Much transmedia fictional practice involves the orchestration of a variety of forms of inter- or transtextuality in the development and representation of a fictional brand and world, not only sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, but also adaptations, remakes,
translations, reissues, and repackagings. Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, for example, comprises (to date) a series of four feature films, two series of children’s books set before the events in the films, and a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game set in between the first and second feature film, but also videogame adaptations of each of the four films. Even the Star Wars and Matrix franchises, frequently held up as paradigmatic examples of transmedia practice where each new instalment “makes its own unique contribution” to an overarching narrative (Jenkins, 2007), include adaptations in their archives; the film Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002) has been novelised (Salvatore, 2003), for example, and the videogame The Matrix: Path of Neo
(Shiny Entertainment, 2005) adapts scenes from the first Matrix film into playable levels. As Jenkins puts it, such transmedia fictions run on logics of multiplicity as well as logics of continuity, generating “alternative retellings”, “alternative versions of[...]characters”, or “parallel universe versions of[...]stories” as well as narrative extensions, requiring consumers “to sort out not only how the pieces [of the transmedia work] fit together but also which version of the story any given work fits within.” (Jenkins, 2009b) They may even be treated as comprised of multiple “canons”, fans of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings franchises, for example, readily speaking of “book-verse” and “movie-verse”, understanding and navigating the series of books and the series of film adaptations in each franchise as distinct (though obviously and necessarily related) narrative realities and fictional systems.
This is the crux of this thesis’ foundational conceptualisation of transmedia franchising as parent practice to transmedia storytelling: that transmedia storytelling is one specific logic of inter-textuality and cross-platform movement, namely narrative or diegetic extension, where transmedia franchising may involve many. Here, however, I
92 wish to go further and theorise transmedia franchising as an art of multiplicity. That is, I wish to bring out that multiplicity is not only an important concept for understanding the make-up and configuration of the textual archives the practice produces, it is also a key principle of the fictional operations and imaginations at play in them.
Multiplicity as a logic of transmedia extension is rarely thus framed. The
comments of Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner (a production company specialising in cross-platform entertainment), are typical of much critical and industrial discourse that denies the creativity and even fictionality of adaptation- or remediation-based
franchising; narrative extension is “artful”, franchising through adaptation is “mercantile” (quoted in Phillips, 2010: 10). Insofar as franchising brings together and announces adaptations, remakes, or reissues as new takes on or representations of a character or narrative world, however, it should be recognised as a practice of creating meaning, of building and developing fictional objects, through setting in play dialogues between rewrites, reimaginings, and alternate versions, of thinking about, presenting and revealing fictional creations through reworkings, revisits, and what-if?s. Franchise consumers understand their plots and characters through, and take pleasure in, returning to and gaining a new perspective on stretches of narrative, mastering and shifting between multiple strands of continuity. The way in which transmedia franchising is organised around content, brand logic, and “core concepts”, as the previous chapters have
discussed, makes multiplicity intelligible as a co-ordinated process or strategy of fictional representation; the extent to which convergence culture more broadly is breeding
adaptations and remakes normalises it as a modality of engagement with media texts and properties. Finding meaning in and creating meaning from multiplicity is, moreover, in the DNA of transmedia franchising. As Ford and Jenkins note, for example, insofar as comic books, particularly those in the superhero genre, are important “precursors for” (2009: 304) and ancestors of transmedia franchising, the practice has its roots in an art form that frequently exploits the creative possibilities of developing “multiple versions of the same characters” (307). Across comic book series’ complex tangle of continuities, “multiple versions of a superhero cumulatively work to create the version that eventually becomes the legend.” (Ndalianis, 2009: 281) This thesis has already noted, meanwhile, that contemporary Anglo-American transmedia practices can be productively understood as developing in relation to Japanese “media mix” culture, in which multiplicity is
93 a fictional property. As Mark Steinberg’s (2009) analysis of the popular character
Tetsuwan Atomu (or Astro Boy, as his name was translated for Anglo-American
audiences) demonstrates, fans of a character in this media landscape readily and adeptly navigate multiple media representations of it and multiple retellings of its narrative adventures, understanding them simply as different, differently valuable and differently useful ways of consuming and experiencing a beloved fictional object.
This is not to say that all “alternate versions” of a character or plot generated through the franchising process are created and treated as equal. Negotiations of hierarchy, authenticity, canonicity and fidelity often play out in the presentation and reception of franchised adaptations, remakes, and alternate continuities, interacting with how they work together in producing fictional meanings. As Derek Johnson notes, meanwhile, there are usually “power differentials” between the various “nodes” of a franchise production network, such that franchise creativity involves similar negotiations; “what results”, Johnson suggests, “is a tension between what might be termed difference and deference, where those creators with more social and institutional capital in the franchise have the ability to diverge from previous uses [of its content], and those [with] less power use the franchise in more conservative ways so as not to challenge the creative acts above them in the creative hierarchy.” (2011: 16) Moreover, not all discontinuities in a franchise’s archive are the product of an aesthetic of multiplicity. Franchises in which every use of the transmedia licence is carefully co-ordinated and integrated with a centralised creative brief tend to be the exception rather than the rule; more commonly, production is diasporic, the transmedia licence farmed out to different production teams for each medium or textual part, and collaboration or consultation between them can be minimal. Inevitably, this produces elements of worldbuilding, narrative, or
characterisation that unintentionally contradict other parts of the work. In acknowledging that multiplicity can be read as a fictional operation and even aesthetic strategy in
transmedia franchises, critical theory and practice should not lose sight of the fact that some discontinuities and divergences in franchise narratives, worldbuilding, or
characterisation are best understood as fault or error, and that subsequent franchise instalments may need to be understood and analysed as attempting to overwrite, brush aside or rationalise them.
94 Analysing the transmedia franchise character, then, in fact means analysing an array of announced variations on a theme, a set of versions presented and set in dialogue as multiple refractions of or perspectives on a single creation by some persisting markers of brand identity or “core concepts”: name, appearance, authorisation or ownership. It means reading how the character is rewritten and reimagined over the course of its transmedia life, and how a picture of it emerges through this multiplicity, from the ways in which its various versions speak to and engage each other. This chapter sets out a framework for so doing. In it, I look to identify some common forms of franchise
extension through multiplicity rather than continuity, conceptualising and theorising each in terms of the relation in which the textual version thereby produced stands to other franchise instalments. I also consider how each type of multiplicity may be understood as a strategy or tool in an overarching fictional method or project, discussing each in terms of the work it can do relative to broader protocols of transmedia franchising.
From Hyperdiegesis to Multiverse
I begin by returning to comic book serials as analogue and influence. DC Comics in the latter half of the twentieth century has attempted to manage, organise and rationalise many of the splinters, resets and disruptions of continuity in its various series using the concept of the multiverse. (Jenkins, 2009d; Ndalianis, 2009) The idea of the multiverse is a framework that makes sense of multiple and contradictory narrative continuities in terms of parallel universes, alternate dimensions, diverging and converging time streams. It figures multiplicity in comic book serials in diegetic terms, distinguishing strands of continuity and versions of characters by the conditions, rules and facts of the fictional reality in each case, what did and did not happen, what is and is not “true” in the narrative world presented and implied by each branch or instalment.
Here, I wish to appropriate the concept of multiversality from discourse on comics as a critical figure for a particular type of multiplicity in franchise extension more
generally, that is, the production of multiple versions of a franchise character through a mechanism of positing and exploring alternate narrative realities. This may be framed as an excursion down a road not taken at a narrative fork or crux in another franchise instalment, or a game of cause and effect, of unravelling the implications of rewriting a diegetic fact or two, as an exercise, in other words, in “what if?” The Star Wars Infinities
95 failing to destroy the Death Star. It may involve altering fictional logics other than
narrative and causality that shape and constrain characters and the narrative realities in which they live, such as genre; DC Comics’s Elseworlds multiverse, for example, offers titles that, for example, “examine what a German expressionist superhero story might have looked like” (Ford and Jenkins, 2009: 308). As mentioned briefly in Chapter One, meanwhile, where a parent corporation holds the rights to multiple franchise licences, characters may be transplanted into another franchise universe entirely, or into one of the peculiar realities described in Chapter One, brand-defined fictional spaces in which characters of common corporate parenthood co-exist and mingle. Often, these
appearances are simply side-steps in a character’s narrative trajectory out of its usual time and space, rationalised by the notion of all a studio’s franchises ultimately taking place in one fictional reality, but not always. A recurring character, for example, with the name, physical appearance, and basic personality traits of Cloud Strife from Square Enix’s
Compilation of Final Fantasy VII franchise turns up in Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts
franchise, yet the fabula of his fictional life is entirely distinct, both his narrative arc and the diegesis he inhabits entirely unconnected to those of Cloud Strife in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII titles.
Given that genres of speculative fiction dominate transmedia franchising, multiversal storytelling in franchises may have an intradiegetic frame of time travel or Hypertime (a science fictional concept “akin to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory” (Ndalianis, 2009: 281), but which admits the possibility of rupture, slippage, and intersection between timelines and dimensions), or may be presented as detours into such speculative fictional spaces as dream worlds, future visions, or immaterial realities; alternatively, it may be framed and made intelligible by nothing more than transmedia franchising’s logic and aesthetic of multiplicity. In either case, franchise properties are treated and exploited as “reservoirs of potentialities” (Ryan, 1999: 117), of possible worlds.
For franchise producers, multiversal storytelling is a useful method of exploring and presenting characters. It is a way, for example, of dealing with the problem of managing narrative climaxes and pacing in vast ongoing narratives, the need to avoid narrative stagnation while at the same time avoiding events that would too greatly disrupt flow. Extending a franchise multiversally allows creators both to reverse otherwise
96 narrative-killing events, and also to indulge in them. As Roz Kaveney notes, for example, multiversality in the X-Men franchise allows contributor Grant Morrison to push the work’s theme of extinction to the point of “total nightmare”, and set out a vision of apocalypse centuries into the future of his continuity that, were it not for the leeway of the multiverse, would provide something of a block for further narrative development (2008: 174). Existing work on comic book multiverses also suggests, meanwhile, that a major function of alternate universes is to provide space for the exploration of directions for a character “not suitable” for other instalments, actions or futures for them
“unthinkable [in] the main continuity” (Ford and Jenkins, 2009: 308). Their frame of digression, speculation and experiment make alternate universe texts to a degree “safe spaces” for the loosening of continuity control and brand control. Transmedia franchises may thus make use of them to attract a larger and more varied consumer base through escaping the confines of a character’s official branded form, and taking it in different tonal, thematic, or generic directions, without thereby destabilising or diluting to too great an extent their brand identity and core concepts. Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope
(Warner, 2002), for example, explores the dark side of Princess Leia; a character defined in the rest of the franchise and in cultural memory by heroism, strong will, and
unwavering principle, in Star Wars Infinites: A New Hope Leia is swayed by Vader and Palpatine to renounce her rebellion against the Empire, and to feed her Force with anger and ambition. Crossing an already extremely popular franchise character over into another franchise universe, meanwhile, as in the case of Cloud Strife’s appearance in the
Kingdom Hearts games, may provide a valuable “hook” to draw consumers into a new sub-franchise or related brand. Recognising this latter as a motivation behind multiversal storytelling can provide a useful framework for analysing the ways in which the “hook” character is constructed in its multiverse incarnations. It highlights that the character in its new reality may be presented with the features that initially made it so appealing
emphasised, for example, or as a reflection more of fan discourses about the character than its creator’s initial vision,18
and that its narrative appearances are likely to be unexpected cameos, and perhaps structured as rewards for close engagement with or investment in the new sub-franchise text. In the first game in the Kingdom Hearts
18 With this in mind, then, having said that the multiversal extension of a character enables experimentation without a concurrent weakening of brand identity, I would qualify that this particular type of multiversality may sometimes be implicated in the shifts in core concepts discussed in the previous chapter. The
multiversal extension of Cloud Strife into the Kingdom Hearts franchise, for example, may be productively understood by these terms as a contributing factor in the gradual distortion of his core concepts noted in Chapter Two.
97 franchise (Square Enix, 2002), for example, popular Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
villain Sephiroth is a secret optional boss, a fight with him hidden behind the menu option “?????” and only available after the completion of five other battle tournaments.
This gives some sense of the value and practical function of this type of multiplicity for franchise producers, but the question of how a picture of a character emerges from multiversal storytelling remains. Much existing critical discourse on meaning and effect in “forking path” fiction is derived from postmodern experiments in labyrinthine narrative and non-linear, non-teleological fictional temporalities; as such, it tends to frame the multiversal representation of character in terms of the articulation of disjointed and abnormal subjectivity, and the contingency and potentiality both of experience and of fictional representations, and of alternative temporalities and
spatialities (see, for example, Buckland ed. 2009 generally, and in particular Elsaesser and Wedel). While there may be formal and structural similarities between such texts and the multiversality of the franchise character, however, it is not a product of the same aesthetic and cultural conditions and motivations, and therefore cannot be made similarly intelligible. Rather than coming from a climate in which the deconstruction of naturalised understandings of the nature of time, subjectivity and reality was an explicit thematic concern that stylistic experiment spoke to and negotiated, it comes from a place of re- presenting intellectual property, experimenting with large-scale fictional worldbuilding, and exploring the reach of a fictional creation. In the immediate contexts of its production and reception, therefore, the transmedia character’s multiplication across fictional
universes is rarely if ever abstracted or thematised, and the significance of stylistic or diegetic multiplicity is read in terms of the specifics of the fictional conditions altered, rather than the act or fact of the multiplicity itself.
A more productive point of comparison, I would argue, is as such the science fiction sub-genre of the counterfactual or alternate history, in which the core sf method of the thought experiment is directed back at history rather than forward at the future. Counterfactuals such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which begins from the premise of an Axis Powers victory in World War II,ask readers to reflect on and gain a deeper understanding of a present actuality through the lens of what might instead have happened, what did not happen, and why. Elena Gomel invokes the term multiverse in a discussion of counterfactual fiction (2009: 348); I propose here the
98 converse: that if the concept of the counterfactual is slightly expanded to accommodate alterations in style, genre, and similar fictional conditions as well as diegetic fact,
franchise multiversality may be usefully understood as a form of counterfactual thinking and writing, and as similar in how it produces fictional meaning to this sub-genre of sf. Some further comment on the fictional operations of counterfactuals and alternate histories is thus here necessary. Fundamentally, counterfactual thinking is a way of understanding and illuminating causality, chains of actions and reactions, implications and consequences; the multiversal representation of a character may as such be
understood as working to highlight and explicate cause and effect, the factors influencing decisions and the ramifications of them, the complex ecology of behaviour, motivation and response. Although, meanwhile, it may be expected that counterfactual thinking, in bringing to light some of the “absolute contingency of history” (Gomel, 2009: 348), “might make the world seem capricious and random” (Galinsky et al., 2005: 112), psychologists have found that it instead tends to lead people to perceive greater meaning in actual events, to induce a sense that things must have happened as they did for a reason