I’d hazard a guess that every anime popular in the 2010s has an AMV (anime music video) set to Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “This Is War.” It was the song for fan-edited music videos, and I’ll never be able to hear it without thinking about how I’d edit it in whatever medium I’m currently obsessed with. (Right now it’s the latest Dragon Age game. I can imagine, the lyrics ‘The Liar’ from the second verse over Solas…)
From the moment the song was released in 2009, it was stated that it would be a hit in fandom culture. It actually debuted with the soundtrack of Dragon Age: Originsa fact that I, a passionate Dragon Age fan, didn’t even realize until I started writing this piece –
Wait, wait a minute, this is completely warping my mind. Excuse me?!
Okay, back to business. The official BioWare trailer didn’t actually address what made so many anime fans particularly obsessed with this song: namely, that the lyrics really just sort and categorize different types of people, warning them all about some vague incoming threat, making it perfect to project onto. It’s generic enough to be applicable to almost anything (fascism and demons). Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, or the epic highs and lows of high school volleyball Haikyuu!!), but also with just enough specificity so fans can have fun labeling beloved characters.
Jared Leto talks about ‘the Good’ and ‘the Evil’, which is super basic (and usually reserved for group shots of the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys), but as the text progresses we start to get into funky archetypes like ‘the Prophet” (usually an older, wiser mentor figure) and “the Victor” (usually a cockier character, sometimes an anti-hero or a minor villain turned good). Sometimes, if the medium allowed it, these labels would be literal, even if they weren’t quite appropriate. But the best fan experience happened when the labels were incredibly loose and based only on the general vibe of the one-word descriptions, because it’s actually so fun to see how many people agree on what character traits these sparse archetypes represent.
There’s an art to correctly categorizing characters into the archetypes of ‘This Is War’. I’m thinking about it way too many. Every time I start a new show, game, or movie, I immediately start casting the characters in a “This Is War” fan video. This is not an exaggeration. I literally have a Google Doc for this. And it has categories for all Dragon Age gamesso the fact that this number came out with Dragon Age: Origins It’s really driving me crazy right now, holy shit.
OK. Sorry. I will stop being distracted.
I didn’t become an anime fan until later in life, but I still knew about the proliferation of “This Is War” AMVs. I had always existed in parallel fandom spaces, so my first exposure to the phenomenon was one Young Justice AVM in 2012. (If we want to be technical, only anime fan videos fall under the AMV label, which would rule out Young Justicebut I use the term very loosely.) “This Is War” may have really taken off in the anime fan space, but as long as a piece of media had a vibrant fan base in the 2010s — like Avatar: The last airbender, Harry Potterhell, even Game of Thrones – it could very well have a “This Is War” fan video.
From the moment Star Trek fan Kandy Fong When he pulled out a slide projector and a cassette tape at a convention in 1975, video edits are an essential part of the fandom ecosystem. Nowadays, with TikTok as the primary hub, the trend is trending towards short videos set Unpleasant specific song lyricsinstead of full music videos. Any form of fan video expression is valid, but I came of age during the time of ‘This Is War’, so those AMVs will always have a very special place in my heart.
And now I know that my deep connection to this downright fundamental OK Thirty Seconds to Mars song is disappearing even deeper, because it’s not only nostalgically intertwined with my first experiences with online fandom, but Also very specifically tied to my favorite video game franchise.