Vids without violence?

[tishaturk]

Last night I spent a couple of hours watching and talking about vids with one of my senior colleagues who watches no TV and very few movies, listens to very little contemporary popular music, and generally doesn't engage much with pop culture. The goal was not to convert her to vidwatching--that was something of a non-starter, as you might imagine--but to familiarize her with what I do when I watch and write about vids; she suggested the session herself because she wants to be able to speak knowledgeably and effectively about my work when my tenure case is reviewed next year, which was an exceptionally kind overture for her to make, especially given her lack of personal interest in all things pop cultural, let alone fannish.

We watched sockkpuppett's "Vogue" and sisabet's "Ring Them Bells," since she's read my article manuscript about them, and then flummery's "Haunted."

Afterwards she turned to me and said "So most vids are based on movies and TV shows that are science fictional or feature lots of violence? Are there any happy vids?"

And while I could truthfully say that yes, there are happy vids and that no, not all vid source is science fictional or violent, I have to admit that I couldn't come up with a lot of examples. (In my defense, I was working off the VividCon DVDs, and the VividCon Premieres vidshows are famously heavy on the angst and light on the light-hearted.) I did show her tv_elf's "I Walk the Line" (because, hey, penguins!) and destina's "To Touch the Face of God" (because I had forgotten the explosion in the middle--oops), which are both lovely, though very different. We talked about why vidders (and fans more generally) gravitate towards the kinds of shows that we do, and also about how what vidders do is constrained by what's on TV, and how this affects, for example, the kinds of stories vidders can tell about women. I referenced geekturnedvamp's terrific "Relationships Between Women" vidshow... and am realizing as I type this that I should have showed my colleague fan_eunice's "Whatever It Takes," which I am now adding to my mental list of "intro vids for non-fans."

But now that I'm thinking about it, I would really like a better answer to the original question. So: what are your favorite vids that don't feature violence? I'll take recs of vids made from source that doesn't emphasize that kind of conflict or vids in which the vidder somehow worked around the guns and blood. 'Shipper vid recs are welcome, and in fact I could think of a fair number of 'ship vids that don't feature violence (and a fair number that do--oh, Buffy), but I find that 'ship vids tend to be fairly context dependent and also not particularly interesting to people not already invested in the relationship, so I'm primarily looking for other kinds of vids--though really, everything is fair game.

All thoughts welcome!