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Climbing Up The Walls
There were a few vids coming out of Vividcon this year that I already knew quite a bit about before watching. Climbing Up The Walls, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
obsessive24's multifandom incest vid, was one of those, so I've been looking forward to it finally being posted. And now that it has been, it's inspired me to meta, which I don't do as often as I'd like, so you know it was doing something right.
(If you haven't already done so, you should watch it, and read the vidder's notes here; if incest is something you can bear to watch, regardless of how you feel about the pairings in question, it's well worth the download. Be warned, though, it's fairly graphic.)
Note: The following is, obviously, my personal opinion.obsessive24 is one of my favourite vidders, and Climbing Up The Walls is - objectively, and subjectively - a Very Good vid. Like many of the other vids released in the past few days, I was expecting to love it.
I didn't.
I thought it was an excellent vid, both technically and creatively. It had a fantastic premise, and a strong argument that was carried through the vid. It just didn't work for me.
obsessive24 has this to say about the vid:
I love Sam/Dean and Simon/River and Peter/Nathan. They're my OTPs of each respective fandom. But sometimes I wonder if we don't think enough about what shipping them actually means. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly support adults having the right to decide with whom to have consensual sex. On the other hand, we have an overly protective older sibling and a often mentally disturbed younger sibling; we have death and self-sacrifice and a certain level of guilt flying left and right; we have control issues, power issues, not to mention domineering and/or absentee parental figures and, well, this is all starting to sound like a big melting pot of Bad. Add sex and stir.
That's really an excellent summary of the vid, and it's a statement I can put my weight behind. Incest is one of my big fictional kinks, precisely because of whatobsessive24 is saying, and that's the same thing the vid - effectively - illustrates. So why didn't I love it?
I think, primarily, it was the use of external source that threw me off. External source is a tricky thing to use in vids, and one there's still a fair amount of controversy over. Personally, I'm all for it (which I know sounds counterintuitive, given my last statement), but in this case, it felt a little ... I dunno, like cheating?
Which is not to say that AU vids, which use external source to create a story not shown in canon, aren't perfectly valid. Tricky to pull off, yes, but no less enjoyable when they're done well. I think maybe the sticking point with this particular vid was that, for better or for worse, I didn't know it was going to be AU. Would I have liked the vid better had I not had any preconceived notions? Maybe. Maybe not. The thing about these three pairings - and the thing I was expecting to see explored in the vid - is that they're already so incestuous; there's already so much canon support for the pairing. So, in a way, using (obvious, and liberal amounts of) external source and manips to create a story for the vid seemed to be overlooking the actual story of these characters - which, when it comes down to it, is not all that different.
Whether or not they're having sex on the side, these relationships are already unhealthy, already co-dependent and bordering on incestuous. In fact, another ofobsessive24's vids, Post Blue, is one of my favourites, and one that explores the relationship between Simon and River as it's portrayed in canon; some of the clips may be recontextualised through isolation, juxtaposition, and the use of music, but it still is, essentially, made up of things that happened in canon. Whether or not they were intended to be read in the way they're portrayed in the vid, this scene happened, and so did this - which is, essentially, what every vid making any kind of argument relies on; to say, see, this character/relationship really is like this. By using so many external sources in Climbing Up The Walls, it felt, in a way, as if the vidder was acknowledging that this was not the sort of story that could be told within the confines of canon, that this was a made-up story rather than an exploration of the relationships presented in canon, which is, I think, doing the vid a disservice. The airtime given to the external sources, as well as the fact that the vid was attempting to tell three separate (if related) stories, sort of combined to make me feel like, at the end, there really wasn't much vid there; at worst, it felt like the canon shots were used to give context to the sex scenes, rather than the sex scenes being used to enhance the message of the vid.
(Interestingly, the use of Jensen Ackles' Dark Angel scenes didn't bother me at all, which is, I suppose, why the use of external sources either enhancing or detracting from a vid is such a fine, and extremely subjective, line.)
Of course, like I said earlier, there's nothing wrong with telling a story that is AU, and if all the vidder was aiming for was to tell a fic in vid form, she pulled it off admirably. Comparedayln03's Tower Over Me, which is clearly AU, and clearly intending to be; that vid works for me brilliantly within its own constructed universe, without necessarily attempting to comment on the relationship between Anders and Duck as portrayed in canon. The difference here, I think, is that I feel that Climbing Up The Walls is attempting to comment on the canonical relationships at the same time as it constructs an AU out of them, and the combination seemed to me to work against the vid rather than in its favour; it seemed like almost exactly the same story could have been told, and the same points made, using canon alone, and I think the vid would have resonated a lot more strongly with me if it had.
All that said - I liked the vid, and I'll probably be watching it again. It just isn't making it onto my list of favourites.
obsessive24's multifandom incest vid, was one of those, so I've been looking forward to it finally being posted. And now that it has been, it's inspired me to meta, which I don't do as often as I'd like, so you know it was doing something right.(If you haven't already done so, you should watch it, and read the vidder's notes here; if incest is something you can bear to watch, regardless of how you feel about the pairings in question, it's well worth the download. Be warned, though, it's fairly graphic.)
Note: The following is, obviously, my personal opinion.
obsessive24 is one of my favourite vidders, and Climbing Up The Walls is - objectively, and subjectively - a Very Good vid. Like many of the other vids released in the past few days, I was expecting to love it.I didn't.
I thought it was an excellent vid, both technically and creatively. It had a fantastic premise, and a strong argument that was carried through the vid. It just didn't work for me.
obsessive24 has this to say about the vid:I love Sam/Dean and Simon/River and Peter/Nathan. They're my OTPs of each respective fandom. But sometimes I wonder if we don't think enough about what shipping them actually means. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly support adults having the right to decide with whom to have consensual sex. On the other hand, we have an overly protective older sibling and a often mentally disturbed younger sibling; we have death and self-sacrifice and a certain level of guilt flying left and right; we have control issues, power issues, not to mention domineering and/or absentee parental figures and, well, this is all starting to sound like a big melting pot of Bad. Add sex and stir.
That's really an excellent summary of the vid, and it's a statement I can put my weight behind. Incest is one of my big fictional kinks, precisely because of what
obsessive24 is saying, and that's the same thing the vid - effectively - illustrates. So why didn't I love it?I think, primarily, it was the use of external source that threw me off. External source is a tricky thing to use in vids, and one there's still a fair amount of controversy over. Personally, I'm all for it (which I know sounds counterintuitive, given my last statement), but in this case, it felt a little ... I dunno, like cheating?
Which is not to say that AU vids, which use external source to create a story not shown in canon, aren't perfectly valid. Tricky to pull off, yes, but no less enjoyable when they're done well. I think maybe the sticking point with this particular vid was that, for better or for worse, I didn't know it was going to be AU. Would I have liked the vid better had I not had any preconceived notions? Maybe. Maybe not. The thing about these three pairings - and the thing I was expecting to see explored in the vid - is that they're already so incestuous; there's already so much canon support for the pairing. So, in a way, using (obvious, and liberal amounts of) external source and manips to create a story for the vid seemed to be overlooking the actual story of these characters - which, when it comes down to it, is not all that different.
Whether or not they're having sex on the side, these relationships are already unhealthy, already co-dependent and bordering on incestuous. In fact, another of
obsessive24's vids, Post Blue, is one of my favourites, and one that explores the relationship between Simon and River as it's portrayed in canon; some of the clips may be recontextualised through isolation, juxtaposition, and the use of music, but it still is, essentially, made up of things that happened in canon. Whether or not they were intended to be read in the way they're portrayed in the vid, this scene happened, and so did this - which is, essentially, what every vid making any kind of argument relies on; to say, see, this character/relationship really is like this. By using so many external sources in Climbing Up The Walls, it felt, in a way, as if the vidder was acknowledging that this was not the sort of story that could be told within the confines of canon, that this was a made-up story rather than an exploration of the relationships presented in canon, which is, I think, doing the vid a disservice. The airtime given to the external sources, as well as the fact that the vid was attempting to tell three separate (if related) stories, sort of combined to make me feel like, at the end, there really wasn't much vid there; at worst, it felt like the canon shots were used to give context to the sex scenes, rather than the sex scenes being used to enhance the message of the vid.(Interestingly, the use of Jensen Ackles' Dark Angel scenes didn't bother me at all, which is, I suppose, why the use of external sources either enhancing or detracting from a vid is such a fine, and extremely subjective, line.)
Of course, like I said earlier, there's nothing wrong with telling a story that is AU, and if all the vidder was aiming for was to tell a fic in vid form, she pulled it off admirably. Compare
dayln03's Tower Over Me, which is clearly AU, and clearly intending to be; that vid works for me brilliantly within its own constructed universe, without necessarily attempting to comment on the relationship between Anders and Duck as portrayed in canon. The difference here, I think, is that I feel that Climbing Up The Walls is attempting to comment on the canonical relationships at the same time as it constructs an AU out of them, and the combination seemed to me to work against the vid rather than in its favour; it seemed like almost exactly the same story could have been told, and the same points made, using canon alone, and I think the vid would have resonated a lot more strongly with me if it had.All that said - I liked the vid, and I'll probably be watching it again. It just isn't making it onto my list of favourites.