Way to ruin it: the people sharing Avengers: Endgame spoilers online
You’ve seen them on Twitter and Facebook, warning their friends in advance: “Mute me, I’m livetweeting it. I’m not holding anything in because you can’t log off.”
That’s right. Avengers: Endgame, the Most Ambitious Crossover Event in Cinematic History, is now in theaters, and no one is safe. Not even the half of the universe that survived Thanos’s feted “snap”.
Google searches for “how to avoid spoilers” have reached a record high. The second and third-highest spikes on the timeline below line up with the releases of Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018).
Various media outlets have published guides to avoiding spoilers, but between the leaked film footage and younger generations’ taste for ironysoaked memes, even the most fastidious among us can’t guarantee living spoiler-free. One Twitter user even complained that some malicious pranksters had attached the leaked footage at the end of a popular meme from the videogame Marvel vs Capcom 2.
Marvel Studios has taken note, rolling out a social media campaign to get viewers to keep mum. A Friday morning
tweet by Mark Ruffalo with the hashtag #DontSpoilTheEndgame garnered 26,000 likes in two hours; a video by Marvel featuring the cast of the film – tagline: “Don’t do it” – has been seen 2.6m times in 26 hours, all in the hopes that people will keep the spoilers to themselves.
Meghan, 20, of New York, thinks “it’s really messed up” when people tweet spoilers. She runs the Twitter account @princeofasgards, which she started in 2017 to discuss the Marvel universe with other like-minded fans. Her display name currently advertises that her account is “spoiler-free”.
“I know it’s hard not to talk about it, but I’ve been direct messaging people who have seen it just so I can vent and talk about it without spoiling it for others. A lot of people who follow me haven’t seen the movie yet, and they deserve to be surprised regardless of how much later they see it!”
And as for “no-context spoilers” – memes containing stock photos and other “unrelated” pictures that describe major plot points for those in the know – Meghan thinks those are just as bad. She says it’s “unfair to the people who haven’t seen it”.
Adriana, 23, agrees. “The fandom knows too many details about these characters so what might pass by casual viewers wouldn’t be the same to fans.”
Adriana’s Twitter account, @iioveyoubucky, has about the same number of followers as @princeofasgards, but she changed her Twitter name to “endgame spoiler” to make it clear she will cross the line. She says her decision to tweet about Endgame was informed by her previous movie-tweeting experiences.
“After previous movies, the nonspoilery thoughts that I shared still made some people upset because it’s hard to hide some feelings after watching the movies, [so I] decided to warn my followers … so they could mute my tweets.”
Of course, some spoilers are much more blatant. A quick Twitter search of any major character name (Iron Man, Hulk, Thanos) and specific verbs (which I can’t use because #spoilers) reveals hundreds of tweets gleefully detailing the major emotional moments of the film, some directly in response to tweets asking people not to tweet spoilers.
The response to these tweets has been uniformly negative, from those who already saw the film and those getting spoiled, but that might be the point: on social media, “savageness” – not caring about the consequences of your actions, per Urban Dictionary – is a strength, not a detriment.
(Over the course of our conversation, Adriana described a no-context spoiler circulating the web that “any member of the fandom” would be able to interpret; while not a member of the fandom myself, this article quickly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, spoiling the Most Ambitious Crossover Event in Cinematic History for me. Rude!)
To find out more about such uncouth behavior, I called up Patricia Napier-Fitzpatrick, the founder of The Etiquette School of New York. “I would say that it’s inconsiderate, and having good manners means you are considerate,” she says. “It’s inconsiderate because you’re not thinking about their joy or pleasure in seeing a movie, reading a book, and finding out the ending for themselves.”
And while she makes it clear she has respect for millennials and Generation Z, Fitzpatrick says society has become less considerate.
“Nowadays I believe people are more self-absorbed. Again, that’s kind of the opposite of being considerate of other people. I don’t know if people necessarily mean to be rude always, I just think totally that they are self-absorbed. It’s all me, me, me, and what about you?”