- "Because she suddenly wanted him. Marcus. Caster. Hyphen. Rupp. The dim, vain man who was, apparently, neither vain nor dim. Or at least not as vain and dim as he pretended.”
"Spoiler Alert" is a romance novel written by Olivia Dade. It is the first installment in her "Spoiler Alert" series and was followed by All The Feels and Ship Wrecked.
Marcus Caster-Rupp has a secret. The world may know him as Aeneas, star of the biggest show on television, but fanfiction readers call him something else: Book!Aeneas Would Never. Marcus gets out his frustrations with the show through anonymous stories about the internet’s favorite couple, Aeneas and Lavinia. But if anyone discovered his online persona, he’d be finished in Hollywood.
April Whittier has secrets of her own. A hardcore Lavinia fan, she’s long hidden her fanfic and cosplay hobbies from her “real life”—but not anymore. When she dares to post her latest costume creation on Twitter, her plus-size take goes viral. And when Marcus asks her out to spite her internet critics, truth officially becomes stranger than fanfiction.
On their date, Marcus quickly realizes he wants more from April than a one-time publicity stunt. But when he discovers she’s Unapologetic Lavinia Stan, his closest fandom friend, he has one more huge secret to keep from her. With love and Marcus’s career on the line, can the two of them stop hiding once and for all, or will a match made in fandom end up prematurely cancelled?
- Fan Convention: Two major plot points occur in a fan convention.
- Fictional Document: Dade includes snippets of scripts from "Gods of the Gates", social media interactions, and even portions of AO 3 fanfiction written by the characters.
- Found Family via Work: By the end of the series, the actors on "Gods of the Gates" and their partners have all become very close. Barring Ian, of course.
- Hated by All: Ian, the actor who plays Jupiter, is despised by all of his co-workers. They only talk to him because they are amused by his antics; however, when it is revealed that he gave scripts from the show to an outsider, he is kicked out of the group chat and excluded from all further events.
- Show Within a Show: The books revolve around the cast members of the fictional show "Gods of the Gates", which is based on The Aeneid.
- Chekhov's Gag: Ian's intense love for tuna (to the point of carrying it around in his pocket) is mentioned occasionally throughout the book; however, at the end, it is revealed that the person who leaked all the scripts from the show was his personal tuna purveyor, with whom Ian shared the scripts.
- Fangirl: April is a huge fan of "Gods of the Gates", which kickstarts her relationship with Marcus (in both of his personas).
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Marcus refers to his public persona as the "Well-Groomed Golden Retriever", meaning that he is pretty but doesn't say much of substance. Having been made to believe he was less intelligent than everybody else because of his dyslexia while growing up, he adopts the "pretty but stupid" persona to escape difficult situations, especially those that require emotional vulnerability. April realizes he is not all that he seems when she catches onto his accidental use of sophisticated phrases and clauses.
- Shout-Out: Marcus and April upload their "Gods of the Gates" fics on AO 3.
