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Is there such a thing as transmedia storytelling? In a sense I am playing the devil's advocate. The culture of the past twenty years has produced a vast number of "cult" narratives that have generated adaptations in many different media, inspired tens of thousands of texts of fan fiction, and were continually expanded through action figures, toys, T-shirts, mugs, and other gimmicks. Narrative systems such as George Lucas's Star Wars, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games keep sprouting up and suggest that transmedia storytelling is the most important narrative mode of our time. There are even manuals that tell us how to write for transmedia (see Bernardo 2011; Phillips 2012), though their advice does not instantly turn readers into masters of the art. The advocates of transmedia want us to believe that, thanks to the recent proliferation of new media, storytelling will never be the same. But while we cannot deny the existence of a cultural phenomenon known as transmedia storytelling, we can ask whether it is a form of storytelling or primarily a marketing strategy, whether it is really new, what its various forms are, and what narratology can do about it beyond acknowledging its existence. As a criterion for deciding whether this cultural phenomenon deserves the labels transmedia and storytelling, I will use Henry Jenkins's well-known definition: "Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story" (2007: n. pag.).
What Transmedia Storytelling Is Not (Or Rather, Should Not Be)
If transmedia storytelling is going to be a truly new narrative experience, it will be useful to take a look at other, mostly older phenomena that bear a certain resemblance with it, but from which it should differ.
First, transmedia storytelling should not be conceived of as mere adaptation or illustration, two forms of transmedial activity that have been with us for centuries if not millennia, as one can see from the dissemination of Greek myth through various...