Fuzzable
Welcome back to this month’s Fuzzable blog from yours truly! If you’re wondering, I’m still stressing over my exams slowly creeping up on me, but I’m here to discuss spoilers. For this post, I’ll mainly be discussing TV show spoilers.
I’m sure you all know what they are. The most accurate description I’ve seen of the definition of “spoilers” is from Urban Dictionary: “when someone reveals a previously unknown aspect of something which you likely would have rather learned on your own.”
Spoilers for me are quite a big thing, especially for shows I’m quite heavily invested in, like The Walking Dead, for example. The only way I’m able to explain it might seem a bit morbid, I’m not sure, but I’m gonna go ahead and explain it anyway. If someone tells me a spoiler, e.g. for The Walking Dead, it’s ruined my one and only chance of being able to watch it without ever having seen it. Yeah, sure, I can still watch the episode but I’m gonna know what happens. The expectations are there and I’ll just be sat waiting for that one thing to happen all because someone had to tell me. I’ll never again have the opportunity to watch that episode or that film, whatever it may be, without never having known what was going to happen. Even if someone tells me an episode was bad or it was really good, I’ll have those expectations put in place and that one opinion of someone else will always be at the back of my mind, influencing my thoughts on it. So when someone tells me a really big spoiler, it’s quite infuriating.
This video sums up everything perfectly:
I’m gonna go ahead and give a couple examples so if you haven’t seen The Walking Dead season 6 onwards and don’t want anything ruined (you all probably knows what happens by now whether you watch it or not) then you may want to skip over this part.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS
I live in the UK so our episodes of TWD air a fair few hours after they do in the US, giving people plenty of time to make gifs, text posts, hashtags, all that stuff about what’s happened. That one episode where Glenn was under a load of walkers by a dumpster was one that got spoiled for me on Tumblr. At this time, I didn’t follow anyone (that I was aware of) who posted about TWD, so I thought I was safe. I was just scrolling through Tumblr and then I saw a gifset of Glenn struggling under countless walkers who were tearing at a body. I immediately shut my laptop and rolled on the floor for about 5 minutes, literally thinking that he had died and known about it not through word of mouth but a gifset. When I watched the episode later that day, I knew what was going to happen. Needless to say, I cried, a lot. Glenn was and still is one of my most adored characters. As we know, that episode Glenn luckily didn’t die, but man, it sure felt like it.
Now onto what you all probably know is gonna come next. Negan. Glenn and Abraham’s fate. Before this episode, I’d speculated who I thought it was going to be, Glenn and Abraham two of a possible few. After the last occurrence of spoilers about TWD, I’d decided not to go on social media at all for the entire day, not even looking in group chats or opening any Snapchats. I should mention that I’d told all my friend’s plenty of times to not send me anything about the episode, or TWD in general, at all, since I didn’t want to know anything that happened. I wanted to completely immerse myself in the episode; to be kept on the edge of my seat unknowingly anticipating what was going to happen next.
It got to about 5pm and TWD airs in the UK at 9pm and none of my friends had said anything about it so I thought it was okay to read their messages. I was right until one of my friends decided to send me a direct message on Twitter. I opened it and it was a link to a tweet that was a meme about the fate of Glenn and Abraham. As you can imagine, I was not happy. I’d specifically told my friends, including this person, to not send me anything at all. Even typing this now, it’s annoying me. I explained my frustration but an apology can’t go back in time to when I didn’t know who was going to be on the end of Negan’s bat.
This was arguably one of the biggest things to happen in TWD so having it spoiled was quite frustrating. There was still that part of me who hoped that tweet was just a joke, that it was still people speculating about their inquisitions but it wasn’t. There was also the part of me that knew it’d be those two characters. However, my own internal thought processes about a potential plot line isn’t the same as having the literal plot spoiled by someone I’d told not to tell me anything at all. Regardless of knowing the spoiler, I cried a hell of a lot when Glenn was brutally murdered. I’m still not over what happened to him. RIP Glenn and Abraham.
POTENTIAL SPOILERS OVER
You may be wondering why I’m so invested in certain shows, games, films, etc. and honestly I can’t even tell you. You may even think I’m being “extra” or over dramatic, and that’s fine, I probably am; but having something I’m completely and totally invested in spoiled, especially by a friend, is a big deal to me. If I ask you not to spoil things for me, please don’t. Or even if you want to talk about something that could be a spoiler, it’d be nice to ask if it’s okay first. In case you’re wondering, I’m not like this for all shows or films or games, just a few, and those few I do let people know.
