Lord King Bad Vid: The Backlash Edition

[sisabet]

Okay, so part of me can just realize that yesterday? Was a bad day to be in fandom and not reflective of us as a whole, thank god. Another part of me knows that I have to be at work in an hour and I really don't have time for this. Another part of me thinks I need to respond to comments or work on a con report if I am gonna sit around typing and another part of me thinks that all of this is ridiculous and I need to go take a walk and chill.

Of course I will ignore all good sense and post this now. God.

So, I understand that there are people in fandom who possibly resent the phrase Lord King Bad Vid. Okay. I understand. I resent a lot of things. I resent the existence of lima beans.

Here is the thing - I won't cook lima beans and NO ONE says you have to participate, enjoy or embrace the label LKBV. Now here is where it gets tricky: If I see someone else enjoying a dish of lima beans - no matter how distasteful and gross I might find it? I am gonna refrain from raining on their lima bean parade. It is just the type of person I am, I believe we all deserve the right to eat or not eat lima beans in peace even though I personally think they are Satan's legume. Same with LKBV. Seriously, it is.

The vidder gets to make the call that she is making a Lord King Bad Vid. That is the only person, you guys. And some LKBVs are freaking brilliant and we love them and don't find anything bad about them at all. YAY! We love vids! Again I say YAY! This is a *good* thing and if you are taking it as a larger fandom indictment on your personal taste because this vid carries a label of LKBV and you love it? You, my friend, are a wee bit on the sensitive side, aren't you? Get over yourself and learn to love, man.

Are you a vidder and feel the term LKBV is being applied to your vids unfairly? Or you fear that it will? Do you secretly suspect that all you make are cheesy vids with poor musical choices and clumsily applied filters? Well, dude. Welcome to vidding. I'd say about 97% of us feel this way about *all* of our vids, one time or the other. Vidding is hard. You are laying open a part of yourself and it is all in visual form and so it is very very easy to take it and yourself too seriously.

Actually, I think that is what the LKBV does for me - it frees me from worrying about taking myself too seriously. I can expose my fluffy insides and do it in an extremely freeing way. I do resent the terminology that the label "Lord King Bad Vid" is a distancing tool we use - that we do it to preserve our cool for our "serious" projects: "Just because I am making this over the top vid to a George Michael song that made me weep when I was 13 does not mean I really mean it." Well, fuck that. If you don't MEAN every single bit of your LKBV then I want nothing to do with it. The vid itself is about admitting, "Hey, so not cool! Look, me - over here! I am crying right now!"

"So, Liz," you ask, "if we are not at least partially ashamed of the Lord King Bad Vids we make then why do we even have to label them? Why not just put them out as any other vid and revel in them that way?"

Well, doofus, because it is FUN. Also - take a vidder's self proclaimed LKBV and take another vid she has done and then another vid she has done and then another vid she has done. Line them up in a grid. Now, remember when we were kids and Sesame Street would sing that song "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong. Can you guess which thing is not like the other?" Cause it will be different. It will want to hang out with its people and be in a show and make people laugh! It has to sing! It has to dance! It has to be SPARKLEY! Your vid is Broadway bound (or the nearest dinner theater bound) and nothing you can do will stop that.

Now, as far as the idea that LKBV is a label we give less sophisticated vid or poorly edited vids? I call bullshit on that. Have you seen the LKBVs from this year's show?? Cause, boy howdy - those are some good vids.

Comments

[zoerayne]

Word.

Also? There's been wank about LKBV? I must've missed that amongst the posts where my fandom is imploding and eating itself like a giant black hole of wanky doom. *sigh*

[vagabondage.livejournal.com]

I stand up and applaud every single thing you said in this post! Publically, and loudly.

[minim_calibre]

Actually, I think that is what the LKBV does for me - it frees me from worrying about taking myself too seriously. I can expose my fluffy insides and do it in an extremely freeing way. I do resent the terminology that the label "Lord King Bad Vid" is a distancing tool we use - that we do it to preserve our cool for our "serious" projects: "Just because I am making this over the top vid to a George Michael song that made me weep when I was 13 does not mean I really mean it." Well, fuck that. If you don't MEAN every single bit of your LKBV then I want nothing to do with it. The vid itself is about admitting, "Hey, so not cool! Look, me - over here! I am crying right now!"

Yes yes yes!

This is exactly why I've been navel gazing about the LKBV's spiritual sibling, crackfic. Because I am realizing that, man, I love crackfic. When I think of authors I love, and I think of what work of theirs I love best, it's usually their most crack-addled creation, the one they posted with warnings about hippogriffs and unicorns and id within. I love its freedom, its sparkle, its sequined jumpsuit of unrestrained yearning and joy and emotional rawness.

Which, naturally, is why LKBVs give me so much pleasure, too.

[barkley.livejournal.com]

Yes! I am in the process of making a "vid to my favorite song" for my fandom of choice, and it's all wrong, and wrong and more wrong, and I said, "Self, is this a LKBV?" And my self said, "No." It's just a vid you wanted to make." I know LKBV. I know when I feeeel them deep in my heart. And the current one in production? It's just fun and breezy and wrong, and I really enjoy dating it, but I do not draw doodles around our names together.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

In other words, LKBV:vids :: crackfic:fic.

[destina.livejournal.com]

There was a LKBV backslash?!?! I feel like I am so totally out of whatever fannish loop exists for vidding.

(And yeah, yesterday was definitely a bad day for much of fandom, it seems.)

[trelkez.livejournal.com]

I tried to explain the concept of LKBV to my dad, as I showed him some of the VVC vids. I told him, "A LKBV is so earnest and heartfelt that it might just make you feel a little bit wrong even as it touches that place in your heart that still connects emotionally with Journey and Air Supply. They might make you laugh. They might make you cry. They might even make you really FEEL Clark's manpain." His response to which was, "What if I don't want to FEEL Clark's manpain?" What a wuss.

[klia.livejournal.com]

I think it's inevitable that whenever you coin a fannish term, as its usage spreads through fandom, people are going to adopt it and apply their own definitions. Heck, during VVC, I heard a lot of things referred to as LKBV that left me going, "Buh?" From some, I got the impression it was being used in an eye-rolling, mocking way about stuff they considered cheesy and *bad*.

[ficbyzee.livejournal.com]

Okay, so part of me can just realize that yesterday? Was a bad day to be in fandom and not reflective of us as a whole, thank god.

Yesterday was a *horrible* day in fandom. There were, like, five different wanks on my flist. (Okay, more like... two-ish. But! Still.)

I don't really have anything else to say on the topic--I agree with you, and LKBVs rule, and stuff.

[debchan.livejournal.com]

All by Myself made me weep. I love the Lord King Bad Vid. In other words, word.

[sdwolfpup.livejournal.com]

I can never seem to explain LKBV with words, I have to use hand gestures to fully encompass it. I'm saving this post because it's exactly what I mean when I make the hand flaily motion.

[that_mireille]

Here via metafandom. I'm not a vidder, but I'm an avid *watcher* of vids, and this is exactly *why* I seek out vids that the creator has labeled as a Lord King Bad Vid. I *love* them, because... seriously, they're awesome, and half the time I'm sniffing back tears because OMG I am totally feeling Spike's (or whoever's) pain.

Of course, I also have a secret stash of 80s/early 90s sappy love ballads burned to CD and sorted out by pairing that they TOTALLY fit if you could get past the fact that it's Celine freaking Dion, so... I have the *soul* of a LKB vidder, just not the skills. ;)

[melata-fic.livejournal.com]

LKBV is a genius term. I love it, because it is an excuse to make vids you otherwise wouldn't, and to make it work in a way that breaks people's brains.

I'm here from metafandom, and am not even a vidder, and I recognise this.

[darlulu.livejournal.com]

I just received my VVC DVDs yesterday and have been gorging myself on all the brilliant viddage. I still haven't gotten through the entire playlist yet, but I did reach the LKBVs, and may I say that they swept me off my feet and made me *believe* in them to such a degree it's downright scary!

Also: I heard that you'd previously created a SV LKBV to "Father Figure," but couldn't find it on your site, so am I mistaken, or is there somewhere I could download this alleged awesome sounding vid?

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm one of those academics who've expressed doubts about the LKBV label, and while I probably shouldn't, here I am trying to explain why. I totally get that it's a label of love for you, and I may end up eventually reacting to it the way you want me to. Right now, I'm not. (And I should note that, as someone who loves to watch your vids, you're actually a bit closer to serving me lima beans than to just eating your lima beans off at the side. Of course you don't have to cook for me -- but you used to cook without them, so things have changed for me. Of course I don't have to eat them -- but I love your cooking. Also, because you're an influential cook, other cooks are following your lead. My favorite restaurant, Vividcon, just changed one of its meals to a lima bean supper. All this really overstates my discomfort with the LKBV label, which really is mixed feelings and not total rejection.)

Vids are diversifying, and maybe we need a term for vids that are at their core about an emotional commitment to a particular fandom/song pairing, as opposed to vids with messages other than Love or vids that invite some other type of reaction. But here's the thing: you called them Lord King Bad Vids, not Big Warm Fuzzy Secret Heart Vids. That's why I see an element of distancing and disavowal when people use the term. Maybe you aren't disavowing at all, but you're not the only one using the term. And once it exists, people are going to use it to describe other people's vids, even though you don't want them to.

I know I'm not going to convince you, and that's okay. As I said, maybe I'll come around when the term is no longer new. But I don't think I'm "missing the point." I'm getting a different point.

[anoel.livejournal.com]

So much word for this post. You can't take things too seriously sometimes, LKBVs are all about the love from the music to the characters to the relationships. And yes, they're awesome just different.