It’s the third day of the US presidential election, and the country is finally starting to get some clarity on who actually won the race. As states have been finalizing their vote counts, election maps have been updating their colors. And now, as a result, we have these.
These are colloquially known as fancams. (More on that in a minute.) The videos have even extended to people like MSNBC anchor Steve Kornacki and Joe Biden.
Let’s talk about fancams. As Twitter user @S_Bareerah pointed out in an archived thread, fancams are fan-made concert videos of idols taken by fans. “They often (but not always) focused on a ‘bias’, their favourite member of a particular group,” they wrote. “For a popular group you could find fancams of each member for any particular performance from a specific date.”
Right! Cool. Fancams don’t just live on YouTube or forums anymore, though. People started replying with them on Twitter, and eventually the meaning of a fancam changed. They became an aesthetic and stopped referring to a specific thing.
This, of course, is how you turn a fancam into an AMV (anime music video). Time, semantic drift, and the eternal September.
fancams are just AMVs for zoomers. we need to stop erasing history
— brian feldman (@bafeldman) November 6, 2020
For the record: AMVs are an old form of fan-made media. Teens used to take pivotal moments of popular shows like Naruto or Sailor Moon and set them to emotional music. They’re beautiful!
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Anyway, next time you see a fancam on Twitter, now you’ll know where it came from. For best results, log onto YouTube and watch a ton of AMVs.
