"Suck it, shippers"?
So, today's Questionable Content. Did not make me ship Hannelore/Marigold any less. It just made me saw aww, how cute, they're in adorable denial. Even in that comic they had so much cute UST.
But I'm fascinated that Jeph Jacques felt the need to make the characters say "No we are not going to 'lez out'" and titled the comic "Suck it, shippers." Does cutting off a popular area of speculation really enhance the comic?
Ironically it came just a couple days after Henry Jenkin's fascinating post about trans-media storytelling and how it builds out a world for further speculation by fans.
That said, most good transmedia artists know that there are certain gaps which should not be filled if they want to maintain interest in the series as a whole. There are certainly reasons to create ambiguities and uncertanties. We may offer more clues through other media, but we certainly don't want to destroy the mystery which makes such characters and worlds compelling in the first place. Fans resent the addition of information simply to close down avenues for speculation -- take, for example, the closing chapter of the last Harry Potter novel which amounted to J.K. Rowling spraying her territory telling us who married who and what they named their children even though most of that information had limited narrative impact and simply felt like she was trying to foreclose certain strands of fan expansion. In some cases, authors are better off allowing fans to create their own narratives, since the community will generate multiple explanations, much as critics will offer multiple accounts of what motivates Hamlet or Travis Bickle to do what they do.
Jeph is one of the people I think has been really successful at transmedia storytelling, with separate, equally complex story arcs going on for the characters on his comic and on the twitter personas he's created for them.
But perhaps he is overly concerned about being the sole provider of all QC-related fiction? In most cases where there are twitter personas for characters in other media, it's fans larping, but Jacques has created his own, perhaps to forstall that.
This is, of course, all speculation, but I think that on the basis of this comic, I'm going to be a whole lot more critical of QC, in particular of Jeph's ways of relating to his fans of the transformative variety.
This entry was originally posted at http://epershand.dreamwidth.org/3860.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
But I'm fascinated that Jeph Jacques felt the need to make the characters say "No we are not going to 'lez out'" and titled the comic "Suck it, shippers." Does cutting off a popular area of speculation really enhance the comic?
Ironically it came just a couple days after Henry Jenkin's fascinating post about trans-media storytelling and how it builds out a world for further speculation by fans.
That said, most good transmedia artists know that there are certain gaps which should not be filled if they want to maintain interest in the series as a whole. There are certainly reasons to create ambiguities and uncertanties. We may offer more clues through other media, but we certainly don't want to destroy the mystery which makes such characters and worlds compelling in the first place. Fans resent the addition of information simply to close down avenues for speculation -- take, for example, the closing chapter of the last Harry Potter novel which amounted to J.K. Rowling spraying her territory telling us who married who and what they named their children even though most of that information had limited narrative impact and simply felt like she was trying to foreclose certain strands of fan expansion. In some cases, authors are better off allowing fans to create their own narratives, since the community will generate multiple explanations, much as critics will offer multiple accounts of what motivates Hamlet or Travis Bickle to do what they do.
Jeph is one of the people I think has been really successful at transmedia storytelling, with separate, equally complex story arcs going on for the characters on his comic and on the twitter personas he's created for them.
But perhaps he is overly concerned about being the sole provider of all QC-related fiction? In most cases where there are twitter personas for characters in other media, it's fans larping, but Jacques has created his own, perhaps to forstall that.
This is, of course, all speculation, but I think that on the basis of this comic, I'm going to be a whole lot more critical of QC, in particular of Jeph's ways of relating to his fans of the transformative variety.
This entry was originally posted at http://epershand.dreamwidth.org/3860.html. Please comment there using OpenID.