Have ‘Game of Thrones’ season 7 spoilers gone too far?

The seventh season of “Game of Thrones” is currently filming, and on paper, of course this is a cause for some wonderful celebration. We’re in the home stretch for the series now with just thirteen episodes still to go, and there are so many stories to tell given that you have the White Walker threat still out there coupled with questions as to who will end up on the Iron Throne by the end of the series.

Unfortunately, there is one narrative that is starting to take over the narrative now in certain parts of the internet, and that is the shocking abundance of set spoilers that are starting to be reported. Many tabloids have run photos giving key moments away, or basically spelling out precisely some of what is going to happen.

We do understand to some extent why sites want to do this. There is a percentage of the fandom who wants answers now, and does not care precisely how they get them. For this audience, there is a recognition that they are large enough to make a good bit of money off of. Sites run these photos, and then they make a considerable amount of cash.

Unfortunately, part of the problem now comes courtesy of the fact that the people who learn said information don’t want to keep it to themselves. If they did, there wouldn’t be nearly as big of an issue. For many years we felt that the majority of George R.R. Martin book readers were kind enough to not overtly spoil the contents of the books to unsuspecting fans. The people who seem to be intent on ruining the fun now are likely that same minority of book readers who wanted to screw with everyone so long ago.

Is there anything that we as an internet public can do to stop the madness? Not entirely, but we offer up the following recommendation: Be careful where you read on the internet, avoid comment threads unless you know it to be a monitored website, and just be careful in general if you are incredibly spoiler-conscious. Treat the internet like you would if you weren’t finished with “House of Cards” just yet and you knew that there were some people out there who were.

There’s no real way to put a genie back in the bottle when it comes to spoilers; the only thing that you can do is guard yourself.