To clarify:
Binging is doing something to excess. If I watch 3 episodes of Star Trek in a row, I just binged Star Trek.
Watching every episode is marathoning.
Or at least that’s my understanding.
Our definitions of it are the reverse of each other's.
On TV, if they'd show all the Star Trek movies in a row on the same day, they'd call it a marathon. One time in Boston, the local TV station had a "Klingon-athon" which consisted of all the major TOS and TNG Klingon episodes up to that point.
Sometimes, on things like holidays in the '90s, I'm thinking around Christmas Time, the Sci-Fi Channel showed
Twilight Zone episodes all day. Or it was the cable channel USA or TBS or whatever it was. It's been a while. Mathematically impossible show
every episode of
Twilight Zone in a day, but they showed as many episodes as they could pack into that single day. They weren't in order or anything like that. Just whatever favorite episodes whoever aired them on the channel chose.
One year during the holidays, in 1995, some cable channel all five
Planet of the Apes movies. So, I'd think of that as a marathon as well. It's also how I first saw those movies.
When I was in college, I was in the Anime Club. I eventually became President. We'd watch random anime or sometimes we'd watch a bunch of episodes from a series.
Slayers,
Ranma 1/2,
Neon Genesis Evangelion, you name it. Whether we mixed up series or just watched the same one all day, we'd call it a marathon.
Common Denominator: If we watched a bunch of episodes or movies in a series or genre during the same day, we called it a Marathon. I was in my teens and early-20s during all of this.
Binging is a much more recent type of phenomenon. You put on Netflix (as an example). You start watching a new series.
Stranger Things for instance. You watch the first episode, then the next one, then the next one, and then the next one, and on and on, and you don't stop. Unless you sleep. Then you get back up and
keep watching. If you're not sleeping, working, shopping, or using the bathroom, you're binging.
The only time I flat-out binged a series was during Christmas Week of 2013. I was on vacation from work that week, I lived by myself, I had no partner, and I just watched every episode of
Breaking Bad that week. Literally all 62 episodes in that one week. It was fucking crazy. I couldn't stop watching it. It was a page-turner. I never did that before and I haven't done it since.
Earlier, when I said I would've binged DS9 if I wasn't doing a Re-Watch Thread, I didn't mean it literally. I wouldn't have watched all 176 episodes of DS9 in a row, except for sleeping etc. But I probably would've watched a few a day until I was done. Definitely would've been a faster pace than what I'm actually doing.
I think people use "binge" and "marathon" interchangeably at
best these days. "Binge" is what's normally said now, almost exclusively. I've fallen into that habit as well.
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Before someone asks, "Why were you President of the Anime Club and not a Star Trek Club?" Well, there's a very good reason for that. To quote one of my friends at the time, "You can't do a Star Trek Club because then it'll be
Original Series fans versus
Next Generation fans!" He wasn't wrong, so I agreed with him. Even though all my friends who liked Star Trek only liked TNG (still the situation today), and I was the only one who liked TOS as well, we knew someone from outside would come along,
something would happen, and the whole TOS vs. TNG Fight would erupt. So we just didn't do it.