smallcreature

slowly recovering from birdsite

autistic queerthing from france. kitty fighting the puppy allegations. Asks welcome!

Icon: Komugi from Wonderful Precure
Header: Whisper of the Heart



rotsharp
@rotsharp

spoiler culture is a consumerist trap designed to make knowing things cost money


as soon as it became the norm to just Never Discuss Media Directly i lost all ability to keep current on anything and it fucking sucks. in my flawed recollection, this started before internet search became useless, so for a time i could supplement and find the things i wanted to know. now i cannot. im slowly moving back into retro games and shit because nobody cares if you just fucking talk about things that are decades old that you played in an emulator like we used to just fucking talk about things in public even ten years ago

it additionally drives me up a wall when i see people in a space who obviously all know about the thing using veiled language and discord spoiler tags with each other, in some kind of bizarre attempt to preserve the virginal experience for some hypothetical consumer who is not and will probably never be present. it feels as gross and contrived to me as the phrasing implies

i adhere in public because even if i think its fucking stupid there isnt any gain in being an asshole about movies and video games to randos and upsetting people but goddamn do i miss actually knowing what people thought about the thing instead of "no spoilers but i liked it a lot," because THAT is what gets me to read the book or whatever. it is one of those things that in no way actually matters but also makes interacting with people sometimes feel like i am snorting steak knives, especially when i have to do the dance with someone of "hey what did you think" and i have to extra-conscientiously wonder if "no spoilers but i liked it" is because they dont WANT to talk about it or-

it is so exhausting. people twist themselves in knots to talk about a thing because they think i want them to, because they think everyone wants them to, and it breaks my brain when people treat me as if what i directly ask for is the opposite of what i want, because theyre so stuck on this whole idea that theyre interacting with what they imagine i am instead of what i am showing them, and goddamn if that doesnt uncomfortably recall the entire social experience of being autistic and trans, making me less willing to try to connect, ever.

i used to keep up with what was going on in video games through lets plays. some of my most favorite games i only played after seeing all or most of an lp and not being able to contain my need to also play. but lps are yesterday, and today is the day of the stream and the podcast and neither work well for me. i relied on sources of community information to navigate media, and now these days even the best "spoiler free" reviews of things rarely tell me anything i actually care about anymore and it has left me feeling desperately lost and wanting to give up on all of it

we have read more and other tools at your disposal here: consider this a plea from the frog in the well to just talk about the things you love because i love hearing about it, and i am sure others do as well. applying what should be a personal preference as a global social rule by default in all spaces everywhere all the time feels constricting and suffocating to my obnoxious autistic ass that hates arbitrary "common sense"

i am not anti spoiler but i am anti spoiler culture and i additionally ask you to consider how "purchasing/investing time in the thing is necessary to talk about it" may unnecessarily constrict and constrain basic human relations more deeply on a behavioral level than simply not expecting thousands of strangers to support your specific consumption preferences at all times and getting upset when everyone IS talking about the thing and your innocence is ruined because either you saw someone talk about it directly or saw enough vague posting to put it together yourself and now you cant marry your favorite video game publisher


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in reply to @rotsharp's post:

it shouldn't be such an unpopular opinion - thank you for saying it and putting this into words. a good compromise i think is tagging things and if people really need to avoid the spoilers then they can block tags as needed - of course people should be able to unabashedly be excited to talk about a thing openly, without fear of "ruining" the experience for another. i wish i could talk about media like this.

and the dancing around this societal norm... i get it. i really do as another autistic person. again thank you for saying this.