The super heroes of the Avengers are they going to succeed to bring back all the missing? Who will survive to the final episode of Game of Thrones ? This is information that fans of Marvel and those of the HBO series want to discover by themselves, and not by reading inadvertently a news article or a post on the social networks. In other words, they do not want to be victims of a “spoiler”. This term, old of tens of years, refers to a practice now commonplace on the Web, and fear by many users, who do not want them ruining the end of their movie or their favorite series. It is even entered in the Petit Larousse 2020, under its term anglicised, “divulgâcher”. But why spoile there, and why does one have learned to be so afraid?
The term “spoiler” has had several meanings over the years. Nowadays it is an anglicism, it is at the origin of a gallicisme. The word comes from the old French, with the word “espoillier”, itself from the latin spoliare which meant “loot” or “strip”. We date often, in 1971, the first use of the term “spoiler” in reference to a cultural work. This year, Douglas Kenney, founder of the humor magazine american, National Lampoon, wrote an article revealing the end of several popular films: The Great Escape , The Godfather or Psycho . The spoiler, he says so, with a little bit of bad faith, is a way to avoid people wasting time and money going to the cinema.
The “danger” of the spoiler
It is nearly a decade later that the word made its arrival on the Internet. In 1982, a user of Usenet, a network of forums, uses the phrase “SPOILER ALERT” (alert spoiler) to warn other users of the content of its publication, which revealed details about the plot of the film Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan a few days after its release. The spoiler was, in this case, a term of politeness, used to avoid upsetting other users with information that they were not necessarily willing to consult.
With the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the word “spoiler” will become increasingly popular on the web. It also becomes synonymous with danger. One of the first “spoilers” to create panic in line for the famous saga littéraire Harry Potter. In 2005, the sixth volume of the series is released: we learn that professor Severus Rogue has killed the director of Hogwarts Albus Dumbledore. Internet fun quickly spread this information key to the plot, to spoil the pleasure of readers who have not yet had the time to finish the book. A viral video even shows a person in a car is fun to shout the famous “spoiler” in front of a bookstore. Act of kindness to the origin, the spoiler is thus gradually became a weapon against the other.
The explosion of social networks has only increased these risks. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are now the places preferred by the internet users to talk about movies and series. Some of the official accounts, for example, by tv channels, also publish images or excerpts of works in order to make the promotion. Besides the media which, in the case of popular works, do not hesitate to publish accounts of highly detailed episodes of the tv series shortly after their broadcast. As many potential risks for the fans who were keen to protect “spoilers”. The problem arises especially at the time of a culture global, and especially american: how to avoid knowing the end of an episode of Game of Thrones as soon as his alarm clock, so that it is broadcast on american television Sunday night, French time? Same thing for movies, which doesn’t come out all at the same date in the world. In march, the day of the release of’ Avengers: Endgame in the United States, Lesean McCoy, american football player in the team of the Buffalo Bills, has shared his feelings about the end of the film on Twitter and Instagram. Spoilant and the passage of over a million people subscribing to our accounts on the social networks. Pissed off, a user has decided to launch a petition to force the player contract with the Buffalo Bills terminated and that his Twitter account was deleted. To this day, the document has been signed by over 830 people.
Argument marketing
in the Face of this onslaught of spoilers, the resistance is organizing. Some rely on technology solutions. They “mutate” (mute) some of the terms on the social networks to remove any messages that contain, or use custom plug-ins on browsers or mobile applications allow them to block any comment relating to a series or a movie. Users can be especially creative in order to avoid spoilers, but also not to spoiler the other. Demonstrated by the practice of “spoiler without context”, which is a publication composed of several pictures that have no relationship to each other. These past evoke only something that people who have already seen the work in question, without revealing anything to the other.
most of the big studios have in any case understood this fear of the spoiler online. On one hand, the practice forces them to adapt the way in which they turned their movies and series, in lying to the players or it is not communicating that information piecemeal, in order to prevent any leakage. But the producers also benefit from their hearing to educate the public. With the approach of the release of’ Avengers: Endgame , the filmmakers and actors of the film, for example, have asked fans not to reveal the key elements of the film to the other after seeing it, even coining a hashtag for them: #dontspoilEndgame (“do spoilez not Endgame”). One way to educate users… but also to encourage them to go more quickly to the cinema. The spoiler then becomes a real argument marketing.
