Vidding Love Meme

[thuviaptarth]

I am in a terrible mood, so I would like to make it better by seeing people say nice things about vids. Let's do a vidding love meme.


Instructions/Rules

1. Comment with your username, a link to your vids, and the fandoms you vid for (or a selection you've vidded the most for, if you're all over the place).
   
2. People will comment telling you what their favorite vid by you is, what show/character/pairing they think you vid best, and other positive comments. They can also mention what they think you should vid more of, or anything else concerning what they like about your vidding. If you don't want anything like suggestions for what you should vid more, just mention it in your original comment.
   
3. Post it to your journal!
   
4. This is a love meme. No wank, no insults, no concrit. Just the love!
   

Comments

[ghost_lingering]

Is this the day I finally give you feedback on ***Flawless?! Maybe it is!!!

I love so many of your vids, but I keep wanting to write you essays about ***Flawless and I keep failing at that. The way I've described ***Flawless — both the vid and the song — to people is that they succeed because they are flawed. In that vein I am going to write this up and it is going to possibly make no sense, but then I will have written it and if it is flawed, well. The important thing is that I love the vid?

In regards to the song: I have a coworker who complains that the line "I woke up like this" doesn't work because no one wakes up like that; I contest that Beyonce knows that and she is playing with the theater of "waking up like this". She knows no one is perfect, but the imperfection and the playacting of perfection is to be celebrated anyway. Many people, particularly white women, criticize her for being "feminist-lite" or whatever. I think they miss the point in assuming that there is some kind of platonic ideal of feminism. There is no One True Feminism, no singular way to be a perfect feminist. If you are a feminist you are a flawed one; that doesn't mean your feminism shouldn't be celebrated. Beyonce is flawed; that doesn't mean she is not powerful. We are all flawed. None of us woke up like this. That doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate ourselves anyway. Likewise, Disney princesses are flawed; their identities as women — as princesses — and their stories re-enforce tropes and stereotypes. At the same time, they are wonderful characters, enjoyable stories, beautiful animations all at once. Their character flaws are so rarely flaws at all, and so we love them because we love the idea that we can be what they are — princesses, perfect, the sort of person who does wake up like this. Their actual flaws — those pesky reenforcements of stereotypes — are larger than themselves.

The vid can't commit to either "Disney princesses are terrible" or "Disney princesses are wonderful" and that lack of commitment from either side is where the magic lies. The failure to commit to one side is far from being a flaw; it is the central strength. Each side can't fully exist without the other: you can't understand why Disney princesses are terrible without understanding that Disney princesses are beloved; you can't understand that Disney princesses are beloved without first understanding why we love them — because we want to be princesses, which in itself is the central reason why they are terrible. The two sides feed into each other, even as they resist each other. The song, likewise, plays with the tensions of wanting to look perfect (/have the perfect relationship/be the most powerful) and how those desires are, themselves, dangerous and imperfect and flawed. So the two sources — the song and Disney — play into each other and off each other with very similar problems and desires.

AND of course that's before even getting to the editing of the vid, the ways that you switch between characters, underscoring just how similiar each character is, just how visually similar they are, as if you can cut one out and just paste another in her place. AHHHHHHHHH, IT IS SO GOOD. It echoes my own love/hate relationship with Disney so well I could rewatch it for hours on end have rewatched it for hours on end.