COVID-19 pandemic

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/wiki/COVID-19 pandemicwork

"Afectos en pandemia", by Hilda Chaulot

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"

This sucks —Justin Trudeau, December 2021

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.

There is much to be said about the pandemic and its lingering effects on global society that cannot be done justice here, and The Other Wiki goes into far more detail about this pandemic than we could ever hope to manage. That said, All The Tropes can hopefully paint an adequate enough picture of what's developed through this article's coverage of the aspects that fall within our purview: specifically, the pandemic, its role in pop culture and its effects on that and other aspects of culture and media - and the mirror that it all holds up to us.

Works where the COVID-19 pandemic plays a major role include:

Anime and Manga

• A swimming competition being cancelled because of the pandemic is what kicks off the plot of the 2020 manga Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You.

Fan Works

• A distressing number of fan authors simply dropped out of sight during the first couple years of the pandemic, leaving their works Dead Fics. It is unknown how many were actually victims of the disease.

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 and eventually canceled 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.

New Media

• 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.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released just as the lockdowns were hitting North America, with much of the fandom spending far more time in the game then they would have been able to otherwise. There were a number of social meetups held through the game, up to and including political campaigning. Much of the fandom content about the game originates from this time, including a budding Friendly Fandom with DOOM.
• In Hitman 3, Carl Ingram, one of 47's targets in the Dubai level, makes mention of the pandemic. This article by Kotaku 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.
• Postal 4: No Regerts parodies COVID with the "Pigeona" virus, a pigeon spread disease with roughly similar symptoms. This is also why many pedestrians are masked - true to the game and its True Art Is Offensive roots, you can even use "Pigeon Mines" to attack people with clouds of disease-carrying pigeons.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 not only aged up the Real Life pro skaters from the original but also has a Setting Update where the remake now takes place in 2020 right during the onset of the pandemic, as evidenced by the face mask accessory and COVID-related PSAs urging students to learn at home while the lockdowns were still in place. This also served as a convenient Hand Wave to explain the lack of NPCs in the remake as in the original game, even if hardware limitations imposed by the PS1 are no longer a concern.
• Technically also a Real Life example, CitizenCon was not held in real life in 2020, 2021 or 2022 (except as a digital livestream, much like E3 and CES). Of course, despite the perception of a fair amount of the Hatedom around Star Citizen, the game's alpha had actually already reached the point that multiple in-universe conventions were held in the Stanton system's Bevin Convention Center on ArcCorp and the Tobin Expo Center in New Babbage on microTech in 2950, 2951 and 2952 (Star Citizen's in-game events are staggered ahead of real life by 930 years) with no significant issues.

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.
• UrinatingTree frequently mentions the pandemic, sometimes referring to it as "Corona-chan", in his non-live commentary videos on sports (which is naturally impacted by the pandemic), with mentions of COVID news and players missing games due to catching it or another illness punctuated by a sound of someone coughing.
• Mister Metokur made fun of COVID-19 in multiple streams around March 2020, when it was still localized in China - he has since gone dark due to his own health complications, including a cancer diagnosis.

Real Life

Note: Please only list examples of Real Life popular-culture events that were affected by the pandemic.

• The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor was not awarded during the pandemic.
• A number of events and award shows were either postponed, scaled back or cancelled outright because of the pandemic. The 2020 Miss Universe and Olympics had to be pushed back several months into 2021, though they were still marketed as the 2020 editions. Other events such as E3 and the Metro Manila Film Festival were held digitally, with film entries for the latter instead being distributed Direct to Video due to restrictions imposed by governments in order to contain the pandemic.
  • E3 in particular was hit hard, with the show permanently ending after a failure to relaunch a live event in 2023. Sources disagree on what really did it in, with the Washington Post coting pre-pandemic industry pull out, Variety citing the Pandemic, and Ars Technica citing both as factors.
• The ceremony for the 2020 Seiyu Awards was cancelled, but the awards were still awarded.
• The Grammy Awards were postponed by a month and a half in 2020, and by two months in 2021. In both cases, COVID-19 was given as the reason for the delays.