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This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is reallyjust the beginning...
List of contents
Part I: Portal.- 1. Doomsday Dreaming.- 2. The End of the Media as We Know It.- 3. The Appeal of the Apocalypse.- Part II: Post-Apocalypse.- 4. The Ending of I Am Legend.- 5. Battlestar Galactica's Post-9/11 Apocalypse.- 6. World Building and World Destroying in BioShock and The Last of Us.- 7. Convergence Publishing and Prestige Niches.- 8. Antichrist Obama and the Doomsday Preppers.- Part III: Paradigms.- 9. The Many Deaths of The Terminator.- 10. The Many Lives of The Walking Dead.- 11. Epilogue: After the End.
About the author
Stephen Joyce is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of A River of Han: Eastern Tragedy in a Western Land.
Summary
This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is reallyjust the beginning…
