AMV chronicles #45: Permanence

Don’t give up on this just because it begins with a series of still frames that will probably leave you wondering if your video player is frozen. It gets better after the first 20 seconds, but anyone hoping for a typical Trigun AMV should probably turn back now. There’s no shortage of the iconic action scenes from the classic series, but here they’re handled in a way that feels sort of… subdued? The epic awesomeness of these scenes don’t hit you over the head like you’d expect, but they still sneak up on you when you’re not looking and pull the rug right out from under your feet. Or maybe even when you’re actually looking right at them, which would be even more unexpected! I’ve never had a rug pulled out from under me and I’ve only ever seen it movies or cartoons or comics, so I don’t even know if it’s a real thing. But it’s a saying that everyone knows so it had to come from somewhere, right? Is it something people used to do all the time and now it’s just gone out of style? I don’t even know if that really describes how I feel about this AMV but it’s a start and maybe we’ll get there yet.

I’d actually been meaning to watch this for a very long time, since it comes up everytime I go looking for AMVs set to music by artists I like. I really like kid606 and have been into his music ever since, incidentally, around the same time I first got into AMVs. And wouldn’t you know it? I really, really like Trigun, too. Took me long enough to finally see it, but now that I have I can finally talk about anime with people whenever I take my time machine back to 1999! I had no idea if this video was going to be any good, but I had a hunch that it was going to be interesting and it certainly fulfilled those expectations (your mileage may vary). This certainly isn’t a depressing video but it really nails a certain sense of detached or repressed regret, which, intentional or not, is certainly appropriate for a character like Vash. You won’t re-experience the sense of dread or fearful remorse that hangs over so much of the series, but any editor striving to encapsulate that in a single video might be biting off more than they can chew.

I don’t know what to say about the shot at 2:38 and the few others like it that follow except that you really can’t complain about them being expected or too predictable.

Cross this video with Nopy’s Sky Journey and something else that I’ve yet to see in an AMV and you might get the video that I’m currently trying to make and will probably finish sometime in 2020 if I don’t pick up the pace sometime soon.