I've been in active therapy since 2012. I've had an array of therapists and a rollercoaster of progress while dealing with some issues I had since I was 11 years old. Coincidentally, I have been editing Anime Music Videos (AMVs) for nearly just as long, so hobbyist editing and the AMV community have shaped much of my life and progression to adulthood.

I had several hobbies, but AMVs was one of the only ones that remained consistent over the years. Even when I was physically unable to edit, I still thought about editing. I had notebooks full of AMV ideas, some I even storyboarded.



The first AMV I ever made was in 2002, putting together 30 second video clips our digital still photo camera could take of my DVDs playing on the TV. Subbed anime was still being released on VHS back then. The SD card the camera took was only 5MB.



Before I had the ability to make real videos, I was making slideshows with a program called RealSlideShow that produced .rm files which could only be played in a now-defunct player called RealPlayer. The first digital thing I created that remotely resembled a "music video" was done in early 2001.

I mostly used AMVs as a way to escape. Anime was "better than cartoons" and editing was a way to make something when I was unable to make something physically. My schools didn't have home ec or wood working class, so editing became the "make something with your hands" stand-in. It made me happy. It felt good.

So it's pretty surprising that it literally never came up in therapy, and I never considered it possible to use as therapy, until 2020.



I grew up in Georgia, where an anime convention called Anime Weekend Atlanta (AWA) takes place. 2001 was my first time attending, and they had an amazing AMV room with wonderful panels. AWA quickly soared in popularity as the convention to go to if you were an AMV editor, so I began attending as much as possible and socializing with the other editors that would regularly attend.

AWA introduced a "Professional" AMV contest, which was perceived as extremely exclusive. In tandem, there was a "Masters" contest, which, at the time, required you to have won an award from the pro contest* in order to participate. Teenage me didn't have many goals, but you bet that one of those goals was to be "good enough" to at least submit something to Masters. I never thought I'd win, but I wanted to be able to submit.

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2019 was the first year I ever submitted to AWA PRO. By then, the contest had dramatically changed and was no longer exclusive. Masters too had changed its rules so anyone could enter. To this day (2022) I still have yet to enter anything into the Masters. My 2019 video to PRO (the contest was renamed to "Peer Review Online") was largely forgettable and only submitted at the behest of ZephyStar convincing me I was indeed "good enough."

I had some other issues going on at that time, and 2019 also marked a year I was getting back into editing after a long hiatus. So the mum response to my video and critical discussions about AMVs in the contest in general bore a hole in me and I resolved to do better.

I won PRO's "Best Technical" and was a finalist in "Artistic" with 2 videos in 2020.

And finally the huge history lesson and preamble has passed and the actual subject matter at hand - AMVs as Art Therapy - can be discussed.

Growing up editing AMVs, I was only concerned with making them. I didn't really care about "the art" of AMVs or what other people's opinions were, outside token acknowledgement of my existence and acceptance in the social group. 2019 was an awakening that made me think about the bigger picture. How did other people see and interact with AMVs? Learning people legitimately attached emotions to these things was absolutely surprising to me. Competitive rivalry and the need to be valued by my peer group had been my primary drivers before then. I liked telling stories in my AMVs, sure, but I was also doing it because I wanted to be better at doing it than the other guys (or at least seen).

Some of my best AMVs had been me going "Yeah I like that person's AMV. But it sucks, I can do it better." This is a largely negative mindset and I'm still working on shedding it.

In 2020, I read Subculture Diaries for the first time. In his 2019 honorable mentions, he states:

Anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Song: “The Great Curve” by Talking Heads

The Great Curve is ugly. It’s a visually overloaded video; most of it consists of overlays upon overlays, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s going on onscreen. It’s jumbled and messy, with sync that barely lines up with the music half the time. In every way, this feels like some sort of aborted attempt at depth where the editor didn’t know where to stop and just piled on everything that came into his head in the moment. But then you get to the first guitar solo, and the video completely destructs, as compression artifacts fill the screen in loose timing with the music. It’s a stunning use of an effect I’ve never once before seen applied intentionally, and it’s at that moment that it hits you that everything here, from the disheveled sync to the visual orgy of layered scenes, is on purpose, assaulting your senses in a way that leaves you unable to interpret any kind of message or meaning. I still don’t know if ProstrateConstantly is trying to say something with this, but I walk away from it feeling completely deluged with information and a desire to get to the bottom of it, even if it means watching this imploding mess a hundred more times.

This video and CrackTheSky's description of it somehow single-handedly dismantled my negative views around AMVs. AMVs could be art. AMVs could be emotional. AMVs could be something not designed to win a contest.

My 2020 PRO videos were heavily influenced by The Great Curve / D E S T R U C T. I used it and the things I learned about flow to create Esoterra, which took nearly 100 hours to edit. A number I had never gotten close to touching before.

While I was editing Esoterra, I befriended a person named Ash on Discord (Rena Cava on Youtube). We were beta testing each other's work for AWA PRO, and they were making a combination anime & live action video about sexual assault. It's not uploaded to youtube and I'm not sure if he'd like it to be uploaded anywhere else. It was an extremely triggering piece that erupted a ton of discussion about users experience with those issues. As someone said in a voice chat during PRO "The video just shows pain."

Ash put themselves into that video (literally, in the live action part) and was using it to show what they had been through. The idea behind the video, its beta, and Ash and my private discussions up to PRO 2020 influenced my decision to change my Dysphoria video from its original "creepy glitch vid" premise to one denoting some of my own feelings and experiences...

And it was cathartic. It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I was telling my story, I was doing it in my way, in my comfortable format, and it was as chaotic or as blunt as it needed to be. It was my first time really pouring myself into an AMV, so it's about half-half emotional discharge and competitive flashiness.

That being said, the REAL catharsis didn't start happening until after the video was done and I had time to decompress from it all. I didn't realize how much good the AMV was for me until I wrote the part where I over-explain everything in the video's description.
I cried. Like, actual sobbing.
I later went back and edited the description so it was less personal, and reading it still makes me a bit teary-eyed.

Obviously the events the AMV is focused on are things I've not fully come to terms with. A 32 year old man doesn't cry writing some words over nothing.


In September 2020, I created the AMV Sashimi Discord Server. Later that year, I made its annual contest called RICE - Rewards Imagined by Editors - to debut in February of 2021.

Keiichiface had befriended me during an AWA PRO contest and became the co-owner of Sashimi. Keiichi was going through some unfortunate events in her personal life, and she was editing to destress. Two videos she made were for her to explore her emotions during those times - Everything Sucks and Two Sides, same coin.

As stated previously, I've been in active therapy since 2012. But around 2019 I had reached a sort of plateau with my therapist and wasn't going anywhere. Keiichi became my go-to to talk about my feelings, because she also was attending therapy and we had some similar issues. Her therapist actually talks to her about AMVs, and so Keiichi is much more in tune with her emotions while making them - at least in my opinion.

Keiichi being so forthright about how she made these AMVs to explore her issues just hammered home that, hey, maybe I should do this too? I asked her if it helped her, and she said she thought so. I felt like Dysphoria helped me, so ever since 2020 I've become passively interested in AMVs as Art Therapy, and have mostly focused on self-indulgent AMVs which fell into two categories:
- just doing it to do it (to try to stop being a perfectionist about everything)
and
- a drastic turn into the black depths of my depressed soul

Indeed, almost all of the videos I edited in 2021 have something to do with Depression (my main issue):


As an aside, Ash's 2021 AWA PRO video was an art piece called Transience, where he states in the description, "i wanted to see how simple i could make the video, while still effectively communicating a solid feeling."

Ash literally makes you feel sad while looking at some geometric shapes. I think Ash is on another level of AMVs as Art Therapy.


But, to turn this all around, the people and videos mentioned in this entry aren't the first, nor will they be the last, people to explore AMVs as art therapy. Countless others have done it, whether they recognize it or not. And if you, who are reading this, also have some issues you would like to work out, perhaps it's time to create a video about them?

But remember, what makes art therapy art therapy is not that you make the art.
Art therapy is exploring your emotions in why you made the art. What story are you trying to tell? Why did you choose this video source? Why did you choose that song? What made you select this scene over that one? Is there a reason you used these effects versus those? Does the video diverge from your usual style? Why?
And how does that make you feel?

I'll end with a funny meme from AMV Sashimi that Ash made about me. It pokes fun at how ignorant I am over my own emotions.
Maybe one day I'll understand them.
Maybe I'll understand them through an AMV other people like too.



* It was actually any contest, but I misunderstood the prerequisite rules.