Handling of spoilerific examples.

There's quite a lot of spoilerific tropes which means, even mentioning this trope in a work is a spoiler in on itself. And sometimes even a context of a non-spoilerific example is also a spoiler, but "spoilering" the whole context makes a bad example.

What to do?

This may be a dumb idea but how about putting all spoilerific examples into a separate folder on a work page?

See Self-Fulfilling Spoiler. It proposes two ways,

1. don't add the example at all and resign yourself to an incomplete page. (which I personally consider contrary to the site's mission and would argue to remove this method)
2. declare the whole page to be Spoilers Off and add a bold "Unmarked Spoilers Ahead" warning at the top of the page. (still requires a discussion)

Handling Spoilers says when in doubt, to "think of the casual reader".

Self-Fulfilling Spoiler calls an all-white entry a poor form, but I personally don't see it that way. The site's goal is documenting tropes first and worrying about readers getting offended by seeing The Hero Dies second, they shouldn't be browsing work summaries in the first place if even context-less tropes bother them.

Our last thread about this.

Having them in a folder does not fix anything. They'll still force people to check the folder to know if they can read the examples. It's a self fulfilling spoiler. If the intent is to prevent people from spoiling themselves, this is not the way to go.

My preferred solution is always just to mark the page as spoilers off. Then untag everything, warn people, and hope people use common sense.

Edit:'d, wow, this thread was around for a while but we posted at once

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 25th 2024 at 1:44:20 PM

While this won't work for every spoilerly trope, I have gotten around it by posting it on the main page. For example Bus Crash. Rather than putting it on the character page, I chose to make it ambiguous on who it was about. You know someone died but without clicking the tag you won't know who. Granted, once it becomes old enough, I will add it to the character page.