#amv: rolling girl

[lisa972kdlz]

Là où tout a commencé.

(Where it all started.)

Il fallait bien que quelqu'un le fasse...

(Someone had to do it...)

Ce crime ne sera jamais pardonné.

(This crime will never be forgiven.)

Je le combattrai jusqu'à la mort pour venger cet enfant.

(I will fight him until death to avenge this child.)

Top images from Underverse

Bottom images from the noot-noot meme

The sound editing was taken from LV on Youtube, from his video featuring this meme with Nightmare Sans.

[someawesomeamvs]

Warning: Major spoilers, violence

Title: Rolling Girl

Editor: Am Light

Song: ローリンガール [Rolling Girl]

Artist: wowaka

Anime: Steins;Gate

Category: Drama

[bayleaf-2]

Fun WIP i got in my art program while some buddies are doing parkour in vc (im writing notes while i wait for them to finish)

(reference is Say It by Yorushika)

[intheticklecloset]

3 AM (Bungo Stray Dogs)

Primary Universe

Summary: After a late night out, Chuuya helps Dazai back to his place to sleep. Unfortunately, Dazai has other ideas.

A/N: The initial idea for this fic was inspired by this AMV (there are SO many good BSD AMVs, btw!). I of course put a tickly spin on it because that's what I do. Enjoy!

Word Count: 973

~~~

Nothing good ever happened after 3 A.M.

Chuuya grunted as he and Dazai stumbled through his front door, no thanks to the detective, who was so drunk he could barely stand upright. “Lightweight,” he muttered, tossing his keys into the bowl by the door and kicking it shut behind them. He fumbled for the light switch.

“Oww, Chuuya,” Dazai whined, nearly toppling over as he tried to shield his eyes from the soft yellow glow.

“Stop being a baby. I’m putting you to bed.”

“Ooh, I must have been a good boy this year~”

“Shut up! Not like that, you idiot. Come on.” Chuuya angled them so they were headed toward his bedroom.

“Chuuya’s dragging me to bed,” Dazai sang drunkenly, giggling a little as he stumbled across the carpet, over the threshold, and toward the surprisingly simple twin bed that Chuuya rarely had time to actually enjoy thanks to his work.

The redhead wrestled Dazai around so he was sitting on the mattress, swaying a little. “You forgot to take your shoes off, moron.” He leaned down to do it for him, but the next thing he knew arms were wrapped around him and he was being yanked off his feet, lying staring up at the ceiling with Dazai’s body beneath him. “Asshole! Let me go; you’re so drunk I don’t know how you aren’t dead already.”

“Chuuya’s grumpy,” Dazai hummed, snuggling his face into the redhead’s neck and hugging him closer, digging his fingertips into his partner’s ribs. “Grumpy, grumpy Chuuya~”

The redhead froze, eyes flying wide open. The touch was gentle, but it didn’t matter; Chuuya was ticklish enough that even that much was enough to do the job. He squeaked, biting his lip hard to keep from giggling like a little girl, thrashing in his drunken boyfriend’s grip. “I-Idiot! Don’t touch me! Let me go!”

Dazai giggled for the both of them, switching from digging to random poking, like he was drumming his fingers on a tabletop out of boredom. Chuuya hated that it tickled so bad.

“Dazai!” he cried, trying and failing to get away. He managed to fall off of the detective’s body onto the mattress, but as soon as he had a momentary glimpse of freedom Dazai was on him, rolling over so he was pinning him awkwardly to the bed, fingers poking and pinching along his ribs. Chuuya snorted. “Shihihit! Dazahahahai! Quit it!”

“Grumpy, grumpy Chuuya needs to learn to smile more,” Dazai slurred.

“Asshohohohole! I’ll kihihihill you! Let me go!”

“No can do, Chuuuuya~”

Chuuya would deny the scream that left his lips until the day he died once his infuriating partner found the spot at the top of his ribs that drove him up the wall, forcing loud, desperate cackles out of him whether he liked it or not. “AHAHAHA!! DAZAHAHAHAI!!”

Dazai giggled again, fingers flying across his ribs, up and down like he was playing a xylophone. “Tickle, tickle, little chibi~”

“Dazai!” Chuuya wheezed, fisting the comforter on his bed into one hand while frantically trying to punch any part of his boyfriend that he could with the other. “Stahahahahap it! I dohohohohon’t like being tihihihihickled!”

For a brief moment, everything stopped. Chuuya gasped for breath while he could, trying to shove Dazai away, hoping his strength would be greater since he wasn’t the one who was drunk enough to pass out at any moment.

“You don’t?” Dazai asked, sounding genuinely surprised, standing up of his own free will and toppling sideways onto the bed so he was looking the redhead in the eye – kind of.

Chuuya flushed at the question. “No.”

The detective observed him for a moment, eyes bleary yet trained hard on his partner. He hummed after a while, flopping onto his back with a sigh. “Then why do you look so disappointed that I stopped?”

“Idiot,” Chuuya grumbled, jumping onto his waist and digging into his hips, smirking at the too-loud squeal of delight Dazai let free. “You’re the one who’s disappointed I wasn’t tickling you back until just now.”

“Ehehehehehehe!” Dazai laughed with such childlike glee that it made Chuuya blush for the both of them, though he kept tickling anyway, fingers flying from his hips to his belly to his neck and even into his underarms, which made the detective shriek so loudly the redhead had to stop lest they wake up the neighbors.

“Okay, dumbass. Take your shoes off and go to sleep, all right? It’s almost four in the morning—”

Dazai grabbed his waist and rolled them over so he was on top again so fast Chuuya got whiplash, but he didn’t have time to worry about that since his ribs were being played like a piano again, this time without the benefit of being able to hide his face or muffle his sounds at all, staring up into Dazai’s eager grin as he was.

“Ahahahahaha! Whahahahahat did I just tehehehehell you, you bahahahastard?! I dohohohon’t lihihihihike it! Lemme gohohohohoho!”

“That’s what you said,” Dazai agreed, flopping down so his entire body weight was pinning Chuuya in place, his chin nestled into his boyfriend’s neck so his ear was as close to Chuuya’s laughing mouth as possible, fingers still digging with an expertise that was absolutely unfair for a drunk person. “But I think you were lying.”

Chuuya raged and fought as much as he could, but it soon became apparent that he wasn’t going anywhere until Dazai was either satisfied or passed out from his alcohol intake, and so – laughing up a storm and letting out embarrassing squeals and snorts – the redhead let himself go limp and accept his ticklish fate, color staining his cheeks as he submitted to the playful torture.

It wasn’t like Dazai would remember any of this in the morning, anyway.

He never remembered anything after 3 A.M.

[chasingrabbits-art]

Do you have any headcanons that you've picked up from s9meone else or vis versa? Are there any plot threads you're excited to get to in your stories? Hope you're having a good day!

Sorry this took so long to answer!

Didn’t see it for a while and then forgot about it :p

Most of my personal hcs are just me looking at general fandom hcs like ghost cores/lairs, speculative biology and basically going

Some of my personal favs are:

Danny is trans masc

Leo is trans masc and gay

Donnie is nb and bi

Mikey is bigender/polygender and asexual

Raph is trans fem/demi girl

I’m a big April/Cas/Sunita truther

Love Jack/Maddie/Vlad College trio or Family breakfast

And need more BaronJitsu

Leo and Danny are fluent in Spanish bc I think it’d be funny

Some that are from some more specific places:

@spookberry ‘s half normie Tucker (even tho I’m not at all familiar monster high i still love this au and hc Tucker as a werewolf)

Slider Casey jr. from Cass’ apocalypse series (bc of course)

Can’t think of any other ones off the top of my head and I’d be pleasantly surprised if people have incorporated some of my ideas even if they aren’t that unique

Send in your AUs/headcanons I love hearing about them!!!!!

And I have soooooo many ideas for stories I’m just chronically tired and stressed LOL

For my DPxROTTMNT comic I’m really excited to just get the ball rolling in the story! I had a lot of fun with the script and I’m itching to just draw it out.

I’m also tossing the idea in my head to do a DPxROTTMNT 2 with Big Mama and Vlad and looking for excuses to draw Sunita since I love drawing her a lot now!

I also have so many ideas for AMVs and fanfics in my head that I work on once in a while but since writing and animation aren’t things I’m ��good at” they might never see the light of day LOL

[ut-museum-guide]

AMV / PMV

38 videos

Dream [3], Nightmare [5], Cross [2], Ink [3], Dust [4], Cross [2], Killer [2]

_in no particular order

.

1. Song: “I’m the Bad Guy”

Animator/Artist: Validxx

Main Feature: Nightmare Sans

Archival Post

.

2. “Eyes on Me”

Lil_inky

Shattered Dream

x

.

3. “The Nowhere King”

Splorfstuffss

Dream

x

.

4. “Just a Man”

Overflowofcrows

Cross

x

.

5. “I Me Myself”

Syxadel

Nightmare

x

.

6. “Viva La Vida”

Mirage

UTMV

Note: “Polka Face”

.

7. “We Like to Party”

darkxsoulzyxcaliberx400

Fresh

x

.

8. “Devil’s Price”

Newmap

Sans and Gaster

x

.

9. “Drugs”

Carlosthefuckingnoodle

Lust

x

.

10. “God”

Itslunatic_05

Nightmare

.

11. “Alien Blues”

OneQuirkyArtist

Red

.

12. “Class Clown”

Itslunatic_05

Dust Sans

.

13. “Click Me”

7killedseven

Killer Sans

.

14. “You Can’t Hide”

7killedseven

Dust sans

.

15. “Love like You”

Adventi647

Underfell Papyrus

.

16. “Therefore You and Me”

AnimeGrimmy

Underfell Sans and Papyrus

.

17. [Ado]

User-vp5kq6cj9z

Dust Sans

.

18. “Happy Face”

Cinna

Killer Sans

.

19. Hammer Song

Castielsans2488

Sans and Papyrus

.

20. “Stronger than You”

Nocochip

Sans v Frisk

.

21. “Rockabye”

Catacrunch_art

Sans and Baby Papyrus

.

22. “Villain”

user-vv3hw8sl6f

Dust

“Dear God” - Sans

.

23. “Rolling Girl”

SankouArt

Papyrus

.

24. “Devinez”

Allunary

Skeleton OC

“The Wolf” - Swap Nightmare

.

25. “Walk with Me”

YoHonne

Cross and Ink

.

28. “Open Up Your Eyes”

Abby_flowertale7802

Nightmare and Dream

.

29. “Lunatic”

MyICreates

Gaster

.

30. “Pink Elephants”

Amundertaleunverse

Dimensionverse

.

31. “Left Brain, Right Brain”

Xevyemyx

Error and Ink

.

32. [Spray]

Zoramoyashi

Blueberror

.

33. “Toes”

Papersu

Lust

.

34. “Can’t Help Falling In Love”

EATinc

Undertale Ensemble

.

35. “Eristocrats”

Brightgoat

Spamton

.

36. “Don’t Stop Me Now”

Tifysp

UTMV, grumpy dadmare

.

37. “Learn to Trust”

Jauntyeyes8063

Sans

.

38. “In the Back of My Mind You Died”

Errorinkgarbagedump

Ink

.

From @undertale-museum

Add later

Horror Sans animation

(Am I a) Bad Guy?

Afterdeath

Aftertale Animatic “Terrible Things”

Zydrate Anatomy - underbody

Non music

Fresh v Ink fight

killer finds you

[yuridovewing]

hiii for ship asks... perhaps Goldenflower x Mapleshade? it has literally zero canon backing but it is my beloved rarepair. also maybe SilverSand? the All That amv changed the world

GoldenMaple: Hmmm this is a ship you're gonna have to sell me on with whatever the premise is. I don't have much to say about it, idk why these two characters would interact too much. HOWEVER i am always in support of f/f obscure rarepairs <3 so however it'll roll i'm sure i'll like it anyways.

SilverSand: I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE THE ALL THAT AMV!!!!!!!!! genuinely got me listening to carly rae jepson again lol. yeah that amv alone sold me on the ship. Two girls that didnt interact much (if at all?) in canon but really should have if they just let Sandstorm have more development. I feel like they'd just naturally have a fun dynamic too, like Sandstorm is this brazen headstrong warrior paired up with a spoiled and sassy girl like Silverstream. Sandstorm being reluctant to break the rules and yet she feels a rush whenever she's with the rebellious Silverstream...

[browniefox]

Another Week, Another Crisis Core Chapter!

Before playing this, I did a TON of sidequests (I got like 30% of them complete) which meant I didn't struggle against any enemies. on one hand, it meant I could get to focus on all the good scenes, but on the other hand, I didn't get to show off any of the new summons I'd gotten ;-;

God I love this church. Because this game works at break-neck pace, I doubt that Aerith and Zack are going to get, like, as many scenes together as I'd like, but I do think this chapter does a decent enough job starting to develop their relationship at the very least.

Zack is so tall I love it, and aw cute little date <3

While I got really frustrated with the little Bruno segment pretty fast, I do like that all the Slums citizens immediately clock Zack as not from around there, and immediately go to protecting Bruno. You can really feel the distrust and disconnect between those above and below plate.

I just Love Aerith <3

Where the general symbolism of monsters and angels is so heavy handed I roll my eyes every single time, I actually really loved this interaction between Zack and Aerith, when Aerith is talking about being afraid of SOLDIERS. To those who know Aerith's story, it's easy to see that she's both projecting her own desire to be normal (why in the world would people sign up to be made less normal?) as well as her own understandable trauma with the Shinra company, onto her thoughts and feelings on SOLDIERS.

Additionally, I love that she's actually scared of the sky. I think in teh Slums, that's not too rare of a feeling.

It's a shame that I feel like the Zack-Angeal relationship is done so poorly at the beginning, because this interaction really makes me start to like their dynamic! Angeal confiding in Zack and trusting Zack really says a lot. Also, I love the detail that Angeal has found that he likes flying, and just kind of carries Zack :D

I do think it's super funny though that it's way brighter and cheerier under the plate than on top of it, and that Zack just totally forgot and put off the mission he was on to go on a not-date with a cute girl.

THE FACT THAT THE FIRST THING ANGEAL SAYS TO SEPHIROTH IS THAT HE LOOKS THINNER SHIT BOYYYYY! I think it just does a lot to characterize their relationship, and especially how this whole thing has been affecting Sephiroth.

Genesis should have just killed Hojo. True good ending <3 It is funny to me that this segment ends with Hojo totally uninjured and honestly, probably happier than before bc he got to do random experiments on Zack.

They put so much effort into making Genesis' model look hot and honestly I love it. When I first saw Genesis in an amv, I thought he was a girl, and I guess that's my hot take for the day is that I think it'd be fun if he was. There is not one single female SOLDIER. There should be more women who got experimented on to be part of the army #feminism

This is here because I was hoping this quest line would mention Reeve, but it didn't and now I'm super disappointed.

I don't think I've seen anyone mention this before, but from this interaction it's implied that Zack is not Angeal's first mentee. Maybe perhaps his most promising, clearly the only one to make it to first, but Angeal had tried to instill his values onto other SOLDIERS.

And then my final thoughts for now is the interesting dynamic between infantry and SOLDIER. Before this game, I thought they were sort of the same group, but no they're actually two very distinct groups within Shinra. I also feel like infantry is often portrayed as always trying to become SOLDIER or something, but mostly there seems to be some resentment towards SOLDIER, and this hate that infantry will never be able to do as much as SOLDIER can. Very interesting, especially when considering Cloud.

[thetooncrew]

i HATE being a "blah blah new generation of fans don't understand the integrity of the original" guy because 9/10 i am The New Guy stumbling blindly into situations so hopefully this doesn't come across that way but it does sometimes baffle me that a lot of the newer vocaloid fans don't know a lot of the classics. like obviously i understand the passage of time and a lot of newer fans come in from project sekai/the new generation of producers but from like 2010-2017 if you were a vocaloid fan you knew songs from like, the very beginning of vocaloid culture. you knew packaged by kz. you knew melt. you knew rolling girl. you had a whole mental catalogue of vocaloid songs with fan AMVs ripped from niconico with poorly translated titles and shit quality and you ate that shit UP

[mirrami226]

due to unfortunate circumstances, i have associated rolling girl with philza and world's end dancehall with cellbit

simply because phil has an old playlist full of rolling girl amvs

while that one clip of cellbit meeting hatsune miku in yansim has world's end dancehall playing in the background

[otaku-tactician]

Had a chainsaw man dream that Denji was an art student who also helped with paranormal shit XD Him, Asa, and some of his crew from part 1 were sitting with him. I do remember there was also black hair guy (not sure which one though) and unfortunately Makima too. likely Power as well. They split up to take the bus to do their own things.

He was talking to another girl I don't really recognise but she straight up gave Denji 300,000 yen of her savings- only then to go to the shopping mall and be like "i could've bought a nintendo switch with 70,000 yen of that" and i swear Aki's voice chastised her LOL

So then she rejoined the group as they chat to an old lady about paranormal activity- Denji scrawling in his art book. She asks Denji if she can take 130,000 back and he's like "I already only have 230,000 left." And she gasps and is like:

"WHAT?! WHY???"

Then Denji awkwardly explains how he used a lot of it to pay off bills and on internet costs (probably art school lifestyle is expensive), and then the girl just gives up and says "It's fine. Just keep it." then they made a plan for how she can use her monthly income to save for a nintendo switch 🤣🤣

then at some point he he asked her out and some whole ass original Japanese rock song played as an amv rolled out in the background about a guy understanding how the person he cares for uses her personal items as a means of protection from the world

HELP ME WHY IS CHAINSAW MAN AUS IN MY SLEEP WHO IS THIS GIRL EVEN

[mihai-florescu]

I was reflecting on my early 2010s internet days and man... i sometimes worry that my obsessions now are performative, i Am doing fanarts in hopes of likes, i Am making posts in hopes of conversations etc, i worry that i only do things for engagement. But then i look back at my adventure time days. I would spend hours drawing fanarts, making fancomics, writing down my favorite song lyrics, browsing wikis, hand drawings character refs and then putting it all together in a big binder that i considered my bible. I had no social media, no friends who cared (those who did were casual watchers on tv because we were 9. I learned english to watch episodes in advance online). All i had was the power of undiagnosed autism. And i must admit an embarassing secret, dear readers. I didnt like bubbline (i only knew that was a ship through youtube comments and amvs) because 1. I was 9 and didnt know 2 girls could date, and 2. I wanted marceline for myself. Looking back it's really funny, the track record was that all my crushes in elenentary school were fictional girls but i just assumed thats normal. I remember when the first fionna and cake episode came out and people were going crazy for matshal lee, i thought he was fine, fun, but i was also mentally rolling my eyes because he's not as cool as marceline. I dont even know why i was a hater there i think i just was too much of a marceline fan to accept what i perceived as people hyping up this guy more than her? Once again i was in elementary school. I had no connection to other Actual people in a fandom setting. And thats how things should be at that age... once i hit middle school my pokemon hyperfixation came back and i also discovered what reddit was... i wasnt posting myself as far as i remember but still. I think it wasnt until my superwholock phase, youtubers phase, and early anime phase in middle school when i started posting online. Wait i just remembered another core memory of the late elementary school days. All the rule 34 that was just free floating on google images when you searched for a character. I was also a mlp girl, so, you know. I like to think im truly and properly desensitized to any and every thing the internet can offer.

[french-toast-enjoyer]

Tag game!

thanks to @symbiotic-slime and @bridoesotherjunk for the tags! I should've gotten to this sooner!!!

favorite color! I'm a color theory nerd, so I tend to think any color can be my favorite in the right context. but right now, I like neon red! it's a fun color to use with lighting! here's an example of one of the (many) times I've rendered with it!

last song I listened to!!!!!!! Time of Dying by Three Days Grace. cringe culture is dead and I'm listening to 2000's amv metal!

last film I watched? oh boy, I don't watch movies! I'd have to say Bamboozled by Spike Lee! it's a very brutal film, and I didn't get to finish it, plus I can't find it anywhere anymore!

currently reading: fight club! it's my favorite book!

currently watching? sitcoms like Frasier and The Golden Girls. I like easy viewing. I'm bad at watching stuff

currently craving? rolls from a reaally specific chicken restaurant from my region of the states. they're so fucking good I think they should be the new communion bread

coffee or tea? sweet tea. is yummy when cold.

tagging @rkmoon @englishknightsky @spibbb and @littlemykiwi ! I'm curious to get to know y'all since I've seen you in my notes and I like yalls stuff!

ps @enemyoflactose u should do this too. or I'll make u listen to amv metal for a week (no pressure for anyone to jump in!)

[stormcloudsandshadows]

I really think rolling Lupin is my crowning achievement. I keep thinking about it randomly and laughing again. I’m genuinely tempted to make a whole rolling girl Lupin amv

[gotta-pet-em-all]

Hiya! Your intro says you like media analysis so I was wondering - watched/read/listened to/etc anything good lately? And/or got any recommendations? (OOC: this is freeform, answer it however floats your boat! Or if it doesn't float your boat, absolutely no worries, you can delete it! /gen)

Ough, that's a good one!

Since the delcatty's out of the bag, I guess I can be more open about how Plasma affected me. Since I was taken in so young, I didn't have much opportunity to learn how to think for myself, and I struggled with bodily awareness and identifying my own emotions. But... stories helped me realize how to feel again. I would use warrior skitty comparisons to try and contextualize my own feelings at first, but it wasn't enough.

Media analysis started as a project my therapist gave me, since I was getting frustrated with my inability to identify my own emotions, and our sessions were sort of hitting a plateau. Which is to say, they asked me how my day was, I yelled that I didn't know and started crying, and I'd spend the rest of the session on the couch snuggling my therapist's vulpix. (Baby Fluff was not very emotionally stable lol)

So I started looking for stories. I got a bit into vocaloid-- a couple favorites of mine are the medical anomaly, rolling girl, irony, yellow, and good kid medicine. It gave me words for what I was feeling, proof I wasn't the only one to feel these things. Suddenly I wasn't alone, I wasn't crazy or exaggerating, I had songs that spoke to me. Someone else out there knew what I was feeling and said it better than I could.

Hatsune Miku got me through some rough times, y'know? And the warrior skitty AMVs-- gods, that made up the rest of my music taste. I was never very good at art, except maybe in trying to copy the anatomy drawings because I was bored, but there were incredibly talented people out there. They told brand new stories, or put a twist on existing ones. I never knew there were so many stories out there!

And then there was anime. I couldn't handle anything with fanservice-- bear in mind at that point, I hadn't yet had The Talk, I just knew it made me uncomfortable. So I mostly watched kid's shows, and there was one magical girl show that looked cute.

It was, ah. Madoka Magica, if you're familiar with it. But the grief and hopelessness, the way the girls try to cope with pain and being fundamentally unsuited for something, the loneliness... and later, it's revealed that one character, who actually looked a lot like me before I cut my hair, had a heart condition and low self-esteem. She felt useless, she...destroyed herself for a chance to save someone who was kind to her. And then the bittersweet ending-- that the world can have love and hope even if it sucks. It made me think... maybe it was okay for me to live. It gave me a lot to think about, and holds a special place in my heart to this day.

I started making progress in therapy again. I'd walk in and say something like, "I think Mami Tomoe probably has a lot of guilt because she survived and her parents didn't" and somehow the conversation would turn to the fact that I wasn't taking painkillers like I was supposed to. And maybe it was because I felt like I didn't deserve it.

Just the weak herbal stuff back then, mind you, because ibuprofen scared the shit out of me, but... sometimes I would talk about a character and realize I was seeing myself through them, talking about myself through them, and I finally had a voice. They gave me a voice. So I want to help their stories be understood in return.

[standardquip]

Dysphoria

A video representation of my experience with dysphoria. Made in 2020.

Video:Bakemonogatari, Kizumonogatari, Vision of Escaflowne, Escaflowne (movie), Revolutionary Girl Utena (movie), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Devil May Cry (anime), Fullmetal Alchemist, Noragami, Steins;Gate, Blue Exorcist, Guilty Crown, K (TV), Death Note, Death Parade, Akira (movie), Demon Slayer, KARAS, Children of the Sea, Dorohedoro, Psycho Pass, Nisemonogatari, Your Name, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, Weathering With You, 5 Centimeters per Second, Charlotte, Attack on Titan, Black Clover, Bleach, Erased, Darwin's Game, Deadman Wonderland, Drifters, Fate Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works, Free!, Sunday Without God, Blood Blockade Battlefront, My Hero Academia, Owari no Seraph, Chivalry of a Failed Knight, Re: Zero, Rozen Maiden, Strike The Blood Third, Sword Art Online, The Rising of the Shield Hero, Macross Frontier Audio:JT Bruce – Hypnic Jerk Premiere Date:2020 Status:Downloadable, Streamable Genre(s):Horror, LGBT+, Other, Artistic Cons/Awards: Anime Weekend Atlanta 2020 PRO Contest: won “Best Technical”, finalist in “Artistic” Agamacon 2021 – Honorable mention “Endless Nightmare” YoumaCon 2021 – “Now in Technicolor!” Award Outside Links:.org

Dysphoria AKA Skeptic’s Hypothesis AKA Multicultural Panic Attack

Started: 12 dec 2019 Finished: 11 aug 2020 Work time: 47hr 58min in premiere 26hr 16min After Effects

General Comments I started out wanting to make a weird/creepy glitch video. But as I started making it it became something way more personal.

The part where I over-explain everything

I joined AWA PRO in 2019 with a video that was completely forgettable (Exposure). I came away from that feeling very weirdly defensive of my editing skills so I set out to make something to prove I could edit. That was the AMV Esoterra, which was largely a shallow, showy piece. Aside from the technicals, it’s also just a type of video I don’t generally make because nostalgia/vibe things don’t interest me much.

While that video was coming along I got the urge to do something edgy, and I have always wanted to do text and glitch effects in a video. I’ve had a love affair with JT Bruce’s “Hypnic Jerk” for several years so worked on cutting it down to something usable (the track is ~10 minutes long). Once that was done I set it aside to make after Esoterra was done, to make sure I finished it before the pro deadline. I didn’t intend to finish Dysphoria for PRO, but I figured if I finished it in time (a big IF) I would submit it in addition to Esoterra.

Once I started on Dysphoria, the time went by so quick. I wanted something that would separate the viewer from reality and just focusing on the song would have been enough. But I got this idea to attach it to something real. And eventually decided to roll with it. It’s weird, because when you look at these 2 videos (Esoterra and Dysphoria) You’d probably think Dysphoria was the gimmicky one, but it’s much closer to my brain than Esoterra is.

I’m not super open about it, but I’m transgender. I also have clinical/major Depression. I wanted Dysphoria to be about the fight you have in your head with yourself on whether or not you want to change, or if what you’re dreaming is really something you want.

During my time in the Navy (2009 – 2012) I was constantly fighting with myself on what I wanted more– transition or to stay in the navy? DADT was repealed shortly after I enlisted, but trans people were still largely unknown and had to be closeted. This video helped me work through some of that, I think. I had a pretty good idea I was trans when I joined, but I wasn’t sure until after boot camp. And once I went on my first deployment things sort of snowballed, and I was constantly weighing the pros and cons of staying in or getting out to transition (Obama’s trans inclusion thing didn’t happen to shortly after I was discharged).

I wanted this video to be relatable to anyone imagining what a mental crisis was like. It was very important to me that it was still “gender dysphoria” but it didn’t beat you over the head with it. I wanted it to be subtle. Something that maybe trans people would get but cis people could still appreciate without feeling like the vid has a specific message. Gender dysphoria can be fairly insiduous. I don’t think many people realize how much it can affect things. It is also easily attributable to other factors, so can be very hard to identify as an issue if you aren’t already 100% sure you’re trans. I guess this video is just relaying feelings, and the general steps/phases/stages you try to work through during a mental crisis or psychological break.

For the text, I watched a lot of AMVs with text in them and I learned that text seemed to work better when you weren’t concerned with reading it. So I made the text hard to read and I used it more as an artistic framing device. Any time the character was feeling the text, I tried to put the text on the character, especially over their face. There are two “worlds” in this vid, one being reality (which is almost always starring a female character), and one being the dream/fantasy. Reality is dim, has washed out colors and hard to read text. Fantasy has easier to read text but it’s usually in another language. It’s also way more raw and emotional, and not the lyrics of the song/track.

And, as especially the case for the first minute, I started out the text being fairly legible but then got more screwed up and harder to read as time progressed. Because in the beginning you think you’ve got things figured out, but the more you think about stuff, the harder it becomes to decide, and the more frustrated you get. Especially true for ~0:28 – 0:34ish, screwing with the text in such a way to be artistic but also to purposefully frustrate you that you cannot read it.

Which introduced an ongoing problem into my video: How do you make things specifically frustrating (especially the later glitches) without it being so frustrating that the video is no longer “good”? That was an ongoing conversation I had with at least 3 different beta testers. Much more about the glitches than the text, because I had very specific visions for the text. In the end, I think I figured it out okay so there is a good balance between “messy” and “not done well”. But that took several tries to get right.

People suffering with mental crises generally feel alone. So I wanted the characters in reality to be relatable but have a barrier between them and the viewer. That being the text, blurs, VHS overlays, etc. I especially tried to pick scenes where the real characters were not looking right at you.

Dream world is brighter, vibrant, hopeful. The characters you see yourself as (the boys) are looking at you, and they’re for the most part cool, badass characters.

The glitches were predominantly hand-made using the very scenes they’re on top of. I did have some presets, but I’d say 80% – 90% of glitches were made from scratch. The presets mostly got used during the elevator scene around 2:13 – 2:17and 2:31 – 2:35. The only other help I had making this were VHS overlays which got peppered in throughout the video.

Despite Esoterra taking more time, I’d consider Dysphoria to be much more technical and difficult to edit. In Esoterra I was playing with, and learning about, flow, composition, and overlays. The time it took to effectively learn and apply those things was immediately used in Dysphoria which surprisingly has a lot of the same core concepts, just utilized differently. Despite them being nearly ideological opposites, I don’t think I would’ve been able to make Dysphoria as good as it is without having the experience of making Esoterra first.

Scene selection was incredibly intentional for every single part, and caused a lot of headache at times due to not finding what I wanted. Because my specific theme was gender dysphoria (and even more specifically, female to male) girls only show up at specific times: – the real world – the very first time the character goes into the dream world “at first it is a plunge into hyper reality” – when the character is actively fighting with themself (the yes / no sections) – after an implied suicide attempt at 1:32, when dream/fantasy start become one.

In the “Yes / no” parts of the video, the boy is always yes, and the girl is always no. That is specific to gender dysphoria, and to FTMs. When you visualize yourself? Is it as a girl or a boy? It was always a boy. But some trans people (myself included) will go through phases where they dream as their real-world (non-transitioned) self. For me, I went through a long period of denial, so would try to force being ok with myself, even though it brought me pain.

So all the scenes with girls in them are painful. The scenes of boys start out cool and confident, but then become trapped and locked away. They get angry and kill the girl around 1:20, which then results in the mental breakdown that follows. The suicide attempt, the male self saving the female self, the overall anger and confusion, and the “crisis” part of the video. The crisis is: Now you know you have to do something. Will you finally accept this part of yourself? Will you finally transition? The overlays at 1:53 signify the decision. Glass breaking, hands parting, and scissors cutting an umbilical cord.

The next section is “Help”. The character finally recognizes that they need help, because they are finally accepting that there is a problem. But just because you recognize there’s a problem doesn’t mean you’re any good at solving it. Therein goes the brief period of survival in the dream with the super clear picture of the man saving the woman. It works in two ways, one at surface gender dysphoria level because it’s a dude being cool, the secondary being that the masculine side is saving the feminine side. “Hey. You don’t have to die. You’re still a part of me. You might be transitioning to male but that doesn’t mean my feminine side disappears.”

The elevator section of the video was one of the first sections I edited, and so it is predominantly just a glitch fest as a way to transition from living in escapism to getting back to reality. It ends at the scene of the girl in bed. For me this symbolizes depression more than anything else. You know you need help, you are constantly thinking about how to get it, but sometimes you just can’t fucking do anything. So we have that scene and then shinji (the boy) appears as a reflection beneath. The video ends with shinji waking up in the hospital and the question “Are you awake?” It’s a throwback to the original video’s premise of a skeptic’s hypothesis… Can never know if you’re dreaming or not. But also a sort of ambiguous ending of never knowing if the character got the help they needed or not. Are they still living in their dream of being a boy? Or did they actually transition and this is reality now?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

So anyway that’s my over-explanation of this video. I put it off for so long, partly because I don’t like revealing this part of myself, and partly because I don’t think it’s right to force my interpretation/message on anyone. But overall decided the pros in putting this essay out there outweighed the cons.

Since I finished this video in August 2019, released it publicly in December, and only now just wrote this explanation at the end of February the following year, I forgot a lot of things maybe I wanted to touch on in between that time. But this is long enough as it is. If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up I guess. Contact info in my profile.

Some things I want to point out just because As mentioned previously, all scene selection was super intentional. But a lot of it goes by so fast and seems kind of random so here’s some things I want to bring attention to lol.

0:02 – there’s an overlay here of more rain (dropping on the camera) and also some faint glowing eyes. I wanted to bring some paranoia into this video but this is the only part that panned out.

Beginning to 0:21 – Your Name was amazing to work with because it had the perfect amount of scenes of girls looking at boys and being sad about it. This establishes the character’s life up to this point as being unhappy with who she is. The scene of her staring in the mirror at the boy and then crying really sets up the whole gender dysphoria framing device without being obvious about it.

0:24 – anthy is a fragmented, bare, vulnerable individual with a trapped and tortured boy prince inside :)

1:20 – metaphor for self injury. Also foreshadowing of some other chest-based scenes. 1:23 – the result of the previous scene. This was the best anime representation I could find for ftm chest surgery. Obviously the scar is all wrong but it was the only chest scar scene I could find that looked kind of believable for what I was going for.

1:24 – 1:32 I synced the tracking dot to the beat lol. Also the text on the bed moves when she lays down on it.

1:57 – 1:59 is all scenes with barriers because the characters are all trapped. The last scene is a first person shot of looking down at boobs, which in context of all the suffering scenes leaning up to it are meant to imply that boobs are bad. Character has massive chest-related dysphoria. It’s a quick callback to the other 2 chest scenes.

2:01 – 2:05 is dilandau!! From Vision of Escaflowne. I won’t explain the scene because it’s a huge spoiler but if you know the anime/character you’ll know why I used it here. :)

Note: the (uncredited) live action footage is a recording of myself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to my beta testers and our discussions about the intricacies of glitches: Ash, Dr. Derpface, TheLazyDaze

Thank you to Synaethesia for helping me with the VHS overlays.

Thank you to Kriegher for the help with including Hindi as a language.

I also must mention ProstrateConstantly/ZaneWins, whose DESTRUCT vid and making of vid heavily inspired me to make my own glitch vid. And to CrackTheSky’s blog for mentioning DESTRUCT, as I otherwise never would’ve seen it. D E S T R U C T: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=878jSaMBtxw Making of DESTRUCT: CTS’s blog: https://crakthesky.wordpress.com/

Original track of JT Bruce – Hypnic Jerk: https://www.jamendo.com/track/24044/hypnic-jerk?language=en https://open.spotify.com/track/0e3aRWcOl7XqYNWP1ss5AO

I did a large amount of work to the song to make it work- here’s a screencap of my Premiere timeline for the song:

In (approximately) September 2021, JT Bruce commented on the youtube video!