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katranatOver the past few years while I’ve been cultivating a deeper interest into this hobby, I’ve noticed a pattern among Utena AMVs - there seems to be an unusually high amount created with songs by the band The Mountain Goats. This isn’t something that happened every single time I came across a Utena AMV, but it did happen frequently enough that I started thinking to myself “why are there so many of these, and why does this combination keep popping up?”. I decided to try and find the answer to these questions.
I began by collecting as many Mountain Goats AMVs as I could - shout out to the three people on YouTube who have created Mountain Goats AMV playlists (Lupin X, mr. brightside and antediluvian), without these I would not have found half of these videos. I consolidated everything that I considered to be an AMV (there are plenty of other types of fanfids made with Mountain Goats music which I disregarded) into a playlist of my own. I then pulled the info from this playlist into a spreadsheet via CrackTheSky’s wonderful AMVTracker, and I started crunching the numbers.
The first thing I wanted to know was how many AMVs there were which used Utena as a source, and what proportion of those make up the entirety of the Mountain Goats collection of AMVs on YouTube:
When I began this exercise, based on the amount I was casually coming across, I was anticipating maybe around 20ish total Utena AMVs. Even I wasn’t ready for the amount to be a whopping 34 videos - making up over 40% of all the Mountain Goats AMVs currently on YouTube. What I’d initially considered to be a potentially interesting coincidence instead seems to be an outright trend. Are editors really skewing so strongly in favour of pairing Utena specifically with this music artist? I decided to check if there were any other source outliers. Here are the top 10 most used sources - after these all other sources only have a single instance of use:
Looking at the numbers in the table above, I feel I can safely say, yes, creators are skewing highly in favour of Utena here.
To make sure it’s not just a fluke, I decided to double check how many different editors were making these:
This muddies the waters slightly. On the one hand, there are 16 unique individuals who decided combining Utena and the Mountain Goats is a good idea. On the other hand, one of these people has made 14 of the 34 total videos. However, I don’t think this invalidates the notion that there are a high proportion of Utena videos. If we discount these from the pool, this leaves 20 Utena entries, which is still a considerable percentage of the total AMVs and 13 more than Evangelion has.
Why does all of this even matter to me, you might ask. In a world where LinkinBall exists, why would a music artist being used over and over again with a particular anime be interesting? Especially as these are rookie numbers - if you search for the combination of Dragonball and Linkin Park on amv.org, there are 1538 results (Naruto and Linkin Park brings up 1459), and that’s just amv.org videos, I don’t even want to try searching those terms on YouTube.
Personally I’m interested because these types of strong correlations between anime and music artists are a relic of the past, or so I thought. Long gone are the days when AMV editors were limited by what sources were available to them/what they were able to watch on TV, as well as the perfect storm of popularity coinciding for these anime and music artists. Fandom in general has spread a lot farther these days, with so much easy access to media leading people to create more unique works. There are always things which have surges in popularity for sure, but I doubt something as huge as LinkinBall will ever happen again.
I think what makes this small pocket of Utena and Mountain Goats so unusual is the fact that neither of these things are what could be considered currently popular. Utena had its heyday in the late 90’s/early 00’s and as far as I can discern so did The Mountain Goats - and yet this is a fairly recent phenomena, with the first AMV of this combination being created in 2020. Making AMVs generally with Mountain Goats music is a more recent pursuit with the majority of all the videos premiering within the last 3 years:
There must be something about this music which matches the aesthetic and themes of Utena, sparking artistic motivation in people. There’s certainly no shortage of music to pull from, The Mountain Goats have a monstrous catalogue, which is represented by 52 unique songs being used among these 83 videos. Heck, the Utena videos alone use 27 different songs, so it’s not like everyone here is making the same thing.
The circle of people who are into the Utena fandom seem to be highly dedicated and very aware of any content being created for it, so I can’t rule out the possibility of some of these people seeing others’ work and it snowballing rather than each person independently having the idea of this combination. If indeed these creators were inspired by each other, then that’s extremely admirable and a testament to the strength of such a fringe fandom community. If these ideas sprouted out of the individual love for these sources in 16 separate cases, well that’s slightly astonishing.
Either way it doesn’t really matter, but each of these possibilities is compelling to consider. In reality it’s most likely a mix of both options.
I’m not sure I’ve come any closer to answering my initial questions about this phenomenon, however I’m glad to be vindicated regarding my suspicions that this pairing was appearing unusually often, and no I wasn’t going crazy imagining it. I suspect if I truly want to understand the reasoning behind why several people enjoy The Mountain Goats music with Utena, I’ll have to, ya know, actually ask one of them. I doubt I will ever be able to appreciate these fully otherwise - I still have not watched all of Utena and The Mountain Goats music is not really my cup of tea (they’re certainly musically engaging, but not the kind of thing I can really listen to for a prolonged period of time), so any nuances regarding the story/lyrics are completely lost on me.
I do have to wonder if there are any other anime/music artist pairings out there that are extraordinarily high, but are just not obvious because they’re lost on the noise of all the videos that exist these days. I wouldn’t have noticed this Utena thing if YouTube didn’t have a habit of shoving every single Utena AMV ever made at me every chance it gets. I’m not sure how I’d ever even start looking for these if they did exist without some kind of precedent making itself known somehow.
We’ve reached the end of my thoughts and findings on this subject, I hope you found it somewhat interesting. For those of you who are so inclined, here’s the playlist I put together of all the AMVs, enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfarsCz7pWa3YwZtf5bYwWh_YN_DcUMq2
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Date: 2023-10-28 11:58 pm (UTC)But as for this pairing in general, I notice that around 2020 was when RGU got super popular with the zoomers, like it has stayed culturally relevant since release but we got Utenatok now, it is wild, I think there is similar 90s-00s nostalgia broadly among them as well as it takes 20-30 years for the nostalgia cycle to rotate, and they both have that artsy/angsty vibe to it that attracts certain sensitive queer folk to like flies to honey (again guilty as charged)
They're both left of the dial enough to feel like a hidden gen to discover, and engage in some emotional complexity, but are not nearly so obscure enough that you can't find plenty of fandom friends to engage with/spread it through a social circle.
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Date: 2023-10-29 01:37 pm (UTC)Interestingly despite being the most popular song among all the AMVs "No Children" only has 3 Utena videos - "Love Love Love" actually has more with 4... I was debating including song info in the post, I decided against it as those two songs were the only ones which were significant outliers. I guess it would still have been useful to give that information.
I suspect you've hit the nail on the head there with the combined nostalgia thing, plus tiktok. I'm pretty blind to where people soak up cultural relevance these days (always have been really).
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Date: 2023-10-29 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-29 12:49 am (UTC)I'm continually coming across AMV editors on YouTube who edit with Utena and nothing BUT Utena, sometimes with a dozen or dozenS of Utena AMVs made over the course of several months or years, usually with vaguely "indie" music and not a lot of well-known hits. I never made it a point to keep track of these channels and they've all sort of bled together over time--maybe there's 3 of them, maybe there's more than 10, I don't know--but I'd be shocked if there weren't a few Mountain Goats songs spread across some of them.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-29 01:40 pm (UTC)Yeah, both you and Seasalt have mentioned tiktok and you're probably most likely correct.
I've also noticed those Utena purist accounts (and to a lesser extent, people who only edit the works of Ikuhara), it's an interesting world for sure.