Right, I get kinda annoyed when people get praise for something that they didn't put much into. One example is when people 'make' an AMV (anime music video), but all they do is put an action scene to an action song. It's like, ooh, exciting fight scene! People already like that! Now slap on some rock or heavy metal song, and it's an awesome action AMV! And then people comment and rate well and they're like "ooh that song goes so well!". But there are like a thousand other songs that could serve just as well, and it takes pretty much no thought to pick out a song that would work. The main thing is that they just use one or two whole scenes, without altering it so it matches the lyrics or the different areas of the song. I think to make a real, good AMV that deserves praise, you gotta work at it, cut up the anime scenes so it matches the words or mood, but still flows fairly smoothly. Then the song choice, it should match the characters or the emotions. Anyone with a computer, internet, and some movie maker can take five minutes of an anime episode and put it to a song.

Similarly, there are people who make a video with pictures from other artists. For example, they'd go out and get all the cute, funny Naruto pictures that they can find in Google, then they string them together, put a catchy song in the background, and they're done. The masses are quite impressed by this, but it seems pretty lame to me. Someone else came up with those adorable, amusing little comics/animations/pictures. Someone else thought of the joke, put in the effort to make a nice picture. People just see it and think it's funny, and immediately want to say so. They don't seem to care who actually did the work for those. Worst of all, the makers of the 'videos' don't give any credit for those pictures. I do realize that it takes some amount of work to collect all those pictures, but that's like someone putting stolen art in their gallery and saying it's okay to take credit for it, because they had to work to collect those works of art.

And no, this sort of thing doesn't cause me to lie awake at night, fuming at those faceless strangers from the internet. I simply like to write down what I think sometimes. And if anyone reads this, maybe it would eventually help to put credit and praise where it belongs. Or maybe it just makes me feel smarter or better, to go beyond 'is the AMV cool?' and think about how much work it actually takes, who did the real work.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I really gotta get to looking through those Psych slash entries. I have like forty alerts that I haven't even touched... -_-

If you like Heroes, check this out: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/45606757/
:3