Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse

223 Pages·2018·2.17 MB·English

by  Stephen Joyce

Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse
Stephen Joyce
Transmedia
Storytelling and the
Apocalypse
Stephen Joyce
Aarhus University
Aarhus C, Denmark
ISBN 978-3-319-93951-3 ISBN 978-3-319-93952-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93952-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950237
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Cover illustration: Johan Swanepoel / Alamy Stock Photo
Cover Design: Tjaša Krivec
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To my grandmother,
who started calling me “professor” at age ten;
looks like the nickname stuck
A
cknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues at Aarhus University for their invalu-
able feedback on rough drafts of the book, especially Susan Yi Sencindiver,
Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, and Matthias Stephan, as well as the Cultural
Transformations research group for organising writing retreats with plenty
of cake.
Thanks also go to my students in the BA project course “American
Apocalypse: Visions of Armageddon in Modern American Culture,” the
MA course “Old, New, and Transmedia Fictions of Disaster: Modern
Media and the Apocalypse,” and the BA elective “Media Convergence.”
They were unfailingly knowledgeable, patient, and articulate in explaining
what was wrong with my concepts, how the way people engage with media
has changed, what social media is, the most revolutionary changes in
major narrative media, and why I should get rid of my old Nokia and for
the love of God get a smartphone. I hope they also learned something.
Thanks finally to Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman at Palgrave
Macmillan for their encouragement, professionalism, and tactful remind-
ers that those deadlines I had blithely agreed to a few months back were
arriving on Friday. I would still be doodling in the margins of a half-
written Chap. 4 if it weren’t for their support.
Elements of certain chapters in this book have appeared in different
articles and are here reprinted with kind permission:
Parts of Chap. 5 previously appeared in:
Joyce, Stephen. 2016. The Last Non-Judgment: Postmodern Apocalypse
in Battlestar Galactica. In The Last Midnight: Essays on Apocalyptic
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Narratives in Millennial Media, eds. Amanda Firestone, Leisa A. Clark,
and Mary F. Pharr, 60–68. Jefferson: McFarland. By permission of
McFarland & Company, INC., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640.
Parts of Chap. 6 previously appeared in:
Joyce, Stephen. 2015. The Rapture at the World’s End: Non-optional
Choice and Libertarianism in New Media. Synthesis 6: n. pag.
Parts of Chap. 7 previously appeared in:
Joyce, Stephen. 2016. The Double Death of Humanity in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road. Transatlantica 2: n. pag.
c
ontents
Part I P ortal 1
1 Doomsday Dreaming 3
2 The End of the Media as We Know It 15
3 The Appeal of the Apocalypse 37
Part II Post-apocalypse 55
4 The Endings of I Am Legend 57
5 Battlestar Galactica’s Post-9/11 Apocalypse 77
6 Worldbuilding and World Destroying in BioShock and 
The Last of Us 99
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Convergence Publishing and Prestige Niches 121
8 Antichrist Obama and the Doomsday Preppers 143
Part III Paradigms 163
9 The Many Deaths of The Terminator 165
10 The Many Lives of The Walking Dead 185
11 Epilogue: After the End 207
Index 213
PART I
Portal