出版社：Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Wales
摘要：In the current media landscape, spoilers have become a major issue of contention for fans and consumers of television series. This paper sheds some light on an unexplored facet of the topic by focusing on the act of spoiling rather than on the decision to engage with spoilers that already exist. By applying a survey with Brazilian fans of American television series (n=1805), we found that spoiling is a profoundly context-sensitive and deeply variable practice that is more nuanced than the popular discussions on the topic reveal. Due to Brazilians’ limited access to American series and to the way fans from Brazil engage with this paratext, spoiling has become a source of sociability, knowledge exchange and empowerment, and pleasure. Having in mind that fans’ spoiling practices are made up of discourses rooted in cultural capital or subcultural capital, and in particular power negotiations inside each community, we seek to understand the spectrum of toxicity behind the practice of spoiling. The results indicate that through vengeance and social capital fans take advantage of showing off more knowledge among each other, culminating in conflict in fandoms and revealing the toxic potential behind the circulation of spoilers.
