Discourse and the Vampire Slayer

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed

"The author's design for a character is a design for discourse. Thus the author's discourse about a character is a discourse about discourse. It is orientated towards the hero as if toward a discourse and is therefore dialogically addressed to him [sic]. By the very construction of the novel [remix] the author speaks not about a character, but with him [sic]. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics p63.

Video Description
In this remixed narrative Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.

Voloshinov: A Philosopher Who Anticipated Simulative Media Environments

"Any consumer good can likewise be made into an ideological sign. For instance, bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament of communion.. But the consumer good, as such, is not at all a sign. Consumer goods, just as tools, may be combined with ideological signs, but the distinct conceptual dividing line between them is not erased by the combination. Bread is made in some particular shape; this shape is not warranted solely by the bread’s function as a consumer good; it also has a certain, if primitive, value as an ideological sign (e.g., bread in the shape of a figure eight (krendel) or a rosette).

Thus, side by side with the natural phenomena, with the equipment of technology, and with articles for consumption, there exists a special world – the world of signs."
Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929)

Dialogic Reality (Indeterminacy)

Remix: Movements relative to discourse. These not so solid arrangements hold brief in the stream. We remix along the crystalline fissures which run with representation and simulation; signs, icons, symbols, images, references and the Real. The Author constructs the space and the Reader enters in to it. We take it on. Such compositions (compos (Lt.), having mastery of) are all around us; overlapping, flowing into each other, banking up into the welts of culture, running away into the evaporating sands of time. By the powers of discourse the genres are gathered. Accompanying this we now have the tools to manage intricate taxonomies, systems of global scale, often in the form of dialogic networks. This has been one hue of the broad and more profound recognitions of complexity since, let’s say, 1927. These treasures we break open and adorn ourselves with.