Well, this debate seems mostly over, but since I was one of the people last year who imprecisely used the term "fannish" to describe the concept under discussion here, I figured I'd chuck in my two cents:
I'm relatively new to fan vids (four years, maybe?), but all the vids that I first encountered, that drew me into this area of fandom, were vids that overtly celebrated the vidder's emotional attachment to a particular character or relationship (or less frequently, the show/movie as a whole). And my impression from various History of Vidding discussions has been that vids like that, which whack you with an emotional 2X4, have been the meat and potatoes of vidding from the get-go.
I happen to respond well, and reliably, to vids like that. They're like a drug. I grabbed the word "fannish" to describe them not only because they're so prevalent in fandom, but because they offer easy, obvious access to the kind of passion that drives all fannish activity.
Vids that have other goals -- aesthetic play, interrogation of a genre, etc. -- are less reliable for me. When they work for me, they're brilliant, worlds better than an "OMG they are *so* doing it" vid (after all, I'm someone whose dominant mode of fannish participation is still the episode review). But when they don't work for me, they leave me cold -- I don't even get a cheap high. So the increase in number of vids like this that I saw at VVC last year was definitely a topic of interest to me. If I'd had a better word come to mind, I would have used it; I certainly didn't mean for people to take from it the implication that vids with goals other than sheer emotion aren't made by fans, or motivated by fannish enthusiasm.
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I'm relatively new to fan vids (four years, maybe?), but all the vids that I first encountered, that drew me into this area of fandom, were vids that overtly celebrated the vidder's emotional attachment to a particular character or relationship (or less frequently, the show/movie as a whole). And my impression from various History of Vidding discussions has been that vids like that, which whack you with an emotional 2X4, have been the meat and potatoes of vidding from the get-go.
I happen to respond well, and reliably, to vids like that. They're like a drug. I grabbed the word "fannish" to describe them not only because they're so prevalent in fandom, but because they offer easy, obvious access to the kind of passion that drives all fannish activity.
Vids that have other goals -- aesthetic play, interrogation of a genre, etc. -- are less reliable for me. When they work for me, they're brilliant, worlds better than an "OMG they are *so* doing it" vid (after all, I'm someone whose dominant mode of fannish participation is still the episode review). But when they don't work for me, they leave me cold -- I don't even get a cheap high. So the increase in number of vids like this that I saw at VVC last year was definitely a topic of interest to me. If I'd had a better word come to mind, I would have used it; I certainly didn't mean for people to take from it the implication that vids with goals other than sheer emotion aren't made by fans, or motivated by fannish enthusiasm.