How to avoid spoilers (in curmudgeon)

Like blondes, spoiler alerts have more fun. They’re also stupid.

PS –blondes aren’t really dumb, but I don’t feel like scrounging up a different analogy. And the opening sentence slipped deep inside my head while I was driving, so I wrapped my brain around it. Why waste a good driving thought?

Being an American nerd is easy. These days it’s practically synonymous with just being an American. There are movies, television shows, Youtubers, video games, card games, print books, comic books, t-shirts, mugs, USB drives, bloggers, dumb window decals, letter openers, “collectible” toys, underwear, lunch boxes, trade paperback comic collections, television shows, Netflix shows and much more. Being a jock, which used to be easy, is probably the new “geek,” but nerds are still easier targets for bullying because of their lack of muscles. And these days the jocks wear Star Wars shirts, which to this day stirs up a weird gag reflex in me.

And being an American nerd is big business, as the merchandise description above indicates. So of course people with an inclination to write are tripping over each other’s wireless keyboards to produce millennial-friendly content we will all want to click. That race can mean more demanding, sexier content too. Roughly translated: “Let’s ruin the plot of every film and TV show months before you actually see it.” Let’s overkill it all in the shallowest way possible. Let’s make a big deal of something that’s not a big deal (much like this post).

Salivating as we do for every fresh nugget from the set of the new Avengers, Star Wars, or Game of Thrones; we click on it, thinking it won’t salt the wound. But it does. It hurts. If the film is fresh air, spoilers are pollution. And these days, spoilers are everywhere. In the rush to make us click their article over someone else’s, those spoilers are starting to surface in the headlines – often mere hours after the film or television show has gone public. And we read them because we love the nerd stuff.

I devoured those articles, thinking it wouldn’t kill my thrill, but I learned the opposite occurs. I watched Game of Thrones and Captain America: Civil War, as well as others, and came away hardly amused. They were okay, I thought. Then I realized I would have gotten way more excited had I not known everything that was going to happen before it happened. I’m such an idiot.

Rather than me saying, “Please take it easy on spilling big reveals when you write about things. Write like you work for Starlog or something,” and getting nothing but trolled as a response, I figured out a better way. I simply don’t read the articles anymore.

Stay off social media until you’ve seen it, hide or unfriend the entertainment sites you once frequented, and you may find you’ll enjoy the experience of the nerd much more. It’s an easy fix and may cause writers and entertainment sites to rethink how they deliver the goods, rather like training an algorithm.

Being like a blonde, it took me WAY too long to figure that out.

And maybe, but not likely, I’ll read more New York Times instead of Cinema Blend.