Spoiler (media)

A spoiler is a summary or description of a narrative (or part of a narrative) that relates plot elements not revealed early in the narrative itself. Moreover, because enjoyment of the plot sometimes depends solely on dramatic tension and suspense, this early revelation of plot elements can "spoil" the enjoyment that some consumers of the narrative would otherwise have experienced.

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In recent years, spoilers have mostly appeared on specialist Internet sites and in newsgroup postings. In these cases, the spoilers are mostly directed at film endings. Usually the spoiling information is preceded by a warning, or the spoiler has to be highlighted before it can be visibly read on the web page. But in recent years these warnings have been omitted, and some unwitting readers have had movies they were looking forward to watching spoiled.

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People who reveal spoilers argue that:

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• readers don't need to read the spoilers (even though most of them are obviously accidental)
• people should have seen the movie already (e.g. Citizen Kane, a movie that was released decades ago with a twist ending that has since become embedded in pop culture.)
• if a movie is not enjoyable anymore because of a spoiler, then it is not a good movie

On Usenet the common method for obscuring spoiler information is to precede it with many blank lines known as "spoiler space", traditionally enough to push the information on to the next screen of a 25-line terminal. A simple encipherment using ROT13 is also used in newsgroups to obscure spoilers, but is rarely used for this purpose elsewhere.

Related Topics:
Usenet - Terminal - ROT13

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Wikipedia encourages media articles to place a Wikipedia Spoiler Warning in an article before it reveals important plot details or endings. The Warning looks like this:

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Spoiler (media): Examples of spoilers ►