Pandemic-Induced Media Habits

  Over the pandemic a lot of things ended up happening, the main thing of course being the societal lockdown and quarantining. Since I didn’t have to really go anywhere, and classes became a lot shorter because they were online, I had a lot more free time in between them. However, since I couldn’t really go to the library because of the required social distancing, similar to my then zoom classes I ended up going online to find more stuff to do instead, which was mainly more anime and manga. If I remember correctly, back near the end of 7th grade when the pandemic first started, there wasn’t much work for me to do either, as  teachers were adjusting their curriculum to online classes, and student’s were very likely not paying attention in classes like they should’ve been. When I had finished the brief homework I was assigned for the day I would end up sometimes with nothing to do, so the time that I had usually spent only on the weekends watching shows started to bleed over into the weekdays after my classes had ended. 

It started with anime that I had already watched before, I would go looking for a site (with an adblocker) to reread or catch up to the things that I had already started, and then when I was done with those I started to move on to newer ones. My formerly tiny to-watch list grew exponentially, as well as the list for the shows and manga I had read all the way through because of it. One of my strongest memories of the early pandemic time (not that I have many other strong memories to compete with it) was how consistently I would have my screen split into two sides: one for my school work, which would be the bigger window until I finished said homework and then closed it out, and the anime site tab. It was also then that I started tracking seasonal anime that I could watch each week, a habit that isn’t as strong today due to the fact that I now have more work than I did then. Due to online learning the lack of a need to get up super early the next morning to get ready to get driven to school, the early pandemic was also when I first started to stay up late in order to binge watch and/or binge read.

In general I think over the pandemic I started to consume a lot more media than I had before, and now my habits whenever I watch or read a new show have changed from how they were before as well. And as the years have gone by from 2020, while some of my habits from back then have shifted back in some way due to having more work now, those pandemic induced changes are still present in some way, shape, or form. For instance, the biggest one as of now is reading and/or watching all of something in practically one sitting. However this habit tends to backfire on me a lot, because when I get too sucked into the media by the time I’ve finished it or even come to a point where I feel as if I could stop for the moment it’s already some very late hour in the morning. The biggest present examples of this are from a few weeks ago where I decided to read an about 98 chapter manga and then ended up going to bed at 4 am, and the fact that by some force of nature I managed to read all of the One Piece manga in 3 months. Overall I think that the time that the pandemic gave me ended up allowing me to take in more media in shorter amounts of time, which to be honest is helpful now that I don’t have much time to take a long time to watch things.

Tv Show Troubles

 In my experience, I’ve discovered that in terms of watching videos I tend to fall on the outside of the movie-tv show-short video triangle, and that I actually tend to take in things by reading. However, if I did have to pick between the three I would say that tv shows are the ones I’m the most likely to watch. Short videos like Tiktok feel too short to me, and I often have to queue up a lot of them when watching because I don’t really like having to click on a new video every 5 minutes, and I don’t really like the autoplay feature either. Movies are to me the opposite side of the “short to long” video spectrum: I like being able to sit down and watch the entirety of a video once I start playing it, and it’s definitely a lot harder to watch the entirety of a 1-2 hour movie than a video that's about 10 minutes. 

Tv shows usually hit the middle point between the two extremes for me: not too short that I constantly have to be picking something new to watch, not too long that I can’t sit down and watch the entire thing at once. Nowadays I tend to be a bit pickier about the shows I watch due to the increasing norm of show episodes being about 45 minutes to about an hour. To be completely honest however, it’s not even like I haven’t watched tv to the point of it becoming several hours on end. Like, my biggest ever TV binge was back a couple years ago where my older sister and I watched about all 78 episodes of Voltron Legendary Defender seasons 1-7 in the span of days. Looking back on it now I still have no idea how I managed to watch all those episodes, and I’m even less sure I could pull it off again with my current workload. My problem with the increasing length of tv show episodes is that for me once an episode goes over the about 40 minute mark, it starts feeling a bit too close to a movie’s runtime to my liking. 

Another one of my gripes with movies and super long tv show episodes has actually to do with the content of the movie/show rather than the actual runtime: bad adaptations. In the past year, the Netflix tv show adaptation for the popular anime One Piece came out on the streaming service. I hadn’t originally planned to watch it, seeing as the episode lengths were about 45 minutes to an hour, but then ended up binging most of it as my mom was doing my hair one day in November. I hadn’t read much of One Piece at that point, but I knew enough about the main characters to enjoy the adaptation immensely, with it also piquing my interest in the manga enough to read all 1106 chapters that were out at the time in the span of less than three months. As I was reading the manga I noticed something though: there was so much that got cut out of the Netflix adaptation. With the rise of hour long tv show episodes, the actual amount of episodes in a season decreases drastically.  

The main reason I like TV shows and anime so much is their short runtime. It feels less stressful for me to go on a run and watch a lot of a season when the episodes are only about 25-30 minutes including the intro, ending credits, and possible ads. Along with that, when shows have that 20-ish minute runtime, its more likely that if the show is an adaptation of something then more will be produced if it makes money It’s because of this that to be completely honest I would prefer watching two 30 minute episodes to one 1 hour long episode. 

My Family Tradition

 My family has a lot of traditions that we tend to uphold, most of them being ones that involve all of us being in the kitchen for hours and hours upon end, resulting in a gratuitous amount of food being made in order to bring to someone’s house, usually family or family friends. As long as I can remember, my parents (especially my mother) have made it a point to take people food as gifts almost all the time, no matter the circumstance, in practically every circumstance. Weddings, birthdays, family get-togethers, general get-togethers, for people in mourning, and even as a thank you for helping out only scrapes the surface of the numerous reasons and events. The holidays also would be a time where my family would get together to cook, to take food to and eat at a friend’s house, or to host people ourselves (said people would likely also be bringing food). The holidays that stand out to me the most in this vein are Thanksgiving and Christmas. These two holidays have the most defined food related tradition: every year we spend Thanksgiving at a friend's house (for the sake of this blog post I’ll call them “friend C”, and then in a month for Christmas we host that same family at our house. While this tradition is one that I believe only started not that long ago, we’ve known Friend C’s family for a decade or possibly even longer, so at this point I know them well enough that they feel like a part of my actual family (which is probably helped by the fact that Friend C and their family have stopped by at a few of my family reunions to be honest).

In the past year (2023) this tradition continued, with my family spending the bulk of Thanksgiving day in the kitchen cooking, and then arriving at Friend C’s house that evening at a time I like to call fashionably late✨ (about half an hour after the originally planned time). It felt a little less lively than usual this year because both my dad and my older sister had gone to Germany for the week, but I still had a fun time there, and ate lots of pumpkin pie. Christmas was also about the same as usual, and since my dad and sibling had arrived back from Germany they also got to make the seafood lasagna and sweet corn casserole (dad and sibling respectively) that is near and dear to my heart. The rest of my family either helped with other people’s dishes or made their own, and I made a fruit cake for friend C’s mother’s birthday. Combined  with the very very large piles of dishes to be washed in the aftermath of all that cooking, I barely sat down until Friend C’s family arrived. That night was spent with most of the kids in the house traveling between watching tv and movies in the basement and returning upstairs to get more food. 

As everyone grows up I know it’s not likely that we’ll be able to reliably get together as often as we were able to when we were younger, especially with how even I’m about to go to college in the next 2 years. However, I’d like to be able to continue being able to meet up with people and eat with them. My memory now isn’t the best, but from what I can remember from my childhood a lot of my fonder memories are from times that my family had get-togethers with other family friends. And when I grow up and make my own connections later in life I would like to be able to help create those good memories for other people as well (though with the amount of dish-washing those events I might just end up getting takeout in the future)