Problem This Solves
Transmedia theory tends to treat world building as a top-down authorial or industrial activity that requires narrative coherence across platforms. This leaves two blind spots: (1) fans are active co-constructors of storyworlds, not passive consumers, and their labor in reconciling contradictions is itself world building; (2) the individual fan curating a private digital archive is an overlooked agent of world building, distinct from visible online fan communities. Hills (Ch. 19) addresses the first gap through Doctor Who's "Whoniverse," showing how fan "world projecting" feeds back into official canon over decades. Collins (Ch. 20) addresses the second by theorizing "transmediaphilia" -- a taste-driven, curatorial practice where fans build personal worlds through digital archives.
Key Principle
World building is not solely a matter of textual architecture or industrial strategy -- it is a diachronic, collaborative practice co-created between fans and producers over generational time, and an affective, taste-driven practice enacted through personal curation. These two chapters redefine both the agent and the mechanism of world building. Hyperdiegesis is not an inherent textual property but "the medium and the outcome of fans' world-projecting activities" (Hills). Transmedia discontinuity is productive rather than destructive: fans selectively "glean" coherence from contradictions, perform "world projecting" by imagining consistency the texts never provide, and engage in strategic "non-memory" to manage unwanted canon.
Good Examples
- World projecting in the Whoniverse: Fan publications like Ahistory (Parkin and Pearson 2012) compile sequential timelines reconciling decades of contradictions across Doctor Who's TV, audio, novel, and comic incarnations. This is not mere cataloguing but active construction of a coherent hyperdiegesis the texts themselves never deliver.
- Transmedia non-memory: Fans collectively rejected the eighth Doctor's half-human status from the 1996 TV Movie. Showrunner-fans Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat validated this fan non-memory by ignoring the semi-humanity in the revival. When Paul McGann returned, his Doctor described himself simply as a "Time Lord."
- Fan-to-producer pipeline as diachronic world building: During the "wilderness years" (1990s), show, merchandise, and fandom "merged completely" (Booy 2012). By the early 2000s, "fans had completely taken over all official merchandise lines." This set the stage for fans to enter official TV production at senior levels, blurring informal and formal economies.
- Extended seriality as fan gift: The 50th anniversary specials "Night of the Doctor" and "Day of the Doctor" (2013) unified classic and new-era Who by featuring Paul McGann's regeneration as a "missing link," described as "superlative unification" in "a single, unbroken narrative" (Robb and Simpson 2015).
- Transmediaphilia and the personal archive: Collins argues individual fans turn digital devices into curated "built environments" where watching, reading, listening, and surfing become acts of self-assemblage -- "downloading isn't buying, it's self-constitution, the digital version of the diary or scrapbook."
- Fan-cultural novum: Showrunner Steven Moffat deliberately defamiliarized "fan culturally acquired logics of continuity and characterization" -- rebooting the Whoniverse, inserting Clara Oswald throughout the Doctor's timeline, undoing the Time War. World building here means not stockpiling narrative facts but transgressing established fan knowledge to generate surprise.
- Textual smelting (Collins): Jerome Siegel forged Superman "through the smelting intensity of his fanatical love and compendious knowledge of the pulps and their antecedents, a magical alloy of several previous characters and archetypes from Samson to Doc Savage" (Chabon 2000). Collins uses this as a model for how deep archival knowledge enables world building through transformative recombination, not creation ex nihilo.
Bad Examples
- Assuming world building requires perfect continuity. Doctor Who's hyperdiegesis has been called a "failure" (Britton 2011) due to "sheer duration and proliferation," but this misses how discontinuity generates fan engagement rather than destroying it.
- Ignoring the individual fan. Fan studies has privileged socially networked fandom (fanfics, wikis, conventions) and "the inability to talk about fans outside of social networks remains one of the most troublesome blind spots of contemporary fan studies" (Collins). Solitary curation on personal devices is a vital form of world building.
- Treating fan coherence-making as narcissism. Sandvoss (2005) and Corrigan (2015) characterize fan engagement with discontinuity as narcissistic self-reflection. Hills counters that it is a dialogical, community-driven process involving competing evaluations.
- Reducing fan activity to a single metanarrative. Treating all fan practice as "textual poaching" or habitus-based disposition "means reducing the diversity of empirical fan activities" (Hills 2005).
Key Quotes
- "Hyperdiegesis, I have argued -- contra my prior use of the term -- is not just a textual attribute inciting fan affects/speculations. Rather, it is the medium and the outcome of Doctor Who fans' world-projecting activities." -- Hills, p. 356
- "In each instance, these fan practices work more as world projecting rather than world building -- that is, they desire and project a consistent, coherent hyperdiegesis that is very much not given canonically." -- Hills, p. 354
- "World building is 'bigger even than the franchise -- since fan speculation and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of directions.'" -- Jenkins 2006, via Hills
- "'Non-memory' can migrate from fans' world projecting to the canonical world building carried out by successive production teams, working to exnominate (if not exterminate) inconsistencies." -- Hills, p. 355
- "I investigate world building as a taste formation shaped by forms of transmediaphilia that are turned into built environments within the digital devices of individual fans." -- Collins, p. 363
- "We can't ignore what individual fans do when left to their own devices." -- Collins, p. 370
- "World building, in this case, does not mean iterating more of the same -- or simply adding to a stockpile of narrative facts or lists -- it means deliberately defamiliarizing 'fan culturally acquired logics of continuity and characterization.'" -- Hills, via Hills 2015a
- "Narrative universes as different as Marvel superheroes and Jane Austen have become worlds that you do something with, functioning not just as especially satisfying fictional realms that offer a unique set of delights but as instigations for further expansion and extension." -- Collins, p. 362
Rules of Thumb
- Discontinuity is a feature, not a bug. Long-running franchises will inevitably produce contradictions; these become productive sites for fan engagement, debate, and creative retconning.
- Track the fan-to-producer pipeline. Harvey's detached/devolved/directed transmedia taxonomy can describe sequential career trajectories -- fans move from unofficial work to licensed extensions to canonical production.
- Account for strategic forgetting. "World blocking" -- selectively ignoring prior canon -- is a legitimate tool used by both fans and producers to manage storyworlds over time.
- Design for temporal depth, not just spatial breadth. Consider how your storyworld will evolve across production eras and how successive fan generations will interpret and reconstruct it.
- Respect the solitary curator. The fan assembling a private digital archive is performing world building as identity construction -- design for both social and solitary modes of engagement.
- Coherence is performed, not inherent. Use paratexts and official discourses to construct the appearance of consistency, while recognizing that fans will do this work regardless.
- Recognize fan curation as authorship. The transmediaphile constructing a personal archive is performing "self-assemblage" -- creative, taste-driven work that parallels the cinephile critic constructing an auteur's oeuvre.
- Leverage the "appropriation franchise." World building has shifted from elite auteurs (1980s postmodern intertextuality) to a democratized spectrum -- from corporate franchise managers to individual fan creators. There was Blade Runner but no "BladeRunnerland" extended by coordinated and uncoordinated contributors. Today, that is the norm.
- Design milestone moments as gifts. Anniversary or milestone events can function as "extended seriality" -- temporarily stitching discontinuous narrative strands into apparent unity as a celebratory event for long-term audiences.
Key Frameworks
- Detached / Devolved / Directed (Harvey 2015): Three modes of transmedia production that also describe a fan career path -- from unofficial fan fiction (detached) to licensed-but-overwritable extensions like Big Finish audios (devolved) to canonical TV production (directed). "Devolved" extension acts as intermediary between peripheral fan work and central canonical power.
- Two modes of digital world building (Collins): Portal mode (outward-facing, socially networked, collaborative fandom) vs. Archive mode (inward-facing, private curatorial collections shaping "the most intimate permutations of identity formation").
- iHabitus (Collins): Bourdieu's habitus applied to digital devices -- a generative grammar of cultural distinction turned into click choices, where "downloading isn't buying, it's self-constitution." But habitus alone cannot capture the felt authenticity of fan identity; Collins supplements it with Rose's theory of self-assemblage through heterogeneous cultural artifacts.
Related References
- Franchise Management: Battleworlds, Copyright, and Managed Multiplicity - Industrial side of the fan-producer dialectic
- Metalepsis and Boundary Transgression - How metalepsis bridges fans and texts
- The Politics of World Building - Political dimensions of fan practices