Transmedia characters: Theory and analysis

Abstract

This article sketches a theoretical framework and method for the analysis of transmedia characters that focuses on specific instantiations of these characters in individual media texts, before asking how these local work-specific characters relate to other local work-specific characters or coalesce into glocal transmedia characters as part of global transmedia character networks, thus evading what one could consider an undue emphasis on the "model of the single character" when analyzing the various characters that are, for example called Sherlock Holmes, Batman, or Lara Croft. The connections between these work-specific characters within transmedia character network could then be described as either relations of redundancy, relations of expansion, or relations of modificationwith only redundancy and expansion allowing for medial representations of work-specific characters to contribute to the representation of a single transmedia character. In intersubjectively constructing characters across media, however, recipients will not only take into account powerful normative discourses that police the representation of characters across media but also draw on their accumulated knowledge about previously represented work-specific or transmedia characters as well as about transmedia character templates and even more general transmedia character types.

Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling

“…Over the years I have been writing this book, the ideal of narrative continuity has been noticed by several scholars (Bertetti 2014;Pearson 2019;Thon 2019). In scholarship on characters from and about Japan, they are treated as entities that can exist beyond stories, and their multiplicity is taken as a given.…”

“…It is only recently that scholars have lessened their academic commitment to explaining characters through a single identity. They have discussed characters through semiotics (Bertetti 2014), as serial characters , or as part of a character network (Thon 2019). It is becoming increasingly acceptable to embrace the multiple identities of transmedia characters.…”

“…Pikachu has since proliferated across so many different media and products that it has become impossible to give a complete overview. Jan-Noël Thon (2019) . This Pikachu originally derives from the game Detective Pikachu (Creatures 2016), in which Pikachu helps Tim Goodman find his father.…”

The Player’s Interpretative Agency and the Developer’s Disruptive Powers: How Blizzard Enforces Authorial Intention in Overwatch

“…It is quite common for franchises to expand in such a way that it creates multiple worlds and universes to create coherence between stories (Thon 2015). Characters too are swept up in this strive for continuity (see Blom 2020) so that readers or recipients rather look for narrative explanations on the paradoxical appearances of characters than accept the paradox that the same character in one text is not the same person in another (see Thon 2019). Blizzard Entertainment too follows this strive of continuity, as the double perspective between a game piece and a fictional being is the result of Blizzard Entertainment attempting to create a single coherent world, although I have argued elsewhere that it instead created a shared universe between players consisting of multiple worlds (see Blom 2018).…”

Intermedial Studies

“…in the TV series Sherlock (2010-17) and Elementary (2012-19), or the movie franchise starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes). Our case study discusses how Sherlock Holmes becomes transmedially recognizable as a character through the standardization of his attributes and his attitudes towards sleuthing and technology across the centuries (for transmedia characters and Holmes, see Thon 2019). Penny Dreadful (2014-16)a transmedial franchise (incorporating a television series and several graphic novels) that also has its roots in the nineteenth century.…”