There’s a unique art form that blossomed on a unique social platform, spurred by the unique way fandom democratizes art. Photosets, edits, or photomanips–they go by all those names, and yet many other things do, too–rose as a way for fandom to express itself beyond the bounds of fanart or fanfiction, and the aesthetic sensibilities that have risen from them have had wide-ranging implications on fandom on Tumblr.
Rose Christo is the pen name of a mildly successful author of fantasy fiction. She also authored My Immortal, the most (in)famous fanfiction ever written. She’s planning on releasing a memoir next May telling the whole story–but Tumblr outed her before news of the book release could drop. So how does this affect where we stand with our favorite fanfiction?
Videodrome is a series of blog posts I’m considering making wherein I talk about various videos of every stripe, because fuck it, I have the ability and it’s not like I’m here to make money, folks.
“More than a memory | (non)Disney Valentine’s MEP” is a fanvid (fan video) that crosses all over the animated children’s film universe, pairing characters in what seems to be essentially random groupings. The creator, AiraSora, puts a lot of work into even having these characters appear in the same shot, much less to construct a narrative of romance between each pairing. This video is fast-paced, apparently throwing a shitton of pairings at us in celebration of Valentine’s Day, so your mileage may vary on whether you find any of these pairings romantic or whether you can remember any of them. I’ll admit to being charmed by the Nani/Prince Charming pairing; when I watch these sorts of videos, I base the merit of the pairing on the merit of the plot the vid creator has constructed, and the story of a white prince falling in love with Nani when she’s halfway through a dog door is delightful.
I think this video serves as a good, albeit over exaggerated, example of what fanvids are made for. A fanvid is made, generally, to either express appreciation for a franchise or to create a fake, generally romantic scenario. A large and growing aspect of fandom is the act of shipping, where a fan finds a cute couple (or threesome or foursome, etc.), obsesses over them, and produces fan works about the couple. This couple does not need to have a single basis in reality, and that’s what often makes fanvids interesting. Because fanvids take footage from the franchise they’re a fan of and remix it to create a new work, the video maker cannot decide that the characters work in a coffeeshop or are stuck in a hot tub, because the footage doesn’t exist. They have to work with the footage they have to create a narrative it wasn’t intended to create, and it’s brilliant the way vid creators go about doing this.
There’s a dedicated community of video makers on Youtube dedicated to this particular subgenre of cut-and-pasting animated characters into new stories. It’s more advanced in some way than normal fanvid making; the ways they succeed as well as fail in making characters look like they exist in the same universe is something really outside of what’s normal for the average fanvid. In a Supernatural fanvid, Dean and Castiel’s thousand-yard stares will be reinterpreted to be in the other’s general vicinity; in these videos, characters are manipulated into kissing, and often. In the above video, several characters are also animals and have magic powers. It takes a few watches before you can make the leaps of logic along with the video maker, but the fact that the leap can be made is a testament to how well these video makers understand narrative.
These videos might not be enjoyable or especially watchable to people outside of this particular video making community, but I am obsessed with watching them, to see what they choose to portray, what movies they take apart and sew them back together. They use a shitton of cheesy iMovie filters to cover the lighting differences across films, to change hair colors, to create overdramatic moods. They use flashing, pulsing crossfades more than any human should be allowed. Every character becomes everything, from an innocent virgin to a rapist, and they live in half-worlds between properties that don’t feel like real places, only amateur backdrops to the drama unfolding between creations that were never meant to touch. Video makers have only the videos that have already been made in reality to work with, and in this particular community, they prove that it’s no barrier to their imagination. Anything is possible in their worlds, and frequently, there’s already a video about it.
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