No limits? Multiverses, alternate universes and the media franchises

Anne Besson (1)

1 TEXTES ET CULTURES - Textes et Cultures

It is no coincidence if the biggest franchises today (Star Trek, Star Wars or Marvel) all dwell around fantastic genres: their specific narratives, namely their ancient uses of “other worlds” provide a perfect ground for mediatic expansions—fictional spaces and times for locating stories and games, only mildly affected by “continuity” issues. This communication will take fan studies’ tools in regard to transmediatic worlds (Jenkins, Peyron, Bourdaa), to investigate narrative options thus opened, focusing on potential limits of the public acceptance for this kind of multiple worlds’ narratives. If fan contributions and the transmedia strategies aiming to engage them have been understood as a form of cognitive training on trans-world circulations, reboots, prequels and other retellings tend, on the opposite, to draw the opposition of the “world-keepers”, not so much on behalf of poor innovation that for abuse of “alternate” storylines—if everything is possible in a given universe, how would its experts recognize their own?

Mots clés: Littérature -- Histoire et critique; Médias -- Histoire et critique

Domaines: Littératures; Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Anne Besson. No limits? Multiverses, alternate universes and the media franchises. Fastitocalon, 2017, Subcreation: Worldbuilding in the Fantastic, 7 (1-2), pp. 5-12. ⟨hal-03211744⟩