Many months ago, I wrote a letter to Naruto manga readers to stop going on about events that happened in the latest chapter when not everyone has read it. Although I doubt any of the offenders read my letter, I'd like to make another complaint. This one is for a slightly different population. Namely, the people who drop spoilers because they think everybody knows about them already.
Well guess what? A spoiler is still a spoiler. Just because the anime is "old" doesn't mean that everyone has seen it. In fact, the term "old" is relative. I'm going to give an example of an anime that ran a few years ago, but I didn't finish until this past summer: Gurren Lagann.
I've been reading posts from this one person who shall remain nameless. This person likes to analyze characters and compare them to each other. In one fairly recent post this person wrote about Simon, Gurren Lagann's lead character. Briefly the person mentioned the death of another character and justified the lack of spoiler tags with a comment stating that the event was "hardly a spoiler these days".
This was after I had seen the whole anime, but it still made me furious. Why? Because I was reading another one of this person's posts last spring when I had just started watching Gurren Lagann, and the person casually mentioned this same character's death without spoiler tags again. It was something of a top ten where this person yammers on about an aspect of the series, and then says something to the effect of, "[character] dies (spoiler)." Yes that person wrote "(spoiler)" AFTER dropping the spoiler. Thank you anonymous person. You ruined a scene in an anime that I had yet to watch, thus greatly diminishing that scene's impact for me.
So, remember kids, always, always use those spoiler tags. You can use them by clicking the black bar at the top of the comment box. They look something like this: [*SPOILER](insert text here)[/SPOILER*] only without the asterisks (*). The place where I wrote "(insert text here)" means that this is where you type your spoiler. Use those tags and you'll make theO a better place. If you're not sure if it's a spoiler, think about whether it's a pivotal scene in the series, like an important character's death or the revealing of a secret identity. It's better to be safe than be the subject of one of Keba's rants.
