@afternoon_tea Kiwifarms won't let me quote you because, idfk.
I enjoyed a lot of the low key moments too. It was that sort of human stuff that got me attached to the fish and made me care about what happened to them. Usually stuff like that would happen as I was unwinding for the day and I'd just chill out and crochet and see what they were up to, it was relaxing.
A lot of people's favorite challenge was the original Cell where the majority of it was just a bunch of people sitting in a room together needing to pee. It's hard to explain to people who never got into the show, it's just a "you had to be there to understand" thing.
There's a really boring film term that doesn't fit exactly but maybe gets my point across - the Kuleshov Effect. I could just define it but maybe this is a better demonstration:
Walter White is shown making a blank face. Then a fly is shown. The camera looks back at White, still making the same face.
He hates the fly. You feel closer to Walter because you were on the same page, feeling frustrated that there is a fly. He didn't need to look frustrated, you just empathized with him and figured out what he was feeling and that's how you feel closer.
I shit on Vance a lot but there was a good example of this during Sylvia's Mental Breakdown. He couldn't get a word in to encourage her because TTSes were flooding in sending her abuse, so he spent a lot of that time sitting with her in B2 in total silence. Once she decided to rejoin the other fish in the kitchen he stayed in the hall, looking down the stairs and not saying anything or even showing much of his face to the camera for a few minutes. I stuck around because I figured, he's camera-aware, he might comment, he didn't though, but he just stood like that for a few minutes.
But watching him, you feel that empathy ("Sylvia goes through so much" "Sylvia is strong for not quitting tonight") and his own frustrations ("I can't make TTS stop" "I can't find the words to help her") insecurities ("Am I still too upset by this to go downstairs?" "If this happens to me one day will I make it out?") maybe the shittier thoughts ("Is Sylvia dead weight?")
At one point in his rumination he started sniffing, and it was like, yeah bro. I feel you.
On a typical reality show they don't have a lot of spare time so they just flash some retard's faces on the screen to demonstrate their shock and disgust, but since the pace of Fishtank was real-time, if you wanted, you could just sit with someone while they processed something and that made them more real.