COVID-19 pandemic

"It was inevitable that films would be made about this significant chapter in global history, in part because a small group of people enduring an extended stay in their own homes is about the only scenario it's safe and logistically possible to actually shoot right now. But did the results have to start arriving while we're all still stuck in this nightmare?"

- A.A. Dowd, The A.V. Club, "The star-powered COVID drama Locked Down is nearly as annoying as, well, lockdown"

The COVID-19 pandemic (December 2019 - ) is a worldwide pandemic brought about by the spread of the "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" family of viruses. It brought society to a near standstill in the early months of 2020. The Other Wiki goes into far more detail about this pandemic than we could ever hope to manage.

This page is about the pandemic's effect on popular culture.

Film

 * Borat Subsequent Moviefilm claims the pandemic was Borat's fault.
 * Songbird, produced by Michael Bay, is set In a World that has been under lockdown for four years because of "COVID-23".

Literature

 * Due to the pandemic, Stephen King changed the setting of his 2021 novel Billy Summers from 2020 to 2019, so that it could reasonably take place on a cruise ship.
 * The backstory for American Girl's 2022 Girl of the Year Corinne Tan–who is of Chinese descent–portrays the racism and xenophobia she and the Asian-American community in general faced due to the pandemic. The so-called "kung flu" epithet coined by Donald Trump and used to disparage Asians who are unfairly blamed for the disease was also mentioned in the story.

Live-Action TV

 * Medical dramas and medical comedies of the early 2020s, including The Good Doctor and Grey's Anatomy, made repeated mentions of the pandemic.

Music

 * BTS has claimed that their album Be - released on November 2020, and whose production began around April (shortly after lockdowns were enacted in Korea) in lieu of their then postponed world tour - is about the effects of the lockdowns on their mental state, and that that album and their English-language singles released in 2020 and 2021 were created as a way to comfort their fans during the crisis.
 * The music video for "Life Goes On" shows band member V going outside in a medical facemask and looking wistfully at a stadium while driving; later in the video, the band is shown singing the last chorus on stage while in the same (very empty) stadium.
 * The music video for "Permission to Dance" and its teaser caused a minor controversy, as the teaser showed band member Suga - who is regarded by the fandom as a "future-teller" due to having accurately predicted every major accolade the group has ever received - reading a newspaper dated 2022 claiming that the pandemic crisis would be over by then, and the actual video showed people ditching their face masks. This turned out to cause an unfortunate coincidence when the video was released during a spike in infections and the discovery of a new variant in several countries, causing quarantines and public mask use to be more strongly enforced.

Video Games

 * In Hitman 3, Carl Ingram, one of 47's targets in the Dubai level, makes mention of the pandemic. This Kotaku article takes note of the apparent complacency of people in-game towards the pandemic, with next to no effort done towards social distancing and vaccination especially in levels such as Berlin and the aforementioned Dubai.

Web Original

 * An edited ad for a fictional Girl of the Year displayed a character wearing a track suit, bob haircut and wielding a semi-automatic pistol, while defiantly violating face mask guidelines, as a personification of the "Karen" stereotype. This provoked criticism from Mattel subsidiary American Girl, who took umbrage to the use of their name and trade dress, stating that they were "disgusted" by a post from brand strategist Adam Padilla under the online persona "Adam the Creator", and "are working with the appropriate teams at American Girl to ensure this copyright violation is handled appropriately". Boing Boing, however, expressed doubts over the merits of American Girl's proposed legal action against the "Karen" parodies, citing the Streisand Effect, though it has also noted the debate on whether the satirical intent of the parody advertisement is protected by law.
 * When the pandemic first began, several posters on 4chan (mostly American ones) ran with the idea of personifying the virus as a standard anime-styled Chinese girl (as they are wont to do); many of them at the time were apparently under the impression that the pandemic was either nothing serious or would blow over quickly enough to be a funny memory. As the pandemic approached its second complete year as (of November 2021), the frequency of searches mentioning her tapered off fairly quickly, and posts about her or the pandemic became decidedly disturbing in nature - and then, in what many consider typical 4chan fashion, she became a sort of figurehead among the more racist segments of the userbase.
 * UrinatingTree frequently alludes to "Corona-chan" in his non-live commentary videos on sports (which is naturally impacted by the pandemic), with mentions of COVID news punctuated by a sound of someone coughing.