With Avengers: Endgame premiering over the past weekend, one word has taken on a context of fear and hatred: “spoiler.”

For those of you who get emotionally attached to movies and shows like me, you will be able to quickly identify where I’m coming from when I say people who share spoilers should face criminal charges.

Now I’m not advocating for the death penalty here, but I think roughly a month in the county jail is a punishment that fits the crime.

Why?

Let’s paint this in a logical sense.  If you are waiting for a blockbuster film to come out, or even a final season to a riveting tv show (I know there’s Game of Thrones fans out there), it can quite literally take over your life.

Between spending hours on end rewatching the series of shows or movies, digging deep for hidden foreshadowing, watching cast interviews, or just browsing the web for any new trailers coming out, the anticipation of a release is a huge deal.

For me, I spent a total of roughly 30 hours, rewatching Marvel movies just to get prepared for Endgame.

Factor in all the other time I spent reading up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I spend a significant amount of time anticipating this release.

Now just imagine, with all that preparation for this movie, someone comes and spoils the entire plot for you the day before you see the film.

This is quite possibly the most devastating crime that goes unnoticed by law enforcement.

We citizens are devoting weeks, months, even years to the culmination of enjoying a piece of work like Avengers, and other people have the inherent power to ruin that for us.  If action isn’t taken soon to stop this epidemic, we are risking the destruction of social institutions.  You never know how someone will take having the last 10 years of their life dismantled by a snobby spoiler.

Therefor, in order to protect everyone it is essential that spoiling should be considered a crime.

Until then, the only way to protect ourselves is seeing the earliest possible premier (which I did for Endgame), so that our friends and foes alike cannot ruin this thing we hold so dear.