Studiously Avoiding Spoilers

It’s that time of year again!  The Walking Dead is back on our screens, and again I am not watching live, forced to avoid spoilers studiously.  In my first post, I said that I hate spoilers about narrative programs and this one is super important.  The Walking Dead is a easily spoilable show.  What events are more important in a tv show than when a beloved character meets his/her tragic end.  And in this show, that is constantly happening. 

                As of this moment, I have yet to watch Sunday’s episode.  I haven’t had the time to sit down and watch it, but I have been scrolling through Twitter once again.  On Sunday nights, Twitter becomes a minefield for me.  And I do admit that I could probably create a less spoiler-y zone. 

Each week, one person who I follow tweets constantly about the night’s show.  When I check Twitter, I often end up scrolling without looking in depth at much because I’m trying to avoid reading something I don’t want to.  Y’know what makes spoiler posts easy to avoid: hashtags.  It’s funny to me because they are meant to help you to find posts.  If you are scrolling down a page quickly a hashtag is easy to spot and avoid, especially now that there is always a hashtag emoji image for each week’s new episode.

Great British Bake Off Spoiled?

Should I be giving spoiler alerts on a blog which consistently claims that spoilers don’t exist?  Yeah, because you don’t have to agree with me.  Don’t read this if you watch the Great British Bake Off but haven’t, for whatever reason, watched this season’s finale.

I, quite unsurprisingly, had the finale episode spoiled for me.  A number of people that I follow on Twitter are British, and that show is a big deal.  13.4 million people watched the finale (in a country of 64.1 million).  Dear reader, you will not at all be shocked to hear that I very quickly moved past the fact that the winner had been soiled for me.  Nadiya was certainly the favorite in my house from the earliest stages of the competition, though we were also fans of Tamal and Ian from the beginning.

I did wonder whether I would have been upset that the results had been spoiled for me if there had been one contestant who I hated and that person had been the winner.  Once again though, I came to the conclusion that what would have been bothersome wouldn’t have been knowing the result of the show without having seen the episode.  Even knowing that Nadiya had won, I still fully enjoyed watching the difficult technical and seeing the successes of each baker with their individual showstopper.  I would only have been bothered if the result was not what I had hoped for in the show.  At least in the way that I experience “spoilers,” I’m more upset at the outcome than I am about having someone else spoil the outcome for me.  Any negative response I have to spoilers is tied back to the emotion about the part of the show that was being spoiled.  Anybody else?  Agree?  Disagree?  Feel free to think either.  Bye.

Not on Topic, But on Theme

Continued this week:  Writing on a topic that isn’t the actual topic but is thematically relevant. 

This past week’s episode of Great British Bake Off was spoiled for me.  And, yes, I realize that in the first post here, I said that I wanted the world to spoil things that were competitions as long as they refrained from spoiling narrative shows that have an actual plot.  But as I was scrolling through Twitter the day after the actual airdate of the show, someone had posted an article which announced in the title the person who had gone home in the semi-final. 

                Now, as I watched the episode, I was feeling a little bit bitter about the fact that I knew who was out.  If we’re being honest though, you can see from the start that one person isn’t going to make it when there are only four contestants and one person has been making the same wrong decision week in and week out.  In the isolation of reading a tweet, it is easy to get wrapped up and feel like some aspect of watching the show has been taken from you, but as soon as you’re focusing on the show and what you know from everything you’ve seen up to this point, there really isn’t that much to ruin.  Maybe that situation would’ve been different if one contestant who was just the best through the whole show had a terrible weekend.  That isn’t what happened though, so there isn’t that much to worry about.