Please watch your media with subtitles

It’s been a little while since my last post - Surprisingly this was intentional. I’ve been trying to slow down a little and be more focused with my attention. This all started a few months ago, when I started watching a TV show that my brother had been recommending me for a while.

Physical: 100 is a South Korean show with a simple premise - Get 100 of the fittest people in a room to compete in a Squid Games-esque competition to see who has the best all-round physique. I found season 1 to be a pretty entertaining show, not super educational but a bit of fun for background watching while I scrolled on my phone or worked on my laptop. By the end I could tell you who won, and a few of the games they competed in, but nothing really stuck in my brain, and I didn’t intend to watch another season now that it was done.

I’m not just comparing it to Squid Games because it’s South Korean, they really do lean into the aesthetic!

When I relayed this review to my brother, his diagnosis as to why I didn’t enjoy the show as much as him was like a scalpel.

“Did you watch with subtitles?”

Of course I didn’t, i’m a native English speaker, and I wanted to sit down and relax at the end of the day, so I flicked on the English audio recordings and watched the same way I’d watch any other show. Evidently this was wrong.

“You HAVE to watch with subtitles” said my brother, “It changes so much.”

He wasn’t wrong. I had missed a lot of context by watching in English. From simple things such as the way the contestants react to big announcements, to even fairly important stuff like one contestants (amazing) nickname, something that was entirely missing from the English dub! Combined with the fact that I treated the show like second-screen watching, I was maybe getting 25% of the full experience.

Learning from my mistake

I decided to give the show another chance on Season 2, but this time I’d watch with subtitles and original audio. It still blows my mind just how quickly this changed things up.

With audio in another language, I could no longer focus on another activity or screen. But nor did I want to. There’s something inherently very interesting (to me at least) about watching other people speak another language. It’s fascinating to think about communication and how language evolves, especially a language so far removed from English as Korean.

But beyond language, I was paying attention to more subtle communication. The way someone stands, the way they react to news, the way a particular contestant smiles or laughs or reacts under intense pressure (which Physical: 100 has plenty of). This show very quickly became one of the most heart-pumping, intense watching experiences I’ve had in years!

I had missed so much of this intensity by treating the first season of the show as basically a podcast with occasional video when I deigned to look up from my other activities.

Subtitles’ ideal use case

I was obviously a nerdy kid growing up (you probably can’t tell from the everything about this blog and website…), but surprisingly I was never hit with the ‘anime’ fandom stick.

I’ve absolutely watched a few particular anime over the course of my life, such as:

• Death Note
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
• I think maybe 2/3 of the Evandgelion movies?

But I would always watch these dubbed, and never ended up desperate to watch more. Funnily enough though, while I was discovering that watching shows with subtitles was a shortcut to resetting an awful attention-destroying habit, I was seeing a lot of chatter in certain circles I run in about a show called “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End”

Frieren was pitched to me as an anime about the aftermath of an epic D&D campaign. A show set from the perspective of an immortal elf mage, after she and her party of adventurers manage to kill the evil Demon King and save the world. It is written as a slow-paced, emotional story about grief, regret, and learning to appreciate the fleeting moments of life, as the elf begins to outlive all her companions and comes to realise that paying attention and slowing down is the key to unlocking joy in her life.

Funny how life throws these weird parallels sometimes.

Long story short, I started watching the show (with subtitles of course), without focusing on anything else, and I absolutely love it.

Intentionality - Not just a meme

I know, us millennials online fucking love using and abusing therapy speech. But truly, no joke, being more intentional about watching media, any type of media I consume, be it reality TV shows, anime stories or even youtube videos, has greatly improved the appreciation I have for that media.

I’ve even started applying this to other parts of my life. The other night talking to some friends over online voice chat, I decided to pause the game I was playing and just chat for a while, focus my attention on the conversation instead of using it as a background, and shocker: I had a great experience talking to a friend about his new job, what he was enjoying and struggling with, and what the next few months look like.

I highly recommend watching with subtitles and chucking your phone on charge across the room every now and again. It did wonders for me and my brain, and I found 2 new shows that I now consider some of my favourites.