The year was 2006. Maybe it was 2007/8/9. I had shitty internet and hogged the family computer set up in the basement. It was riddled with viruses after trying to download full discographies of Japanese rock bands who sang the opening songs of my favorite anime at the time. I was chronically online before the term chronically online even existed. My favorite activity was “computer” and my favorite social activity was “computer, but with friends.” You could say with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses that I was “living the life” or just “in it deep.”
Much of my computer time was spent loading up Fall Out Boy and (insert any other pop punk band) music videos to look at the various band guys that I was sexually attracted to as a preteen (but never got to meet under probably illegal circumstances due to the fact that I never got to go to Warped Tour, but that’s for another time). I think we forget about it now, but music videos were still a pretty big deal. We had a whole television program still dedicated to them! There also was a different type of music video that my classmates were not aware of at the time but were equally as important to me as seeing Ryan Ross looking like That (iykyk)—and that is the AMV, or anime music video.
For those of you uninitiated, an anime music video is exactly what it sounds like. Fans of a certain show and/or characters with various levels of video editing skills would splice up clips from the movie or show behind a song. This was back when it was a free-for-all on the internet and nobody was making money off of anything, and YouTube didn’t care if you were using licensed music really. Linkin Park and Papa Roach songs were popular for edgy fight scenes. Evanescence was used for things that were particularly emo (think Sasuke from Naruto). This was the time that “Numa Numa” and Dane Cook bits were popular (thank god they no longer are!). And then there were the shipping AMVs to “Everytime We Touch” by Cascada.
I cannot tell you how many hours of my adolescent life was spent watching the same Sasuke X Naruto video over and over again because I cannot remember, but knowing who I was as a person it was probably a lot. There were also these Naruto chat room AMVs I’d watch all the time that were basically people writing out what they’d want the characters of Naruto to be like if they were ~quirky and ~random and had internet access. That’s a whole other rabbit hole that I’m not going to get into for this newsletter (aw man), but as a treat I will let you in on a secret: I also made AMVs.
I made like two of them because I was not and am not computer savvy and didn’t have the right computer to make anything actually good. We were using Windows Movie Maker—truly in the trenches. But I will let you know that it was a Yu-Gi-Oh! GX AMV with Nightshroud and Goth Zane dueling each other to an Escape the Fate song and when I checked years ago it was at around 30,000 views and when I checked again it was nowhere to be found (I’m guessing it got the copyright boot). Please nobody find this, I do not want to see it. I know it was bad. I was there when it was written.
But anyways, let’s get to present day. Anime music videos as I grew up with them are gone, but they have been replaced with something else: the fan edit. Fan edits can be about anime, sure, but they’re mostly edits of videos of real people, usually K-pop stars or actors, where there’s a short 30-second snippet of a popular sound that is probably sexy or Ariana Grande and the clips are edited to go back and forth very fast. They usually involve clips of a guy sticking his tongue out, breathing heavily, or taking his shirt off. Who the man is changes pretty frequently but right now I’m getting a lot of young Hayden Christensen and Cillian Murphy, and some guy I’ve literally never heard of before. Oh, and there was one of Milo Manheim that was almost a jump scare for me (he’s no longer just Zed from Zombies).
Oh you don’t see these types of videos on your feed? You think that’s weird that I get fed fan-made content of hot people looking hot like cereal for breakfast? You think I’m poorly-adjusted and too horny for my age? I’m almost 30 so I should settle down and start a family? Maybe so! But I physically cannot stop.
When I was a thirteen year-old weirdo watching anime music videos in my parents’ basement late at night, when I would imagine myself at 29 years old I had so many expectations for myself: sexual experience and a good wardrobe at least. Instead here I am, in the middle of the night, on my phone, watching edits of hot people to distract me from the human urge to have someone to kiss (something I never had back then, and something I haven’t had in months). Some things truly never change.
This Tuesday, March 12th I’m doing some two-prov in a bracket-style show with Blue Txt Bubbles in It’s Improv Madness, 7:30pm at the Bughouse! Also this Friday the 15th Ghost Rats has our final Date Night with the Rats of March, so come get tickets and pregame St. Patrick’s weekend here.