If a vid is a vidder's path through a text, how do we account for vids that combine multiple source texts into one work? This chapter focuses on multifandom vids, a genre of vidding that draws together video clips from several sources and that demonstrates ways of watching broadly across media texts. It expands on the premise of the previous chapter to discuss the vid form as detailing a mode of spectatorship that works across a genre (e.g. science fiction) or other set of related texts (e.g. Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in a transmedia romance across films, animated and live-action television series, and comic book pages). In this, vids are the record of more than the interpretation of a single text: they construct ‘paths’ through genres, transmedia narratives, or even actors’ careers. Looking once again at critical work on particular found footage films as close proximate forms to vids, this chapter analyses the visual pleasures of vids and their relationship with audience fascinations of erotics, of spectacle, and of the pleasures offered by closely watching genres.

This chapter positions vids as works that describe the act of critical engagement as a form of fascination. As Jenkins (1992: 24) has pointed out, in media fandom this fascination can often be tinged with frustration of the ‘unrealized possibilities’ in the objects of their fandom. In this chapter I sort these fascinations into somewhat different categories to Helen Wheatley’s discussion of recent television programming in which she explores fascination with medicalized and abject televized bodies and fascination in relation to the erotics of desiring and desired bodies (2016).