Do Fans Generate Transtexts?: An Interview with Melanie Bourdaa and Benjamin Derhy-Kurtz (Part Three)

Part of what had initially interested me about transmedia storytelling was that we were seeing the kinds of textual expansion, backstory elaboration, and development of secondary characters that I had long associated with fan fiction but being incorporated officially into the franchise and thus becoming part of the canon. Although I appreciate the intellectual rationale for doing so, I also worry that our ability to make meaningful distinctions about the status of different textual extensions may get lost in your more expansive concept. What do you see as the continued value of canon and fanon in this transtexts paradigm?

 

M. Bourdaa: This book offers a new perspective in Transmedia, as it was so often analyzed from a production point of view, i.e. studying the canon and authentic texts produced by the industrial and executive team at work.

Canon productions and fanon ones have to be both distinct and yet, if we think in terms of transtexts, they have also to be linked together in a shared storyworld. When I quoted Geoffrey Long earlier on negative spaces, I think we have here the core aspect of transtexts: those space left by the production teams are inevitable going to be filled by the creativity of fans. A dialogue, a co-creative process have to be envisioned by both parties. The extended universes have to be built by both the production teams and the fans.

Of course, that can create monsters and controversies like for example Star Wars, the paragon of extended universe. The Star Wars stories are augmented by hundreds of novels and comic books, video games and TV series (animated or not). And fans complete this huge narrative universe with their own productions, sometimes creating alternate universes within the canon.

When Disney bought the franchise, before launching Star Wars 7, they created a clean slate for the canon, keeping only a few ancillary content such as The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels for example. But the fans’ texts are still out there, still part of the storyworld. To control fans’ productivity and play with the canon, J.K. Rowling created the interactive website Pottermore, which contains original content from the Harry Potter universe, thus extending the stories. But the author, wishing to regain control on the fanon productions and especially on the proliferation of slash fictions, created a creative space where fans could write their own stories but would have to follow some rules if they wanted to be published on the website.

Examples here from Hunger Games and Doctor Who suggest ways that fans and other audiences actively accept and reject bids for authenticity and canonicity rather than taking all commercially produced texts at face value and we’ve seen with Star Wars that the producers, themselves, may actively retract the canonical status of particular transtexts if they block potential future developments in the franchise. On what basis do fans arbitrate and resolve these conflicting bids on what constitutes the canon? Why does it matter if we have an agreed-upon sense of what constitutes the canon?

 

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: To go back to the origin of the term, canon, of course, initially refers to what is considered as ‘officially part of the “story”’ by a legitimate figure of authority, with the Rabbis deciding on which texts to include in (and reject from) the Old Testament (Tanakh), twenty four books / texts in total, and later on the Church, making slight adjustments to the list of texts from the Old Testament and making a new selection for the New one (with, interestingly, a number of variations: the Samaritan canon only retaining the Pentateuch and the various Christian denominations having certain dissensions on the final version of the canonical Bible). From this, we see that decision on what is considered canonical or not comes from the authoritative figure, rather than from the ‘audience’.

As developed in the chapter that I wrote about canonicity and transtexts, institutional figures still have a major role in whether a text is recognised as canonical or not when it comes to, as you say, the commercially produced texts. In many cases, once they weigh in, fans would not typically challenge the ‘official version’ (I’m still talking about transtexts from the same ‘universe’ here; not, say, adaptations). When things are left unsaid, however, without the show-runner, the channel, the writer or whichever authoritative person, everything is left to discussion, and fans can engage in heated debate over the status of a given transtext. In such cases, issues of credibility and consistency with the rest of the canonical texts arise, and, when such elements are debatable, long debates are sure to ensue.

As for why it matters to have an agreed upon sense of what constitutes the canon, I guess this comes back to the historical original sense of the term and purpose thereof: for the community to have a collective understanding of the ‘story’ in question so as to bring consistency and togetherness to its members with regards to a shared culture and ‘myth’, to know what did ‘happen’ and what did not; what is, what was, and what could be.

M. Bourdaa: When it comes to fans’ creations and works, there is often, if not always, a tension between what is considered by the authoritative production as canon and what is considered by fans as fanon. Fans play with the universe in the sense that when they produce their videos, write their fanfictions, draw their artworks, they poach what they think is interesting and re-work it into something new. They produce a new meaning, new contexts, new relationships.

In the Hunger Games case study, fans went against the authoritative canon of the movies because they thought it was not faithful enough to the books. The marketing campaign and the movies were glamorizing the stories and characters, thus weakening the purpose the books. So, they “took back the narrative” and organized themselves to build a transmedia activism, on multiple media platforms and social networks, and make something positive out of a negative narrative. This form of “resistance” from engaged audiences and this activism can be cultural, social or even political. A more recent example: the science-fiction show The 100 (broadcast on the CW) killed off Lexa, a lesbian character in episode 3×07 and a fans’ favourite, by a stray bullet, continuing the Bury Your Gay trope, that is infamous among LGBTQ fans. This trope shows how gay characters can be killed off to make a straight character’s arc move forward (see Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries for example). In this case, LGBTQ fans felt betrayed and enraged but they chose to re-direct their energy towards a good cause: raising money for the Trevor Project and bringing awareness on lesbian and more largely on LGBTQ representation on TV and media. Moreover, fans created their own alternate universe with fanfictions and tumblrs in which Lexa is still alive and still in her relationship with Clarke, her lover. These fanon productions and creations do not match with the canon since Lexa is dead but give fans an opportunity to make Lexa live again and build their own imaginative storyworld, emphasising on a positive representation that is lacking now in the canon.

An important contribution of this book is expanding the range of exemplars of transmedia practice to consider the role that transtexts play in relation to the contemporary sitcom and professional wrestling, among others. What are sitcom producers doing differently from those working with speculative fictions and how might expanding what we look at further sharpen our conceptual vocabulary for thinking about transmedia?

 

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: Thank you. Sam Ford’s chapter on wrestling and the chapter on sitcoms do offer perspectives which are… under-represented, we could say, in academic literature on transmedia; as does yours, on a totally different level, with regards to geographically and conceptually different types of transmedia. This was precisely the point of this book: not only to develop the analysis of key and often-discussed topics through new case studies, as Matt Hills and Paul Booth skilfully have, but also to bring new elements and perspectives to the table.

And some sitcom producers using transmedia strategies, indeed, do things differently, on a number of levels. In our chapter, Simone Knox and I explain that in this TV III era, TV channels, and US networks in particular, are struggling for audience share, and sitcoms are thus turning to smaller but more engaged audiences; with the producers encouraging invested viewership by using transtexts.

This is where we came up with two new notions (albeit not specific/limited to comedy). Transtexts give their audiences the opportunity to willingly (continue to) suspend their disbelief, play along and ‘believe’ that the transtexts are ‘real’ (for example, that books and or tweets were in fact written by the characters); this is what we have called Accepted Imaginative Realism. It is, therefore, an imaginative game between the producers, who invest in creative labour to provide a more compelling and life-like storyworld, and the audience, who becomes further engaged and chooses to ‘believe’ in the transtexts (in a manner reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s ‘we-know-they-know’ double-codedness of the postmodern). But of course, one can also express the situation from the production perspective, rather than the reception one, through the concept of the Reality Envelope, where the producers have a specific agenda: attempting to push this (reality) envelope so as to penetrate beyond the TV set’s screen and thus bring this sense of reality to the audience.

We chose that expression because, in addition to the ‘pushing the envelope’ idiom, an envelope is a spatial object, alike transtexts ‘hovering’ around their storyworlds, and also because envelopes are fragile, a notion which we must be kept in mind in relation to these concepts of ‘realism’. But I wish we had more time / space, because there are many more elements to talk about, which are used within transtexts by sitcoms producers, such as issues relating to texture, performance and the actors’ input. To sum up, individually and collectively, such concepts can enrich debates on transtexts, and in our conclusion, we invite others to engage with them and test them out through other case studies, whether from or beyond the sitcom genre.

While most accounts acknowledge that many transmedia texts function as both storytelling and branding, the emphasis has largely been on identifying their contributions to the story. Yet there are several places in the book where this emphasis is reversed. What might readers learn about branding by looking more closely at transmedia franchises?

 

B.W.L. Derhy Kurtz: Yes, I think this is another important element as well, and it is interesting to finish on that note. Besides studying what transtexts and branding can bring to a story, one could and should also look at what transmedia stories can bring to branding, and marketing, and communication. As it happens, the answer is: a lot! I have long been interested in that aspect, in fact, and aside from guest-editing a special issue entitled ‘Branding TV: Transmedia to the Rescue’ a few years ago, I actually teach transmedia as a communication and a branding strategy to communication postgraduate students (it was only natural, therefore, that this emphasis would be reversed at times in the book, as you note).

Regarding transtexts and branding, and the text-brand, Hélène Laurichesse, by applying concepts such as the galaxy system and the brand universe to transtexts, and by clarifying the place of fans in this brand-centred analysis, brings a rare insight into how the two can work with one another. But aside from branding, transmedia franchises (for which a whole new legal framework must be considered, as explained by Jennifer Henderson, due to the presence of extensions under many forms) can be used as an example to create an engaging marketing or communication strategy around a product, which will be more immersive and more compelling than a traditional advertising campaign could ever be; as was done, for instance, by Chipotle and its scarecrow campaign a few years back.

But it can also be used in order to create a new storyworld, the transtexts of which would be the ones to be sold to the public, like LEGO (through the help of various right-leasing devices, in order to use a number of comic books or other fictional characters), which have created a universe where people are… ‘legos’, and directed the audience to the transtexts themselves: videogames, films, etc., which are sold to the consumers, rather than to the original product itself: the toys (as opposed to using transtexts as a decoy to hide the advertising purpose, while bringing people back to the original product; in the case of Chipotle: sandwiches).

Transtexts are, therefore, not ‘simply’ a persistent – and rising – narrative form for a variety of cultural products anymore; they are also part of the future of communication, marketing, branding and advertising.

Melanie Bourdaa is an associate professor at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne in Communication and Information Sciences, and a researcher in Transmedia Storytelling and fan studies. She ran a MOOC entitled « Understanding Transmedia Storytelling » in France. She created the GREF, a research group gathering scholars working in the field of Fan Studies.  She co-created the CATS, a consortium on Transmedia Storytelling, gathering researchers and professionals in this field of expertise. She runs the research program “MediaNum”, dealing with the valorization of Cultural Heritage via Transmedia Storytelling, funded by the Region d’Aquitaine.

Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz teaches at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), Sciences Po (IEP) and Ecole Polytechnique (X), as well as at various communication and business schools. He created undergraduates/postgraduates courses, including on Transmedia, and holds experience in marketing and in institutional/promotional/political communication and consulting. His PhD, at the University of East Anglia, explores ‘success’ in the TV industry.