Introduction: Characters across media

Abstract

Contemporary media culture is fundamentally shaped by a technological and cultural media convergence that has also led to the continued rise of transmedia franchises such as The lord of the rings or Harry Potter, Star wars or A song of ice and fire/Game of thrones, The walking dead or Doctor who, the DC or Marvel universes,Warcraft or Tomb raider. During the past decade, literary, media, and cultural studies have increasingly become aware of the socio-cultural significance of these franchises as well as of the considerable theoretical and methodological challenges their study presents. A range of book-length studies by scholars such as Henry Jenkins (2006), Kristin Thompson (2007), Robert A. Brookey (2010), Elizabeth Evans (2011), Mark J. P. Wolf (2012), Derek Johnson (2013), Colin B. Harvey (2015), Matthew Freeman (2016), or Dan Hassler-Forest (2016) examine important aspects of the production, aesthetics, and reception of transmedia franchises in convergent media culture. Yet, while virtually all of these studies mention characters at some point and there is a solid consensus that characters fulfil key integrating functions for many transmedia franchises, their reception, and the continued engagement of their fans within networks of collaborative creation, there is as of yet comparatively little research that focuses specifically on the forms and functions of characters across media (see, however, the discussion of “intertextual characters” in Margolin 1996; of “transtextual characters” in Richardson 2010; or of “transmedia characters” in Bertetti 2014; as well as various in-depth studies of “character-focused” franchises such as Brooker 2012, 2013; Condry 2009; Denson 2014; Hills 2010, 2015; Pearson 2015; Steinberg 2012). This is of course not to say that there are no attempts aimed toward a better understanding of the forms and functions of characters in different media. While it may still be true “that many have written only a little and only a few have written much on characters” (Eder 2008 a: 40; “dass viele nur wenig und nur wenige viel zum Bereich der Figur geschrieben haben”), we now have a range of mediumspecific theories of characters not only in literary texts and theatrical perfor-