But EOEM was obviously a parody, thus fitting into the category. After meeting the basic criteria, how can I not consider the editing/flow/atmosphere as a feature to critique the work with? The whole point of critiquing AMVs for this contest is to see which one better combines the elements of editing to each specific category. It's like with "Best First". Once you knock out the ones that weren't first AMVs, you've got to go by which one was best edited and had the best flow. Parody is a little different, because you also have to ask "CorpseGoddess wrote: If you just ignore the category and vote for the video you like, it kind of defeats the purpose of having separate categories, no? We might as well just throw all the year's vids into a giant pigpile and vote based purely on personal taste. But, since we've gone through all the trouble of sifting through which videos best represent the category, whether or not "Every Opening..." is a better video (as opposed to a better parody) is irrelevant to this competition.
Although I totally disagree that editing shouldn't be a considered factor. Once you see which degree of how well a parody is done [let's say that there was another really great parody video that obviously fit into this category, on par with Bonklers], then you should obviously go and see which one was better executed in terms of editing.