Avoid Polygon if you don't want to be spoiled to episode 2 of Life is Strange.
Ugh.
I clicked and I really don't see how they could possibly wrote the feature they wanted to write and not "spoil" Life is Strange episode 2.
If they kept the image and removed the title, they'd alienate readers who are interested in the subject matter of the article (which is more a personal reflection about an event in the game and how it parallels a similar event in the author's life) at the expense of reducing spoiler concerns. If they kept the title and removed the image, they'd alienate readers who are interested in the game but wouldn't necessarily pick it up from the title. A spoiler warning would itself spoil the thing being warned. Like, you can't have an article called "Games where the main character dies in the story. Spoiler: Spoilers for Super Mario Bros 4", because the spoiler warning is the spoiler.
So I'm sort of left with the impression that either no one should write articles that jump off plot events in games but contain a broader reflection on theme and meaning... which I think would make games writing poorer... or people need to accept that occasionally jump-off points for discussions are going to involve pop-culture events, and thus involve "spoiling" things.
And it's not even like you can say "she could have written this article a year from now", because the whole point is that it's emotional, personal writing. Of course she's going to write it when the feelings are fresh, that's what breathes life into the writing itself.
I guess one solution could be a multi-site master list of everything you've ever seen in pop-culture, and then depending on the site you go to, content would automagically be selectively censored by replacing specific references with more general ones depending on what you've seen. I think that's an awful overwhelming amount of technology to solve a problem that isn't really much of a problem at all.
I'm not being a jerk, you can tell from this post that I'm going out of my way to tiptoe around the actual spoiler. I'm just saying that I can't see a solution here that makes sense, so I guess I sort of don't see why people shouldn't simply "deal with it". Not in a condescending, jerk, lol deal with it nublet kind of way, but just in the sense that if the best option is not changing things, then this is going to keep happening and people should sort of adjust their reactions to reflect that.