Spoilers for Harry Potter book five but nothing in Game of Thrones season 8. If you want to yell at me about spoilers on Twitter, slide into my DMs – let’s not accidentally spoil a bystander.

I will never forget the day Jack Nicholson spoiled Harry Potter. It was 2003 and we were loitering around a cluster of demountable classrooms waiting for our Italian teacher to show up. I was never sure if Jack was deliberately named or his parents were stubbornly sticking to a family name, Oscar winners be damned, but I did know that from this day on, I hated him.

It was the last week of June and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had just come out. I was picking up my copy on the weekend but one of my classmates had already read it and therefore knew who died at the end. That someone would die had already been telegraphed in the press.

Jack demanded to know, and I covered my ears. Once my ears were uncovered, he turned to me and grinned. “Is there someone called Sirius Black?”

It’s been 16 years. I’m still not over it.

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Given the devastation of that early experience, it may seem odd that I actively seek out spoilers for the last of the great watercooler television dramas Game of Thrones.

My stance on non-consensual spoiling is unchanged, which is that it’s mean and you shouldn’t do it. To those who turn up to work on Tuesday and bring the office Game of Thrones conversation to a grinding halt because they have the gall to have an active social life and haven’t yet watched, I say: you are annoying but valid.

But if you’re willing to be spoiled, and the story is rich enough not to rely on plot twists to carry you through, it makes the watching better.

Which brings us to the final season of Game of Thrones.

I know — or I think I know, and Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson, whose podcast universe hath brought these spoilers unto me, rarely steers me wrong — the next big twist, and it’s a doozy.

And just as knowing that Sirius Black was going to die did not ruin the experience of reading Order of the Phoenix, knowing this spoiler has not ruined the experience of watching Game of Thrones.

I am more excited about the final season now because I feel reassured, in a way I haven’t for a few years, that the show will stick the landing. Of course, if I didn’t like what the spoiler foreshadowed then the season would be prematurely ruined.

It’s a gamble, but a story capable of being ruined by a spoiler is not a good story. It’s a victory unearned, a twist that makes no sense. When you say a spoiler ruined a television show for you, what you really mean is you found out, a little ahead of time, that the story was rubbish anyway.

Game of Thrones itself proved this theory true. The book series from which it is adapted, A Song Of Ice And Fire, has been around for years, but even for those who had read ahead the Rains of Castamere was a devastating episode. It was not lessened in any way by knowing about the Red Wedding ahead of time, just as knowing that Oberyn Martell dies does not prevent me from believing, for a few seconds on every re-watch, that this time he might win.

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Knowing what is coming makes those episodes more devastating, not less, because the storytelling is good and grounded in character.

It is not always thus. Before season seven I waded happily into spoiler territory, courtesy of Robinson’s podcast Storm of Spoilers, and rapidly sunk in a pit of production spoilers that laid out the entire season arc. It was too much, and that season was not strong enough to fill the gaps.

As Storm of Spoilers co-host Dave Gonzales says (frequently, just listen to that podcast): if the execution is good then spoilers don’t matter. When that goes wrong it’s the execution, and not the spoiler, that let you down. To that, I’m going to add my own rule: a few vague spoilers is good; too much detail is bad.

This stand is, perhaps, coloured by two facts that have coloured my pop-culture consumption since childhood: I am a re-reader, and I am a coward. That first reading experience, where you don’t know anything or don’t know much, is still precious to me in the way the more communal experience of watching television is not, but a good story gets better each time you revisit.

And while being unspoiled for a scary thing may be a more authentic watching experience, my authentic reaction is to immediately turn all the lights on and leave the room. A bit of light spoiling is a hand to hold through the jump scares. It’s my friend Meg telling me the plot of every 90s slasher film on the walk home from school in the hope I’d be brave enough to watch one. I wasn’t but I loved talking about them.

Being able to talk over a story, to dissect it with friends or colleagues or people who host podcasts and can’t hear you talk back, is to me the most pleasurable thing about watching a show like Game of Thrones.

Spoilers and fan theories just give you more to talk about. Generally, if I don’t like something enough to be elbows-deep in the discourse, it becomes unspoilable by virtue of being personally unimportant. See: all Marvel movies.

Game of Thrones became a cultural phenomenon not because of the tits and dragons, but because it offered characters complex enough, and actors good enough, that millions of people were prepared to spend nine years watching them talk and stab each other in dark rooms and still care about what happens next. Shocking moments like the Red Wedding captured audience attention, but they work because we care about the characters.

To spoil that, you would have to not just kill characters but undermine them in a way that undoes eight seasons of work. And if that’s how this ends, going in blind won’t help you.