Spoiler Alert!!! But just WHAT is a spoiler?

skizzerflake

skizzerflake

Audioholic Field Marshall
It doesn’t happen just on movie review sites, but in general life too…we’ve all done it, said something to someone about a movie and someone in the conversation looks downcast and proclaims a spoiler. Spoiler aversion seems to be on the increase. If you look at trailers from the 1940’s and 50’s, you hardly needed to see the movie. They were longer, had voiceover narrations and did nearly the entire movie in a 5 minute capsule. Back then it was common for people to walk in on a movie half way through, see the end and watch the beginning; theaters were NOT emptied after each showing.

Now we are in the era where trailers, reviews and even casual conversations are subject to someone angrily declaring a spoiler, the worst of movie offenses. So…just WHAT is a spoiler? This is a question proposed to our forumers. What’s the threshold level of revelation for a spoiler? Is it different for different kinds of movies?

The worst and most obvious spoilers of course are in full-out fiction. Revealing, in a bittersweet love story, whether the guy ever does get the girl is certainly a spoiler, but is it a spoiler to say that one or the other of them is crazy or hard to get along with when the first shot in the trailer shows them being cute?

What about trailers? Some of them say a little, some say more, but is it fair ground to assume that anything in an official trailer that shows up in the theater or on Youtube is acceptable to reveal in a conversation or review?

If a movie is about history, is the historic event itself that can be a spoiler? Really, is there anybody out there that thinks that it’s a spoiler while discussing a Civil War movie to say that the North wins? In a World War movie, is it OK to say that the Germans are on the losing side in both wars to someone who has not seen the movie? Is spoiler aversion just a substitute for a lack of basic historical knowledge?

I’ll grant that completely fictional stories and fictional characters added to realistic movies can be spoiled. I’ll state that D Day certainly happened, and that it IS a spoiler to say whether a fictional character makes if off the beach and to the end of the war, but can anybody claim that the overall D Day events themselves can be spoilers?

What’s the consensus of opinion on this? What ARE the rules for what constitutes a spoiler?
 
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