Subculture Media: From Vine to TikTok
March 15, 2024 • Written by Ari Bowman
If you survived the depths of stan Twitter from (approximately) the years 2018 to 2020, you are more than likely familiar with the audio-visual phenomenon popularly referred to as “fancams” or “fan edits.” Imagine this: it’s a gloomy day, you’re scrolling through Twitter. The year is 2019 and you’re in fifth period pre-calculus. All of a sudden, you see the words: “an exposing thread about @twitteruser99…” But wait! Oh my God, that’s your mutual! As you scroll through @twitteruser99’s account, their mentions are filled with videos of dancing K-Pop idols, anime magical girls, and groggy-looking middle-aged male actors. Visual effects flash your tiny phone screen while your speakers try to turn out some chomped-down, sped up version of “Promiscuous Girl” or even “Washing Machine Heart.” But where did fan cams and edits originate? How did they become such an integral part of fandom culture?
To truly answer this question, we must return to a bygone staple of popular video-based internet culture: Vine.
While Vine might be best known nowadays for its depository of corny, six-second, slice-of-life videos that pockmarked the web for years following its shutdown in early 2017, Vine was also a space for many different fan subcultures, from anime to K-Pop to TV and movies to sports, to share clips. While most of these groups began with sharing simple iMovie edits of their favorite characters, athletes, or celebrities, users soon began to get serious, taking use of more professional editing programs like Sony Vegas, Final Cut, and After Effects.
This crop of editors was likely influenced by the more widespread (at the time) editing by those within Call of Duty and skateboard communities. Perhaps one of the most influential was YouTuber BakersTuts, single-handedly responsible for the adoption of overly-edited Vine creations. Along with his composition of heavily color-corrected Call of Duty and skateboarding edits, he also released multiple tutorials on creating video effects and transitions that became widely used within 2016-2017 Vine editing communities, particularly the sports community.
It might be interesting to those not familiar to wrap their heads around the fact that, for a number of years, there was a subculture of mid-teenage boys making highly creative edits of athletes on their computers in whatever free time high school allowed them. But regardless, it was a community that did exist, and one that I (although being in middle school at the time) was a part of. It was male-dominated and thus inherently toxic. When Vine introduced a K-Pop category for videos circa 2016, the sports editors’ fury was channeled through racist remarks and punching down on the much more female-dominated fanbase. Effeminacy was not allowed, and toxic masculinity was an enforced norm through Telegram chats of hundreds of people. If you dissented in these chats – one aptly named “The Oven” – you would then be, “roasted.”
Despite the toxicity of the sports editing community, the use of Magic Bullet Looks, video transitions, timewarp and other visual effects that they popularized through BakersTuts videos still follows through many avenues of fan editing today. While the community is much smaller than it used to be, now mostly existing in the various pocket dimensions of YouTube and TikTok, the legacy that it paved – along with that of K-Pop, anime, and other editing communities – is still very much alive. And as time has gone on, the medium has only become more and more accessible, with editing done directly on one’s phone becoming easier and producing effects that rival those done by expensive software. This leads into the culture that we know today built of fancams and fan edits, popularized by post-Vine K-Pop fans, but soon adopted by innumerable fanbases on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. All it takes is a quick search for “‘x character’ fan edit” and more likely than not, something will come up. Here are some of my favorite finds:
Clearly, the culture of fan edits and fancams have changed dramatically during their time. As many started out bare-bones and simple, they quickly evolved to extravagant displays of RAM, challenging even the most advanced graphics cards, and soon settled back into a solid middle ground of time-editing and transitions. And despite their origin site ceasing to exist, they have survived the throes of unkempt social media management. Despite the mass exodus of users from Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk, and frivolous attempts to ban TikTok, fancams and edits still live on in pretty much every fanbase you could imagine – while their popularity might wax and wane over time, they are a permanent staple of internet culture.
