Affect and the Analysis of Transmedial Characters

ABSTRACT:Fans of games and media have generally been analyzed as social communities that invest in particular narratives. Their reception is not just critical, but affective, spanning a wide range of emotions from love and nostalgia to frustration. In this essay, I propose a model of affective reception that attends to both textual representation and affective responses of audiences. By drawing from affect theory, I conceptualize affect as a dynamic process with social, political, and temporal dimensions. I apply this model to the controversy around the playable character Kassandra from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which functions as a case study to show how affective reception works in practice. Ultimately, I argue that to understand contemporary media and their characters, we need to look deeper into these affective responses of different interpretive communities.