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We have a general policy on Handling Spoilers. But sometimes, there's no point. Some works have become so common, old, or Spoilered Rotten, that there are probably only one or two humans left worldwide who haven't seen or read it and still care about not seeing spoilers. We feel for them, but we can't help them; catering to them would leave the wiki half-covered in spoiler tags.

To that end, here's an incomplete list of pages where you won't see spoilers at all — either the page is designed for people who've already consumed the whole work, any spoilers are Late Arrival Spoilers and shouldn't be on that page to begin with, or the work is so seminal that everyone already knows all the spoilers.


Spoilers off for:

  • Particularly old works. This basically encompasses works whose copyright has expired or which predate the very concept of copyright. In the vast majority of countries, this roughly coincides with anything Older Than Radio (e.g. anything by William Shakespeare). It certainly includes things Older Than Feudalism, including mythology (e.g. Oedipus), legend (e.g. Robin Hood), or religion. There's no point in spoiling The Bible; The big exception is The Mousetrap, a play famous for swearing its audience to secrecy. So long as it is still running, it will never be on this list.
  • Particularly spoiler-heavy work pages and trope pages. This is true if the proportion of content that counts as spoilers is high enough that using spoiler tags would result in most of the page being spoilered out (namely in all Death Tropes; works with the volume of Self-Fulfilling Spoilers that Danganronpa, Deltarune, Doki Doki Literature Club!, and Shimeji Simulation do; and works as short as Air Pressure, Space Patrol Luluco, and Escaped Chasm), and especially if the trope examples or works are highly impractical to discuss without spoiling everything. However, trope examples from spoiler-heavy works may have spoiler tags on trope pages.
  • Well-known historical facts. If it happened in Real Life, there's no point in putting up spoilers on it. It would be pretty ridiculous to claim that the ship sinking in Titanic is a spoiler when it's based on an event that has its own Useful Notes page. Obviously, this does not apply to things that aren't quite historical fact, such as heavy dramatisations, alternate histories, or interaction of fictional characters in historical events (especially where they're explicitly changing things from what we know as fact, such as Been There, Shaped History or Beethoven Was an Alien Spy). And it's important that it be well-known; if the plot twist is a very obscure historical event, it's probably better to make it a spoiler — most of the audience won't know it and will still be surprised (and for the rest it's a Genius Bonus). Again, sometimes you can tag obvious historical fact as a spoiler if it would be funny, but again, don't go overdoing it.
  • Recap and Timeline pages. These are designed to give detailed information about the plot of a work. It is impossible to know all of the details without knowing the spoilers. Details about future episodes should not be on an episode's recap page to begin with; those go in the page for the episode in which they appear. Foreshadowing should be handled delicately; again, mention only the details in the episode in question and not what specifically is being foreshadowed.
  • Fridge pages, Headscratchers, Wild Mass Guessing pages, and the various "Moments" subpages (e.g. Funny Moments, Heartwarming Moments, Moment of Awesome, Nightmare Fuel, Tear Jerker). These are for post-viewing discussions of the work in question; everyone who reads them is assumed to have either already seen all there is to see or not care about seeing spoilers. However, there are a few compromises:
    • It's considered good practice to put a notice at the top of the page warning Tropers who stumble upon it of unmarked spoilers. Similarly, the page image cannot be a spoiler, as it's above the example line and the first thing most readers see.
    • As a courtesy, please do not spoil later installments or episodes in a subpage for an earlier installment or episode, so as to minimize the Late-Arrival Spoiler effect. With Headscratchers, it can be tricky sometimes, as something that happens in that work may only be called into question by something that happens in a later work; future works may be referenced but not described.
    • Moments entries on general YMMV pages may have spoiler tags.
    • WMG subpages house theories made by users familiar with the work. Spoiler tags there will defeat the purpose, and cases in which the theory header gets completely spoiler tagged along with the body are worse than no theory at all.
  • Re-examination of past fictional events in a later installment. When dealing with things like Fridge Brilliance, Hilarious in Hindsight, or a Harsher in Hindsight, it may be tempting to put a spoiler for a later installment when describing something that is seen in a new light because of events in that later installment. Don't put those details in the earlier installment's page at all; only reference them in the page for the later installment, and only put the relevant Hindsight examples on the page for the earlier installment. If a plot element is re-examined because of Real Life events, then said tropes go in the YMMV page for the earlier work, and without spoiler tags.
  • Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard pages. These are complicated tropes, and they require one to have seen basically the entire work so as to have as much context as possible for said characters’ actions. As with the post-viewing discussion pages, it can be safely assumed that anyone reads these pages has seen the entire work. However, Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard entries on general YMMV pages may be tagged.
  • Entries in Character Sheets with Walking or Late Arrival Spoilers. Sometimes, some seemingly minor characters are so significant that discussing or even mentioning them would spoil a major plot point of a work, if not the entire work. In character pages for these works, these characters' entire entries could be spoiler-tagged to the point of the entry being unreadable to the average reader, making the effort pointless. Later works can also inadvertently spoil significant points about these characters if the reader hadn't read any prior works featuring them. Thus, it's recommended that character entries whose subjects fall under Walking and/or Late-Arrival spoiler have their spoilers un-tagged from the works' character pages; they can still be tagged on main, trivia and YMMV pages as well as other character entries mentioning the characters in question. However, a notice cautioning the reader about the spoiler-heavy character should be added at the top of these pages as a form of courtesy. If possible, give the character an alternate name for the entry folder while leaving their real name in the entry. If the character is part of a larger set of characters in a single folder (e.g. Roz from Monsters, Inc. being part of the "Monsters Inc. Staff" folder), please add a spoiler notice before the sub-entry.
  • Trope Epitaph: A few old titles that had spoiler tags were self-fulfilling given alphabetical ordering, with another making a poor spoiler out of context. Since a page's title cannot be redacted with a spoiler tag while still making sense, there's no point.

Incidentally, if you're utterly disgusted with big blocks of whited-out text (or blacked out if you have Night Vision) turning everything into Swiss cheese, there's an easy solution: activate the "Show Spoilers" switch near the top of the page (or in your profile), and see everything without having to click on it.

If that's still not enough, you can help us clean it up! If the spoiler text really has nothing to do with the trope, go ahead and delete it. Or, if the entire page should be spoiler-free, you can use the "strip spoilers tool" to remove the spoiler tags from the entire page — but if you do this, remember to do two things: first, add a general unmarked spoiler warning at the top of the page; and second, check the page for stray brackets, as sometimes potholes within spoiler tags can get a little messed up.


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