Violations of the Spoiler Policy

Spoilers are never allowed above the example line. This especially applies to pictures, since your eyes are naturally drawn to them and you can't stop yourself from seeing it in the way you can stop reading a piece of text.

For Foreshadowing.Coco, it sounds hard to write good examples without detailing the payoff, so does it sound wise to just delete all the spoiler tags, and add a warning at the top about unmarked spoilers?

edited 30th Mar '18 9:31:51 AM by dsneybuf

Considering Foreshadowing is inherently a spoiler trope, I think that's a good idea. If you go to a page about foreshadowing for a specific work, you're expecting spoilers about that work. It's not like on a work page where you're looking for other tropes, or on the trope page where you're looking for other works.

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The Spoilers Off page lists Headscratchers, Moments, and the various Fridge pages as SO as they are "for post-viewing discussions"

To me, that includes installment in a continuity that are both released and set chronologically before the installment in question. And I acknowledge that we have Tropes for when a Moment is made worse, more funny, or just plan nullified in a later installment than the one the page is about,^note Whether chronologically or in release order, (and, in my opinion, should all be listed as such on the later work's page,) but what if the answer to a Headscratcher or Fridge Logic item is found in a later installment than the one the page is about? Does the answer then become a Late-Arrival Spoiler? Or should there be only a reference that it is answered in said later installment with no context as to how?^note You know some schmuck will ask if there is no context given...

Ketchum's corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced tactic is indistinguishable from blind luck.

Have people who've already seen Avengers: Infinity War made sure that the pages for the Unexpected Characters didn't gain spoiler tags at the top? I unfortunately won't see the movie until later this week.

Connie Swap has several whited-out entries, and a few even have their titled spoilered.

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PBG Hardcore and its YMMV page are covered with spoilered out entries.

edited 4th Jun '18 10:12:53 PM by Crossover-Enthusiast

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An Ask The Tropers thread "Forced Spoilers" was made last night by ~Savini24.

Their concern, as I understood it, was that the page for VideoGame.Final Fantasy VII, left a major event unspoiled in multiple entries. That event (spoiler tagged here out if consideration for Savini 24's concerns) is the death of Aerith.

Many would argue that this event has become It Was His Sled. Though I think Savini feels that precisely because of the game's age, the Sled nature of the spoiler has diminished, causing it to loop around into a spoiler again.

Not being sure on this myself, having forgotten this thread was a Thing, there being no FF7 specific thread, and the page (plus discussions) being locked due to what seems to have been shipping wars, I directed them to the FF General thread. Having since been reminded of this one, I thought it should be brought up here to get some additional opinions/consensus on what should or shouldn't be spoiled, with Savini tagged to direct them here and offer their own thoughts on the matter.

Being honest, I was never huge into FF 7 so I'm not sure where the spoiler line should be drawn. Thus, I'm punting just a bit.

Thanks in advance for any assistance in this situation.

edited 20th Jun '18 8:10:39 AM by sgamer82

"Aerith dies" is right up there with "Jesus dies" on the It-Was-His-Sled-O-Meter.

At this point, newborn babies have the knowledge the Aerith dies encoded into their DNA on an instinctive level. That is how much this is not a spoiler.

edited 20th Jun '18 11:27:05 AM by DracMonster

I can't imagine someone being on that page without knowing Aeris dies. They would somehow have to be playing through a 20 year old game, avoided literally any discussion of it, all of its sequels and spinoffs, and made sure not to google the character's name or look at any fan works.

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This adds nothing to the discussion. I don't even think this is figuratively true.

That is not an unlikely scenario. People looking to be introduced to FF may start with VII, because it's considered one of the best on its own. Furthermore, even if it's a bad idea to look up encyclopedias as expect not to be spoiled, people expect major spoilers to be covered up here on TV Tropes.

Your argument is still irrelevant. There is no expectation that twenty-year old works will have their major plot points spoiler-tagged, and nobody should expect to read about them online without having spoilers revealed.

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Aeris' death is gaming's best-known case of It Was His Sled. Additionally, it only happens at the end of disc 1 (out of 3), so even if one truly didn't know about it (somehow) and got spoiled, it doesn't ruin the whole game, there's still more than half of the story left to experience afterwards.

The idea that there's a time limit for protecting spoilers is incredibly flawed. There are spoiler tags on pages for movies older that that game.

I can actually understand your argument. I still dislike that such a big twist is fair game for spoiling, but if it happens earlier in the game, I'm at least a little more comfortable about it.

Would spoiling it cause large swaths of the page to be whited out?

ETA: More to the point, is the FFVII related pages to the point where they need to be Spoilers Off?

edited 20th Jun '18 7:09:25 PM by HarpieSiren

So, should we not white out any spoilers?

If we were sensible? No, no we should not.

But that's probably a bridge too far for TV Tropes at the moment. A good solution would be to have a time limit of, oh, ten years after the first release of a work, and once those ten years are up, it is Spoilers Off.

There are spoiler tags on the work page for Psycho and that movie is 58 years old.

Nice false equivalency. How does having spoiler tags keep users who want to view the information from viewing it?

The issue isn't really who is prevented from reading "spoilers". I'd suggest to you that there are two issues.

One: The problem of treating things that have already happened and are public knowledge as "spoilers" that must be hidden. There are spoilers for Psycho. There are spoilers for The Godfather. Movies made before any of us were born, movies made before our parents were born in the case of younger Tropers. Norman Bates is Mother and people have known that since Eisenhower was president.

Two: Why do we feel the need to protect people from themselves? There's a good way, a foolproof way, not to get spoiled by a TV Tropes work page: not to read the page. Instead we operate on this assumption that people will insist on reading work pages while at the same time not wanting to find out about the works that they are in fact reading about. This is what causes people to tie themselves in knots about "spoiler" tags and when and how much they should be used. And there's never a good answer, because there's always someone out there who is ignorant of the work. There's somebody out there who doesn't know that Hamlet dies in the end.

If you get rid of spoiler tags, and assume that people can and should police themselves, all of that goes away.

However, as I said in the post that was deleted above, that would be a pretty radical change for TV Tropes, one that is probably too much to ask for at the present time. I suggest a hard-and-fast rule regarding the age of the work. Ten years, no spoilers. Done.

The first point is not a problem. There is no problem with treating plot twists of old works as spoilers.

The second is a lack of consideration for others, and assuming people will always make perfect choices. It's a black-and-white mentality. It assumes there's no middle ground between "not wanting any spoilers whatsoever" and "wanting to know spoilers". Telling people to go away if they don't want spoilers is plain inconsiderate and selfish. That is not a sensible argument.

Spoiler markup allows for that middle ground. It allows for people to read up a bit about something to see if it interests them, or read about tropes found in works they might want to consume later on without fear of spoilers. Locking all content with the threat of spoilers is excluding a huge part of the readers.

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It is a problem. It causes every single discussion like this, because there is no real way to determine what is a spoiler and what isn't. It's also absurd on the face of it to regard plot elements from works that are decades, centuries old as secrets, but it's a problem as far as TV Tropes is concerned, because there's always that one person who thinks we should keep what happens in this 20-year-old video game or that 50-year-old movie or that 100-year-old book a secret. And these discussions will never die.

As far as point 2, I guess I have to disagree that expecting people to take a certain amount of responsibility for their own actions is a lack of consideration. I think the use of spoiler tags is either too much consideration, or an unfair and unreasonable amount of consideration on behalf of those folks who want to read work pages about works but somehow at the same time not learn about those works.

Anyway—we've probably beaten this horse long enough. But before too long someone will be asking another question about what should we hide when talking about work X from Y years ago, and there will never be a good answer, as long as we continue to operate on the idea that there are some things that should be hidden and that it's the responsibility of the wiki to protect people from themselves.

On similar issue to Aerith, should examples involving Sheik spoiler out their spoiler for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? I've seen some examples that do but most don't. To me, Sheik is in the "Everyone knows this spoiler" territory, especially since Nintendo doesn't attempt to hide it in derivative works. Tetra's spoiler is probably a spoiler, but Sheik's isn't.

I'd say no to Sheik still being a spoiler. At least outside of Ocarina's page itself, maybe. When discussing the whole Aerith thing in the Final Fantasy General thread, a point was made that promotional materials from square-enix for things like the FF7 remake or Dissidia made no attempt to hide her death, if not actively advertised it.

Sheik meanwhile, was a playable character in Super Smash Bros by virtue of Zelda transforming into Sheik.

I think something loses its spoiler value when not even the parent company is bothering to hide it.

edited 23rd Jun '18 7:45:40 AM by sgamer82

Most works are relatively self-contained. If something is a spoiler within a work, it's a spoiler for that work. If it then turns out that a later work treats it as a non-spoiler, it doesn't stop being a spoiler for the first work. It's just not a spoiler in the later work.

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deleted

Edited by jamespolk on Jun 26th 2018 at 1:20:56 AM