ABSTRACT
Often clad in a black t-shirt featuring the image of a brooding cinematic Edward Cullen, twelve-year-old Liza is known as “theTwilightReader” on YouTube, a popular video streaming website. She usually films herself speaking to a camera amid the backdrop of her cluttered bedroom, which is decked out in posters and homemade artwork honoring the Young Adult (YA) Twilight Saga, a popular vampire romance by Stephenie Meyer. Over the course of a year (2009–10), Liza directed, edited, and posted more than eighty videos on her personal YouTube channel, which began as a project to celebrate the novels, characters, films, songs, and actors associated with the Twilight phenomenon. In her “10 Reasons Why I Love Twilight” video, Liza enumerates factors that led to her fascination:
Number Seven. It’s AD-DIC-TING! It really is, I mean really, okay, like the first time I read Twilight, I wasn’t—I knew I’d probably like it but I wasn’t quite sure that I’d get that into it, so I didn’t buy the book. I just borrowed it from my teacher. (I own it now. [chuckles knowingly] Second time I’m going to read it.) But, like, when I first got the book, my Language Arts teacher came into my Social Studies class, handed it to me real quick and said, “Don’t lose it” (because I lose things all the time) and then walked out the door. I read the first sentence: “I”—[begins to mime the action, but runs back to her unmade daybed for the book, which she opens] “I’d never given much thought to how I would die—though I’d had reason enough in the last few months—but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.” [closes the book, then reconsiders, giving the novel a double take] That’s a run-on sentence, but oh well. [shrugs before looking intently into the camera] I was already addicted to it. I didn’t want to go to PE class. I wanted to go home and lie on my couch and read the rest. But [sighing] really, it’s addicting. If you haven’t read it—warning: it’s going to be like your “own personal brand of heroin.” HAHAHA. Ahhhhh, you need to see the movie.
