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Karla: See, Tanner, the great thing about Buffy is that every season has a new villain! Tanner: Uh-huh. Karla: That's how Buffy fans remember each season! By villain. Season one is The Master, and season two is- Tom: *coughcough*
Information relating to surprises and character entry/exits in an episode were revealed ahead of transmission. The surprise was spoiled.
The most common kinds of spoilers are thus:
- Someone de-bagged the cat in an online forum or in more conventional conversation (as demonstrated in an ep of Seinfeld with a movie about a comatose woman);
- plot points got out by way of the media;
- a show aired overseas first and overseas fans were talking about it.
The overseas type occurs frequently with anime airing in Japan before a dubbed version reaches the west and in Britain due to the transatlantic delay — the show aired first in the States and Staties will talk. Recently, Americans have had a taste of this with the new, reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which was well into its first season on Sky One in the U.K. by the time it began showing on Sci-Fi in the U.S. Ditto Justice League Unlimited, which consistently showed in Canada long before the US. Also, the latest Doctor Who. Even Winx Club suffers from it (although the plot points on that show are subject to change due to 4Kids' editing: see Pragmatic Adaptation for an example).
Subtypes of the media type of spoiler:
- TV Guide Spoiler — An episode review makes a big emphasis on the fact of a major revelation or character death. They'll say it is being closely kept under wraps. Except, obviously, it isn't. In Britain, TV guides for the following week (Sat-Fri) go on sale on the previous Tuesday. If the episode with the mysterious revelation is on Wednesday, all you have to do is look at next week's episode guide and the revelation is revealed.
- Yet another type is the commercial spoiler, or for movies, the trailer spoiler, where, in attempting to advertise, they directly quote all the big surprise moments. Law And Order Special Victims Unit is somehow a major offender of both the above and the opposite.
- Preview Tapes Not Available — critics are sent tapes of the episodes before they're shown so they can review them. However, producers want to keep stuff under wraps will not give out preview tapes, as has happened with Doctor Who. By season 4, they came up with another way to prevent spoilers-cutting out the most shocking bit when showing it to critics...and hoping the critics don't complain about the episode seemingly not having an ending.
Happens more for main networks.
When a spoiler becomes common knowledge in the mainstream — such as Darth Vader turning out to be Luke Skywalker's father —, it's no longer spoiler fodder and gets demoted to It Was His Sled. When a sequel to a work spoils it predecessors, it's You Should Know This Already.
Posting spoilers on a fan forum will almost always get the forumgoers royally pissed off at you, but when the show's actual owners start using or threatening legal action against people who spoiler, you should Spoil At Your Own Risk.
For a few tips on how we abuse treat spoilers around this wiki, see Spoiler Policy.
See Spoilered Rotten for tropes where spoilers are almost inherent.
Examples:
- Dark City is possibly the only work in any fictional medium to spoil itself over its own course, with a studio-imposed monologue at the beginning explaining multiple plot twists which are repeated quite clearly later on in the film. Many fans advise first-time viewers to turn the sound off until the end of the monologue.
- Alternately, you can pick up the Director's Cut DVD, which takes out the monologue and adds in new footage to boot.
- The Bill has this happen frequently.
- Star Trek Voyager fans call this Previews Always Spoil.
- Sci-Fi Channel commercials for the season finale of Doctor Who, spoiling the end of the penultimate episode. The network seems to have trouble with this in general.
- Most wrestling websites prominently post spoilers for shows that are taped before they air. WWE.com even got in on the act for a short time.
- Of course, the most egregious use of spoilers in wrestling was done by WCW, against the then-WWF. WCW's Monday Nitro was aired live, while WWF's Monday Night RAW was taped a week in advance; thus, right before 9:00 (when WWF RAW started), the WCW commentary team would spoil the WWF's main event for the evening, in order to coax viewers into continuing to watch Nitro instead. This backfired, however, when Tony Schiavone revealed that Mick Foley - then wrestling as Mankind - would be winning the WWF Championship that evening; he jokingly said "yeah, that'll put butts in seats". An estimated half a million viewers switched over to RAW, an act which killed Nitro's ratings, gave the WWF the upper hand in the Monday Night Wars, and caused fans to start bringing "Mick Foley put my butt in this seat" signs to WWF shows.
- In advertising the championship match of the 2006 World Series of Pop Culture, VH1 put up the names of the teams who would battle it out... even though one of the semifinal matches was not finished yet.
- Brazillian soap operas: at least 80% of the newspapers have a complete spoiler of the current episodes of all the soap operas airing on open TV. Oddly enough, most of the audience actually reads the spoilers and watches the show anyway.
- The main exception is the final episodes (usually the last two), especially if there is a "who killed X" plot. In the last case, often several variations of the reveal are filmed, with different culprits, to prevent leaks (only one of them is actually broadcast).
- On The Next trailers are a frequent source of spoilers, to the degree that many fans refuse to watch them in order to remain "pure". 24 and the 2000s Battlestar Galactica are major offenders in that category.
- Some Cowboy Bebop fans are fond of spoiling the ending for their friends, with the blunt phrase, Spike dies. At this point, it's become a kind of joke. This particular spoiler is revered for being solid spoiler gold: it is final, powerful, massively important to the plot, extremely well-done, and occurs at the very end of the last episode of the series.
- This Troper never understood how that could be a spoiler. They say it's going to happen right in the first episode.
- In a similar vein as the above example, "Ladies' Night" eventually became code for the point in the Death Note anime where L was killed.
- A spoiler from the sixth Harry Potter book actually managed to become an Internet meme. Someone who found out that Snape kills Dumbledore went out to the Internet, posted it everywhere, and now you can even see image macros in the biggest Web forums with this spoiler that, on top of that, is as short, powerful and final as the one from Cowboy Bebop. There's even a story about a fanboy who killed himself
 after he accidentally stumbled upon it!
- This Troper saw one of the spoiler images a while before the book came out or so, and thought it was a really quite witty joke. As I read the book it became more and more obvious that it had been an actual spoiler and where events were leading...
- The British TV guide Radio Times is bad at this; so bad, in fact, that one of the writers of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat, once went onto a massive Doctor Who forum and warned everyone to stay away from it. Ironically, said magazine is made by the same people who make Doctor Who in the first place.
- Many Doctor Who stories have been spoilt by the title, particularly when featuring popular and prominent villains such as the Daleks and the Cybermen. As such, many a big dramatic surprise reveal and cliffhanger that these feared adversaries appeared in would be completely ruined by the fact that the story was titled '(Something) of the Daleks / Cybermen', thus priming the audience to expect them to appear at some point. The new series isn't entirely free of this; guess what appears in the episode called 'Dalek'?
- The Master?
- Russell T Davies caught some flak for them putting Dalek Sec on the front cover, he'd decided to go for the cover than the surprise.
- "Bad Wolf" did not have its title revealed until some weeks into Season 27/1.
- In season 30/4, the producers have tried to avert this with the twelfth episode, which remains unrevealed several months after the other titles have been revealed.
- In "Silence in the Library" the Doctor berates Donna for trying to look in some history books from the future as they'd contain spoilers for reality.
- The episode's subsequent 'Next Time' trailer then ended with two characters repeating the word "spoilers", followed by a third shouting "No, don't tell, you mustn't tell!" into the camera. Knowing what Steven Moffat's like, it's not hard to imagine that the trailer was edited that way deliberately.
- A notable aversion, though, occurred in 1982, when the Cybermen returned to the series for the first time in seven years. The episode title ("Earthshock") doesn't mention them, the TV guide listings were carefully crafted to avoid TV Guide Spoilers, and the then producer actually turned down a Radio Times cover story in order to keep the surprise.
- The Jon Pertwee serial "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" did something similar. The title was simply "Invasion" until the big reveal, after which the complete title was shown.
- Advertising for the fifth season finale of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (and the series finale, from the WB's perspective) blatantly spoiled Buffy's death, by running ads featuring Buffy's tombstone.
- This week's (as of 3/24/08) episode preview for two game shows—Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? and Deal or No Deal—revealed the results of the games.
- Stargate SG 1's fourth-wall cracking, in-joke spouting, lampshade-hanging 200th episode...called, of course, 200 (for reasons both related and not to this fact)...featured the return of Richard Dean Anderson's character General (formerly Colonel) Jack O'Neill for the first time on the show since the end of season 8. This exchange says it all:
- Complete scene by scene spoilers for Lost's 3rd and 4th season finales made it to the internet before those episodes aired. In the case of season 4, some fans thought the spoiler was actually a foiler because the "frozen donkey wheel" seemed so crazy.
- It's family tradition around this troper's household to make up fake spoilers as we're heading out of the theatres. Kind of like when Homer spoiled Star Wars, only building up something that seems rational partway through the movie but runs off in a totally different direction from the real ending. And talking about it in a totally serious manner. Often takes the form of "I can't believe they couldn't come up with a better solution than blowing up the planet."
- Hit my shining moment when I managed to spoof my own mom... who had watched Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 right alongside me that very evening. Directly after the movie, I spent an hour's grocery shopping trip with her, chatting on about how (not the real spoiler) Jack was really Calypso, the sea goddess. Kept elaborating as I went, all the different ways this worked with the plot, how obvious it was that that's who he was, how he never seemed to act quite normal, mortal, or manly to begin with, how capricious he was, and how the mysterious sea goddess being presented as a woman made us subconsciously rule out all male characters. Mom was "playing along" the whole time, which was great - but once we got back in the car, her comments made me realize that she thought I was serious. She doesn't watch many movies with us, and had just accepted the fact that she had somehow misunderstood that plot point.
- This troper and his buddies spoof-do this to people who are watching a movie for the first time. We point to a random object in the background, often in frame for all of two minutes, and yell to the new guy "See that tree, right there? You missed it? Just leave now, the rest of the movie won't make sense." The tree has no real plot significance.
- This troper was hanging with a bunch of friends at the book store party for the seventh Harry Potter Book, and began a spoiler guessing game. When it got out of hand, this trope yelled out "Harry Potter dies" to much laughter when the shocked looks of people going to get the book looked at them. At the time none of us had gotten our copy.
- This troper remembers when this was a problem on alt.fan.pratchett. Discworld books were on significantly different schedules in the UK and the US.
- Speaking of Discworld, Harper Torch has a bad habit of putting a spoilerriffic image against a solid-color background on the front cover-they don't do it with every book, but particularly bad was the cover for Men At Arms, which gave away the big reveal (the characters spend the entirety of the book mystified as hell until said reveal, and the only character who makes any progress on the problem dies without getting the chance to share it with anyone).
- To be fair, the UK Josh Kirby cover for Men At Arms also spoiled the same plot point, albeit on the back of the cover. I remember Terry Pratchett saying that he wasn't particulary concerned about the spoiler, since the novel isn't really meant to be a whodunit and more of a character piece on the temptation of power.
- Code Geass does the spoiler-in-the-title thing just enough to be EXTREMELY ANNOYING to people who have preview lists that include titles of upcoming episodes, like the now-aired "Emperor Lelouch", where the NAME spoils the previous episode's end result. There have even been cases where the title for a particular episode spoiled a shocking twist from later on in the very same episode, such as "Bloodstained Euphemia"
- A plot point was spoiled for the webcomic And Shine Heaven Now when the author posted the relevant trope on the comic's page on this wiki two days before posting the corresponding comic. While spoilers are a common enough occurrence here, it usually does not happen that way.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, Sozin's comet was originally supposed to be a shocking and incredible SERIES finale. Unfortunately, the third midseason was back scheduled to fill out Nickelodeon's summer schedule. Even more unfortunate, was that nobody told the publishers of the junior novelization of said series finale, as they released on schedule. Boom.
- This Troper had the suicide of Kutner on House spoiled by the front page of the Washington Post, which helpfully announced that he was leaving to become a staffer for Obama.
- Right at the start of Romeo And Juliet, one of the actors comes out on stage and tells the audience everything that's about to happen in one soliloque. In the Leonardo Di Caprio version, this happens twice. first it's basically a small TV on a mostly black screen with a news anchor reciting the soliloque, and then we get it again but with more dramatic editing, imagery, naration etc
- Warrior Cats has a big problem with spoilers. Several people have been able to read the entire book weeks early due to Amazon's 'Search Inside.' Besides that, Canadian bookstores tend to stock the newest book a week or so early, which has allowed This Troper to know exactly what happens in each Warriors book since Sunrise a month before the release date.
- The concept of spoilers is mentioned - and briefly discussed - in The Kite Runner: the narrator/protagonist discovers, after revealing to a stranger the ending of a western, that Americans aren't very keen of the whole "telling people what happens in the end" thing - as opposed to life in his home country, where everyone floods the moviegoer with questions after he watches a movie.
Exceptions:
- New Zealanders really know how to keep their mouths shut. While the Kim Possible finale episode "Graduation" has already aired there, none of the lucky fans who got to see it said even a single word, and no trace of the episode appeared at any internet file-sharing sites.
- The identity of the killer in the play The Mouse Trap is one of the best kept secrets in theatre.
- Nope, not gonna tell.
- Oh for God's sake, it's on Wikipedia!
- Everything is on Wikipedia. That includes secrets.
- The big twist in Psycho was considered so integral to the enjoyment of the film that Hitchcock didn't let anyone come into the movie casually (as people were allowed to walk into films late at the time) and specifically requested at the start of the film to not talk about the plot to any of their friends.
Not to be confused with the DC Universe character Spoiler.
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