Are Ships Spoilers? Discussion

Minor spoilers for character ships in ACOTAR trilogy ahead! (let’s be real you all already know our bae though ❤ )

I love shipping couples. I love romance. I love my OTPs, my book boyfriends. I think we pretty much all do in this bookish community 🙂

I really do love to gush about these ships I have. They frequently pop up in my random posts such as Top Ten Tuesdays and tags with questions like favorite ship? I see them in posts all over the book blog community as well, and it usually brings a smile to my face to see everyone gushing about my baes ❤

With that being said, I really really hate spoilers. (still salty about being spoiled for Divergent…but then again, who wasn’t?). I think we all do. So a question I’ve been thinking about for a while is should we could talking about ships as spoilers?

Honestly, it’s often no surprise when a couple gets together. In young adult, which I and many book bloggers review, pretty much every book has a love interest for the main character, often a love interest. Love interest is usually introduced fairly early on, and may even be mentioned in the synopsis/blurb, and then all the readers spend the book in eager anticipation for when they finally get together.

 

In this case, I think it’s perfectly okay to talk about the ships and gush about them to our hearts delight! Who wouldn’t love talking about some swoony boyfriends? And reading about how amazing these guys are in reviews, etc, make me so excited to read the book and finally get to meet them.

However, in some books, it’s not apparent from early on who the protagonist is going to get together with. This is most notable in the dreaded love triangle.

One aspect of the love triangle (that I hate) is when Guy #1 starts out amazing, and then deteriorates and turns into a complete ahole by the last book so that all the readers will ship the main character with Guy #2. In these cases, often times all the readers and rooting for Guy #1 for the entirety of the first book, and then by the end of book three we all love Guy #2.

Which is why it can be really annoying to go onto Goodreads and gush about Guy #1, only to see a bunch of people who have already finished the series going on and on about their undying love for Guy #2

For example, after reading ACOTAR, I loved Tamlin. In the couple of weeks between finishing ACOTAR and starting ACOMAF, I saw countless people gushing on and on and on about their undying love for Rhysand, who I still hated at the time. After reading all of these, I pretty much knew it would be Rhys going into ACOMAF, which really bugged me because I didn’t get to find out about his amazing-ness firsthand myself.

Since then, like all those people, I have been guilty of raving about Rhys on my blog as well. But I’ve done some thinking about it, and I’m thinking that if a ship isn’t really a ship until the second book, we should be adding spoiler warnings to the beginning of our posts. Same with reviews–I think that if you only know about a ship because you’ve read the entire series, you shouldn’t be mentioning it in your review of book one.

Do you think that mentioning ships is considered a spoiler? I’m really curious to hear what people think, because if so, I might want to go back to my older posts and add spoiler warnings!