absolutely no suspense left at all regarding that character.
The Quest for Views/Hits/Clicks/Whatever
A similar thing has been happening on YouTube for a while where YouTubers are often posting “spoilery” things in their “Thumbnail” images that go out to promote their videos. There is a video game called Nier Automata that I really want to get and play later in the year when I’ve cleared some of my backlog of games. It is supposed to have multiple endings with a mind-blowing reveal. However, somebody thought it would be “fun” to post that ending in his/her thumbnail in the form of Hey what did you think about [this incredibly important topic that happens at the END OF THE GAME]?
Really?
The YouTuber knows full well that the video is not going out to just subscribers to his/her channel, but to anyone who YouTube’s algorithms think in a good match (that’s how these videos get so many views–not from subscribers but those who are tangentially/incidentally targeted because YouTube thinks the content is similar to what you’ve already watched). This is pervasive in the Web arena as well–clicks/likes = revenue, so being all spoilery some is a legitimate tactic (in their minds) to enhance traffic and to bring people in, but it has the opposite affect on me.
To quote a famous queen–“I do not approve.” To all those would be spoilers out there: if you want to spoil something–great, but please, give those of us who would rather enjoy the story on our terms the time (& ability) to leave your content before you do so.
Sidney
- Read Skin Deep for Free at Aurora Wolf
- Read Childe Roland for Free at Electric Spec
- Read Faerie Knight in the anthology Fae, Rhonda Parrish, Ed. or the Kindle Edition
- Read Ship of Shadows in the anthology Visions IV: Space Between Stars, Carrol Fix, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
- Read WarLight in the anthology Visions VI: Galaxies, Carrol Fix, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
- Read Dragonhawk in the magazine Tales of the Talisman, Vol. 8, Iss. 3, David Lee Summers, Ed. or the Kindle Edition
OtherWorlds: A Science Fiction & Fantasy Web Journal 