Sigh. Yesterday, I decided to test my hypothesis that every song, no matter how unlikely, has an incredibly cheesy AMV attached to it somewhere (that somewhere being on YouTube). It started out innocently enough. I was looking for Toto AMVs when I stumbled across this gem:

Next time you need to tell your special lady that you love her, do it with Toto and Photobucket! Actually, I don’t really have a problem with this guy; the song is catchy as far as these things go and the slideshow is appealingly amateurish. And, I suppose, if your special lady also loves seeing static images of Squall and Rinoa, it could even be kind of sweet. But it gets better! It turns out that the images from the slideshow were largely plagiarized (as much as one can plagiarize something that is not the source’s IP to begin with, but I’ll leave that to Lawrence Lessig) from this source (which he, in a ballsy move, actually favorited):

Now this one is an abomination; not only is it set to Bryan Adams but it demands the viewer to ask, “How is it possible that a cheesy half-assed slideshow of “romantic” anime images (that features no moving images) has gotten almost 1.5 million views?” OK, so I count for about 6 of those views. Still, is this a meme I somehow missed? It doesn’t seem likely, because there is nothing particularly funny about it aside from the jaw-dropping banality (and the part where Bryan Adams caterwauls “The one thing I’m sure of/is the way we made love” and it is accompanied by some nakedness), and banality isn’t generally a LOL-type thing. So, is it possible that this “video” has gotten over a million legitimate viewers? To test that hypothesis, I decided to conduct a scientific survey.OK, so my scientific survey consisted of searching for AMVs of “I Want It That Way.” A couple things I noticed: A lot of people chose this particular song to commemorate their love of a middling anime series, including this ineffably creepy Naruto lip dub:

(n.b. There are a bunch of Naruto “I Want It That Way” AMVs; this is the best one–try reading the subtitles! Unintentional hilarity!)

Then, however, there was this gem, proving that the “related” pane is actually useful, nay, necessary to life itself:

Somehow it sums up everything that is right and wrong about Final Fantasy and it also gets stuck in your head. From the render-porn visuals to the utterly cheesy content to the melodramatic montages–it’s all in there! And you know what? Tidus and Yuna are two worlds apart. Yuna lives in Spira and Tidus doesn’t actually exist. I don’t even know what to say. I’ll leave it to xYunaax:Every Night I dream about yOUCause yOu’re The Best Thing In My LifeAnd I Think yOu’re the One…With lOvee,Me