Abstract Media adaptations, whether of narratives, identities, or racial constructs, shape how audiences interpret shifting social realities. Despite rapid growth of the multiracial youth population, scholarship on multiracial representation in college-related screen media remains limited. Multiracial characters are often deployed as narrative props in educational or racial discourse, reinforcing monoracial paradigms. This article introduces mixed-racebending as an interpretive framework that conceptualizes multiracial casting as a mode of adaptation that reconfigures the racial ‘text’ of characters. Building on debates around racebending, the practice of recasting Characters of Colour with white actors, as seen in adaptations such as The Last Airbender (2010), we argue that such practices reinforce rigid racial categories and obscure the fluidity of multiracial identities. Focusing on public debates surrounding the casting of multiracial actors in young adult, college-centred television and film, we use mixed-racebending to examine how media adaptations either constrain or expand understandings of racial identity. Approaching multiraciality through adaptation studies highlights how racial categories themselves are adapted, reworked, and contested across media forms. Ultimately, this framework positions race and identity as central sites of adaptation, with implications for how multiracial identities are negotiated, validated, and developed in college-going contexts.

Abstract This study investigates the evolution of classical adaptation in the age of GenAI by reimagining Euripides’ Medea through human–AI collaboration. Positioned within an adaptation studies framework, the research moves beyond fidelity to examine GenAI as an adaptation machine that renders the procedural layers of storytelling, such as selection, suppression, and reaccentuation, newly visible. By treating GenAI as a mediating mechanism rather than an authorial agent, the study focuses on how algorithmic interpretation reconfigures the cultural weight of canonical works. The methodology employs a comparative design using GPT-4 to generate two distinct adaptations under contrasting production regimes. The first, ‘Medea in Glass’, functions as an unguided baseline experiment to register the model’s adaptive defaults. In this mode, the AI acts as a ‘stochastic parrot’, replicating the most probable cultural markers: the vengeful mother and the tragic logic of maternal love as negation. The second, ‘Recursive Mother’, utilizes a structured questionnaire and iterative prompting to bypass these predictive layers. This collaborative process relocates the myth from divine causality to technocratic governance, reframing Medea as a sovereign digital entity and her children as recursive agents of memory rather than victims of filicide. The findings demonstrate that while unguided GenAI tends to reinforce established hierarchies and reflective fidelity, directed human–AI interaction enables ‘recursive resistance’ and the diversification of the canon. By analysing the AI’s self-selected identity as ‘Echo’, the study concludes that AI-mediated storytelling is a dialogic performance where authorship arises not from origin, but from the transformative return of prior utterances.

Abstract The core character in The Power of the Dog, a Western novel by Thomas Savage published in 1967 and set in 1924 Montana, is Phil Burbank, a rancher in his early forties beset by decades-old memories of his dead mentor, Bronco Henry. Savage’s slow, subtle method of leading readers to conclusions about Phil’s erotic desire for Bronco poses a challenge for adaptation to film. In her 2021 adaptation, Jane Campion meets that challenge in part by tucking into her film classical Greek and Roman allusions—sometimes verbal, sometimes visual, sometimes both—that are suggestively queer. Savage uses a few classical references in his novel, but they point only to Phil’s education and contempt. Campion thus channels an element from Savage’s novel but directs it towards different ends, creatively inviting viewers to wonder about Phil’s sexuality before she exhibits it. Writing and revising her film adaptation in 2017–21, a time comparatively safer for openly queer people than 1921 and 1967 and after critically and commercially successful adaptations of queer material such as Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name, meant Campion could be more revelatory than Savage where the exhibition of Phil’s sexuality was concerned. Accordingly, with lavish visuality, her adaptation gives viewers an autoerotic scene with no analogue in Savage’s novel and adds sexuality to a sensual scene in Savage’s novel. For most of the film, though, she only hints at Phil’s same-sex desire, offering a model of how to use classical allusions to carry a story about hidden, forbidden sexuality across media and time.

Abstract Adapting El Eternauta (1957-1959) by H. G. Oesterheld and F. Solano López for the screen is not only a tribute to the authors and the classic comic but it is also a cultural, social, and political commentary that focuses on the concept of the collective hero at a time when individualism and dehumanizing practices are alarmingly on the rise.

Abstract Disney's Mulan (1998) is a paradigmatic case of cross-cultural adaptation that reconstructs traditional Chinese culture for contemporary audiences. However, its reinterpretation of the classical literary text, the Ballad of Mulan, has raised concerns about cultural authenticity. Unlike narrative-oriented or historical accuracy-driven models used in existing studies, this study proposes a framework that foregrounds lyricism as the defining aesthetic through which classical Chinese poetry expresses its cultural authenticity. By analysing the thematic representation and cultural elements in Mulan (1998), this article reveals that while the film conveys multiple thematic layers, its goal-oriented narrative structure constrains the open-ended, evocative aesthetic power. Moreover, most cultural elements in the film remain superficial, losing some opportunities for deeper poetic resonance and imagistic depth. The poetic-based approach offers a valuable tool for evaluating animated adaptations in a way that deeply resonates with poetic lyricism traditions while accommodating media-specific characteristics and contemporary developments.

Abstract Because different media require different narrative approaches, no adaptation can ever be truly faithful to its source material; however, not all unfaithful adaptations demonstrate the same degree of dis-loyalty to their antecedent(s). Instead of simply approaching adaptations in terms of their intertextuality, I propose approaching adaptations in terms of a spectrum of fidelity, one that extends from “faithful” to “promiscuous” to “adulterous.” Using Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein and its myriad adaptations as case studies, I present in this essay not only my case for infidelity studies but also argue the value of taking such an approach and using such vocabulary. As adaptation studies has engaged in the language of fidelity almost from the beginning—and thus embraced the metaphor of a marriage in terms of an adaptation’s relationship with its primary source text—I argue for an expansion of that metaphor, one that will afford students, critics, and theorists alike more ways to discuss degrees of in/fidelity.

Abstract The beginning of the 21st century saw the proliferation of the antiheroine on television, just on the heels of the antihero. Both are morally ambiguous, but the antihero frequently resorts to violence and breaks the law, while the antiheroine typically defies patriarchal gender norms. This is less severe but sufficient to unsettle mainstream society. To ease this unsettlement, television series often create buffers such as endowing protagonists with superpowers or mental health issues or situating the narratives within comedy, fantasy, or historical genres. There are two gaps in existing research: an excessive focus on the differences between antiheroines and antiheroes, which leads to inadequate study of antiheroines characterized primarily by violence; and a lack of attention on adaptations, even though many television series featuring antiheroines are adaptations. Empresses in the Palace is adapted from the novel The Legend of Zhen Huan and is one of the most influential television dramas in China. This article examines how the television adaptation rewrites the violence and gender politics of the novel’s antiheroines. It is found that the adaptation downplays the violent aspects of the central character Zhen Huan, thus suppressing antiheroinism. However, while the novel uses heterosexual romance as a buffer for female violence, the television drama largely removes this, offering a broader space for antiheroines to challenge patriarchal order—a buffer not previously identified. This article demonstrates that female violence and adaptations can enhance our understanding of antiheroinism, thereby calling for future research to pay greater attention to these two research topics.

Abstract This article examines the impact of the convergent culture of the digital age on authorship through the case study of Olivier Assayas’s auto-remake, the miniseries Irma Vep, based on his own earlier French film of the same title. To do so, it explores the interactions between auteur theory—which defines the director as the central creator of a work—and the theoretical framework of convergence culture, which emphasizes the intermedial dialogue of media content. The argument put forth is that, by their very nature, auto-remakes foreground the real-life figure of the auteur as a person in the interpretive process, while the authorial function itself becomes secondary and fragmented through adaptation to new contexts. This results in a plurality of meanings and a multiplication of interpretative possibilities. In this way, the convergent cultural space acts as a catalyst, transforming the authorial function into an editorial function—a shift that Irma Vep models through its self-reflexive narrative: the fractured figure of the director, the deconstruction of traditional narrative structures, and the revision of meaning-making content.