![]() Instead, the following offers a modest proposal to think about characters and their relations across conventionally distinct media such as literary texts, comics, films, television series, or video games in a way that privileges their conceptualization as entities that are located in medially represented storyworlds rather than as “popular heroes” (see Bennett 2017) or “cultural icons” (see Brooker 2013) that exist “above” any particular medial representation or media text. Yet, this ubiquity of characters also leads to a pronounced heterogeneity that the present article may be able to hint at, but certainly cannot reconstruct and explore exhaustively. Indeed, there are rather few media texts that do not represent characters in some way or another. 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.Ĭharacters are a salient part of our current media culture. 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 modification – with only redundancy and expansion allowing for medial representations of work-specific characters to contribute to the representation of a single transmedia character. ![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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