Transmedia Critical| Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters

Abstract

A transmedia character is a fictional hero whose adventures are told in different media platforms, each one giving more details on the life of that character. There is not a direct correspondence between transmedia storytelling and transmedia characters. In a shared narrative world, in fact, different characters can live and act, and every story can focus on a different one; moreover, the presence of the same character in different texts and media platforms does not necessarily imply that these texts or platforms share the same world. More generally, transtextuality and transmediality propose some problems to the status of the character, in particular to his identity, which is not always univocally defined. On this basis, this article investigates the different ways to construct a transmedia character in order to elaborate a first, preliminary typology.