The Troll Awakens

by Katie Notopoulos

Early in the day that the new Star Wars movie came out, my boss and I were joking about how it would be really funny to do fake spoilers. I remembered a really funny time when Adrian Chen tweeted out a fake spoiler for The Dark Knight Rises in the Comic Con hashtag when the trailer first came out. The genius was that he made the fake spoiler as an image, the tweeted out, “Whoa, very hot Suicide Girls at #comiccon #SDCC”, thereby tricking horny Comic Con attendees — the ideal marks — into seeing it. So I attempted a blatant ripoff of Adrian. I put the fake spoiler into the bottom of an image, and tweeted with it “Holy shit — Martin Shkreli releases the Wu Tang album!” (Martin Shkreli was very topical that morning). A bunch of people replied something like “fuck you,” and I cackled, feeling smug under my assumption I’d be vindicated once it was clear that this was a fake spoiler. Just another zinger from ol’ trollmaster Kapie. Kek kek kek. The problem was, it turned out my “fake” spoiler actually happens in the movie. It was a real spoiler. Oops. I respect spoilers. I love movies! I love the wonderment and emotion and attachment we have to the noble and beautiful art of the cinema. I respect people’s right to enjoy Star Wars without knowing a key plot point in advance. I felt absolutely fucking awful. Since real spoilers for the movie were actually out there on the internet that morning, people thought that I had found a real spoiler and did it on purpose. That night I got a Google Alert for my name for an article about spoilers that said, “There will always be malicious folks who blast out spoilers simply to troll — like Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos, who tweeted out an image of probably The Force Awakens’ biggest spoiler on Thursday morning for no reason other than to screw with people…” That’s not me! Sure, I was trolling but not maliciously! I’m the nice troll not the bad troll! I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I regret this very much.

By the way, it WAS really weird how there was that really long scene with C-3PO’s nude dick.

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.