Can't We All Just Stop with the Spoilers, Please?

I was standing in a comic book shop in the summer of 2005 when I watched as a customer smugly spoiled the ending of the newest Harry Potter book to his friends. His justification was that they would enjoy it anyways and who really cared about a dumb kiddie book. What he didn't see was the 7 year-old behind a rack of books who was crying into his mother's thigh. He looked like he had just been punched in the stomach.

I can't stand spoilers. I believe all people dislike spoilers in some way or another and the personal attachment to the subject being spoiled definitely factors in. For me, I like to be surprised by everything. An action scene that some may find exciting in a trailer just tells me what I can expect at some point in the movie and that can have an effect on my enjoyment of earlier scenes. Maybe this is a little extreme. I think most people probably fall into a looser category.

Most people understand that if a form of entertainment has a lot of anticipation around it, there might be some spoilers being thrown about. My personal plea would be for these spoiler-loving cretins to keep their conversation restricted to a private space. Coffee shops, book stores, grocery lines, movie theater lobbies, and restaurants are all public spaces and should be considered off-limits for spoiler talk.

I've had to sit behind self-superior nerds at Comic-Con and overhear as they lazily go through all the spoilers of the upcoming books I had just bought. They didn't know that I cared about those books but that's not the point. As a society, we should contain ourselves around others. It doesn't matter if the subject at hand is years old, either. Someone may be about to enjoy it.

It used to be that you were chastised for being wary of spoilers. “It's three years old so you should have seen it by now,” was a common line. TV episodes older than three weeks were fair game in Entertainment Weekly. That has since been reduced to five days, as I had the ending to American Horror Story ruined in just one picture with a single sentence caption. This excuse can no longer stand with the advent of instantly streaming archives of television episodes and movies.

Now that anybody can have access to almost any complete series they may have missed when it was airing, this opens the gates to late-entry fans. I never saw Fringe but it's sitting on my Instant Queue, dutifully waiting for me. My friend and his wife only started watching Lost after it had finished airing the last episode. They blew through every season in less than a month.

These are examples of shows that just a mere ten years ago would have been happily spoiled by the masses who assumed that if you hadn't watched it by now, it was your fault for them telling you what was about to happen. Nobody can stop that loudmouth in a doctor's office from complaining about the ending of a recent show but if we all just agreed that public places should be off-limits for those discussions it would go a long way to keeping the uninformed from bawling into their mother's pants leg.