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237 Joining the Evil League of Evil The Rhetoric of Posthuman Negotiation in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog V I C T O R I A W I L L I S Written by Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Joss Whedon, and Zack Whedon, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog garnered so many hits when Act 1 was released on July 15, 2008, that the online server crashed. After the acquisition of more bandwidth, and the attempted resolution of viewing problems for international viewers who wanted to participate in the Internet serial release, Acts 2 and 3 were released on July 17 and 19, respectively. With little advertisement other than word of mouth, the forty-two-minute Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog won the 2009 Hugo Award for “Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form,” the 2009 People’s Choice Award for “Best Internet Phenomenon ,” seven of the 2009 Streamy Awards for Web TV, and the 2009 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy for “Outstanding Special Class—Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Programs.” Additionally, Time listed Dr. Horrible as number 4 in its Top 10 TV Series of 2008 and number 15 in its Best Inventions of 2008, accolades that perhaps best represent the hybridity of the text. In Critical Studies in Television’s CSTOnline, Stacey Abbott, David Lavery , and Rhonda Wilcox each discuss the multilayered hybridity of Dr. Horrible ’s format. Abbott briefly outlines the shifts among the blog space, narrative world, and cinematic flourishings throughout the Web film and concludes, “In typical Whedon form Dr. Horrible is a curious hybrid” (2009b, para. 2). Lavery discusses the rising popularity of “transmedia storytelling” and claims that after Dr. Horrible, “the status will no longer be quo, for Whedon or for television” (2009, para. 7). In addition, Wilcox considers the conjunctions between the Web film’s intertextuality and metatextuality and claims, “We don’t just break the fourth wall in Dr. Horrible; as Zack Whedon says in ‘Commentary! The Musical,’ it feels ‘like we’re breaking the ninth wall.’ 238 ✴ Beyond the Box The complexity of the text gives us more and more to think about” (2009a, para. 10). The complex hybridization of Dr. Horrible is the reason it appears on both Time’s Best TV Series of 2008 (a slot Lavery called “perplexing” since, after all, Dr. Horrible never actually aired on television [2009, para. 3]) and Time’s Best Inventions of 2008. The attempt to categorize Dr. Horrible’s genre and format is difficult at best and tends to focus on the narrative mode of “musical” and the cinematic format of “short film” more than anything else. However, for viewers who watched the initial release on the Internet, and then subsequently on DVD, this attempt at categorization is clearly not sufficient. The medium may indeed be the message, as Marshall McLuhan claimed, since something is certainly lost in the displacement from computer screen to TV screen (1995, 148). And that something, I contend, is us, the posthuman viewers, who watch as posthumans and whose watching makes us posthuman. The posthuman, according to N. Katherine Hayles, “does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg” (1999, 4). Rather, posthumanism is marked by the fluidity of boundaries between bodily self and environment, where the posthuman subject is constructed through interactions and feedback loops between not only the mind and the body to form the self, but also the self and the environment (2). It is our posthuman negotiation and identification that are missing when we watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on the TV screen rather than the computer screen, because blogs are a format designed for computers, not television . When we watch and engage with blogs, we negotiate our posthumanness , our artificial extensions and engagements with the world around us, and we struggle with our posthuman identities even as we engage, posthumanly, in the world around us. When we watch Dr. Horrible on the computer screen, our posthuman identification is more actively engaged than when we watch it on the TV screen. Dr. Horrible serves both as an allegory of our struggles with posthuman identification through its narrative and as a re-creation of our experiences with posthuman negotiation through the format of the text. When we watch on the computer screen, where we normally view blogs, the narrative follows and demonstrates the circular negotiations that we engage in while encouraging us to engage in those negotiations, creating a feedback loop characteristic of the posthuman. To analyze how this circular (but...

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