Thirty Seconds to Mars’ This Is War still has a grip on YouTube kids

I would hazard a guess that every anime popular in the 2010s has an AMV (anime music video) set to Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “This Is War.” It was the song for fan-edited music videos, and I will never be able to hear it without thinking of how I would edit it to whatever piece of media I’m currently obsessing over. (Right now, it’s the newest Dragon Age game. I can picture it, the second verse’s “the Liar” lyric superimposed on Solas…)

From the moment the song came out in 2009, it was posited to be a hit in fandom culture. It actually debuted with the soundtrack of Dragon Age: Origins, a fact that I, a passionate Dragon Age fan, did not even realize until I started writing this piece—

Wait, hang on, this is completely warping my mind. Excuse me?!

OK, back to business. The official BioWare trailer didn’t actually lean into what made so many anime fans particularly obsessed with this song: namely that the lyrics basically just sort and categorize different types of people, warning them all about a nebulous incoming threat, making it perfect to project onto. It’s generic enough to be applicable to basically anything (fascism and demons in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, or the epic highs and lows of high school volleyball in Haikyuu!!), but also with just enough specificity that fans can have some fun labeling beloved characters.

Jared Leto croons about “the Good” and “the Evil,” which is super basic (and usually reserved for group shots of the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys), but as the lyrics go on, we start getting into funky archetypes like “the Prophet” (usually an older, wiser mentor-figure character) and “the Victor” (usually a cockier character, sometimes an antihero or minor bad guy turned good). Sometimes, if the piece of media allowed, these labels would be literal, even if they weren’t exactly fitting. But the best fan experience happened when the labels were incredibly loose and just based on the general vibe of the one-word descriptions, because it’s actually so fun to see how many people agree on what character traits these sparse archetypes represent.

There’s an art to correctly categorizing characters in the “This Is War” archetypes. I think about it way too much. Every time I get into a new show, game, or movie, I immediately begin to cast the characters in a “This Is War” fan video. This is no exaggeration. I literally have a Google Doc for this. And it has categories for all the Dragon Age games, so the fact that this song came out with Dragon Age: Origins is really blowing my mind right now, holy shit.

OK. Sorry. I’ll stop getting distracted.

I didn’t become an anime fan until later in life, but I still knew about the proliferation of “This Is War” AMVs. I’d always existed in parallel fandom spaces, so my first brush with the phenomenon was a Young Justice AMV in 2012. (If we wanna be technical, only anime fan videos fall under the AMV label, which would exclude Young Justice, but I use the term very loosely.) “This Is War” may have really taken off in the anime fan space, but as long as a piece of media had a vibrant fan base in the 2010s — like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter, hell, even Game of Thrones — it could very well have a “This Is War” fan video.

From the moment Star Trek fan Kandy Fong busted out a slide projector and a cassette tape at a convention in 1975, video edits have been a vital part of the fandom ecosystem. Nowadays, with TikTok as a primary hub, the trend skews toward short-form videos set to specific lyrics of songs, instead of full music videos. Every form of fan video expression is valid, but I came of age in the time of “This Is War,” so those AMVs will always have a very special place in my heart.

And now I know that my deep connection to this frankly fundamentally OK Thirty Seconds to Mars song goes even deeper, since it’s not just nostalgically intertwined with my first experiences with online fandom, but also very specifically tied to my favorite video game franchise.