lierdumoa | More Vidding Ramble

Happy birthday kitkatbyte!

So I was talking to

permetaform last night about a post I wrote a little while back on how a lot of vidding resembles meta to me. The vidder is presenting her interpretation of canon -- and she's got the clips to back it up.

There are the character manifestos. Superman is basically a character manifesto for Brian Kinney.

sisabet's Cowboy is a character manifesto for Angel.

heres_luck's Superstar is a character manifesto for Faith.

There are ship manifesto's. My Pretty When You Cry vid was basically a ship manifesto for Beecher/Keller.

gwyn_r's Valentine Heart was a ship manifesto for Wesley/Lilah.

astolat's Drop Dead Gorgeous is a parody of a ship manifesto on Clark/Lex (in which most of the real meaning is ignored in favor or the pretty).

A lot of vids argue a point.

permetaform's Why argues that Lex's corruption is largely the fault of a series of betrayals from both Clark and his father Lionel, and that both of them are damaging Lex and forcing him to become whatever it is he's becoming.

linzeems's Falling From the Sky is an argument that Lex is in fact the hero of the story -- that Clark is too caught up in his own self-righteousness and Lionel is just too plain evil and their moral codes are more fucked up than Lex's, even if Lex is kind of evil. My very first vid, Beautiful, argued that Ted and Brian really aren't as different as they appear, and that Ted is as fully developed a character as Brian.

The main difference, of course, between written meta and meta vidding is that virtually no written meta is intended to be art, whereas virtually all vids are. I think that's the main reason why I haven't seen anyone make this connection. People who write meta generally don't vid. People who vid don't generally write meta. Neither online hobby is nearly as popular as fic writing, so vidding is more often compared to fic than it is to meta.

Which isn't to say that some vidding isn't like fic. There is a lot of narrative vidding. I've seen a number of humor vids that take the source clips and construct a story quite different from the one the source is actually telling. Other vids try to retell the source story in a different way, which I think has elements of both narrative and meta.

In fact, I'd say most vids (not an overwhelming majority, but a majority) both retell the source and present an argument for a particular interpretation of the source (including some of the ones mentioned above).

Note: For the vids I chose to mention here -- I just named a bunch of vids that either I made, or I know and like. I didn't really do much research for this post. Just my two cents for the day. Ten cents, maybe.

Also, GIP.