Transmedia Characters/Transmedia Figures: Drawing Distinctions and Staging Re-Entries

Abstract

Aiming to contribute to character studies as an interdisciplinary field, this article sketches two particularly challenging conceptual problems that commonly reoccur in academic discussions about characters. On the one hand, this refers to the tension between characters' transmediality and medium specificity, which suggests that it is just as undesirable to overgeneralize from how characters are represented in one media form to how characters are represented in any or all other media forms as it is to undergeneralize by overemphasizing the differences between media forms and/or the characters they represent. On the other hand, and no less importantly, a fair bit of conceptual confusion seems to result from a range of scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical commitments using the term "character" to refer to very different phenomena. Drawing on a diverse set of existing research on characters across media forms, I propose to address the second problem by distinguishing between local work-specific characters, transmedia characters, transmedia character networks, transmedia character templates, and transmedia figures as different aspects of the complex assemblage of characters and character-like phenomena that current transmedia franchises commonly present. I then briefly explore how these distinctions are drawn quite differently in the context of the transmedia figures of Lara Croft and Spider-Man, the latter of which also seems to be defined by a staged "re-entry" of these very distinctions into the multidimensional storyworld of Marvel's "multiverse."