Those are the AMVs that don’t have a story and a solid timeline. They can follow the story of the original anime or it can be something completely different.

When creating a story based AMV the challenge is to tell the story with the scenes that the original anime provides. For that reason the creators very often use more than one animes and rely on compositions with masks (masks is a term for extracting a character or an object and compositing it into another background or space).

There are AMVs with a linear story,in which the viewer can follow the events unfolding; there is a “beginning”, “middle” and “end”.For example,”Collab - Our tapes”

In this first example, the progress of the story and the character development is very clear. The female protagonist starts a relationship with the male one, after some time she gets into a car accident and gets hospitalized. She struggles with her paralysis, and considers suicide, but in the end the male protagonist changes her mind.

But there are also AMVs with more complex timeline. In this sub-category, the story can be unclear and even misunderstood by the viewers.For example,” [AMV] De:Persoreal [ST IC XIII] ”

In this second example, it can be unclear if the AMV belongs in the “plot driven videos” category. The first scenes shows the protagonist married and then it cuts to segments of flashbacks from his school days. In the next scenes we see him either divorced or just alone, in misery. The same pattern continues through the whole video. We see in parallel his good memories and what is considered to be his dull present state. The sequence at 1:24-1:28 suggests that he is diagnosed with bone cancer, or some other bone disease. So a famous interpretation  of this AMV is that, after he learned that he is going to die, he is reminiscing of his past life and he is imagining how his life would be like ,if things had gone differently.

An important note is that the community distinguishes “character profile” as a different kind ,than story based AMVs . For example,” AMV - John the Hellhound - Bestamvsofalltime Anime MV ”