Spoiler Alert. There are spoilers in this post about spoilers. Be aware. That's all I got for you.
So Tommy killed Holly. About damn time. I can’t lie, I’ve been waiting for Holly to die since season one of Power, and as annoyed as I’ve been that she’s made it this long, I’ll take it. And I really didn’t know how I thought she’d go out, I just knew I needed her gone. Thank you, powers that be. That’s a pun.
Oh, that’s a spoiler.
Thing is, it shouldn’t matter at this point because if you spend any amount of time on social media…like ANY…then you saw meme after meme of spoilers about Holly being dead. It wasn’t quite the death of Stringer Bell in season 3 of The Wire (that’s another spoiler that isn’t a spoiler), but hey, it resonated all the same.
Me? I watched the show in real time. I typically block out my Sunday nights to watch Power and then The Night Of, which comes on HBO at the same time as Power, so I DVR it like many people do with the shows they love so that they can do things like live life and attend their children’s activities or do the family thing. Here’s the problem, as a culture, we really like watching these things together. If there’s one thing that we all learned from Scandal, it’s that watching Scandal with Twitter is A LOT better than just watching it for its plot. Communal viewing is just a thing now. So when you decide to live life you have a significant choice to make, fam.
Either you accept that you’re about to find out the key shit you didn’t want to know AS SOON AS you fire up Facebook or you harken back to quieter times, like 2007, and put your fucking phone down and remember what life is like without staring at your phone until you watch the show and see what happens on your own.
There’s no middle ground. It is outright fucking ridiculous to expect everybody that you know on social media to adhere to some arbitrary “be considerate” rule so as to not give away major plot points before you get a chance to see a show. That’s not how social media works. Sure, at this point we all hate spoilers, but if you run up on one, that’s entirely your fault. We all know what shows we don’t want spoiled, right? And we know them because they’re the shows that we are all watching. Typically you would watch in real time if not for that thing you had to do at the place with the people.
But since we’re all attached to our phones, the first thing we do when sitting at stop lights or on the toilet, or wherever, is scroll through various timelines. And if you know that a show you like – because everybody likes it – came on even 20 minutes prior to you hitting that app on your phone, there’s a better than 90 percent chance that SOMEBODY is going to say something that will piss you off about it. Sure, you can hope somebody will put the term “Spoiler Alert” at the beginning so you can quickly avert your eyes but the truth is they don’t owe you shit.
Just like you can put on your timeline anything you damn well please, so can they. Which means that me and you, your mama and your cousin too, pretty much need to suck that shit up. If you don’t want to catch a spoiler, then your monkey ass needs to put down the phone or stay off of the social medias until you watch whatever it is that you’re worried about seeing in the first place.
You can’t police people’s timelines OR expect them to think about you before posting. It’s unreasonable. Don’t put up spoilers. But do make sure you put up a status message indicating your wokeness or awareness about what’s going on in the world to show support for cause A or B or a lack of support for cause C. I personally subscribe to the idea that anybody who tells me what I can or cannot put upon my timeline can eat all of the dicks. However, I do understand where some of it comes from. We use, at least for social justice issues, our social media timelines as means of spreading information and awareness. I get it, if people with a voice don’t use it, it’s almost like condoning the status quo. But if you’re the type of person to use a person’s timeline to fully gauge who a person is, then you’re the problem, not them.
And I mean that.
But spoilers ain’t social justice OR the problem. It’s you and your ilk thinking that people owe you the common courtesy not to immediately do what we all do the other 99 percent of the time we’re on social media: share information about some shit we just saw.
So, you, person who is upset that you found out that Holly was dead before you had a chance to watch Power, too damn bad. Next time, do YOUR part and expect it to happen since it ALWAYS happens, and wait until you watch it to run your timelines.
Because you know what, the news ALSO comes on television.