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olderthannetfic · 3 years ago

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Escapade 2022: Building the Dance Party

Here’s the monster I’ve been working on! I cannot believe it took me 17k to write up the damn dance party. You can also see it on DW for easier reading.

We managed to have Escapade in person this year, after only one year off. I was skeptical, but it seems to have worked out well, and that’s great for me because the things I do for the con are in-person only. Many years, though not this one, I help run a wine tasting. I host a tea party. This time around, the Bobaboard yaoi cheese board made an appearance, and we decorated the room with an Our Flag Means Death theme. And, probably my favorite of all, I run the dance party. Once upon a time, Escapade was one of the focal points of a certain kind of Media Fandom vidding culture, but that group founded Vividcon and decamped there. Vividcon’s dance party featured some old favorites but was heavy with premieres by attending vidders. It was wonderful in many ways… but I’d also heard about the changes it had wrought on Vividcon’s main premieres show: once there was also a dance party to send vids to, many vidders started saving their heavier work to less popular music for Premieres and sending their joyful, fun vids to the dance party. While the individual vids in Premieres remained strong, the Premieres show as a show suffered. Those of us running the Escapade dance party in the first couple of years chose not to accept new vids for this reason. Escapade was also, by that point, far less vid-focused than it had been, and even asking attendees for requests and suggestions typically only yielded a few ideas. The result is that I have had almost entirely free rein to create a three-hour mixtape of vids. The creation of this is one of my favorite parts of the con. It’s more than just recs or even a playlist: for me, it serves the full metaphorical and interpretive functions of a mixtape. I’m saying something with the vids I choose and the order I put them in, and something far, far beyond “this vid is good”. My only limitations are that the vid does need to be danceable and that it has to exist. Somebody somewhere has to have made the building block I want for this larger fanwork.

Vidshows As Canon Formation, Fandom News, and Identity So what does a vidshow say? The dance party occupies one of the main nights of the con. Most people attend the party, whether or not they want to dance, and I think the natural reaction is that whatever is on screen is an expression of who the con is. It’s the canon, in the sense of a literary canon. So if you don’t see yourself reflected in that canon, it’s drama time! That doesn’t just go for a party like this, by the way: I see this idea reflected in reactions to most vidshows outside of very narrow parameters like a memorial vidshow for such-and-such a vidder or “vids about coffee”. There’s something visceral about a collection of vids that makes people feel seen and included or… not. Escapade is a slash con—the oldest one still running—and like others of that type, it’s very small: 100-150 people. So the “fandom” represented there isn’t some abstract notion of People Who Were on LJ or the far wider People Currently on AO3 or the even more vast People Who Have Ever Liked Fanfic: it’s a hundred plus very specific people with their specific fannish interests. It’s also an aging con with quite a few attendees who did things like hold the first Star Trek cons. Both actual ages and years in fandom vary, but a big chunk of the con has at least been around long enough that their original home base of fandom has withered and died. Maybe it was Media Fandom print zines. Maybe it was the glory days of Livejournal in the 00s. Maybe it was classic Tumblr fandom in the 2010s. I remember when I started going to these tiny, oldschool cons, a lot of them talked about how cons had once been the only way to really connect with fandom. They were your once-a-year opportunity, and people saved up their vids, their fic, their meta ideas, and their need for conversation. It all came pouring out during that one weekend. In some ways, that’s sad. How much better off are we now that we can have more fic than we could ever read all year long? But there was a good side too: the con created a sense of who “Fandom” was. Whatever the latest hot show was going to be, wherever “We” were moving next, you’d find out at the con. What is the most consistent lament on Tumblr these days? In fandom in general? “Where did everyone go?” “How do I find my people?” “I can’t figure out where fandom is hanging out anymore!” So for anyone, but especially for a con of people who may not even have made it to the tumblr era in a lot of cases, I wanted to bring back that feeling. Attend the party, watch the vids, and feel like you’ve got a grasp on fandom again. I wanted to include big fandoms that are coming down the pike: Maybe not every Disney channel thing your nice might be into, but the canons your favorite AO3 author is about to jump ship to. I also wanted to expose younger/newer Escapade attendees to megafandoms of yore that are part of the long-time fans’ culture. At the same time, I wanted to celebrate the canons attendees happen to like, whether they’re big or not. One of the advantages of being a small group is that our taste is our taste. It doesn’t have to be whatever won the numbers game on AO3. I personally tend to be in a lot of small fandoms, so I also like celebrating random weird shit that falls within common fannish tastes, like hot hero/villain slash vids, but that is perhaps not for a canon most people are familiar with. I don’t at all expect people to get into every fandom, but I like the idea of creating an Escapade population that is well-rounded in its general grasp on fandom. As a fandom meta person, it routinely annoys me to see people thinking all of fandom is US live action TV or, conversely, prioritizing anime over absolutely everything else. If people read and write fic only for a few things, they have every right, but if people want to talk about Who We Are, I want them to have better tools to investigate the boundaries of “we”. So in the end, my dance party playlists are not only an illustration of who I think we actually are but who I think we could be. Music choice is another kind of canon formation. Look at old playlists from Vividcon, and you will see a lot of samey musical taste. Look at animemusicvideos.org and you will see equally samey but completely different taste. It’s not that no one vids thing X: it’s that no one in a particular space does. On a very personal note, it annoys the shit out of me how crybabies cannot handle vids in any language but English. I’ve heard all the arguments about how traditional vidding primarily uses lyrics to build meaning, blah blah blah, but they ignore how much most audience members cannot fully and accurately parse lyrics in a con environment on a first viewing of a vid. People will say “Oh, but everyone knows that song.” Only… they don’t. This has been a source of alienation and pain in “the vidding community” for longer than I have been vidding. I remember old meta posts about it on Dreamwidth that really made me think about which music is default and what we assume about other fans’ musical knowledge. I listen to a lot of Latin music, it’s what I’d most like to dance to, and let me tell you, the reactions over the years to Spanish-language music for vids from what is supposed to be my community have not been good. There’s plenty of other music I enjoy that is also not valued in a lot of vidding spaces. Kpop is currently on an upswing among a certain kind of fan (and has long been popular with another), but country, rap, and plenty of other things are often overlooked. Moreover, many types of music will be seen as good choices when they match canon (Korean music for a Korean show, American hip hop for The Wire, etc.) but too specialized to be used broadly in all contexts. Meanwhile, English language pop is “universal”, including ABBA. I think, too, that there is a false sense of what is accessible. I’ve heard a lot of talk over the years about “recruiter” vids and “con vids”. The former are supposed to lure new fans into a thing with an easy-to-follow vid about the iddiest or most obviously fun parts of canon. The latter are big crowd pleasers you can understand on a first viewing. But the only times I’ve ever actually recruited fans was with impenetrable meta vids about my layered feelings over minute details of canon plots. There’s some truth to the concept, of course, but I think the key factors are music with a good beat (present in most dance music and thus most vids I’d be looking at for a dance party anyway) and some level of traditional visual storytelling so that the unfamiliar audience can catch at least a fraction of the meaning. Vids that are a wall of impenetrable murk will attract no-one, but vids that are like the shadow of some massive creature in the water under your boat will often make people want to know more. So for the dance party, I want vids that do at least work as “ooh pretty”, but if their subtler meanings are opaque, that’s fine. It’s enough that a viewer can suspect there might be a subtler level of meaning in there somewhere. Buuuuuut… Escapade is also old as balls. (It started in 1991 when internet fandom wasn’t even on the web.) And many attendees like shows that are also old or vidders who only operated in the VCR era. So while I won’t show something that’s just a gray blur, I also won’t require HD footage or crystal clear images. If I have to pull something a little blurry from the vaults to include the more obscure 60s shows or highlight a Livejournal vidder who worked on a computer but in an era prone to small file sizes, that’s fine. If the visuals are beautiful-but-blurry, that’s okay. (If the sound sucks, that’s a hard no though.) I’m reading Francesca Coppa’s book right now, and it’s so interesting and free! I didn’t realize it was free. Did you? Go download it! I had hoped to finish before writing up this post, but time is getting away from me. I’ll have lots more thoughts about canon formation and eras of vidding, but I want to give the book a thorough read before I nitpick or build off of anything. But one thing that strikes me about it is how absent many of the Vividcon and now VidUKon vidders I care about are. That’s not a strike against the book. It’s a product of me having started vidding only in 2010. The period the book really covers is vidding’s inception with Kandy Fong’s slide shows in the 70s through to the height of 00s Livejournal fandom. I think that’s just fine for a book about history. That’s a key period before changing technology and the existence of platforms like youtube massively opened vidding to just about anyone. Less fine with me is how often I see people I know socially, who are in my current fandom spaces, being unable to move beyond a shortlist of like 10 vidders they heard about on LJ a lifetime ago. The ones who aren’t dead or long out of the hobby end up being the only vidders some people are aware of. In an era when an increasing number of oldschool style vidders post to AO3 with highly findable tags, this annoys me even more. I don’t think anyone’s obligated to do a lot of work to find vids, especially if they’re only casually interested in the art form. If it were only that, I wouldn’t kvetch so much, but I keep running into people acting like “our” community is dead… and including me in that “our”. Ironically, this attempt to include me often makes me feel alienated instead. I came to vidding as a personal dialogue between me and canon. I enjoyed parts of Vividcon a lot. I ran into plenty of great vidders there. But my sense of community hasn’t changed radically between then and now. In both eras, people watch their friends’ vids and vids for their own fandoms that go viral. In both eras, people have little interest in actively seeking out randos outside of their sphere. My view is that vidding is no different from fic: Small, insular communities often worked out specific aesthetics in the past. We should celebrate that history and not try to erase how instrumental those small communities were. But those aesthetics escaped into wider circulation many years ago. It’s not that modern fans are outsiders entirely like the oldschool concept of a self-taught “feral” fan. It’s that they have consciously and intentionally picked up aesthetics from the cultural products rather than from a direct social connection. What’s the point of all this? Basically, a dance party needs vids that are danceable. That means they need to be to music that is danceable, and that music needs to not be interrupted much or turned down way lower than other sounds. They also need to be of a length that lets you get into dancing to a particular song without taking up half the party for just one vid and thus one fandom/set of fandoms. (More on why I rarely use multifandom vids below.) 2-5 minutes is a good length. Some people try to draw a sharp boundary around what A Vid™ was. I think that’s foolish. There were plenty of vids at Vividcon itself that fell a bit outside of any narrow definition. At the same time, definitions are important so we can have some sort of shared vocabulary and assumptions. I think we can handle this by defining where the center was, rather than the boundaries. Coppa’s definition is pretty good: “A vid (sometimes called a fan vid, song vid or song tape) is a fan-made music video in which preexisting footage (usually from television or movies) is edited to music (usually, but not always, a pop song). Some of said songs are more danceable than others, but basically, that’s the type of fanvid that makes sense for a dance party. Many, many vids at Vividcon or from Media Fandom VCR vidders fall into this range and are suitable. Many, many recent vids on Youtube or Tiktok fall outside of this range and are unsuitable. (I’d still call those other fannish remix videos with at least some music, many of which are shippy and made by AO3 fic reader types, “fanvids”. I just wouldn’t try to dance to them.) This has led to a situation where a lot of people seem to think that this classic type of fanvid isn’t made anymore or isn’t made outside of a certain community, but I think it’s more accurate to say that other types of vids are going viral currently and thus are easy to find. I have long tried to find vids that aren’t just old favorites everyone has already seen, but for this year, I was determined to get further than ever before from relying on other similar cons, like Fanworks con (successor to Vividcon). I tried to banish not only all con vids from those cons but also almost all vidders who would be familiar to Escapade attendees, especially if they don’t actually attend Escapade themselves. I went so far as to look through AO3 kudos to see which accounts had kudosed vids and knocked things out for having too many familiar names. (That doesn’t mean there aren’t any in the playlist though. I went by the metadata vidders provided on the platform I found the vids on, which may just not include that kind of information.) All of this made my task exponentially harder but also exponentially more interesting. In the end, I had so many vids I adored that keeping the playlist down to 3 hours was nearly impossible. It seems like I wasn’t alone: I got more compliments on this year’s party than any before. Vidding Terminology vs. The Peril of Multifandom Vids One of the biggest problems finding vids is that there is no consistent word for them. Long ago, Media Fandom vids were ‘songtapes’ or ‘songvids’. Later, that evolved to ‘fanvid’ and now the highly ambiguous ‘vid’. AMVs spawned terms like ‘fmv’ for their live action equivalent or ‘gmv’ for game videos. Youtube is full of “tributes”, and sometimes, people even label a traditional fanvid as an “edit”. (More commonly, edits are micro vids in a modern tiktok-y style or the term is used for non-video things entirely.) To make it worse, most recent youtube vids today in 2022 don’t include any word for what they are in their description. They’ll have character or ship names. They might have the fandom name. They don’t have a word for the artform. This makes searching youtube difficult, and since it’s by far the most common place to post vids… arrrrgh. The one type of terminology that is everywhere on youtube and that does make vids easier to find is genres like “Multi-female”, “Multi-male”, “Multi-BL” (meaning a multifandom vid of all those boys love dramas coming out of Thailand and Taiwan and such). That would be great if I just wanted to find a vid, but I show very, very few multifandom vids at the dance party, and when I do show them, they are almost never ones that would be labeled “multi-female”. Why is this? Simply put, I think they tend to have the opposite effect of what is desired. As a standalone vid, a multi-female tends to celebrate badass women and include way more of our faves than would be in a single-fandom vid. It’s super fun to watch in isolation… A three-hour dance party is not isolation. In the context of a three-hour dance party, those vids blur into mush. If you put a bunch next to each other, it feels like one interminable vid. But worse than that, it feels like my least favorite experience on tumblr where you’re scrolling through somebody’s blog and it’s like 95% beautiful stucky gifsets and in-depth meta and squee interspersed with 5% one-off inspirational posts about how we should care about some female character or reblogs of a beautiful photo of an African model. The posts themselves are fine. In aggregate, the vibe is that deep fannish love is for one thing and everything else is a diversity afterthought that we like on a completely surface level. That’s fine on someone’s unplanned personal tumblr, but I’m not having it in my curated mixtape. How the “Badass X” multifandom vids tend to read in this context is that all Strong Female Characters are essentially interchangeable. Black characters are there to fill a diversity slot, not as individuals, not as themselves. It’s very blatant when pairing A/B gets a whole vid exploring their arc while character C is relegated to a montage of the top 30 fannish tv series of the day. There are some multifandom vids that make a deep and compelling meta analysis instead of seeming to conflate their characters, and there are crossover vids that really engage with each fandom they contain, but those aren’t the ones labeled with the “multi-“ terminology, and they’re a lot rarer. For this reason, I try to both limit the total number of multifandom vids I show and to save them for topics where I feel the multi-fandomness is more welcome, like vids that combine many adaptations of the same thing or vids of franchises like MCU where it’s more ambiguous what counts as a single fandom. I still try to opt for vids that highlight a single character or ship most of the time, especially if it’s the only vid for that fandom or fandoms that I’m using. The Search I started out by defining what I as looking for. I looked through Escapade attendee profiles, which people can fill out on the site. Those are often out of date, and only some people fill them out, but they can give me a sense of what people are currently into. I then looked at what fandoms had a lot of fic updated on AO3 in the past year, especially m/m fic. From this, I made a priority fandom list of fandoms I wanted to actively search for vids in. I also added anything I personally predicted would be the next big thing among attendees—in this case, Our Flag Means Death. I also made a list of songs I particularly like and wanted to dance to. Since we didn’t have an in-person con or a dance party last year, I had more work than usual: I went through a full two years of the ‘fanvids’ tag on AO3. Even once I removed everything from a familiar con/fest/etc., that still took forever. What I do is open every vid post for the last year (or in this case two), find the embed, if any, set the playhead to the middle of the vid and play a few seconds. If it sounds like music someone could dance to and it’s at least a couple of minutes long, I put the URL in a spreadsheet along with some cursory notes about the nature of the vid based on that tiny preview plus headers. If the vid was clearly way too short, too long to be to a single song, or not set to music in the part I watched, I’d close the tab. If there was no embed, I sometimes downloaded/went to another site/etc. right then and repeated the same procedure and sometimes left the tab open to deal with later. While AO3 has a high concentration of vidders and cons/fests/similar origins I was avoiding, it also has such a high concentration of oldschool vids that it’s worth looking through. In particular, I found a lot of interesting vids by Russian-speaking fans in various fandom combats. I did something similar on Tumblr, scrolling back through many pages of tags like ‘fanvid’. This was not especially useful this year, but it does occasionally find me some obscure and awesome vids I couldn’t find otherwise. Next, I went through various Youtube hashtags like #fanvidfeed. This mostly got me undanceable het vids for recent teen shows, but I found the occasional interesting account this way. Even if the vid I first landed on wasn’t right for my purposes, sometimes, they either had another vid that was or their metadata suggested other hashtags to me. I searched for recs playlists on Youtube and put them on in the background while doing other things, not even watching the vids. When I heard music that sounded danceable, I’d click back to that tab and see what the vid was. Since I’m looking for dance vids, I do a lot of this music previewing before I even bother looking at a vid itself. After all that, it was time for the fandom-specific searches. I searched Youtube and Bilibili for all of my target fandoms. In some cases, this required looking up ship names in hanzi. I also sometimes search for things in Russian or Japanese or look up more generic terms like ‘slash’ or ‘fanvid’ if I know the equivalent. Whenever I came across a fanvid by a non-English speaker, I’d look at its metadata for possible search terms. I don’t think I found that many vids I ended up using this way, but it’s a valuable exercise to find vidders far outside of my social circles. All of these I tested the same way as the AO3 vids. After a long period, I had a big spreadsheet of possibilities. This year, it contained 690 vids. I filled out the fandom column of the spreadsheet. I went back through and compared the fandom list to my target fandom list. Anything really important that was missing I searched for again. As usual, the biggest problem was finding even one danceable vid about a major black character from US media. Less urgent but also difficult is adding a little geographic variety to the wealth of US, UK, and East Asian media. It is only at this point that I actually watched the vids to see if they were any good. I cannot emphasize this enough: If you want to find vids on the modern internet that are outside your social circles, you have to first find vids at all. If you waste time figuring out if they’re good first, you will never get anywhere. Hunt, hunt, hunt, and then refine. I worked fandom by fandom or topic by topic, narrowing my possibilities. I usually cleaned up my notes at this point, transferring information into actual columns like ‘song title’ only if I thought I might actually use the vid. This is where I knocked out vids to the same song and made sure I didn’t have 20 for the same fandom. I still had to do another round of searching for some missing high priority fandoms where none of my brainstormed list turned out to be good enough once I watched the vids through all the way. In one case, the Youtube channel had been deleted by the time I made it back to that item on my spreadsheet. I came up with a short list of around 76 vids. At this point, I went back and filled out my runtime field and began paring down the list to fit into the three-hour party. At the end of this, I had 61 vids plus Not Literally Productions’ I Ship It, which we used to open with but now close with at lola’s suggestion. (This hearkens back to Vividcon opening and closing their dance party with the same things every year. We wanted to copy the concept but not the particular items chosen.) Play Order Escapade’s dance party has two halves of roughly equal length with an intermission in between. I often have some internal meta structure to the playlist. This year, the first half was a progression of pirate media and a progression of boy band love. The second half was less specific but had more of the old favorites, weird shit, and vids I thought could probably use a warning. One of the things I appreciate most about Escapade is its oldschool commitment to being pro-kink. The dance party is also an expression of my taste. On the other hand, a dance party isn’t like watching a vid on your own where you’re able to pause and see the headers, so I now produce a printed playlist that’s on tables throughout the party. I’ll tend to warn for things with Hannibal levels of gore. I try to put the horny murder vids in the same part of the playlist and later in the evening. If I find anything good with dicks out, I’ll put that later in the evening too (though it’s pretty hard to find good vids that actually use that kind of footage). The very end of the playlist is for the sorts of things you’d put your lighter up for. I also try to put the least danceable vids at the beginning or end of a section or right before a vid I think will bring everyone running to the dance floor. Too many of the danceable-but-not-that-danceable vids in a row makes people wander off, but using only the most danceable vids means missing out on many fascinating vids, fandoms, and vidders I think are worth including. Other considerations for play order are things like splitting vids from the same fandom or franchise so they are in different halves or at least not next to each other, putting vids early if I think their fans will leave the party and go to bed before the end, and putting whatever I want to highlight at a key point in the playlist where I think more people will be in the room. I also decide play order based on the music itself, of course, trying to have things transition in a way that feels natural. I listen to the very beginnings and endings of vids to make sure I can make those two songs work next to each other. Once I decide on a theoretical play order, I play all of the vids while I do chores, listening for any really bad audio in the middle of vids that I didn’t notice before. When I’m satisfied, I put everything together into one video file per half, cutting off vid credits outside of the music, crossfading where needed, and attempting to adjust audio levels to be about even. This Year’s Playlist First Half: Pirates Macarena by Jacksjarofdirt Vividcon used to always start their dance party with a clip from Xena. Over time, people learned the dance from it. This year, I got a request to open the party with a dance people would know. Naturally, this meant picking the most irritating earworm of my adolescence. The vid itself is not amazing. It’s from 2007. The aspect ratio on Youtube is borked. There are ugly digital transitions that look even worse at this resolution. There’s tons of talky face (aka clips where characters’ mouths move in undesirable ways, similar to “lip flap” in AMV circles) and only a small amount of it is supposed to be characters lip syncing the song. In a move unusual for Media Fandom type vids, it repeats footage a lot, using the same clips for repetitive parts of the song, of which there are many. However, the combination of the song and the fandom was too much to pass up. I really wanted to get POTC in there as a key development in pirate fandoms. Oldschool aesthetic elements here include starting with a pretty clear POV: Jack is the main male voice. Elizabeth is the main female one. Jack gets the “I am not trying to seduce you” line for comedy purposes. The song doesn’t have a ton of lyrics to work with, and the vid did nothing with the out of town boyfriend verse, but it does have a funny lyric match on “las chicas que son buenas” with the shot of the garishly made-up prostitutes. The vidder’s blurb on Youtube is: “A pirates of the caribbean fan video to the song Macarena. This is for the Moonlit Curse fanvid contest. **All rights reserved to their respectable owners.**” Notable here is the use of “fan video” by the vidder and “fanvid” by the contest. (What people actually call vids varies a lot by part of fandom and era.) Now that I google, this seems to have been a contest held by a particular forum, the Moonlit Curse board. There’s another old youtube channel here with some of the other entries: Larger than life by Retro Dreams The instant I saw this, I knew I wanted to open with it. I had just seen Turning Red, and it’s such a perfect portrait of fandom. I figured many con-goers would feel the same and others wouldn’t yet have seen this gem of a film. With the request to start with a known dance, I bumped it to second. Brilliant choice of exceptionally classic actual boy band music for this movie that has so much about a fictional boy band! I figured this song would get people on the dance floor if the macarena didn’t, which is always important at a con of shy nerds. The vid deploys comedy brilliantly. The song is famous enough that many viewers will recognize it from the opening, so there’s that moment of seeing the gigantic mother stomping through the city and realizing just what song is about to play. Literalism is hilarious! The lyrics take center stage here. “Prices to fame” is the moment when Mei looks around and all the children are suddenly afraid of her after treating her as a celebrity a minute before. “Your love” is about the students’ love of Mei’s red panda form. “Crowd”, “body”, etc. have highly literal matches, but the fictional boy band dance is also set to the music. The vidder demonstrates excellent musicality, using the quiet part of the song and the huge build to transition to the longer, slower shots of the mother and the build to her losing her shit. Some editing choices are more about rhythm, like the well-timed panda running shots. Notice the sequence around 2:57 where the dips and rises in the music correspond to the panda jumping and even to her grin spreading. The vid also has a more metaphorical level: 4★Town is “larger than life” in that they’re a beloved boy band in the movie. The vidder lists this as an “AMV” in the title on Youtube despite it being Western animation. They also have live action vids labeled as AMVs. Pump It by Christian DS MEP w/ Elisiandy, Valentina Zemlyanaya, Moonnxth, stellzxn, garnetoo, yoonqissmile, Clxeee, darkburn club Someone sent me this wonderful BTS vid, and it was so good I had to include it despite already having another BTS vid I wanted to use. I decided to put it early in the half to separate it from the other one and also because BTS is the idol group fandom currently sweeping the planet. I liked the progression from media about boy band fandom to the current example. This is a MEP or multi-editor project, which are common on Youtube. Oldschool media fandom vids are often collaborations, but they generally involved a group making the whole vid together. MEPs typically involve each party being given 20 seconds of a song and the host stitching the whole thing together when the parts come back from the individual editors. A lot of vids of idols have blurry, ugly footage from their reality shows or feature just one ship or are 30 seconds long. This vid was perfect for my needs because it highlights all members of BTS and has beautiful, clear footage that will be more compelling for an audience that may not have succumbed yet. Notice: if you go to Escapade, it’s only a matter of time before I get you. There is no escape. I would normally have gone for some non-BTS idol vid since I had another BTS vid already, but this one was too good to pass up. I like the very, very clear use of text on the screen indicating that this is BTS (remember, I wanted this for a loud dance party containing a lot of people unfamiliar with the group). Many vidders pick fonts that are hard to read or don’t make text big enough or keep it on screen long enough, but this vid does an excellent job. The vid is also absolutely slathered in effects and color grading. I think it works here because the vidders have used such crystal clear high quality footage and because once you rewatch, you can see that the vid has a strong structure: It starts with an introduction section, then highlights each member of BTS in age order, so all those quick flashes of different footage tend to be the same guy over and over. This makes it easier to parse visually. The last section seems to be some group stuff, each in order again, and then another group shot. I don’t think there’s much of a meta point here, but that’s good because there’s way too much going on visually for the viewer to have time to pick up much more than “pretty!” The vid is labeled as an FMV and an edit, and the vidders are referred to as editors in the Youtube description, which is typical of live action vidders on Youtube, especially those who have any experience in AMV spaces. The tech used is also listed and is Sony Vegas plus After Effects. Both bothering to list it and the use of Sony Vegas are also typical. Not Today by Yūrei Naturally, after a BTS member-themed vid, I had to put one to BTS’ own music. This was an eleventh-hour addition when I realized I had zero of BTS’s music in the playlist. Thematically, it was important to me to find one for this position. I forget what search terms I used. I suspect I started going through BTS songs I thought would have vids and entering their names plus various vidding words and fandoms in Youtube search. And, yes, it’s one of those vids that mashes all the characters into a couple of minutes, but I was willing to make an exception because the biggest fandom among attendees is MCU collectively (though all different ships and parts), I had other MCU vids, and it uses its many characters to show one consistent narrative. I don’t love the use of canon dialogue, but it’s reasonably well integrated, and this was the last minute. I do like that BTS music is used for a US source. I definitely wanted at least some vids that used non-US music for mainstream US fandoms. The editing and use of sound effects from canon are very typical of a certain kind of rhythmic editing on Youtube. While the vid is focused on visual spectacle, it does use the song lyrics to set up a simple theme that unifies all the different MCU characters and what they’re doing in the vid. The vidder’s blurb is: “‘Kneel…’ ‘Not Today!’ A video I've been wanting to make for quite some time now and finally got around to doing it. This is the first video I've put together in a few years but I am quite proud of it.” Note the lack of specific vidding terminology of any kind. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by teyla This one I suspect some people had seen already, but I specifically wanted to include both this fandom and this version of Pangzi. The majority of Lost Tomb vids focus on Wu Xie, Zhang Qiling, or Wu Xie/Zhang Qiling. I am not surprised, given that Wang Pangzi is the “fat” one, but he’s my favorite, including for shipping. I searched pretty hard for a vid about him that wasn’t by a vidder on AO3 whom I thought people would be familiar with, but I never found any. Also, it’s a great vid, and I was entertained by including Wham! in my boy band half of the playlist. I love how the vid starts with very clear establishing shots of their faces. This is key for an Escapade audience, only a few of whom have seen the show and many of whom think of it as “That other thing that guy from Guardian is in” without being very aware of the other two leads. I especially love how Pangzi’s completely ridiculous expressions set the tone for the vid. There’s tons of comedy literalism like “high” being them falling through the air or “spark” being an explosion. The editing is tight with cuts and internal movements falling precisely on beats in the music. The POV is less intensely obvious than in some classic vids due to the lyrics starting with generally establishing all three and not clearly associating anyone with the first pronouns in the lyrics, but the combination of many shots of Pangzi being woken up and the goofy tussling with Wu Xie on some of the shippy lyrics make it clear that this is Pangzi’s POV. The vidder’s view of the ship comes through pretty clearly (OT3 but with Wang Pangzi/Wu Xie being more primary). As one would expect from AO3, this vid is labeled as a ‘vid’ and ‘fanvid’ and even has a download link. 【铁三角沙雕日常】“这敢纹身的人还能叫人吗？！” by 指甲长长的小能 I was stoked to hear this song on a Bilibili vid. Not only do I love Álvaro Soler, but I love seeing vidders using music from totally different places (in this case a probably Chinese vidder using music from Spain). One reason I included the previous vid was to help give context to this one. Lost Tomb is the more popular adaptation among the Escapade crowd, but this franchise has a bunch of parts and plenty of fandom for the other adaptations. I don’t love the show audio use, but the clear visual comedy like the mud shoves and the inexplicable boxers was too good to pass up. I’m unclear on exactly how the vidder is using the lyrics. I understand the Spanish fine, but not the Chinese, and I haven’t seen this adaptation, so I’m not totally sure how the canon dialogue is playing off of the music. It doesn’t really seem like this is about an ex you’re still into or whatever the song is about. I have a feeling the vidder isn’t expecting their audience to understand the lyrics or look them up, and I notice they haven’t put the lyrics on screen like so many Bilibili vids do. Power by Mozzaphne God, this vid is so perfect. The minute I saw it on grumpyphoenix’s recs playlist, I knew I had to include it despite all the show audio and the fact that it appears to be a het vid. (Would the vidder consider it a het vid? Unclear. That character is a modern man who woke up in the body of a historical queen.) I owe a lot to that recs list! I like how the highly visible color grade and effects (typical of youtube) are deployed for specific purposes here. The vidder’s use of the twerking on “I make it shower” killed me. It’s just such a joyful, exuberant vid. I have many many feelings and have watched this vid many, many times. Ghost by Vivendel I was determined to find a Scum Villain vid because everyone has fallen into MXTX fandom lately, but the adaptation is… not so amazing visually. It’s also not a fandom I know well, so it was hard to evaluate the subtler vids. Only a very few were even marginally danceable. And then I spotted this one. The title is wordplay. According to the vidder: “Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu is like the ghost of a good person in a villain's role. He does a lot of things behind the scenes to protect Luo Binghe. However, the system also makes Shen Qingqiu "ghost" Luo Binghe all the time. From Luo Binghe's perspective, his kind Shizun seems to pop in and out of existence. And I'm sure Luo Binghe questions whether or not he is imagining that transient good Shizun. Also, the original Shizun's dark ending makes Shen Qingqiu kinda like a dead man walking, so there's that. ” The vid is listed as an AMV, which is common though it’s of Chinese animation. Having not consumed canon, I can’t catch all of the clever uses of lyrics, but I can tell the vidder is playing with them. The editing aesthetic is similar to classic vids despite the canon. The vid opens with a clear establishing shot of eyes and then the system. Scum Villain fans at the party burst out laughing when they realized what the vid was. There are many angsty vids for this fandom, but starting up front with this aspect of the canon foregrounds the humor. “I don’t want to fight you” clearly establishes the protagonist visually with his hand out in a ‘stop’ gesture and shows the system opposite him. “When I said that I liked you” switches to LBH on ‘you’, establishing the love interest. I love the next transition on “or maybe just the idea”, which goes to art of LBH’s original version. “Now you see me, now you don’t” is used to illustrate the protagonist’s real personality vs. The role he’s forced to play. The vidder comments: “I twisted the meaning of the song quite a bit.” I’d say instead that they made clever metaphorical use of it. White Rabbit by tartiflette Sherlock is still big with many congoers, but I’m so over it, and straightforward vids have been done to death. As a life-long Holmes fan, I was intrigued by this older multi-Holmes vid that was recently posted to AO3. I love how this song about drugs is used to illustrate the idea of Moriarty and Moran as dark fantasies of Holmes and Watson. The vidder does not match every lyric precisely. A few key ones are used in a 1:1 manner, like a man being hanged on “low”, but the overall cutting style is a highly effective montage intercutting drug imagery with Holmes and Watson and juxtaposing Holmes with Moriarty and Watson with Moran. I really enjoyed this meta take on Holmes, and props for including one of my favorite adaptations, The Case of the Silk Stocking. As with most AO3 vids, this one uses a fanvid tag. I chose to place this here in the play order both because it’s as meta as the previous vid and because I wanted a sharp swing away from the Asian fandoms after that long run of them. One balancing act for Escapade is to introduce people to these but not to make them feel totally left behind as many of their friends head to media that may just not work for them. And there is no more classic or oldschool Western media fandom than Holmes. The Passenger Redux by zzebeddy Speaking of oldschool, The Professionals is a classic buddy cop slash fandom that’s still going strong, especially at Escapade. A lot of our Pros crew was online only this year, but I still try to include it because it’s such a major fandom for Escapade. (Compare to Starsky & Hutch: S&H even has its own slash con and is a highly active fandom but while many Escapade attendees, including me, have been into it at some point, it hasn’t been a major focus at the con.) The Professionals has a wonderful vidding history, but it’s more common to find vids to music that just does not work for dancing. I was pleased to find this excellent vid on AO3, where it is tagged both with ‘fanvid’ and the older ‘songvid’. The vid is only viewable as a password protected vimeo video, as is common for oldschool vids. For the dance party, I of course had to cut off the show clip at the beginning. I hope people will go watch the vid in its original context as well. If there are 1:1 lyric matches with deep meta meaning, they’re lost on me as someone relatively unfamiliar with the footage, but the excellent musicality, sense of movement, and overall tone of the song give a wonderful feeling of Pros as a gritty crime drama—as it was in its day. I thought it would be good here to give us another classic Western fandom before going on to less familiar things. Games by Franzeska I put my own vids in every year, sometimes as many as three, but it’s less about wanting to show my own stuff and more about the difficulty of sourcing vids that cover certain topics or music. This year, I thought I might not need any, but as I developed my pirate theme, I realized it woudl be fun to include this little-known Spanish series starring that guy who played Cougar in The Losers. Cancelled after just a season and never officially subtitled in English, Piratas is pretty inaccessible to English speakers, but it’s so funny I had to include it. I originally made this years ago for a deeply ungrateful CON.TXT audience who talked shit about the song being in Spanish in the room with me. Thanks, guys. I knew most people watching it would not understand the lyrics, so I tried to show the basis for my ship very blatantly and visually. The song is by rock legends Soda Stereo, who are nearly unknown in the US but who are the founders of Latin American rock in Spanish. I ran across them during a phase where I was looking up bestselling Latin American music and working my way through it to find music I couldn’t through friends. (Amusingly, a friend from later on has totally vidded this same song.) The lyrics are: Voy a ser tu mayordomo Y vos harás el rol de señora bien O puedo ser tu violador La imaginación Esta noche todo lo puede In other words: “I’ll be your servant and you’ll play the lady. Or I could be your rapist. Imagination can do anything tonight.” I remember listening to it for the first time and doing a double take. I put this here to spread the pirate fandoms throughout the first half. Piratas is the story of a cowardly, philandering, fast-talking nobleman who has to get out of the capital ahead of angry husbands and debt collectors. An old friend of his father’s sends him undercover as a pirate, but on the way, he manages to sleep with yet another married woman, and his benefactor soon dies, leaving him without a single ally… except for this latest angry husband who has followed him onto the ship. Why yes, this is a dumb and hilarious “Only I am allowed to kill you!” story. What is this, shounen manga? Classic by caliowl 333 Speaking of classic shounen tropes, I absolutely had to follow that with BNHA. We don’t tend to see a ton of AMVs at Escapade, so I wanted to include one from this since BakuDeku is one of the current m/m juggernauts on AO3. I haven’t read or watched the series, but these two reportedly have that fangirl-favorite dynamic of childhood friends to rivals to allies. Also, antis haaaate this ship, and nothing says Escapade like celebrating that kind of ship. While BNHA is vidded extensively, few are suitable for a dance party. Not only do many of them have constant canon dialogue, but a bunch of them take it from the dub. DEAR GOD WHY?! It’s also the kind of fandom with plenty of straight dude AMV editors and lots of het content or gen tributes to the heroes endlessly leveling up. Eventually, after several hours-long sessions of searching, I spotted this vid. I love this one for how clear the visual language is: It shows the progression of the relationship clearly in a way that you can grasp without knowing canon. I like the slower cutting on this one. Even for the Escapade audience that does know the source, I wanted a classic slash vid, not an effects extravaganza, and this more measured pace with its focus on characters’ faces provides that. It’s labeled as a “bakudeku AMV”, so the vidder does intend it to be read as shippy. Having now seen a lot of AMVs of the same footage, I was interested in how the editor pared down some of the more overused stuff to just a couple of reference shots of Bakugo’s face disappearing into the sludge and Midoriya jumping after him. I think it’s a mistake to imagine that AMV aesthetics are completely divorced from live action vidding ones, oldschool or otherwise. While this AMV does not establish POV on the pronouns early in the song, I do notice editing of that kind in the middle, and the nature of the footage itself means we are firmly in one POV from the beginning. This AMV overall demonstrates a type of close reading typical of shippers of non-canon ships. Certain key moments are recontextualized as romantic. I don’t know that this AMV would do all that well at a big con contest. (There’s too much lipflap for one thing.) It is, nonetheless, indubitably an AMV, and one that overlaps with old slash vids aesthetically. Undisclosed Desires by Akuuza This was another I found on Grumpyphoenix’s recs list. I’ve loved this franchise for years, and the song is a classic for a certain kind of ship vid, so I was instantly attracted when seeing it in the playlist. This one I picked for a great song, fandom I wanted, and visual beauty. The cutting is crisp, but I found the POV muddy. It seems like which one of them “I” is switches a few times, but I didn’t find any clearly demarcated transition points. Nonetheless, if one does know the footage, this displays their dynamic nicely. Castles by serrico This is one I found on AO3 and that may be somewhat familiar to the Escapade audience. I picked it because I loved the emotional tone. I have no idea what’s going on, but now I have a lot of feelings! I haven’t seen Picard, but this vid makes it look full of found family feels and intriguing plot. I placed it here in the playlist because its sad but hopeful emotional tone seemed like a nice transition from the previous song and because I wanted a big Western franchise alternating with the Asian fandoms, particularly since the two on either side of this are less well known to the Escapade audience. I'm a Ruler by akiv This one came from AO3 as well. It’s a classic buddy cop vid of the more antagonistic variety. The vidder’s summary grabbed me: “Han Joowon and Lee Dongsik getting on each other's nerves (or something) - and then on other people's nerves, together.” I’ve never seen the show, but the vidder perfectly sets up the classic crazy one and uptight one forced to work together scenario. I found the use of POV quite skillful here. Pronouns are used as usual, but the quality of characters’ facial expressions also makes it clear who is acting and who is reacting in each part. When the POV abruptly switches around 1:09, it’s done on a change in the music and with the same clear pattern of the smirking one pushing buttons and the other one taken aback. Well-chosen closeups immediately show the shift. The third section at 2:13 was a little less clear to me on first watching, but on rewatch, I notice that “When I” is on one of them, while the other literally walks into the room on “walk into the room”. I believe this is an attempt to show the progression to partners who work together. The vidder has saved the good two shots and most footage where the duo interact with suspects for this last section. I liked the use of show audio here aside from some infelicitous background sound left in one of the clips. I don’t know the show, but I do know crime dramas, so using some actual dialogue to instantly establish what kind of trope these guys are set the scene nicely for me. The vidder also made interesting choices about how to display the subtitles. Also, I’ll be real: these guys are super hot. A lot of fandoms have two idol-looking guys, but I’m much more into this character actor-looking dude with his eye bags being paired with the idol-looking dude. This is definitely high on my to-watch list now. Blinding Lights by madxthing You can tell I added that other Marvel one at the last second, and a lot of the play order was already set. I would normally have split them between the two halves. This is the one I picked first from a long list of MCU ensemble vids. It’s a classic example of that type of rhythmic editing common on Youtube where tons of canon audio is used, but all sound effects that complement the music. I felt the use of the “dance off” clip made it especially fun for a dance party. I also appreciate how recent it is (January 2022) and that it includes so much Shang-Chi and other recent MCU. I placed it here because I felt it was a nice change of pace. Comeback Kid by To Shanshu in Fiction When I saw this vid on grumpyphoenix’s recs list, I fell in love. Yes, that’s right, it wasn’t a request: I the notorious Buffy hater picked this vid because I liked it. The song is extremely repetitive, and the vid has one single joke, but somehow, it does not overstay its welcome. I think part of the reason is that even though it’s so intensely literal with Buffy getting knocked down a lot or coming back from the dead, the overall tone isn’t that comedic. The vidder is using the emotional quality of the song to tell a story about endurance. It’s humorous, but on the same level canon was. Even with all of the canon dialogue, the song lyrics are used very directly to support the vidder’s narrative. That makes this vid feel closer to oldschool vidding aesthetics to me compared to some that use dialogue. The vid has some sort of internal build. I don’t know the footage well for obvious reasons, but it seemed like the vid was starting with Buffy younger and more unsure and building to her more confident self, including more group shots where she has support. The internal motion and cutting also seemed to build, though I’m not going to take the time to do a shot by shot analysis. Glitter & Gold by boredcollegeedits God, if there’s one song that Youtube over-vids, it’s this. G&G plus clanking noises is basically its own youtube genre at this point, but it’s a great song for dance parties, and this is a nice example of the type. This particular vid also uses the lyrics well in a meta way. The door shutting on Scorpion on “sold their lives to a dream” is so pointed. This one has “A Word of Honor FMV” on screen on the title card and in the Youtube title. Only Human by Brian Smith I love this song and wanted to include a vid using it. I was pleased to find one while searching for Expanse vids. This show doesn’t have the biggest fandom, but a lot of Escapade attendees are into it. There are some excellent f/f vids I’ve enjoyed in the past, but the impression I get from Escapade attendees is that they have a variety of different ships and that many of them just like the show for its overall ensemble. I like how this vid showcases a lot of the cast. I also like how it feels like it’s making an argument and referencing specific moments in canon to tie these characters’ arcs together thematically. Of course, not knowing the show, I have no idea if it’s actually doing a good job of that! For all I know, it could be a trite or incoherent argument. But it certainly felt like there was something interesting in here. The vidder’s summary is: "Video: The Expanse Audio: 'Human' by Rag'n'Bone Man This is my favourite show on TV right now, credited as the Game of Thrones of sci-fi. I struggled to find a song for the show, but after hearing the Mass Effect Andromeda trailer, I realised Human might be a good match given how human the show is and what it focuses on.” I notice there’s no actual word like ‘fanvid’ in here and also that the vidder is highlighting the argument the vid makes. That’s a very classic aesthetic. 99 Problems by MockingJamie As soon as I realized I wanted to do something with pirate canons, I knew I had to include Black Sails. It’s such an interesting contrast to Our Flag Means Death, not just in terms of being dark but in terms of how far they were able or willing to go with their m/m storyline. I’m not normally a big fan of folk-y covers of rap. (Too many of them get presented to me in a way that reads as “now without the black people!!!”) But Hugo’s bluegrass take on 99 Problems keeps a lot of the energy and feels appropriate for a historical drama like Black Sails. This vid is another nice example of rhythmic Youtube editing. It doesn’t seem to be making an especially deep argument, but I’m also not very familiar with Black Sails. I love how it opens on that guy grinning and getting hit by a woman in humorous contrast to the lyrics. Overall, it’s a foot-stomping good time. To be honest, for my overall meta point, I’d have preferred a Black Sails vid that engaged with Flint’s backstory and arc, but the ones I found tended to be to long, slow, sad songs and not at all appropriate for a dance party. This vid got people stamping on the dance floor, and I wanted a high energy vid after the slower, more somber previous one. The vidder mentions their editing software in an on-screen credit, which is so very Youtube. Unsurprisingly, it’s Sony Vegas. Their description also lists “colouring: mine”. This explicit crediting of and focus on the color grade is another hallmark of a certain type of Youtube vidding culture. The Man Who Sold The World by Tabi_essentially The Untamed is hands down the most popular individual fandom among Escapade attendees (if you count MCU as multiple), and there are a million vids for it. But last time we had the dance party in 2020, I played three to get people into the fandom, and I’ve seen a hell of a lot of samey wangxian vids in the time since. There’s some variety in the form of rarer pairing vids, but those too become samey quickly, and that’s a shame because there’s so much plot in the show and so much to explore. When I saw this vid, I was blown away. I saw the title on AO3 and thought “Holy shit, that song?” I knew I had to include it as one of my Untamed picks for this year. I do find the POV a bit confused in this vid. I think it could have benefitted from more attention to who shows up on pronouns early in the song, but at the same time, it clearly establishes both of these masterminds and their relationship to the song. On the whole, I think it’s positing Nie Huaisang as the man who sold the world. I chortled at that clip of him on “Who knows, not me”. The one of him tossing a coin to the storyteller on “the man who sold the world” is fantastic. “For years and years I roamed” is interesting in that it’s on the saber. It makes a lot of sense in isolation, but this is what I mean about confused POV: I can certainly read this as metaphorically about Nie Huaisang’s search for the truth, but it looks more like the POV has switched to his brother’s. And then the POV switches to JGY for a couple of lyrics. The very end fascinates me: In quick succession, we see the temple intercut with JGY’s bloody hat, JGY jumping in front of NHS, the brothers as children, JGY holding NHS during the qi deviation, and JGY’s childhood. It’s a real gut punch of a vid about an aspect of the show I haven’t seen explored much. He said I was his friend, indeed! I’m left with a real sense of how much Nie Huaisang would have understood someone else overlooked and undervalued by their shitty society if he hadn’t gone quite so far. The vidder has collected their work on AO3 in a single chapter of a work titled “ A series of CQL and WangXian fanvids and edits “ with the songs listed in the notes, not even next to each embed. I think that’s a real pity, particularly since Youtube messes up a lot of embeds now. It really robs these vids of the sense that they are individual works worthy of comment and discussion in their own right. The vidder’s summary on Youtube includes: “Hi, Gen X Mom here still trying my hand at fanvidding! These were called AMVs back in my day - whether or not they were anime. :)” Sorry, Jules, but to a lot of AMV purists, they most certainly were not! LOL. Still, that’s an interesting point of reference. WTF by Aaronantium Okay, I broke my own rule a little on this one. Two years ago, at the last dance party, there were so few Witcher vids that I had to vid one just for the dance party. By now, there are considerably more, but almost none of them are danceable. The few that are that I could find were all by vidders who might already be known to the Escapade audience, and some were het. Aaron’s vid was made for Revelcon, but it was just too hilarious for me to pass up. I had to see its effects on the dance party. (And yes, people nearly died laughing when the first “WHAT THE FUCK!” played.) Aaron is a second generation fan with exposure to oldschool Media Fandom vids but also AMVs. This vid demonstrates the expected style of POV where shots of Jaskier singing come in as the lyrics start and pronouns match up precisely to the vid’s narrative. My favorite parts are all of the absolutely absurd facial expressions the vidder found. I placed this here in the play order because of how deep, meta, and depressing the previous vid was. I thought WTF would be even more hilarious coming right after that. Pa' Bailar by Studio Sagittarius Studio Sagittarius is a masterful Russian-speaking Youtube vidder. They use a lot of original animation and art. Unfortunately, many of their vids are also quite short and so not suitable for my purposes. I picked this one because I’m a big Julieta Venegas fan. A Russian editor vidding anime to an Argentinian-Uruguayan group featuring a Mexican pop star tickled my fancy. RUMORS by 给我一碗黑米粥 I thought it would be fun to put a jdrama vid after the previous AMV. I originally spotted this one on Youtube with some fugly subtitles added, but the credits indicated that the original was on Bilibili. I followed the link to this fun vid of one of my latest fandoms, Kei x Yaku. It’s a BL drama about a cop and a mobster investigating a conspiracy together. I’ve still only seen the beginning, but I was interested that one of the characters openly identifies as bisexual. What I like about this vid is how appropriate the song choice is. A lot of vidders use this song for non-canon ships with shippy subtext. But Kei x Yaku is apparently about these two fake dating as a cover for their investigation. The two random guys in the vid are a greek chorus of yakuza underlings who keep spying on them and thinking they’re getting it on when they’re actually doing some plot-related nonsense. I love their silly reaction shots. I also found the use of text here quite interesting. It often hits a beat late and isn’t always words I’d have chosen to highlight, which makes sense since presumably the vidder is Chinese. I Freakin' Love You by colls This is a vidder I suspect people already know, but this is a ship that has very few vids despite Star Wars being such a big franchise. I’ve been looking for a really solid finn/poe vid that is danceable, and this delivered. It has an excellent command of POV and a wonderful sense of movement, perfect for a dance party. I thought it would make a fun contrast to the relatively unknown jdrama preceding and the extremely wacky oldschool vid that follows. Moscow Drug Club by P.R. Zed This is the one vid I pulled from the Internet Archive this year. The novelty song killed me. Too funny! This is a type of comedy vid I’ve seen occasionally from oldschool Media Fandom: instead of the song illustrating some theme from canon that the vidder is pulling out, canon is used to illustrate the song. It’s not precisely an AU, but viewers who know canon will find it even funnier because it’s taking things totally out of context. (It reminds me of TM’s Copacabana Starsky & Hutch vid.) On “little red pills to stay awake”, the vidder has used a notorious torture scene with a fake suicide pill. It’s completely inappropriate for this lyric, which makes it all the goofier. At the same time, the overall vibe does fit. Illya is a Soviet agent who does like jazz and beatnik outfits. Blood // Water by Ирина Денищенко One of my big discoveries this year was that all the Russians have been vidding this recent Russian action movie I’d never heard of, Major Grom: Plague Doctor. I asked around, and it sounds like a fun one. I like knowing what’s going on in different parts of fandom. Much of the time, it’s yet more MCU, Harry Potter, and the same Asian media English speakers like, but sometimes, there’s a fandom we don’t tend to know about, and I love throwing those in. I thought it would be amusing to follow Illya, Soviet from a US show played by a Scottish actor, with some actual contemporary Russian characters. I liked this vid for how it clearly showed some major elements of the film that the slash ships are based on. It also uses the lyrics very directly in an accessible, oldschool style. The vidder has an excellent command of musicality, seen for example in the music change around 2:27. Ooh La-La by Helen_scram This one came from AO3 but from a Russian fandom combat. Obviously, I needed to follow that serious business Russian vid with… this. Its summary, in English and Russian, reads: “Kitsch, wank and other Guilty Pleasure.” It’s like they sent me an engraved invitation. What can I say about this vid? It’s a no good Kevin Sorbo sword and sandals movie vidded to one hit wonder dance pop and tagged with ‘Sexy sword fight’. In other words, a flawless masterpiece! mamma mia! By Emily Gardner Oh, the pain of trying to find a danceable nandermo vid! I particularly wanted to include this fandom this year because of the links to Our Flag Means Death. Because What We Do In The Shadows is a mockumentary, it is intentionally shot in an ugly style that’s hard to vid. This vid manages to make it move with pop music. I love the comedic look of the lyrics text. Even though the image quality is only moderate, that text really elevates the whole thing and made it still play well on a large screen. WWDITS is inherently a completely ridiculous show, but this vid does a great job at highlighting the absurdity, like using the doll cuddle on “told you we’re through”. But notice also how internal motion of Guillermo lifting the doll falls right on a beat. It’s solid use of internal motion like that that makes this vid flow despite the intentionally bland camerawork of canon. I Wanna Be Like You by zehstern I knew I’d be ending the first half by wrapping up my two themes. First, the pirate theme has built to Our Flag Means Death, this year’s slash fandom surprise hit just a few weeks before the con. The vids were already multiplying fast when I made this playlist, but the number of solidly danceable ones was low. Most were montages of funny show clips, and I wanted a song. And then I found this one. The song choice is brilliant! It’s upbeat and funny sounding anyway, but removing it from its Jungle Book context makes it funnier. At the same time, the lyrics tell a very clear story that makes the plot of the vid (and the actual plot of OFMD) easy to follow. Hall of Fame by Min Uona I reserved the prime ending slot for my fandom. There are a lot of BTS vids out there, but this is the first one I’ve seen that makes an actual meta point. The argument of most BTS vids is “look, so hot!” This one does so much more. While the visual quality isn’t crystal clear like that earlier BTS vid, I love how the vidder has set up this very explicit narrative and cut very precisely though not quickly (which is what both the footage quality and the song require). I thought this would be an interesting introduction especially for attendees who don’t know much about BTS. The contrast of their younger and older faces might not be so obvious, especially with the low image quality, but the shots of them at the UN are striking. How many pop groups do that? Second half: Genghis Khan by Idontgiveahuxx This year, Escapade had a Garak/Bashir panel on the ballot, and a lot of people voted for it. I thought it would be fun to open the second half with a vid of them. Sadly, danceable vids are a little thin on the ground, and I didn’t want to repeat the one from last time, which is to a song I wanted to save for something else. I looked around and found this cute recent vid. Though the show audio is not ideal, I was able to bump up the audio levels to be more even with the song, and putting it at the very beginning of a half meant that the dialogue was less disruptive than in the middle of people dancing furiously. I was pleasantly surprised by this vid. For a while, this song was over-popular for vidding, and I get why, but at the same time, the official music video is so nuts and so brilliant that most fanvids don’t really hold up. In this case, the vidder seems to have taken inspiration from the official video itself. As their blurb says: “‘I get a little bit gay James Bond’ - quote seen on tumblr.” I like how the vid captures that vibe of banter and a touch of danger that is so fun about this ship. What I didn’t even notice until I was putting together the dance party was that the vid has a 1:1 aspect ratio! Fascinating choice. Thought you were the perfect lover by Harumi Bazh And now for some self indulgence! A lot of Escapade missed the tumblr era, and I am all about education. What ship more epitomizes tumblr culture and thus is more important to know about than this: The most inexplicable! The most memetastic! The most fundamentally absurd! Onecest. I was also, of course, looking for horny vids. Escapade vidshows have gottten a little tame, and I’ve heard complaints. There are a lot of horny fan art vids for this ship, but sadly, they all reuse the same art and often not well. When I found this vid I was overjoyed: it’s so much clearer than most about what the ship actually is. I’m impressed by how the vidder used effects and various panels to stretch the extremely limited footage and create a narrative. I placed it here for maximum “WAT!!!” after the previous much less comedic vid for a normal ship from a normal fannish source. Classic 90s to JESUS CHRIST, TUMBLR. La Gozadera by AliceBlue Speaking of self indulgence, I desperately wanted to dance to this song. (And Gasolina, but I had to give up on the latter for this year.) A lot of the music I like is rarely, rarely vidded, and in this case, it makes sense. The lyrics are hard to use with most fandoms. I found only two vids in existence: this one to Latin Hetalia and another to Countryhumans. These are both fandoms that consist of anthropomorphic versions of countries. Hetalia itself is set in Europe, and many non-European countries have not appeared. Latin Hetalia is, of course, fan-made Latin American country characters. I’m told this is pretty popular among Latin American fans of the original. The vid is, of course, by a Spanish speaker. It’s a pretty standard fan art vid where the vidder added motion to still art. It’s an okay example of the type, though I think some of the motion is a little slow and doesn’t quite match the music. Still, if I wanted to dance to this song, this was the option available. I like how exuberant it is and how it shows off a type of fannish love not typically seen at Escapade. To my surprise, however, when the vid started playing, someone in the room screamed “Hetalia!” so I guess it wasn’t pure self indulgence on my part. I placed it here because, like Onecest, it’s a fandom that consists of fanon, created basically out of wholecloth. u can't touch this by findmeinthealps Okay, yes, a lot of people have seen this, but I wanted to slip Nirvana in Fire in. A lot of people went back and watched it after getting into c-dramas in the last couple of years. All those people trying to pimp it like four years ago are finally succeeding… Succeeding at making everyone vid interminable, slow-paced, depressing songs. It’s here in the play order to continue our theme of “WAT???” What can I say? I too am from the Oaktown, and I love this song. Seeing it paired with a serious Chinese historical drama makes me die laughing. At the same time, it really fits: the song is bragging about skills, and what could be more appropriate for this kind of martial artist character? The vid displays both hilarious literalism and wonderful musicality. As the vidder’s tag says: “You come at Mei Changsu you best not miss (but you will)” LOL. Lone Digger 100 by PhenomSage I had a request for a Mob Psycho vid (and then the Mob Psycho fan we were going to surprise with it did not attend, how dare). I know antis are annoying about some ship from this, but I could not find a good shippy vid. This one appealed to me for the great song and for looking completely nuts. It demonstrates excellent musicality. Check out the build of slower shots gradually zooming in at the beginning before the song and the editing break out into chaos. I placed it here in the play order because the crazy visuals fit with my progression of wackier stuff. The vidder’s Youtube blurb calls it an AMV, which it is, and lists the programs used: Vegas, of course, plus photoshop and after effects. Lean on me by Polish edition I knew Untamed would be easy to include, but I really wanted to get some of the other Chinese fandoms in this year. Heaven Official’s Blessing is one a lot of attendees are just getting into now, and it has a gorgeous animated version. (Look upon this and feel shame, Scum Villain!) While there are a lot of vids already, most of them are to long, slow, sad music. This one isn’t super energetic, but it felt dancey to me. This is labeled as an AMV, unsurprisingly, but what I most appreciate about it is how it’s cut a lot like live action. This measured pace and use of internal motion for rhythm is what I most enjoy in vids of animation. The vid sets up their two faces reacting and cute two shots in a way that is quite similar to a lot of classic slash vids. I thought it would make for a particularly accessible vid for those who don’t know the fandom yet and a nice break in the playlist from the faster preceding vid. THE TERROR / BOYS (LIZZO) by Allegra Rosenberg On the chance that the previous vid made everyone decide to go take a break, I wanted to put something next that was guaranteed to drag people onto the dance floor. Lizzo fits the bill. The Terror is not a fandom I expected to have many dance vids, but its fans abound at Escapade, and I got a specific request for it and a rec for this vid. This is a fantastic vid! The cutting is precise. The lyric matches are on point and hilarious (“come and get a taste” on the dead body!). The historical drama footage moves wonderfully to the modern song with a strong beat, and that’s down to the vidder’s skill. You could study this vid for tips on musicality. 20年入坑的我总算做了第一支朱白视频 (I’ve been in this fandom since 2020 and I’ve finally made my first Zhubai video) by 吃完了糯米饭 I see Chinese vidders also do the thing where they don’t give their work real titles. Arrrrgh. I asked someone to translate for me, but… well… I like alternating Western and Asian fandoms a bit, so I decided it was time for a Guardian vid. I looked through a lot of Guardian vids this year, and I found many of them a bit samey. A lot of the music wasn’t ideal either. And then I spotted this one. It’s a ‘Zhubai’ vid rather than a pure Guardian one, meaning that it contains a number of roles featuring those two actors. I felt it would be understandable yet fresh. Plus I love the tempo of the song. The vid does a great job of immediately establishing what it is. We open on a well known Guardian shot. (And look at how he turns on that rising noise in the music. Excellent musicality there!) But after that, we go straight to a shot of the other guy but from another canon and one that is hard to mistake for Guardian. The vidder then goes back to the same guy in Guardian. With these first three shots, we know what the vid is about. I enjoyed how the vidder alternated between using cuts to create tempo for all the short clips of smiles and subtle expression changes and closeups of items and using internal motion for tempo in the shots and parts of the song that could support that. I notice that the vidder hasn’t included lyrics for this highly repetitive song and doesn’t seem to be doing very exact lyric matches. I think the song was chosen more for its beat and overall sound, which I think is smart. It’s a shippy song overall, but the lyrics aren’t the interesting part. Hellfire by Gentlesideoffury We’re on to Untamed vid number two, and it’s a vid for me. Wen Ning is my fave, and almost no one vids him. I was very excited to find this one to a slightly less over-vidded Barns Courtney song. The youtube description describes it as a “Wen Ning edit”. The heavy color grading is typical of a certain kind of youtube vid. I’m not always a fan of that, but I like how this vidder paired it with those distressed video tape effects and used it to unify the fairly different-looking footage of Wen Ning. More than usual, this slathering of effects seems to fit the emotional tone of the song and of the story the vidder is trying to create. Despite the level of effects and color, the vid does conform pretty closely to traditional fanvid aesthetics in terms of how it uses the song. The vidder starts by establishing Wen Ning walking in his super gothed up naruto villain… err… his Living Dead outfit and then very young, living Wen Ning smiling. Immediately, we see not only that he’s the subject of the vid but that it’s going to be about his full arc, including the movie. “Cold as a valley where I lay my head” is paired with Wen Ning dying. “The devil in me” is Wen Ning as an out of control, mindless fierce corpse. It wasn’t until I was looking up the lyrics that I realized that the vidder had edited the song: they removed the second line “Cold as a woman in another man’s bed”. This is a common practice to make a song fit a vid narrative better and a smart choice here. “Ain't no chariots of fire come to take me home” is paired with WWX grabbing a possessed WN at the lake, showing how the rescue isn’t really enough. “I’m lost in the woods and I wander alone” is again him as a mindless fierce corpse, a time that he was metaphorically lost in the woods. “Run in an alleyway through a dead end street” is a funny clip but ends on WN murdering, which goes immediately into “Murdering promises that I just can't keep”. In the context of canon, he’s being controlled, but WN feels guilty about this and blames himself. “Cause I ain't dead yet” shows us WN’s first awakening as a sentient fierce corpse, and then we’re back to “chariots” with his final confrontation with his demons in the movie. The vid doesn’t go in strictly chronological order, but the way it uses badass fight scenes at the end, including the chronologically late ones from the end of the movie shows the specific narrative the vidder is building of Wen Ning’s transformation from innocent teenager to helpless puppet to zombie badass who has overcome his guilt and self doubt. Take Me to Church by hopelessnerd No one has seen this source, and I do not care. I found it via AO3 where it had a handful of kudos and few hits, so I figured it would be new to most. The song is massively overused, but this vid felt fresh to me for applying it to a bloody, fucked up movie version of Dorian Gray. I wanted some more badwrong in my playlist, and here it was, waiting for me. I thought the previous vid was a nice ramp up to this much bloodier one. I like how the vidder used black and white flashbacks in the murder and aftermath at the end of the vid. Overall, this just has a very nice, steady pace of cutting that goes with the song well. And, really, this is me: am I going to pass up a vid linking blowjobs and stabbing? good girls go to hell by ChemicalAttraction What could be more appropriate as a followup than Killing Eve? Though people are understandably disappointed with the finale, given that the series just ended, I felt like it was a good year to include it in the dance party. This vid uses more show audio than is ideal for a dance party, but it has a nice rhythm, and it shows a lot of sexy violence without being just a long montage of extra gross eye stabbings. I appreciated what the vidder did with the text, particularly since some of the canon dialogue somewhat obscured lyrics it was matching up with, and the text made it clearer what the connection was. Like many Youtube vids, this one credits the color grader in the blurb. It also uses the hashtag #fanvidfeed. Psycho Killer by allheadybooks Obviously, Hannibal had to come next. This one came from AO3, but I liked that it appears to be one of the vidder’s first vids. The tempo of the cutting is great, especially the moments where the vidder holds longer after a pattern of quick cuts. They have a good sense of how the music moves. I do think not providing it in HD quality is a pity given the gorgeous but under-lit visuals of Hannibal. One thing I especially appreciated was the use of juxtapositions like cutting the plum and washing blood from hands: The vid showcases the visual language and beauty of Hannibal and flirts with darkness without just being a total slasher movie gorefest. “I hate people when they’re not polite” caught me off guard. I know the song, but I’d forgotten that lyric, and it was hilarious with Hannibal. Gangsta's Paradise by XXZANABAEXX This one was also from Grumpyphoenix’s list. I was instantly in love. I don’t know this canon, but it doesn’t matter. This was one of the first vids I picked for this year. Look at this brilliant song choice! Ooh, it gives me chills! The vid has a gorgeous sense of inevitability, flowing with the lead through all of these centered compositions and beautiful, smooth camera movement. Even though some canon dialogue is used, there’s only a taste of it to enhance the message of the song lyrics. The vidder lists their software (Vegas, of course). This is one of my very favorites from this year. Look What You Made Me Do by frayadjacent Continuing the theme of darkness but much weirder, I decided to move on to this unusual Xena vid. I was a big fan of Xena back in its first season, and I always enjoy seeing vids that go beyond fluffy Xena/Gabrielle to really dig into meta about the show. I’ve seen plenty of vids to this song, but this is an especially interesting one. Between the lack of conventional subject matter and how very recently it had been posted, it only had like four kudos when I found it on AO3, so even though the vidder is probably known to plenty of Escapade attendees, I thought this vid would be new to them. Fray is a fantasic vidder in a classic fanvid style. This vid displays the expected musicality and command of POV. I picked it over fray’s many other excellent Xena vids for the fresh meta take and the quantity of Callisto CRAZYEYES. Bring the Action by jonesandashes The Old Guard was a big hit with Escapade attendees, including some who I knew wouldn’t be into most of my playlist, so I really wanted to include it. I didn’t find many vids that would be danceable. There were some interesting ones with constructed historical narratives, but I felt they were too dark and hard to follow for the dance party. I would ideally have liked a vid not on AO3 and thus new to attendees, but I never found anything as apt as this fun ensemble vid. Notice how the vidder times movement like the helicopter’s to changes in the music and uses the different singers to switch POVs. The humorous use of “Britney, bitch” to punctuate the vid is a highlight. Another Way by VielMouse Sentinel fandom is still going strong for some attendees, so I try to find a danceable Sentinel vid each year that I haven’t shown before. Though this one’s a little blurry, I loved the combination of psychedelic colors and electronic music. I found this one especially interesting because it’s an episode vid. We don’t commonly see new examples of those for older fandoms, and I wanted to celebrate that. I placed it here because I thought it would be fun to go from the oldschool slash fandom-feeling Old Guard to an actually oldschool slash fandom. (Well, not oldschool by Escapade standards, but��) Keep Coming Back to the Start by Arashinoookami There has always been considerable English-speaking fandom for East Asian media, and even some holdouts have recently gotten into fandoms like The Untamed, but media from other parts of Asia still lags behind in the consciousness of a lot of fans. I thought it would be fun to include at least one Thai drama since they produce quite a lot of BL. Bad Buddy seems to have the most active English-speaking fandom, and there are many vids. I picked this one because I found the visual storytelling particularly clear. I like how slow and measured the cutting is because it really highlights what this vid is about: their LITTLE FAAAAACES! As someone who doesn’t know canon, I do find that the vid drags a bit by the end, but the song is excellent for a dance party, and I love that it shows them kissing. I wanted to showcase how plenty of Asian dramas do show explicitly canonical m/m since many fans at Escapade have only dipped their toes into the mainland Chinese heavily censored end of the pool. The Anchor by swiftrax One thing I knew I absolutely had to have for the dance party was a good Sam Wilson vid, preferably a classic slash vid of Sam and Bucky. I knew exactly how much of a pain in the ass it was going to be too. (I’ll spare you the full rant, but, again, I can only show what people have made, and for a host of Hollywood Sucks reasons and also a lot of Fandom Sucks reasons, vids of major black characters from major Western media franchises are thin on the ground. Hardison is probably the only fan fave who’s actually easy to cover for a dance party.) I searched and searched. Youtube. Bilibili. All useless. Somehow, in previewing music on AO3, I missed this one. I must have tested it out somewhere in the very long intro section that isn’t very danceable. That’s what happens when I’m previewing hundreds of vids. Doh! I was whining on tumblr about a sad lack of Sam vids when this vidder showed up to comment on their in-progress Sam vid that computer death had put the kibosh on. I got curious and checked them out and realized they had the perfect vid for my needs all along! Also, they have a lot of extremely valid and correct AO3 tags such as: The Grumpy One is Soft For the Sunshine One, Lots of extremely meaningful eye contact, Sam Wilson is the light of Bucky's life, and the feeling is Mutual According to their AO3 work, this was “Done in a bit of a hurry in time for "Favourite Relationship" Day for TFATWS Week on Tumblr.” Musically, I thought this one fit nicely after the previous vid. It has a long slow build to a type of showstopper bombast I adore for vids. Structurally, it’s a classic slash vid with a lot of face closeups leading into two shots. Zero by TechnoPoet Leverage: Redemption has fans talking again, so I wanted to include a Leverage vid. I got this one from AO3. It’s a recent vid with only a few kudos, so I figured it might be new to many attendees. I like the smart song choice for Parker and the emotion of this one. everybody talks by editsandstuff Cherry Magic has a number of ardent fans at the con. This vid, labeled as an FMV on Youtube, came up in my searches. I thought the song would be good for a dance party, and it showcases the cuteness of the show nicely. True Love by Julih Moreno This one was a rec I was sent. It takes a lot to get me to care about yet another True Love vid, but this ship is so perfectly suited to the song. I like what the vidder did with the text, the aggressive Youtube color grade less so. What I did love is how well the vidder uses their reaction shots. There’s a whole lot of emotion packed into this vid. The POV isn’t very clearly established, and there’s an awkward audio edit, but I had to watch it five times to notice. I think that’s the hallmark of a solid grasp of building emotion via editing. I like how the vidder used the past footage only once at a key moment. Loving Him Was Red by Fannibalistic The Mandalorian panel didn’t make it this year, and I’d just been talking to a first-time attendee about their love of the show. I wanted a really solid slash vid for it. I spotted this triumph of earnest cheese on AO3. The vidder has tagged it with: “Fanvids, Idiots in Love, Inspired by Taylor Swift, Which is a tag I never expected to use”, so you know it’s some quality shit. I love how this more country-sounding Taylor song brings out the space Western vibes. Those long shots of them racing across desert are so appropriate for this sound. The strong color effects are used for humorous literalism here. I appreciate the corny iris transitions and the heart cutout. This is a vid for the inner 13-year-old in the best way. What makes the vid work so well is how polished it is at being exactly what it’s trying to be: the font choice and text placement are precise. The cutting is clean aside from a stray frame late in the vid. The vidder isn’t afraid to linger on faces to build up the emotion. When half of your ship has a helmet on, you need those moments of significant eye contact and the body language to show the relationship, which the vidder used excellently. Interestingly, now that I’m rewatching it, I realize there’s no clear establishment of POV. I could have sworn I knew who the POV character was, but now that I look, I can’t see any evidence. This one is here in the play order because it felt like it belonged in the drunken sing-along, lighters up section of the evening. (Not that anyone actually has lighters now or would use them in a hotel ballroom, but still.) люблю/прощай (I Love You, Farewell) by birdcellar This was pure self indulgence on my part. Do I know this canon? Does anyone at Escapade know this canon? No, and I don’t care. Look at this fantastic, angsty enemies-to-lovers vid. The visual language is so clear and the closeups so good that I feel like I know their relationship. This is a case where the vidder is definitely using the lyrics. It’s a Russian vidder vidding a Russian song. But it almost doesn’t even matter because the narrative is so clear without them. Jeeves wants to break free by WTF Anything Retro 2021 (Anything_Retro) After that angsty vid to a fandom nobody knows, I thought it would be fun to move to yet another Russian vidder… vidding a fandom everybody at the con knows to equally familiar music. This is a brilliant comedy vid with great timing on all those absurd faces everyone makes. Bertie’s extra idiotic expression at 1:24 paired with “I’ve fallen in love” kills me, the trombone on 2:04 similarly. It also has a wonderful musicality. I love them jumping over the railing on the previous “I’ve fallen in love”. The whole vid is apparently an homage to the original music video, which explains the heavy use of drag. Kudos to the Anything Retro team from WTF. That’s Winter Temporary Fandom Kombat. Obviously. Na Na Na by Sal绫罗 I was in a real quandary over what Good Omens vid to show. There are a billion great ones, so I wanted to try to get far away from vidders people would be familiar with. I stumbled across this Bilibili vid with the typical double subtitles for an English song. Other than that, one would have no idea where it came from. I liked what a classic vid it was, no show audio at all. The use of One Direction really highlights how ridiculous these two are. Hurry Hurry by AceofWands I wanted to get some old favorites in towards the end of the evening, and SGA is always a crowd pleaser. I liked this vid for being so recent and being such a great and ridiculous character study of Rodney. It’s a perfect song choice. The vidder opens on an excellent establishing shot of messy snacks around a keyboard and goes to Rodney for the start of the lyrics. It’s a classic opening that establishes POV very clearly. Many lyrics are matched extremely literally with Rodney checking his pockets on a line about that and so on. Drop Dead Gorgeous by nostalgia Wow, the Master got hot. This is another AO3 one. I like the intentionally jerky rhythm to the cuts and how this showcases the many faces of the Doctor and Master. Doctor Who is a fairly popular fandom among Escapade attendees, but the minimal attention this vid had received on AO3 made me think it would be new to people. Right Kind of Wrong by xxLornyTunesxx Like Doctor Who, original Star Trek has so many vids out there I’m spoiled for choice, but when I heard this, I knew it was my pick. This half of the vidshow was less overpowering with current Asian fandoms, but it’s where I stuck a lot of the random stuff nobody is in the fandom for. For that reason, I wanted to end my little progression of better-known Western fandoms on a really classic note before one last epic Untamed vid, and nothing is more classic than Kirk/Spock. The vibe of this song is also right for the very end of the night rather than for the most energetic dancing. When I heard what song the vidder had picked, I burst out laughing. Corny LeAnn Rimes would not have been my first association with Spock, and the absurd contrast is delightful. It’s full of talky face and corny 00s effects and I do not care. This vid is a glorious triumph of camp. Good to You by shirasade I admit it. I cheated for this one. Anyone who cares about Untamed vids knows shirasade, one of the finest vidders in the fandom, but this vid floored me, and I had to use it. As you’ve noticed, I included two Untamed vids before this, neither wangxian. Truthfully, I did not feel their chemistry in canon. I found Lan Zhan an unlikable prig who seemed angry not tragically pining. Wei Ying just seemed annoying a lot of the time. This vid makes me feel everything I ought to be feeling from canon. It suddenly makes me feel Lan Zhan’s devotion and see why Wei Ying is worth it. The song has the build that makes a truly epic vid, and it’s used with such musicality! The tempo, the internal movement, the emotions: everything swells when the music does. That one piece of dialogue is edited horribly, but I can forgive that for this overall triumph. Lan Zhan being beaten and then stepping up to defend Wei Ying on “has paved every path that I've known” gives me chills. Out of the many, many Untamed vids I looked at, this one is truly worthy of capping off the night. I Ship It by Not Literally Productions For our very last video, we show this parody and celebration of fandom rather than an actual vid.

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