Reasoning With Vampires: a Moment of Appreciation
In the autumn semester of 2012, I was in Professor Ryan Cordell's Literary Criticism: Technology of Text course at Northeastern University. It was a digital humanities introductory course pretending to be a literary criticism course, and I enjoyed every second of my time learning about how the Internet and literature have a closer relationship than I previously considered. The final project for this class included an essay about a particular aspect of digital humanities, and I chose to focus on critical response on the Internet. My project was titled "Twilight, Pleasure Fiction, and Criticism: A Troubling Text, a Developing Genre, and an Internet Community" and it focused on Twilight as a catalyst for critical response on the Internet. I chose this topic because I have a personal, passionate dislike for the Twilight series, and I've noticed that other people on the Internet do as well. One particular user, a girl who goes by Dana, runs a tumblr called reasoningwithvampires that is dedicated to deconstructing Stephenie Meyer's novels through intensely close readings of the texts. A great gripe amongst anti-fans of Meyer's work is how poorly-written her books are, and Dana uses direct scans of the books themselves to demonstrate this aspect:
Dana also uses sentence tree diagrams and syntactical analysis to further show the poor quality of Meyer's popular books:
Dana's discourse on the 104-and-counting pages of her tumblr could be dismissed as semantic and overly critical, but I personally agree wholeheartedly with Dana and the rationale behind reasoningwithvampires. Poor characterization, bad plotting, and a general lack of care for the use of English are major features of Meyer's texts, and as someone who has grudgingly read all of her work I take great issue with the popularity of Twilight—something deep in my prescriptivist heart riles at the butchery that is Meyer's body of work, and it raises my hackles even further to know that these books are extremely popular all over the world and spawning spinoffs that gain an equal amount of popularity (I am glaring directly at Fifty Shades of Grey here). This is my opinion, of course, and I cling to it tightly, but I was relieved and thoroughly excited when I found Dana's tumblr. reasoningwithvampires is one perfect example of tumblr being utilized as a channel for critical response and discussion. Dana takes an often-humorous and sarcastic angle in her discourse, but the facts are nonetheless evident in her posts and it's difficult to argue with her analysis because she does use direct scans of the book pages. Dana's tumblr is also wonderfully exemplar of people using tumblr for things that they think are important:
reasoningwithvampires exists because at least one person thinks that this work is important, and the 528 notes on the above post denote that at least several others agree. Dana spends so much time with these texts that she and I both hate because she finds it important and necessary to demonstrate exactly why they are so bad and how they can affect our perception of language, and she has the ability to do so in a public space. It's not fandom so much as it is anti-fan discourse, but the critical response that Dana puts forth is important on the Internet simply because it is important to her. This is what is so exciting to me about the Internet: it is a direct and public way of expanding upon and exploring human interest and passion. The discussion and analysis that Dana posts on reasoningwithvampires is an example of passion for language and good usage made material and public, archived and organized for easy browsing and learning. I learn something new about language, usage, grammar, or syntax every time I check out reasoningwithvampires, and that's part of what I love about tumblr: for the hundreds of thousands of image-centric scroll-through blogs, there exist corners of the site like Dana's that are great examples of passionate discourse and participation, sites where learning can take place in a casual setting. Tumblr also changes the medium in which such discussion and learning happen. Dana's posts are a mix of textual image and textual commentary, and her juxtaposition of the book pages with her colorful analysis would not be nearly as smooth or effective in another medium. It would seem that tumblr is an ideal outlet for passion like Dana's: it provides freedom of formatting that leads to creativity from users and thus to such collections of critical response on the Internet.