PSA: Saying There’s A Plot Twist Still Counts As A Spoiler

Listen, internet. You and I need to sit down with a biscuit and a hot drink and talk over some things.

Spoilers are rife online. That’s just something you have to accept if you’re going to be one of it many denizens. Unless someone goes out of their way to thrust a pixelated meme in your face with the explicit intention of spoiling something for you, it isn’t too hard to avoid them.

What sucks the most, though, more than someone directly telling you that X gets killed by Y or A ends up with B, is when you find out that something has a twist in store. In my mind, this is the worst kind of spoiler there is by a long shot.

It’s still possible to sit and watch a movie or play a game that you’re fully familiar with before you even put your ass in a seat. On the other hand, try to approach something that you’re aware has a twist and tell me afterwards that it didn’t hamper your enjoyment of it.

Case in point: after months of anticipation, I finally settled down to watch one of last year’s most hyped horror movies – I won’t tell you which one. However, prior to turning the lights off and sending the girlfriend off to her safe haven, I remembered its marketing that specifically made a fuss about how mind-blowing its twist is. For the next hour and a half, I found myself wondering what it could be, questioning if this scene would be it or when it would actually arrive. My immersion went out the window and my clutched, tense hands found themselves stroking my chin and I even found it hard to focus on what was going on.

Shyamalan twist

While this could be down to my obsessive nature (I often spend nights in bed tossing and turning over terrible things I’ve written), I don’t think I’m alone. What makes it worse is that the studio had decided to make a big deal of it, slapping the spoiler on all of its social media promotions and post-release trailers.

The sad thing is that it works. For many of the same reasons why clickbait is a disgracefully effective way of getting people to view your content, telling potential audiences that there’s information they don’t know makes them crave to find out exactly what it is. More curiosity, more tickets sold or Amazon orders fulfilled. Why do you think M. Night Shyamalan has a plot twist in most of his movies?

We’re living in an age of information where what’s buzzed about one minute can be completely irrelevant the next. Studios have a constant battle on their hands to grab the attention away. That’s why I try to avoid trailers as much as I can as they now seem specifically designed to create theories and, in many cases, just outright ruin the plot, who lives and dies, and so on.

When you add publications eager to ride on the waves of hype, you have yourself a minefield to navigate. Even though websites aren’t affiliated with the media they’re discussing directly, content is their product, which makes it all too tempting to spread the same spoiler; We need to talk about X’s twist. More clicks sell the product.

This is going to fall on deaf ears, I have no doubt about that, but instead of rushing out to discuss the big twist in the current hot thing, let people find out for themselves, at least until it’s been long enough so that everyone in the world knows that Bruce Willis was the Lindbergh baby all along.

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