Hey Nerdom, can I ask a quick favour? Consider it a late Christmas present or an early Easter one, I really don’t care but this has been driving me up the wall the last few weeks. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.
Could we cool it with the WandaVision spoilers?
It hasn’t been this bad since Avengers: Endgame was dominating theatres a few years ago. In case you need a refresher, there were a lot of people going out of their way to ruin Endgame’s ending for everyone else. If you weren’t lucky enough to see Endgame on its opening day, something was inevitably spoiled for you. I wasn’t able to see it until three days after it was released and I treated the Internet like a minefield until then, gingerly watching my step and reading everything-including my email-with one eye tightly closed. Every second I was online I was like a kid watching his first horror movie through splayed fingers.
Alas, all my caution was for naught. I almost made it but when I popped into a Star Trek message board the night before, I discovered spoilers galore thanks to some unrepentant trolls. Before I could shut my eyes I saw how our heroes brought Thanos’ victims back from the dead and that Black Widow didn’t live to see the credits. I wasn’t the only one who had it ruined so savagely. An usher at the theatre told me it was spoiled for him because his gym’s Facebook page was bombed with spoilers disguised as fitness tips.
Good times.
But as bad as it was for Endgame, WandaVision is worse because the lion’s share of the spoilers in question are coming from people who should know better.
Since Endgame, I’ve adapted my Internet viewing habits accordingly and make sure I see any movie rich in potential spoilers the second its available (a habit I will get back into when movie theatres become a thing again). A culture of spoiler troll has risen and I’ve accepted them as a part of every day life. While I can never understand, appreciate or respect getting perverse joy from spoiling things for total strangers, I can manage it.Â
But they’re not the biggest problem anymore. The Nerd media (for lack of a better term) is.
During February I noticed a disturbing trend. Popular sites were posting spoiler filled WandaVision reviews and commentaries the day new episodes dropped. Worse yet, they were posting said spoilers as early as 8 AM. And while you could argue that if I (or others) didn’t want anything spoiled, I could simply refrain from reading the articles until after I’d seen the new episode, they were giving things away in the title of the post.
Wanna for instance? Sure thing, but here’s the part where I politely insert a SPOILER ALERT for anyone who hasn’t watched the last few episodes so I don’t ruin anything for them (see how easy and courteous that was?). I found out that Agatha Harkness was the one pulling Wanda’s strings and that she was hiding in plain sight as someone we had all assumed was another one of Wanda’s victims/pawns, not by watching the episode and enjoying the discovery, but by reading a headline while skimming my social media before work the day that particular episode dropped. It had only been available for a handful of hours and there were already headlines blabbing the big reveal smeared all over Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.Â
So the last few weeks I’ve been up extra early so I can watch without worrying about the show being spoiled for me the next time I checked the weather on my phone. I haven’t been up early to watch TV since I was in elementary school and needed my cartoon fix before being abducted by the school bus. Let me tell you, the experience definitely loses something as an adult. I don’t watch a lot of TV but I like to relax while savouring the TV I do watch. Setting my alarm for 6 AM and then racing to shave and shower the second the show concludes isn’t my idea of relaxing. But the alternative is inevitably having it spoiled sometime before lunch.
Everyone on the planet wants to see WandaVision’s new episodes the second they drop. It is one of the most watched shows of 2021 so far and DisneyPlus’s servers have even crashed under the stress. So the possibility exists that this week’s season ending could be spoiled even if you’re up at the crack of dawn to see it. Your playing Nerd roulette, hoping that the entire Internet doesn’t crash so you can catch it before the sun rises. Otherwise you risk being devastated by someone who caught it before Disney’s entire system buckled beneath the demand.  Â
I don’t think asking news sites to NOT GIVE away everything in a headline is an unreasonable thing to ask. At least wait until Monday before giving everything away. Because WandaVision is just the beginning. Given Disney’s current release schedule, we’re all likely to be glued to our screens for the rest of the year. But that begs the question, are we going to be fending off spoilers every second of our lives moving forward?
Should I even bother watching the rest of the MCU shows this year or just wait for MovieWeb to give away all the endings? Do I clear my calendar for all the new Star Wars shows headed our way or just peruse Newsarama/Gamesradar’s headlines to see how everything turns out? What about the next season of The Boys or The Expanse? Do I invest in them or just read i09’s headlines the second I wake up so they can save me the trouble of enjoying life?
Like I said, I expect this kind of douchebaggery from the legions of trolls that call the Internet home. But I expect better from “news sites.” Sure, we live in a clickbait world where it’s a nonstop battle to win as many eyeballs as possible, but there’s a way to do business without scrambling to ruin things for people who committed the sin of not watching TV at 4 AM on a weekday.
Perhaps my expectations are too high. Perhaps I give some of those “sources” too much credit. Looks like I’ll just have to adjust my habits like I did following Endgame. I guess I have to accept the fact that we’re now living in the age where the onus of not having something instantly ruined is on the consumer, the demands of their lives or time be damned. It would be nice to just relax for once, and not have to play defence to enjoy things.
Maybe that’s what I’ll ask Santa for next Christmas.
Image via www.anchor.fm
