You came back! Thank goodness. If you’re here, you must be looking for more information after my last article on transmedia storytelling. As promised, this article is going to dive into the first of my three observable transmedia structures: Exposition in External Mediums.
If you want to know more about the basics of transmedia storytelling, then I suggest you have a look through my other articles before going any further. It’s not that this article will be difficult to follow if you don’t, it’s just shameless self-promotion.
Exposition in External Mediums sounds simple enough, but it’s actually a deeply nuanced art that, if done wrong, creates a network of stories that are vaguely connected and frustrating for audiences. As the name suggests, it is the process of telling a single narrative, often in a single medium, and then exploiting ‘entry points’ or ‘plot holes’ to spin off into other stories in other mediums. Each of these ‘spin-offs’ should in some way tie directly to the central narrative without detracting from their own intrinsic value.
Not so easy now, is it?
To make it easier, here’s some pretty prolific examples of this type of transmedia:
Star Wars episodes 01 to 03 were expanded in TV cartoon The Clone Wars.
Doctor Who has repeatedly spun-off into series such as CBBC’s The Sarah Jane Adventures and BBC3/BBC1 show Torchwood.
It’s easy to be cynical about why storytellers would expand into other franchises and mediums, especially in the modern climate of Cinematic Universes. There’s certainly a place for this criticism, but you won’t find that here. Instead, let’s look at why there is a genuine creative foundation to expanding a story in other mediums.
Storytelling is bloody hard work. No writer has ever looked at their ‘magnum opus’ and said, “It was a piece of piss, so easy!” Despite all the hard work that goes in to writing, producing, and distributing a story, mistakes can happen. Maybe a character dies early on, only to magically reappear in the final act. Okay, that’s a little extreme, but go with it. A writer, at this point, has two options. Either they can go back into the story and write a moment to reveal the character was never really dead, thus pulling the audience out of the central story and breaking the carefully curated flow of the story, OR they could tell this story some other way, and give it the focus such a story would require.
Take, for example, Disney’s first cinematic outing into the pre-established Star Wars universe: Rogue One. Barely anyone among casual audiences had considered how there was a tiny hole in the Death Star. Disney could easily have done what George Lucas was always doing and tweak the original film to include a line of dialogue about a disillusioned engineer getting his revenge on the Empire.
Instead, they told a completely contained story about a daughter hunting for her father, in which the construction of the Death Star became a crucial plot point for all the characters. There were references and easter eggs to other external media littered throughout the film, but ultimately it filled a minor plot hole in A New Hope to such a high standard, Rogue One is now considered crucial Star Wars viewing.
This deepening understanding of a story that already exists is crucial to this method of storytelling. By the time new media is created, the story is in essence already complete. This is incredibly freeing for creatives, as there is no production pressure to create more. Instead, writers are able to explore what they feel is important. Perhaps there’s a character in the central story (a rogue smuggler, let’s say) that was forced to have reduced presence in the central story in order to focus on the protagonist’s journey. Through transmedia, the writer is able to put the central story aside and focus completely on this dashing space pirate. The original remains materially unchanged, but once audiences see the tragedy of the rogue’s past, everything they say and do in the central story carries more emotional weight.
Having material appear to be superfluous to the central story can appear to go against the grain of the core of transmedia storytelling. The thing isn’t meant to be whole until it’s complete. So, how can I honestly argue that posthumously putting exposition in external media is the same thing? Easily: it’s not up to me to prove it.
Exposition in external media is a conversation between creatives and their audiences. If a piece of material does fundamentally change the audience understanding of the core (Rogue One), then it counts. If the new addition is widely seen to be superfluous (Solo), then it doesn’t. The point is this: once the material exists, can the whole survive without it?
Sticking with Star Wars, let’s look at how the idea of a central story can evolve. Every story is different, but audiences and creatives always know what the ‘core’ is. Star Wars, for example, is a saga of trilogies. Regardless of what other material is created, it will always be so. It’s how audiences anchor themselves. Whatever they watch is seen through the lens of ‘where in the Saga does this take place?’ Ask a Star Wars fan when Andor takes place, they’ll likely say it takes place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. If they say it takes place between The Bad Batch and Rebels, they’re either an insane person or you’re both big enough fans that you didn’t need to ask the question in the first place.
So long as Star Wars sticks to the formula of ‘central trilogy + External worldbuilding’, it can continue exponentially.
On the flip side, this model also means that as soon as the new TV series / movies / games stop making LucasFilm any money, Disney can safely pull the plug and not worry about fan backlash from incomplete stories. They’ve recently shown their hand regarding their intent to abandon this model and faced the consequences.
Every story is different. The Star Wars model won’t fit every franchise utilising this form of worldbuilding transmedia. Doctor Who, for example, is a long running series that can continue exponentially on Saturday / Sunday nights. Spin-off material can come and go as it pleases, occasionally making a difference to the life of the titular Doctor or choosing not to. The point is that the external material should loop itself around certain tenets of the core show and exploit them for new audiences. The Sarah Jane Adventures, for example, picked up the life of arguably the most popular Doctor Who companion of all time, Sarah Jane Smith. The show, aimed at a much younger audience than the main series, adopted the episodic nature of Doctor Who, focusing on a character that exemplified all the Doctor’s best and most loving qualities. Conversely, Torchwood did the exact opposite. It was a hyper-violent adult drama that spun away from three unresolved strands in the central show:
- What happened to Captain Jack Harkness after he was reincarnated?
- How did Cardiff recover from the events of Boom Town?
- What happened to the Torchwood Institute after the battle of Canary Wharf?
From these three questions, stories of love, sex, and monsters were spawned and spiralled into a show that ran for several series of varying tone and subject. Both series became essential viewing in 2008, when their stories wove into Doctor Who’s two-part season finale that saw the return of arch-nemesis Davros. The two spin-offs very existence became part of Davros’ plan to prove to the Doctor that he is a monster that creates monsters.
Both Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures have now ended, but Doctor Who continues. With over 60 years of material to be inspired by, there’s no reason why Doctor Who couldn’t become a multi-franchise behemoth. But, like Star Wars, it will only succeed if it recognises what it is and uses that as its constant foundation.
As alluded to above, sometimes stories do deviate from their established rules. Star Wars recently released The Acolyte, a live-action series that takes place before the events of Episode 01: The Phantom Menace. It promised to be a truly original story set apart from the events of the ‘Skywalker Saga’. Despite boasting some of the best action Star Wars has ever produced on the small screen, nobody tuned in.
The argument has been made that racism, sexism, and general stupidity of the right wing is to blame for The Acolyte failing. Yes, that is a huge part of it, but not watching The Acolyte doesn’t automatically make a Star Wars fan a bigot. It’s completely valid to think that audiences didn’t tune in because, quite simply, there was no point. The characters were unfamiliar, the world completely alien to casual fans. Yes, there were Jedi, but their robes were completely different to those of recognised characters. It was too unfamiliar to get the attention of casual viewers.
Doctor Who similarly made a blunder like this. In 2016, BBC3 released Class, written by Patrick Ness. It had all the hallmarks of a potentially stunning show, except it had literally nothing to do with Doctor Who. None of the characters were pre-established in the franchise, and the setting was tied to the lore in name only. The series was book-ended by Doctor Who references but was otherwise completely disconnected. It ended up being a show that was either trying desperately to be something unlike Doctor Who, or something naturally unlike Doctor Who, trying to fit in. It was cancelled after one series; with Patrick Ness voicing disappointment he was unable to pursue a story that would have taken audiences to the home world of the Weeping Angels.
Deviating from audience expectations is the first step towards failure. That doesn’t mean storytellers can’t enthral and excite audiences. The Clone Wars series garnered such a loyal fanbase it was resurrected to finish the story and tie its core threads back into the central franchise. What storytellers shouldn’t do, is decide that their core narrative is no longer their core narrative. The Clone Wars is a spin-off from the ‘Skywalker Saga’, not the other way around.
Remember, this method is called Exposition in external media. When that exposition tries to become its own thing, the whole experience becomes something new entirely, and it will fail. But we’ll talk about that ‘new’ thing a little more in a couple of weeks.
I hope this article has helped shed some light on the reason beneath the reason you’re probably not enjoying Star Wars as much as you used to, while also teaching you something exciting about storytelling. Audiences often get so wound up about the specifics of what they don’t like in modern stories, they neglect to look at their root causes.
Exposition in external mediums will always be the most audience-accessible of all transmedia practices. Exploration and world building has been a hallmark of sequels since before the days of Shakespeare. Where once storytellers would use new instalments to plough forwards, now they are able to go left and right, up and down, or any direction they choose, and audiences feel safe knowing they have a strong foundation to cling to with the central narrative.
Do this well, and audiences will rejoice in the explorative potential of following beloved characters, settings, and stories across various media. Shake the bedrock, however, and the audience will jump ship in their droves.
But what happens when there is no central ‘franchise’ life raft for audiences to feel safe in? How could a story like that even succeed?
Come back next week and I’ll tell you.
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