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Information

• Member: seasons
• Title: Untitled After School Dice Club AMV
• Premiered: 2024-07-13
• Category:
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Yaeji For Granted
• Anime:
  • After School Dice Club (TV)
• Comments: I. The twelve episodes of "After School Dice Club" aired in late 2019. While this coincided with the debut of "Beastars" and "Ascendance of a Bookworm," not to mention continuing seasons at least a half-dozen ongoing shonen megafranchises with huge, built-in followings, this wasn't a particularly stacked anime season. Still "After School Dice Club" struggled to find an audience during the last gasps of our pre-COVID world and I don't get the impression that it's caught on as any kind of a cult classic since then.
  
  II. I wasn't surprised to see that there aren't any other AMVs made with this series in the Org database (not counting a single multi-source AMV that I'm almost certain only contains a clip from the opening credits animation), but I wasn't expecting to run a similar search on YouTube and find almost nothing at all. There is one TikTok-style "edit" of the anime that's 9 seconds long and seemingly nothing else. I didn't set out to make the first "After School Dice Club" AMV on the Internet but it's possible that's what this is. It's possible that others may have been created over the last four-and-a-half years, only to later disappear from the Internet, but we may never know.
  
  III. The main protagonist of "After School Dice Club" is a fifteen-year-old high school student named Miki, an introverted and soft-spoken girl who is socially withdrawn, possibly depressed and might be even autistically-coded to a mild degree (this last aspect being extremely subjective and probably not specifically intended by the writers, if we're being realistic here). This (admittedly pretty broad) spectrum of loosely-connected traits is always really appealing to me as I watch anime, maybe because it's a whole bunch of traits that I see in myself... and completely despise! But when they're traits that are present in a likeable and sympathetic character, one that that competent writers and directors can successfully convince the viewer to root for, watching an anime such as "After School Dice Club," as steeped in genre cliches as it might be, can feel both comforting and validating. (I also think this is a double-edged sword in certain regards but that's a matter I won't try to unpack here and now.)
  
  IV. When depictions of these emotions or experiences are so strongly felt or willingly indulged in, they can become THE motivation for creating an AMV. Given there is no reason to assume that the viewer will recognize or vibe with any of this, most likely approaching the AMV with no knowledge of the anime or its characters, this is a very dangerous trap for an editor to fall into! Ideally, the overall visual appeal of the anime will help overcome this divide between the editor and the viewer. Unfortunately, while I'm completely content with the animation and art style of "After School Dice Club," it's simply not a memorable or impressive anime from a visual perspective. There's a lot I really do like about it, but I completely acknowledge that it's going to strike most viewers as extremely basic, at best.
  
  V. This is a video made up of anime clips, set to music, so in that regard it's definitely an anime music video. But I'm not completely sure, even after all this time of making this stuff, not to mention trying to be a thoughtful and attentive viewer of other editors' works for, oh geez, two freakin' decades now, that I'm even really grasping the basics of what makes a good AMV, let alone an "average" AMV that most viewers can meet halfway and sort of get something out of watching. My sense of rhythm, in every sense of the word, is deeply felt but rarely expressed in any coherent or appealing fashion. As a creator, what makes perfect sense to me from a narrative perspective is often completely misunderstood by viewers. When this happens often enough, as it has, it's probably a sign that I'm not quite "getting it," at least when it comes to making a traditional AMV that's not an obviously experimental work that's willingly defying normal conventions. I don't think I'm really "editing" so much as engaging in a sort of metatextual "self talk" that's deeply meaningful to me and often results in videos that feel emotionally congruent with many of the AMVs that I've loved most over the years, but simply does not work as intended on a bigger stage for other people to watch.
  
  VI. I really don't know if I've managed to overcome this disconnect to find a happy medium between making what my gut tells me to make and making a video I won't eventually realize was an embarrassing mistake. This AMV is similar to others I have made before or other projects that are still in development. I am routinely repeating myself. I guess that goes for most creators. Once again, I bypassed the opportunity to have other editors beta test this. Maybe someday I'll be ready to try that. I just don't know if this AMV is suited for that kind of focus grouped feedback. I can see myself scrapping the entire thing before attempting to restructure it from the ground up, as I get the feeling that I'd likely be advised to consider.
  
  VII. I love this song. I don't just think it slaps but it's been a catalyst for some more deeply considered appreciation of and gratitude towards so many of the people who've carried me this far in my sometimes difficult but still absurdly blessed life. I can also anticipate many viewers finding it unnecessarily quirky or even annoying to listen to. It has a certain intangible quality that a lot of songs I have edited with (or are planning to edit with) have. I can't really elaborate on this. If I keep editing long enough, eventually I'll be able to make an entire mixtape out of "these kind" of songs and maybe then it will be easier to understand why I chose them and whether or not they're as universally grating to some specific or broadly imagined audience as I've begun to suspect they might be. I was surprised to search YouTube and find lots and lots of AMVs made with Yaeji tracks. Seems like "Raingurl" really caught on for a few minutes in certain corners of the AMV world?
  
  VIII. I have no idea what to title this video and I'd rather not brainstorm that any further than I already have.