The Normalization of Spoilers
As Valerie Cherish once said, “I don’t wanna see that!”
I don’t know about you, but ever since Grimes’s ex took over Twitter, everything’s been fucked — especially on the platform, where he gutted 80% of the workforce. All the people that made the app fun for me (Rihanna, Lena Dunham, Guillermo del Toro) have fled and my algorithm is a confluence of gay men getting railed, devastation and disasters around the world and updates about the Big Brother house — none of which I’ve willfully opted into. Alright, some of which I’ve never opted into. But why then, you may ask, do you still use it? Well, I do and I don’t. As I wrote back in December, I no longer tweet and deleted all 27K+ of my old tweets, but I do continue to dwell there. I’m not proud about it, make no mistake. But the reality is that no other platform offers the kind of pop culture news ticker that I crave. And even though I must put up with mostly slop and gruel, the occasional goldmine (which do still exist) makes it ~worth it~.
But besides the downward trajectory, there’s been another notable change that I’ve seen upticking in recent months: the proliferation of spoilers. “Mistress [Isabelle Brooks] eliminated — I’m in shock. I thought she would be top 3. #AllStars10 #DragRace.” This was tweeted at 4am on Friday, an hour after the new episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars had begun streaming. (They release new episodes at 3am EST? Don’t get me started.) The post gave no warning. I don’t follow the account. I wasn’t searching for Drag Race tweets. It simply populated on the top of my feed the moment I logged on to do my cursory early morning doom scroll.
The rule when it comes to spoilers online has always been… there are no rules. I used to get dinged for my White Lotus memes (even when they contained no spoilers relevant to any plot twists) when I would post them the morning after the episode aired, so I instituted an arbitrary 24-hour rule to give myself and my audience a sense of a playbook. Still, people would get mad at me. But the reality is, there’s nothing, really, that can be done from the consumer side to prevent this unless you’re willing to simply avoid logging on (which is quite frankly not a realistic workaround).
“We can't set up guidelines and baby bumpers anymore on the Internet,” my friend and fellow podcaster Johnny Atorino, co-host of the popular Drag Race podcast Alright Mary, tells me. “Nobody's doing it for us. It's impossible. There's too many trolls. There's too many people that want clout and those clicks to be posting about and reacting to something first that it's just not how it's gonna work for us to be able to control it.” Sure, he admits, we can try and train our algorithm. We can unfollow accounts, mute, click “I’m not interested in this post,” etc. But that takes a level of commitment that could be exhaustive and might only stifle the problem without fully choking it out.
But of equal merit to consider is what Johnny describes as the caste system of spoilers.
“So the winner of a season versus somebody who gets eliminated or a blindside on a show like Survivor versus the expected early out. I feel like an amazing lip sync or a big plot twist or, say, Sarah Michelle Gellar if she were resurrected in the new I Know What You Did Last Summer… things like that that are huge news are different.”
What separates the two, from what I pick up here, is that an elimination is an inevitable part of the format, so while it can be spoiled, it’s not the same degree of spoiler as when something unexpected occurs, and thus, yeah, not all spoilers are of the same hierarchy and the response should be in accordance.
Another thing to consider is the way competition reality has been crafted over time, which is essentially around the concept of “who will go home in this episode?” But as someone who mainlined all 40 seasons of Survivor available during COVID and had about half of the winners “spoiled” in advance, I found that sometimes I enjoyed it all the same knowing who the winner was and being able to watch the season to see how that journey was going to play out. Kind-of like when you watch a horror movie that you love for the second time and you’re like, “Okay, now I know who Ghostface is, but now I’m going to track to see all the breadcrumbs that were laid out that I wasn’t cognizant of during my first watch.” It’s shifting the viewpoint from “who?” to “how?” And I often found greater satisfaction when I could alleviate the “who dunnit?” component from the show and simply enjoy the story arcs and characters.
The deemphasizing of the “who?” is present in some of cinema’s greatest masterpieces. In Psycho, the audience is aware of Norman Bates's dual personality and the danger he poses to Marion Crane well before she arrives at the Bates Motel. In Jaws, while the characters initially dismiss the idea of a shark, the audience is shown the shark's presence and attacks early on. In both instances, the filmmaker emphasizes the journey rather than the destination, which is seemingly in contrast to the schematics of how reality competition as a genre is built. This to say, it’s a familiar trope.
But all of this fails to recognize what I see as a distinct uptick in this behavior. What was once deemed unacceptable is now the status quo. The inability to avoid spoilers is a “you problem” instead of a necessary conversation around spoiler etiquette. “I've seen a distinct change in the cultural attitude towards spoilers on social media,” says my friend and Drop Your Buffs co-host Sean Ross.
“For the past 20-ish years as I've been lurking on reality TV websites, fan forums and corners of social media, I have always been able to rely on a mostly unspoken agreement that spoilers wouldn't be discussed openly or, at the very least, they would be clearly marked with a spoiler warning so that I could avoid them at will. But I think the potential for virality by being ‘first’ to report or comment on something has overtaken the long-held cultural norm of protecting the integrity of the viewing experience of others.”
What Sean sees as the bigger change happening is the shift from tweeting the results of reality competition in real-time as the show airs to actively seeking out spoilers for shows that have yet to air.
“For example, on my corner of Twitter, I've been inundated with casting spoilers for shows like The Traitors and Survivor. Not only that, but, within the past year or so, I've seen a cavalier approach to tweeting out rumored placements and even winners of seasons that are sometimes 8, 9 or 10 months out from airing. Unfortunately, much like the decades of movie theater etiquette that have been flushed down the drain in recent years, I think we've crossed a threshold in the world of spoiler culture when it comes to discussing television on the internet.”
I think, too, there’s been a shift in the acceptance of spoilers from an annoyance to an inevitability. And as they've become more pervasive, people have adopted seemingly more lax attitudes about them. I can’t help but be reminded of the destruction of democracy in America, where everyday we’re subjected to watching long-held norms, standards and protocols chipped away at, or in some instances eroded altogether. And while that happens, we watch our stand-bearers not only do nothing about it, but whimper at the mere expression of outrage. The effect — the tactic all along — is to flood the zone and overwhelm the ability to hold the line.
Am I really comparing Mistress Isabelle Brooks’s elimination to the downfall of democracy? Yes, I am. Hopefully when democracy makes its grand return in 2026 or 2028 (God willing), we can see to reinforcing the unspoken etiquette that once kept spoilers in check. And until then? I guess have to continue shaking my fists up toward the sky and asking “Why?”