Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality 9780739196748

Citation preview

Media Marathoning

Media Marathoning Immersions in Morality

Lisa Glebatis Perks

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-0-7391-9674-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introductionix 1 A Walk through the Wardrobe

1

2 Behavioral Patterns

15

3 Affective Involvement

39

4 Cognitive Involvement

63

5 Equipment for Living Morally

87

6 The Technocrat Villain

101

7 An Unlikely Hero

111

8 The Puppeteer 

123

9 An Unlikely Alliance 

133

10 Love and Friendships

143

11 Untenable Position

153

12 Ambiguous Morality

163

13 Postmodern Immersion and Interactivity

173

Conclusion: The Media Marathoning Paradigm

185

v

vi Contents

Appendix: Schedule of Questions for Marathoner Interviewees 

191

Bibliography193 Index203 About the Author

209

Acknowledgments

I wasn’t planning to write a book about media marathoning, but I just could not leave this project alone. I felt a bit like a hobbit going on an unexpected journey. And I needed a fellowship to get me there and back again. Students in my first Media Marathoning class and independent studies at Nazareth College helped get this project off the ground by conducting interviews, bringing scholarly research to my attention, sharing their marathoning journals, and giving feedback on the earliest chapter drafts. Thank you for your invaluable contributions, Katie Bishop, Tedisa Castle, Steph Cerio, Chris Ferrin, Aleks Flur, Meagan Holung, Julia Ingersoll, Sarah Marshall, Elise Miklich, Rachel Montpelier, Breann (Page) Morris, Kelly Oliver, and Carissa Risucci. My colleagues provided instrumental help and guidance in the latter stages of this project. Greg Foran, Jerry Denno, and Ed Wiltse gave valuable chapter feedback. Scott Campbell helped guide my foray into moral philosophy and suggested relevant books. Deb Dooley, J. Michael Hogan, Sharon Jarvis, Tom Lappas, Adrielle Mitchell, and Joseph Viera provided letters of support or helpful advice as I sought grant funding. E. Johanna Hartelius, Hope Inman, Luke Winslow, and Amy Young gave me prospectus feedback or shared their publishing advice. Amanda Davis Gatchet, Liliana Palumbo, and Barry Brummett helped me in many different ways from research start to book finish. I hope to eventually repay these many favors. For their encouragement and kind words of support, I thank my students and colleagues listed above, and also my wonderful friends and family. These people talked with me not just about the ideas in this book, but also about the project’s impact on my life. I felt as though Patricia Foran, Roger Gatchet, Beverly Brown, Rochelle Ruffer, Jennifer Leigh, Marianne Campbell, Jaime Wright, Jennifer Asenas, Kevin Johnson, Sarah Perks, Marlene Perks, and Steve Perks were cheering me on through this journey. vii

viii Acknowledgments

This book project entered my life about the same time as my oldest daughter, Hazel. Her love has enriched my life and her love of stories has enriched my study of marathoning. I look forward to journeying through more of these captivating story worlds with her. Baby Rosaleen was born at the tail end of this project. Her good nature and excellent sleep habits helped me access my brain to be able to finish the book. With Hazel’s skilled coaching, I hope Rosaleen will one day be able to match Jedi and lightsaber colors. My parents have always provided me with unfailing support, and this book project was no different. They checked in with me at every step and helped me remain optimistic. I will strive to be the same kind of champion for my girls. Most of all, it was Josh’s wisdom and generosity that helped me complete this journey. Josh shared so much with me: articles on new technologies, his remarkable knowledge of these stories, our nightly media time with my television research, his graphic design skills, and his encouragement. It was Josh who truly helped me get there and back again.

Introduction

THE INTERSECTION OF TECHNOLOGIES, READERS, AND TEXTS “Would I like to build myself a huge amphitheater with an 80 inch screen, and Blu-ray player, and sit and watch it for 24 hours straight, like sit and watch Star Trek, and then right after Star Trek then watch um Star Trek: The Next Gen. and then right after that sit and watch SG-1, right after that sit and watch Stargate: Atlantis, and right after that, watch The Terminator? Absolutely.” —Kenneth,1 media marathoner

Kenneth’s dream of twenty-four hours of in-home viewing is close to a reality for him and others whom I call “media marathoners.” Not only the way people watch television and film series, but also the way they read book series has undergone a tremendous shift in the last decade. Adults dedicate their weekends (and weekdays) to watching full seasons of shows like Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, and Mad Men. Friends have parties for viewing all Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movies. Teenagers read The Hunger Games trilogy or Twilight series in one weekend. I consider all these behaviors “media marathoning,” which I broadly define as readers or viewers rapidly engaging with a story world. Although the popular press uses the negatively connoted phrase “binge-watching,” I employ the more comprehensive and complimentary phrase “media marathoning.” Rather than viewing these media experiences as mindless indulgences, “media marathoning” connotes a conjoined triumph of commitment and stamina. This phrase also captures viewers’ and readers’ engrossment, effort, and sense of accomplishment surrounding their media interaction. From here on, I most often use the term “readers” to refer to watching television and films as well as reading books ix

x Introduction

because this label captures marathoners’ interpretive engagement throughout the narrative journey. According to Google Trends, 2013 saw an explosion of popular press accounts of “binge-watching.” The phrase went from 0 news headlines in 2011 to over 100 in 2013. Articles on television binge-watching appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as online periodicals Wired and Slate.2 Several entertainment journalists have taken stands against binge-watching with arguments commonly revolving around concerns that watching too quickly reduces anticipation and, therefore, enjoyment. Jim Pagels of Slate fuels this rhetoric when he writes “cliffhangers and suspense need time to breathe.”3 Reporting for CNN, Alexandra Field interviews psychologist Sonja Lyubomirski, who cautions that the “anticipation period is really pleasurable” and binge-watching won’t “generate as much happiness” as an unnamed comparison style of television viewing.4 This rhetoric echoes Brenton Malin’s argument that news coverage of new technologies, including media devices and automobiles, generates a rhetoric of “speed mania” that expresses fears of human intoxication at the hands of our tools.5 In this anti-binging rhetoric, viewers are cast as unfeeling and unthinking, racing through what could be a more pleasurable, leisurely media experience. Some writers acknowledge marathoning’s addictive properties (and, by extension, remove marathoners of agency), but render ambivalent judgments about the practice. For example, James Hibberd opens his article by comparing the addictive tendencies of television marathoners to Breaking Bad’s “meth-heads” but ultimately throws his hands up regarding the marathoning trend (and its accompanying speed mania), stating, “Once a more, better, faster, everywhere system is invented, it’s difficult to stop its spread and adoption. If technology permits us to watch full TV seasons over days or weeks instead of months, we’ll do it.”6 Linda Holmes of NPR also preaches power to the people, scolding Pagels for scolding binge watchers. Writing about Breaking Bad, she encourages viewers to “Watch it however you need to, because it’s awesome.”7 Studies suggest that marathoning is a form of television engagement people increasingly need—or at least want. A Harris Interactive study Netflix commissioned found that marathoning is widespread, particularly among television streamers: Over half of the study’s television streamers had watched two to six episodes of the same show in one sitting—what Netflix defined as “binge-watching.”8 In a spring 2014 TiVo survey of over 15,000 respondents, 40 percent had done binge-watching (defined as watching three or more episodes from the same show in a day) in the week before the survey.9 Although the popular press has focused on the ubiquity of television binging, media marathoning is a common media engagement pattern for films and books as well. For all media, I locate the media marathoning trend at the

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intersection of three essential variables: digital content delivery technologies, active audience behaviors, and increasing complexity in media entertainment content. I see content delivery technologies as the media industry adaptation that meets readers’ intertwined needs for enhanced media experiences and complex texts. These content delivery technologies offer such convenience for anywhere, anytime, almost-any-text media engagement that they enable a stronger connection between reader and story world: readers can engage with their chosen stories both at will and in-depth, fundamentally altering textual forms and the reader/text relationship. More specifically, marathoning blurs traditional media demarcations: reader/character, reader/text, reader/ programmer, and reader/author. Throughout this book, I argue that through the blurring of those traditional lines, media marathoning exists at the intersection of lived and fictive experience. Compared to more traditional, slower-paced media engagement patterns— watching a television show in weekly installments, reading books from the same series over the course of a year, or watching films from the same series as they are released, for example—media marathoning affords readers a greater depth of story world engagement. By controlling the pace of the narrative journey and focusing on one story world, marathoners can maximize the emotional and cognitive rewards of their media experience. Marathoners’ focused engagement with the text promotes stronger diegetic memories that enhance emotional and cognitive connectivity to the story world. Reader affective investments transform the characters into pseudo-avatars, blurring the line between reader and character in their coordinated journey. Enhanced diegetic memories (from not having to work to recall what happened on a show that aired a week ago, or a book one read months ago) free up marathoners’ cognitive space to further plumb narrative depths. This work is pleasurable and exciting—a break from mundane media routines. It is around these formative media marathoning experiences that fan communities can coalesce and existing social bonds can be maintained. The engaging quality of the story journey is not just about the cast of characters we as marathoners get to know, the landscape we traverse, or the new language we pick up: complexity is found in the story world ideas marathoners confront. Media marathoning’s blurring of the real and fictive worlds encourages readers to place themselves in the stories. Through this immersion, we engage fully with the story world questions asked and the answers offered, applying our own schema to assess the characters’ decisions and narrative twists. I suspect my readers aren’t surprised that the stories I mentioned in the book’s opening paragraph are highly marathonable: Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Mad Men, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and Twilight. But why these stories? What draws marathoners in? What commonalities might we find in these disparate fictive worlds?

xii Introduction

Underneath several obvious characteristics shared among several of the texts—an epic quality, exciting suspense, and excellent cinematography— there lies a strong moral current to these stories. My cumulative thesis of this book is that the practice of marathoning encourages readers to place themselves in the stories and negotiate the nuances of morality. These stories invite us in to serve as an additional character on their council, to assess what has happened, and to consider the best course of action, moving forward. The collapse of the real and fictive makes these questions of morality matter to us, to take our role as arbiter seriously. Through our immersive marathoning experiences, we can seriously engage with these mediated questions about human nature and society, refining our orientation toward morality through our internal dialogue about the story and communication with other readers as we process the journey. METHODOLOGY I consider journalists and admitted marathoners James Hibberd and Hannah Goldfield to be wise in their marathoning ambivalence because no comprehensive media marathoner study has yet been published. In an effort to fill this gap in understanding, I explored marathoner activities by collecting and analyzing the discourse of 176 marathoners: anonymous participants in three online surveys (one each for books, TV, and film; N = 116), individual interviewees (N = 32), book focus group participants (N = 17), and marathon journal keepers (N = 11). Participants were recruited through social media and word of mouth. The discourse collected from the marathoning population spans over 500 typed pages. The discourse was coded and organized into three chapters analyzing the behavioral, affective, and cognitive components of marathoning. To qualify for the study, participants had to have viewed a television season in a week or less, watched three or more films from the same series in a week or less, or read three or more books from the same series in a month or less. These time frames were selected with the goal of capturing condensed and holistic reading experiences—experiences that did not have to interfere with a regular work or school day. Other studies cited above defined bingeviewing as watching a handful of episodes from the same series in a day or in one sitting, which means that “bingers” could conceivably watch a few episodes of multiple television programs each week without finishing a single series. My parameters capture a more holistic story experience. These marathons are not about the length of time spent with the story, but rather the comprehensive engagement. As with marathon runners, media marathoners will clock various times and traverse different terrain. What these marathoners all share is the completion of the journey.

Introduction

xiii

The study population ranged in age from eighteen to sixty-five, with an average age of thirty-one. The gender breakdown was heavily skewed toward women, with 134 females, 41 males, and one person not reporting. The racial and ethnic breakdown of the participants was as follows: 6 African American, 3 Asian American, 131 Caucasian, 7 Latino/a, 1 Native American, 1 Asian Indian, 2 “other,” and 25 who elected not to disclose. The preponderance of women and Caucasians would certainly undercut the ability to generalize about the broader population of marathoners from this discourse, but generalizability is not the goal of this qualitative study. My goal was to map patterns in marathoners’ reader/text relationships. Indeed, many themes I identified in the participants’ discourse were echoed in other venues—journalists’ and scholars’ accounts of binging, online fora devoted to binging, and even my personal conversations with marathoners who did not partake in the study. These echoes add further support to the patterns, suggesting commonalities among experiences. Fully understanding changing reader/text relationships involves not only consulting media marathoners but also critically examining the structure and content of chosen texts. What about these story worlds invites holistic and rapid engagement? What do these immersive narratives offer to readers? An astounding forty-five study participants had marathoned The Hunger Games book series (representing over one-quarter of the study population). Also drawing in at least nine marathoners each were the Harry Potter books, Harry Potter films, Lord of the Rings films, and the Dexter, Weeds, and Arrested Development television series. (See Table 0.1 for a list of the texts most marathoned.) To be sure, the timing of many texts’ releases aligned with my study’s time period, thus shaping the results. However, these texts were not the only popular series available while the study ran from 2010 to 2012. Some series, including Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars, had not offered new installments since many years prior to the start of my study, thus suggesting that there was something compelling about these stories that went beyond novelty and hype. To distill the commonly marathoned texts’ unique properties, I analyzed book, film, or television series marathoned by five or more participants (see Table 0.1). To this list I added television shows cited in many popular press articles on binge-watching, such as Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey. Through analysis of commonly marathoned texts, I learned that many of the stories share similar character types and themes. Although a large number of the texts are from the science fiction or fantasy genres, the repeated themes and character types cut across both genre and medium, suggesting that these characteristics are uniquely located within the constellation of commonly marathoned texts. The common thread that holds these character types and themes together is morality: commonly marathoned texts are collectively proposing,

xiv Introduction Table 0.1  Commonly Marathoned Texts Book Series The Hunger Games (N = 45) Twilight (N = 23) Harry Potter (N = 20) Millennium (N = 10) A Song of Ice and Fire (N = 8) 50 Shades of Gray (N = 4) Lord of the Rings (N = 3) Outlander (N = 3) Film Series Lord of the Rings (N = 19) Harry Potter (N = 18) Star Wars (N = 17) Indiana Jones (N = 6) Toy Story (N = 5) Avengers (N = 3) Back to the Future (N = 3) Godfather (N = 3) James Bond (N = 3)

Television Series Dexter (N = 11) Arrested Development (N = 9) Glee (N = 9) Weeds (N = 9) True Blood (N = 8) Battlestar Galactica (N = 7) Mad Men (N = 6) 24 (N = 5) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (N = 5) Firefly (N = 5) How I Met Your Mother (N = 5) Gossip Girl (N = 4) Jersey Shore (N = 4) The League (N = 4) Law and Order SVU (N = 4) Lost (N = 4) The Walking Dead (N = 4)

The above table lists the texts commonly marathoned by this study’s population. Any text marathoned by three or more readers is included in the list. This list comprises the “commonly marathoned texts” that serve as the basis for the textual analysis in Chapters 6 through 13.

questioning, and exploring moral ways of being. I consider this moral code the “equipment for living” marathoners can gain from their texts. Although marathoners did not consciously articulate all the moral codes I found in commonly marathoned stories, my systematic study suggests that these prominent codes are readily available in the stories, proffering an invitation for morality-tinged dialogue between readers’ lived worlds and experiences with fictive texts. Readers may better understand the direction of this book by knowing that my disciplinary grounding is in rhetoric, with an emphasis on examining the rhetorical dimensions of mediated texts and media engagement. Drawing not just from formal, mediated discourses, but also from qualitative discourses gathered from marathoners, I seek to parse out discursive patterns and analyze their meanings to get a better sense of the culture co-constructed in reader interactions with mediated texts. Both the audience- and textual-based studies that comprise this book draw on my training as a rhetorical critic. I concur with Janet Staiger’s argument that any “approach to meaningmaking” involves textual analysis—whether of film dialogue, focus group remarks, or open-ended survey responses.10 This book draws from relevant scholarly research in rhetorical theory, reception studies, media studies, narratology, cultural studies, media psychology, and media effects to craft a framework for the analysis. I consider works from these various disciplines to be helpful in analyzing and

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interpreting the discourses presented here. A framework that draws from disparate disciplines will undoubtedly elide contested terrain and risk sacrificing depth for breadth. However, I stand by my selection of sources because of an overarching criterion of salience. This book marks the first sustained, published scholarly analysis of media marathoning and there is no clear existing body of literature from which to draw. There is, indeed, more work to be done in the aforementioned disciplines to mine the nuances of this form of media engagement. Several ideas at play in the introduction—such as television economics and media piracy—could be their own chapters or subjects of sustained study in relation to media marathoning. I hope other scholars will undertake that research. For now, my goal is to cover what I perceive to be the most relevant techno-cultural components shaping, comprising, inviting, and perpetuating the media marathoning phenomenon. This introduction sets the stage for analyzing readers’ marathoning experiences and the content of their commonly marathoned texts by tracing the shifting relationships between readers, texts, and technologies that have collectively fueled the marathoning trend. My explanation for the (r)evolution in reader behavior is organized into three sections, covering the aforementioned synergistic variables that contribute to the marathoning phenomenon: content delivery technologies, active and immersive audience behaviors, and media content that is increasingly dense and thought provoking. Whether owned or borrowed, books have always been available for immediate consumption, and film series have been available for home viewing for decades because of the videocassette recorder (VCR). In contrast, television has most recently been a “catch it when you can” medium, employing what P. David Marshall describes as a “paternalistic form of delivery.”11 Although this introduction covers e-readers, upgrades in home-viewing technologies, and shifts in book and film storytelling, it necessarily emphasizes changes in television content delivery technologies and content because these areas have arguably undergone the greatest changes. Collectively, these transformations in media technologies and content have met the needs of readers who not only want to consume the media they want, when they want, but also want to get the whole story when they want. The upcoming pages trace key moments in this cultural shift.

CONTENT DELIVERY TECHNOLOGIES From VCRs to DVD Players Media marathoning has its roots in content delivery innovation of the 1980s, the VCR, which facilitated an in-home, user-directed viewing experience.

xvi Introduction

In Beyond the Multiplex, Barbara Klinger describes film’s technologically adaptive move into the home (through VCR, films on TV, internet, and other means) as a strategy to increase ancillary revenues and to “weave movies firmly into the audience’s routines, rituals, and experiences.”12 Watching films in the home enabled a greater sense of control over the film availability and experience, also paving the way for ownership and re-watching that integrated the text more firmly in one’s identity. The same principles of control and personalization apply to watching television shows through the VCR. In his 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins provides one of the earliest published accounts of media marathoning behavior as he describes his and his wife’s immersion in a videotaped television show: “My wife and I watched the final season of Blake’s 7 in less than a week, sometimes viewing as many as three or four episodes in a row; our fascination with the unfolding plot could be satisfied through our control over the tapes in a way that it could not be through weekly broadcasts.”13 Jenkins’ ethnographic experience with fan cultures involved recording and physically sharing episodes of weekly aired television shows with other fans. The VCR afforded television fans greater agency, but it was clearly a cumbersome television technology. Using a VCR to capture a television series took commitment, know-how, effort, and preparation. I remember panicking in graduate school when I missed recording one night of The Bachelorette—the subject of my M.A. thesis. Luckily, I was able to buy a videotape of the entire season from an eBay seller. The internet had allowed me to easily purchase a compilation videotape, but more barriers had to be removed until I could watch my desired content with the click of a mouse. Despite a few years of popularity for the digital versatile disc (DVD) recorder, the VCR was overtaken by a combination of more user-friendly technologies: the DVD player allowed convenient playing of discs and, later, the digital video recorder (DVR) allowed both television recording and playback through a hard drive. In the introduction to their edited collection on media change, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins write that transitions between content delivery technologies do not occur suddenly but are rather “an accretive, gradual process.”14 Indeed, it took me nearly a decade to wean off of my VCR and VHS tapes, switching from a VCR/TV combo, to a VCR/ DVD combo, to a Blu-ray player. One aspect of the VCR’s (and DVD’s) user-friendliness was the availability of affordable rentals. The Friday night trip to the local video store was a ritual for many families. For those who wanted the cost savings of renting but desired greater convenience, mail subscription services like Netflix and Blockbuster mail temporarily filled the need. These services, however, are no longer convenient enough for most people. In his article titled

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“The DVD is dying,” Tim Cushing emphasizes convenience when predicting that Hollywood’s future lies in digital files. Cushing draws support for his argument from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ pronouncement, “We expect DVD subscribers to decline steadily every quarter, forever.”15 The trip to the video store is certainly less convenient than in-home digital access, but even the brief physical effort of putting in a DVD can delay gratification and make a marathon less likely. Ingrid initially marathoned Sex and the City after borrowing a friend’s DVDs, but she noted that her viewing became “sporadic” because the DVDs weren’t “as convenient as having it already on my computer. I’d have to change the DVDs, so that kind of prohibited me from watching it.” Changing the DVD disrupted the flow Ingrid was used to through streaming and downloading. Josh’s delight in streaming stands in contrast to Ingrid’s DVD malaise. Josh stated, “[Streaming] makes [marathoning] a hell of a lot easier. You know, I can just hook Netflix up to my Xbox and just watch it right through there.” Marathons can thus be seen as a product of convenience and convergence—or of convenient convergence. Although Ingrid was not motivated to marathon her borrowed DVDs, purchasing a box set is a more likely marathon-inducer (or re-marathoninducer) because the owner has invested more in the text. A box set—of books, films, or television seasons—represents a commitment of money, time, space in one’s home, and space in one’s identity construction. The TV on DVD box set is particularly transformative packaging, according to Matt

Figure 0.1  Empty Blockbuster store in Rochester, NY

xviii Introduction

Hills, because it converts television texts “from being primarily moments in a schedule, designed to hold audiences or reach audiences of a specific type, to symbolically bounded objects more akin to artworks or novels.”16 Since the proliferation of the videotape and its progeny, the DVD, film and television series can be both an aesthetic experience and a collectible media artifact. John Caldwell writes that these box sets represent a change in the reader/ text relationships: not only do these box sets make series “collectibles,” but they are also a way “to ‘memorialize’ one’s personal history.”17 Presumably, one purchases the box set because the media engagement experience was so pleasurable that one wanted to both memorialize and attempt to recapture the experience. Lincoln Geraghty’s Cult Collectors positions media merchandise and related collectibles as personalized, not commodified. He unites one’s history, identity, and group membership, explaining that these items are “emblems of the self, markers of identity and symbolic of the cultural capital that fans accumulate in their life-long engagement with a media text.”18 Box sets are not one-off media experiences, but rather mark formative, enduring relationships between reader and story world. One can not only memorialize their history or have a marker of identity signified in these tangible representations of story worlds, but also broadcast that signifier through social media, thus strengthening a sense of subcultural belonging. Twitter and Instagram have seen a proliferation of the “shelfie”— a photo of one’s entertainment collection, potentially including books, DVDs, box sets, or collectibles. The #shelfie, particularly when re-Tweeted by fan sites (such as Middle-Earth News during #TolkienReadingDay), is a way to connect with a fan community, compare one’s level of commitment with other fans, and to make public the private artifacts of one’s subcultural identity. Having a shelf of value to the fan community is like having a fan membership card, and broadcasting the shelfie is the equivalent of flashing that card to those who recognize its meaning.19 Technologies for re-watching or even recording are essential to fan and cult television experiences, according to Michael Newman and Elana Levine, who note that these “technologies of agency” and their accompanying reader practices make television content an “object of intricacy, richness, complexity, and beauty.”20 The authors argue that while these technologies of agency appear to “transform television viewing into a more worthwhile and artistic endeavor,” they only elevate television’s cultural status by reinscribing medium biases: Television is now high art because it has taken on the qualities of books and films; contemporary television is an aesthetic experience that is much better than the mindless television of the past. Advances in home viewing technologies have enhanced the convenience and aesthetics of the television and film experience. No episode of MTV’s Cribs would be complete without a tour of the celebrity’s media room—often

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Figure 0.2  Shelfie of commonly marathoned stories

featuring a huge screen, surround sound, and a bank of recliners. The book’s opening quote from marathoner Kenneth, who desires an in-home amphitheater with an 80-inch screen, also evokes this standard Cribs scene. Even for people of average means, improvements in picture quality with the advent of plasma televisions, liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions, LCD projectors, high-definition programming, and high-definition televisions have helped to make the in-home viewing experience move closer to movie-theater quality. Klinger notes that by 2004, nearly one-third of homes boasted a home theater, what she calls an “entertainment mecca in domestic space.”21 My first planned movie marathon, an in-home showing of all extended release Lord of the Rings films in 2006, involved a borrowed LCD projector and a large blank wall. Creating a (temporary) entertainment mecca was possible even on a graduate student’s income. Good visual quality paired with the comforts of home was as important to my “Hobbit Day” friends as it was for the How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) gang who broke into Barney’s richly furnished apartment to watch their triennial Star Wars marathon on his “giant TV.”22 Convergence Convenience, convergence, and quality go hand in hand (in hand) with various technological devices equipped to display a wide variety of digital media. The VCR was a Trojan horse enabling film to invade television’s main turf

xx Introduction

(the home) and mobile devices have further blurred spatial boundaries by at once bringing public communication inside the home and extending personalized reading and viewing technologies outside the home. Rapidly evolving relationships between content delivery technologies, formats, temporality, and spatiality are common in the era of digital convergence culture, which Jenkins defines as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”23 Some examples of convergence are particularly salient to marathoning: television co-opting the home video market with its TV on DVD box sets, film festivals and theaters screening television programs and even hosting television marathons, and popular book series being made into film series that are then aired in theatrical and television channel marathons. For example, in the summer of 2013, the Film Society of Lincoln Center offered a Breaking Bad marathon, because, as the Society’s Director of Cinematheque Programming, Dennis Lim, explained, “As this most cinematic of shows draws to a close, it seemed more than appropriate for the Film Society to pay tribute to its achievements by presenting every episode to date on the big screen.”24 The convergence is clearly happening not just in venue, but also in content, with Lim describing Breaking Bad as a “cinematic” show and Breaking Bad appearing on a network whose acronym stands for American Movie Classics. The Breaking Bad theatrical marathon occurred during the summer, but both summer and winter holidays are ripe for film/television marathoning convergence as people have more time to devote to entertainment when work and first-aired television shows commonly go on hiatus. Viewers can experience books-adapted-to-film-and-aired-on-TV marathons with ABC Family frequently offering up the Harry Potter films and ENCORE showcasing Lord of the Rings. Websites such as ScreenCrush index both film-on-TV and TVon-TV marathons for a given holiday season, spanning a dozen channels. Various theater chains have embraced marathons, including Regal Cinemas with the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2012, and AMC theaters with “The Ultimate Marvel Marathon” prior to the release of The Avengers in 2012. Interviewee Karl was sucked into The Avengers excitement and created his own marathon to prepare for the film release. He recalled watching “Iron Man 2, Captain America, and Thor all in the same week so I could kind of get all those plot lines back together since they tied in the plot from all three of those movies towards The Avengers.” One could certainly understand and enjoy The Avengers without viewing the preceding texts, but Karl’s marathon preparation method enhanced the new movie experience by offering a greater context for inside jokes and references. And, as we’ll see in Chapter 13, intertextuality is a great part of The Avengers’ appeal and immersiveness.

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Although Karl marathoned the movies by himself—meaning that no one was watching with him in person—he could easily link to the community of likeminded fans using the hashtag #marvelmarathon to see words, screen shots, videos, and even film checklists cataloguing others’ similar experiences. Capitalizing on this impulse to watch “separately together,” fan organization TheOneRing.Net (TORn) offers an annual Lord of the Rings film marathon with an online chat session built into the breaks. Unlike the Twittersphere’s more organic communication from fans who happen to be engaged in the same movie-release preparations, TORn’s structured, controlled environment is created with boundaries around the timing of online fan conversations. With the panoply of fan communication opportunities available to marathoners, marathoners can choose their type of engagement depending on their preferences for structure, depth of interactivity, (a)synchronicity, or other communicative variables. When comparing the theatrical marathons, home marathons, and online chat-enabled marathons, it is clear that how one experiences a marathon varies widely, not just in terms of marathon location but also in terms of reader preparation and story engagement. Media marathons can involve many paratexts, a term Jonathan Gray uses to unite trailers, posters, soundtracks, video games, fan commentary, and other related symbolic works. These texts, Gray explains, are “not simply add-ons, spinoffs, and also-rans: they create texts, they manage them, and they fill them with many of the meanings that we associate with them.”25 The internet is a repository for many paratexts, enabling fan communication, trailer viewing, sound track downloading, and even marathon advice seeking. Writing for The Huffington Post, Stacy Hinojosa tells readers “How to Power Through All 7 [Harry Potter] Films This Thanksgiving.” (Hopefully an article update will give readers fair warning that there are now eight films to budget for.) Pinterest boasts Harry Potter-themed recipes to enhance the authenticity of the marathon viewing experience. TORn instructs marathoners about the do’s and don’ts of Lord of the Rings marathons. Like wine tasting that involves a protocol for properly appreciating the drink as art, marathoning has its own user-created protocol for appreciating the show/book/film as art. This marathon protocol is illustrative of Geraghty’s conclusion, based on analysis of communication and behaviors among Star Wars toy collectors, that fan communities “involve a systematized structure of subcultural taste.”26 However, the fan protocol is not just about what media artifacts you have, what you know about mediated texts and paratexts, or whether other members of the fan community are aware of what you have and know: it is also about being able to perform properly within the subculture. Learning this systematized structure—including how to properly engage media and fellow fans— can both enable and acknowledge one’s membership in a fan subculture.

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ENTRANCE FLOW AND INSULATED FLOW Subscription streaming services, including Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, and Netflix, have commandeered a great proportion of media viewing time and been instrumental in fueling the marathon trend. Netflix, which boasted forty million streaming subscribers in 2013,27 has recognized, monetized, and researched media marathoning. According to The Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen, Netflix has charted an increase in the number of episodes watched per week of one show, signifying a more rapid consumption of a single series28—a movement toward marathoning. Netflix’s successes likely inspired streaming service Hulu to join the marathoning bandwagon by offering weekly summer “binge-a-thons” in 2013 to promote various genres. And streaming is, indeed, a marathoning gateway: out of sixty-seven surveyed television marathoners, thirty-five accessed their show through streaming, seventeen used DVDs (owned or borrowed), five watched On Demand, four explicitly mentioned using illegal means of streaming or downloading, and three watched a marathon that was on cable television. (Not all interviewees reported their means of access, and several participants accessed their show through multiple means.)29 Digital technologies and marathoning behavior demand an update to Raymond Williams’ groundbreaking ideas on television flow. Williams describes the television experience as one of multiple, planned symbolic sequences, including traditional programming, product and service advertising, and programming advertising: “[T]hese sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting.’”30 Williams clarifies that, because of competition from other networks, the programmer faces an important challenge: “to get viewers in at the beginning of a flow.”31 In the post-broadcast and post-television era characterized by convergence and exponential growth in competition from content providers, programmers’ efforts to secure viewer attention at the beginning of flow can be seen as an increasing challenge. However, marathoning has resulted in an alternative model of flow, one that is seemingly user-directed, self-perpetuating (because of technology and reader motives), and often self-contained (with little competition from other media flows). Derek Kompare explains that Williams’ flow model is based “on the aggregate experience of television over time, rather than on individual texts.”32 With the insulated flow that characterizes a marathoning experience, the opposite is true: individual texts are foregrounded. Put differently, insulated flow marks a reversion to the textual purity Williams wisely encouraged TV scholars to see past decades ago. Digital content delivery technologies accomplish textual foregrounding through a two-part flow. Rather than being intertwined symbolic sequences, these forms of flow are consecutive. Digital content delivery technologies

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make finding the sequence, a process that I call entrance flow, seemingly more personalized and convenient. It is akin to using one “preview channel” that is purportedly tailored for you, the reader, by cataloguing your history, making suggestions, and allowing you to maintain a queue. Entrance flow is enhanced by digital content delivery technologies and services, but it is also based on the more traditional, word-of-mouth means of finding new stories. Entrance flow can be user-directed or programmer-directed, or it may draw from a combination of the two. Many marathoners selected texts because of recommendations from their peer or family networks, which I classify as user-directed because other users, and not media companies, are passing the content along. These recommendations are an “alternative form of market value,” according to Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green who view the audience as “grassroots intermediaries,” drawing in new readers.33 Recommendations and textual immersion are positively correlated, according to research by Melanie Green, Timothy Brock, and Geoff Kaufman. The authors found that “individuals who showed high levels of transportation or enjoyment were more likely to say that they would recommend the story to someone else.”34 Readers who have a pleasurable, immersive story world experience often want to share it with others, and this fuels the “spreadability” of media in our networked society. Interviewee Nora was very active in spreading texts she found enjoyable: “Generally, if I am really excited about [a media text], I will try to shout it from the roof tops and tell the every single person that I think would appreciate it.” Recommending was a two-way street for Nora who also picked up new texts based on friends’ opinions. Marathoner Joe was also open to media suggestions, particularly if he and his friends had well-established commonalities in taste: “[I]f one of my friends, if their interests are pretty aligned with mine, comedy-wise and entertainment-wise, I listen to them.” Whereas advertisements for new media texts may feel like an “intrusion” according to Jenkins, Ford, and Green, the authors note that “people often welcome spreadable media content from friends (at least discerning ones) because it reflects shared interests.”35 In comparison to the algorithms content delivery services use to recommend texts, time-tested friendships and family relationships have their own humanistic methods for matching the text to person. Perhaps a combination of user- and programmer-directed entrance flow is the most persuasive for potential marathoners: the artificial intelligence knowing you as well as your friends do. Marathons that run on television or are promoted by digital content delivery services occupy the programmer-directed side. As noted earlier, only three study participants engaged in cable television marathons. Marathons incited by content delivery service recommendations were much more common. Josh claimed that Netflix “makes it a lot easier to [marathon] and look

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for new shows,” and Ingrid said she doesn’t “even have to actively seek [new marathons] out because Netflix suggests them for you.” Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other content delivery services have changed the relationship between viewer and programmer within television’s flow, according to William Uricchio. Uricchio notes that flow now involves “metadata protocols” and “filters”—the algorithms that classify media texts, chart our viewing behaviors, and combine the two data sets to approximate “our individual taste formation.”36 Intermediary technologies like the Roku, Blu-ray player, and Xbox bring together these sources of media personalization, serving as a conduit between digital content delivery services (each with their own interfaces) and one’s television. These devices are a way to amass many recommendations and streaming possibilities in one convenient visual “location,” thus offering viewers a limited, but seemingly personalized gateway to entrance flow. Because digital availability has meant a big change from the slower-paced traditional delivery methods, the new flow for books and TV share some commonalities. Jake exhibited entrance flow when he followed a digital suggestion to pick up The Hunger Games series, recalling, “I was flipping through my Kindle, looking at recommendations [including] The Hunger Games. I was like ‘Okay, I’ve heard a lot of good things about that. I’ll try it.’ And I ended up just buying the set of three all in one.” By encouraging Jake to purchase the entire series, digital entrance flow promoted insulated flow, the second step in the marathon process, which I discuss next. Marathoning’s second step in flow is what I call insulated flow. Insulated flow is characterized by extended and focused attention on one text. This type of flow is promoted not only by narrative features, which I discuss in Chapters 1 and 4, but also by content delivery services and DVDs. Although Will Brooker notes that watching television through downloads (or, I would add, streaming) can result in “interflow—where the TV ‘screen,’ a media player, is in competition with various other equally demanding ‘screens’ within a larger screen”37—I found that many marathoners were fixated on their primary text. Lotti, for example, not only shut down competing computer windows while watching her favorite Sherlock episodes, but also declared in her marathoning journal, “I will not answer my phone, I will not leave for a fire alarm, and I will not do my math homework while I watch.” The collection of study discourse suggests that marathoning promotes insulated flow rather than interflow. The internet research and online connections to fan communities can come after the insulated flow concludes for the day—otherwise, with attentions divided, one might miss an important diegetic detail. Content delivery services vary greatly in their promotion of insulated flow. Several marathoners used Amazon Instant Video to access their texts, but the service’s interactive features suggest that Amazon is not urging marathons.

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During the research for this book, the Amazon interface let the entire credits roll, presenting viewers with a static screen that offered them the opportunity to buy the episode, rewatch the episode, or purchase the entire season. Users had to go back to the main menu and scroll through to find the next series episode. Amazon’s insulated flow at that time kept one in the story world, but did not urge them forward, thus following commercial logic (urging a purchase) rather than marathoning logic (urging the viewing of a new episode). Amazon’s most recent interface (as of summer 2014) incorporates more marathon logic, letting the credits roll and the screen go black, offering a tiny “advance” arrow button at the bottom right of the screen that invites “next up.” Still, it takes viewer work—clicking on the inconspicuous button—to keep the marathon afloat, access that next episode, and maintain the insulated flow. Netflix’s interface (although for a commercial service) follows marathon logic, attempting to coax readers into further episode viewing rather than driving them to make a purchase through the site. Depending on the television program, viewers may see a few pages of credits (in the case of Dexter) or none at all (in the case of Arrested Development) when they complete an episode. Netflix quickly minimizes the credits, placing them in the top left corner, to make way for the next installment. The subsequent episode calls to viewers through several additional means: the title of the next episode, its place within the series (e.g., Series 1, Ep. 3), and a one-sentence synopsis of the next episode are located at the bottom center of the screen; a clickable image from the next episode appears in the bottom right-hand corner, and a clock just above the image of the next episode announces “Next episode playing in 15 seconds.” Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John Jurgensen describes Netflix’s “post-play” feature that uses an algorithm to assess when other viewers commonly signed out and automatically starts the next episode before that time.38 The clock of Netflix’s post-play feature was set to fifteen brief seconds for the series I examined. Whereas the Amazon Instant Video interface is static, the Netflix interface is always forward-looking. Drawing from a top-down, left-to-right flow of past to future, Netflix neatly moves the already watched episode into one’s past and positions the next episode as one’s expected future. These features lend understanding to Karl’s description of becoming absorbed in a Damages marathon: “Once I went on Netflix I [thought], ‘Oh, well I’ll watch one episode,’ and then next thing I knew it was, ‘I’ll watch fourteen episodes.’” Felix explicitly cited Netflix’s post-play feature as a factor in his Revenge marathon, saying, “You’ll get up and start walking away [from the screen] and [the next episode] just starts up again. And then you’ll watch it for about a minute and you just want to keep watching it.” Netflix users only have a brief fifteen-second liminal moment in which the “past is momentarily negated,

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suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun.”39 In this form of insulated flow, lived experiences are not positioned as one’s future: the fictive world is. More specifically, one cohesive fictive world is both their past and future. This insulated flow announces itself, making viewers take ownership of their experience, but its automaticity makes it difficult for viewers to escape the insulated flow. They may already envision themselves as moving through that fictive world. Instead of having to opt-in to a marathon, viewers are made to opt-out with technologies like “post-play.” Perhaps because digital content delivery technologies cultivate a “watch what I want, when I want” (or a “watch what I think I want, when Netflix wants”) attitude, several marathoners saw illegal downloads, illegal streaming, and purchases of illegally recorded or copied media texts as acceptable alternatives to legal access. Dominick professed the intention to legally access texts through On Demand and Netflix, but capitulated to the greater convenience of illegal downloads. Similar to Dominick, Charles would use the illegal website “Megavideo” if a desired text was not offered through his streaming subscription services. Nora, too, would have used legal means to access her texts, but she turned to illegal downloading sites because of an interest in British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) shows like Sherlock that are on delayed release in the United States. In all the previous marathoner examples, legal methods were the first channel and illegal the second. However, with Ana Lucia, we see a blurring of these content delivery avenues. She lumped streaming and piracy together noting that TV marathoning was prevalent among her friends because of “Hulu and being able to illegally download.” Because streaming subscriptions offer a huge catalog to users (and the friends of users who share their passwords), and users are not paying per view, illegal downloads are a logical extension of that easy-access mindset: “I have a lot of content available to me in the Netflix library, and I have a lot available through file sharing sites.” The difference blurs. With its Game of Thrones series as the most illegally downloaded show of 2013, whether Home Box Office (HBO) is a fool or a genius for not distributing its show through means other than television broadcast is unclear. CEO Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner, HBO’s parent company, called the extensive piracy “better than an Emmy” in promoting interest in the show and network.40 Seen through the lens of Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s “engagementbased” audience model, winning the illegal download award might just be better than an Emmy because grassroots intermediaries (even those who illegally download media texts) often draw in new readers or participate in other more traditionally legitimized channels of fandom such as purchasing cross-marketed products or box sets.41 These grassroots intermediaries may even write academic books about the shows. Although the long-term economic impact of illegal downloads is still up for debate, this thread in the

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marathoner discourse indicates that viewers are conditioned to expect easy access to texts. E-readers Out of the sixty book marathoners who participated in the study, twenty-two said their marathons involved a Kindle, Nook, Kindle application, or other e-reader-enabled mobile device. Similar to television streaming, the entrance flow of e-books promotes marathoning because of automaticity and instant access. The insulated flow for books, however, is more opt-in, more agentic, and potentially more expensive. E-readers promote “personally programmed” automaticity by allowing readers to preorder texts and commit themselves to reading them (or at least buying them) even before the texts are available. Vera and Jessica both engaged in this pre-order practice, with Vera explaining the motivation as, “You’re like ‘I just have to have the next book’. . . . You can set up to pre-order and it will already be there like as soon as it’s ready.” This automaticity capitalizes on the readers’ previous craving for the text, thereby reigniting the interest when the book is delivered. The instant access to texts—without needing to be on a long library wait list, order a physical book online, or travel to a book store—also fueled readers’ marathons. The ease of downloading had great appeal for Sondra who reveled in her ability to cruise through The Hunger Games series on her Nook: “I was able to just buy the next one right then and there and download it and start reading. And it was amazing. I mean that the satisfaction of that is so great. I didn’t even have to leave the house.” A Song of Ice and Fire marathoner, Christine, also praised her e-reader’s ease of access: “That’s the nice thing about having the Kindle: even if you just have the slightest inclination to read, you have [the book].” Twilight and The Hunger Games marathoner Vera noted, “Having a Kindle has greatly increased my ability to like continue reading one book after another because I can download it immediately. Like, even if it’s 2 a.m. I can have the next book right then.” E-readers thus remove many barriers to entrance and insulated flow. Before the series excitement wanes and their minds wander away from the story world, readers can have the next book in the series. Compared to those who marathoned TV or film series, book marathoners were much more likely to report continuing their story world engagement in short intervals. The portability of e-readers helped both Jessica and Vera read throughout the day, at their own pace, on their own schedules: Jessica: You know you’re sitting in the doctor’s office and the doctor’s always running an hour and a half behind. . . . So since I’ve gotten [the Kindle] I always keep it in my purse and just read.

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Vera: My Kindle, I can take it with me. It’s always right to my saved spot. I can just turn it on and read a few pages, like fit it in around other things in my life. I can’t stop taking care of my son, but I can read for two minutes while he’s eating.

Although readers may prefer to be immersed in their texts for an extended length of time, those who only have small windows of time can cover more pages throughout the day with a highly portable e-reader. The reader is never far away from his or her compelling fictive world when he or she is carrying an e-reader. These electronic devices also promote reading throughout the day because they eliminate the need to use both hands to physically hold open a book, a factor Jake and Josie implicitly mentioned when cataloguing their marathoning behaviors: Josie: Books I can read any time and will, especially if it’s on my iPad. I’ll just prop it up, you know, holding a baby, and I can do that anytime. Jake: I do find with the Kindle that you can kind of take it places. Like I go to the gym, and I’d do like 60 minutes of cardio. It’s so much easier to read than actually having to like flip the book, and you fly through it.

With their physical features of being spineless and advancing pages at the press of a button, these devices helped Josie and Jake read relatively handsfree throughout their busy days with kids and cardio. Although we’re often task switching when using mobile devices, Josie and Jake illustrate true multitasking—reading while baby-minding and exercising.

AGENTIC VIEWERS AND READERS Viewers and readers have been conditioned to control the pace of their media journeys, and we see evidence of this shifting relationship between reader, text, and programmer in the marathoner discourse expressing frustration at delayed access to media or delayed series closure. Christopher, marathoner of The League, explained his need for control thus: “I find that I become frustrated with traditional television when it comes to a show I am interested in. I want to see more of the show NOW rather than waiting a week to continue the story.” Netflix’s release of full seasons of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, along with a fourth season of Arrested Development, put programming control in viewers’ hands, allowing them to capitalize on this instant gratification culture that the media company has helped create.

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Time-Shifting Technologies DVDs, DVRs, streaming and downloads are all time-shifting technologies that enable readers to fit television marathons around their existing schedules. The practice of viewing television content at more convenient times than an original air date and time began with the VCR.42 Compared to their precursor the VCR, streaming services or downloads provide a better opportunity for viewers to find marathonable texts because the content is already available (without viewers needing to anticipate their interests and record the content), the visuals are the same quality as a TV broadcast, and one need not even leave the couch to select from a variety of texts (compared to selecting and popping in a tape or DVD). In time-shifting practices, episodes are decontextualized from the media landscape, but recontextualized to fit with the fabric of our lived existence—and all interruptions or schedule inconsistencies that existence entails. Unlike the e-reader examples explored earlier, this isn’t multitasking. Rather, time shifting allows readers to capitalize on their spare moments to create an attentive media experience. After enjoying the convenience of using time-shifting technologies and having a show conform to their lives (instead of the reverse), many viewers are reluctant to go back to being subjected to network schedules, such as Sandy who said she prefers media marathoning and is “motivated by the convenience” and Caleb who doesn’t “want to be committed to have to watch something on someone else’s schedule to keep up.” After Josie and her wife became used to streaming Glee, Josie remarked that returning to the traditional viewing pattern of watching a new episode every week caused “resentment” as they were thinking “Ugh, I want to know what happens.” After engaging in insulated flow, Josie had a hard time readjusting her expectations of network television. Stockpiling, Chronology Shifting, and Television Economics Whereas time shifting is a more modest practice—such as watching a new episode a few days after it aired—stockpiling is a more extensive practice of saving up entire television seasons or book or film series. The term “stockpiling” treats a media text as a discrete object and fails to capture the relationship between reader and text. I label the reader/text stockpiling interaction chronology shifting because readers are going back to the beginning of the narrative and avoiding the latest installment so that they can follow the text’s traditional diegetic frame. Chronology shifting can happen passively or actively—readers finding a series after its completion or readers purposely waiting for a series to be complete before picking it up. The Hunger Games book marathoners capture these two forms of chronology shifting, with

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Sam stating, “I’m so glad I stumbled upon this after all three were out,” and Sondra explaining, “I didn’t want to read them until all three were out.” TV marathoner Jeff engaged in the latter form of chronology shifting as his standard practice for entrance flow: “I tend to search for shows that have already aired multiple seasons that I have not seen before so that I can move through the episodes rather quickly.” Jeff’s chronology shifting practice thus delimits his possible texts for entrance flow and promotes insulated flow upon engagement. Newman and Levine argue that a result of digital convergence is that “a television viewer can reasonably be expected to watch every episode of a series from the beginning, in order, making the experience of TV less casual and more intense.”43 In his January 23, 2009 Flow blog post titled “TV Binge,” Newman connects chronology shifting not to convergence, but to “Quality TV,” which he says “demands a completist mandate: start at the beginning.” Because the opportunity exists to chronology shift, and because quality television is aestheticized, program connoisseurs are expected to start at the beginning to properly experience the story. Chronology shifting may be the result of external pressures, but marathoners cited intrinsic motivation to know their story from the very beginning. Josh enjoyed the freedom from traditional programming schedules, stating, “you don’t have to start from the middle of the season if a show is airing on TV and you’re watching on TV. You can go right from the start.” Virginia, a Dead Like Me marathoner, recalled that she “liked it when it was on television and did not see all of the series. When I found it on Netflix with all episodes and the movie I had to watch them all.” Once hooked, Virginia watched “all day long for two days” until she had exhausted the series. Considering the ease of chronology shifting, traditional broadcasts can be seen as a teaser for the more engaging and holistic marathoning experience. Viewers increasing emphasis on streaming and marathoning has farreaching implications for television economics. Nielsen ratings are currently focused on how many people tune into a broadcast. Vanderbilt writes that “Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet—none of these platforms or devices are reflected in the Nielsen rating” and points out that “millions of hours of TV” are consumed beyond one week of the original air date.44 In addition to failing to capture some of the digital viewers, the current ratings system ignores potential viewers. Because of chronology shifting, shows can more readily build a viewer base over time rather than expecting a natural attrition in that base. Journalist John Jurgensen writes that streaming helped Mad Men and Breaking Bad buck a television trend by having increased ratings for subsequent seasons.45 DVD releases of television episodes are one method of building an audience. Citing the examples of Boomtown and Arrested Development, Caldwell

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wrote that Fox attempted to keep the “struggling series alive and profitable” by rushing “the DVD component of each series to the market after only one full season.”46 Writing about The Sopranos, Newman and Levine describe TV on DVD as “a new kind of rerun for non-subscribers,” helping to draw in those who did not have access to HBO and were therefore less likely to pick up the entrance flow.47 Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan did not attribute his program’s longevity to TV on DVD, but rather praised digital chronology shifting and marathoning: “[I]t’s very possible we wouldn’t have made it to 62 episodes without this creation of these technologies and this cultural creation of binge-watching. . . . Under the old paradigm—using the old technology of simply having first runs and then reruns on networks—I don’t know that we would’ve reached the critical mass that we reached.”48 Through these examples, we see that chronology shifting and convergence can draw a greater audience to a text and thus increase its life span. Instead of standard audience segmentation methods, marathoning demands a more nuanced approach that traces not just who is watching what, but also what means they are using to watch, when they are watching, and how fast they are watching. MEDIA CONTENT: PARATEXTS AND COMPLEXITY According to my operational definition of media marathoning, any television series consumed within one week counts as a marathon, and books and film have to be in a series of three or more related texts to have their readers qualify as marathoners. As media companies seek to limit their economic risk-taking, franchises and series will likely continue rising in popularity, thus leading to more marathoning opportunities. Dobby was barely cold in the computergenerated ground when Warner Brothers announced that J. K. Rowling was penning the screenplay for a spinoff movie franchise, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Providing an analysis of the media economics inherent in the decision, Dorothy Pomerantz writes in Forbes that Warner Brothers only had three choices to keep their more than eight billion dollar franchise fresh: “reboot the franchise, come up with sequels or spin off part of the Potter world into a new movie.”49 Although I would bet on a future Harry Potter reboot, the time was not yet ripe in Warner Brothers’ eyes. Reboots, sequels, and series extensions can be looked at as a purely profitdriven enterprise or as thoughtful extensions of robust story worlds. The reality can often be somewhere in the middle. Famed movie reviewer Leonard Maltin was bored by the 2013 Hollywood summer offerings, summarizing his review with the observation, “The movies get bigger and dumber every year, and we’re subjected to more remakes and sequels.”50 In a similar vein,

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but with less disdain, Laura Hudson of Wired suggests that it would have been wise for director Peter Jackson “to ignore the conventional wisdom that says something has to be big in order to be valuable” when adapting The Hobbit book for the screen, but she ultimately concedes, “The Desolation of Smaug [the second of three Hobbit movies] delivers exactly what it promises: More. . . . Because isn’t that the point? Sometimes when you really love something, all you want is more, even if it’s less.”51 Despite Maltin’s “bigger and dumber” proclamation and Hudson’s “more is less” argument, movie viewers may be drawn to the elevated quality of media series, and not just their quantity of installments. Sequels, prequels, and reboots may enhance a story world’s depth. Story extensions can also be told through multiple media to provide diverse sensory experiences. In Jenkins’ explication of transmedia storytelling, he states, “More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium.”52 If the fictive world is built artfully and thoughtfully, more can be more and not less. Hype and Media Franchises We live in a hype-ready society that is quick to activate publicity in both topdown and bottom-up ways. Many marathoners were inspired to read certain books or watch certain shows and movies because of the public’s attention on them. This marathoning pathway seems similar to word-of-mouth recommendations, but hype is more extensive, representing a critical mass of voices and not the recommendation of a single trusted friend or family member. Gray defines hype as “advertising that goes ‘over’ and ‘beyond’ an accepted norm, establishing heightened presence, often for a brief, unsustainable period of time.”53 Ivy illustrated the concept of hype through recounting her exposure to the Game of Thrones television series: “I initially was drawn to Game of Thrones because of all the hype. My new friends . . . would always talk about it when we hung out at [a coffee shop], and I desperately wanted to be ‘in the know!’” Hype in this case was so extensive that Ivy’s friends’ conversations “always” revolved around it, and she wanted to have more such fulfilling social experiences. Natalie had a similar experience of being drawn into two book series. She said, “Twilight I read because everyone was obsessed with it and everyone said that it was amazing, so I just needed to see what the hype was about. And same thing with Dragon Tattoo [the Millennium series], everyone was really into it.” As we see with Ivy and Natalie, readers were willing to try a text because it dominated the public discussion, and they wanted to be part of that discussion. The media’s dependence on disposable texts adds pressure on

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viewers to consume, evaluate, and thus also become part of the hype surrounding a text before the moment is gone. However, as I discuss in Chapter 2, fan communities and the internet present many continued opportunities to connect with others and cash in on one’s newly acquired cultural capital. Because of enhanced opportunities to chronology shift and to communicate through computer mediation, the moment is not gone as fast as it once was. Hype may sometimes have a boomerang effect, bombarding potential readers with persuasive messages that turn them away from the text (at least temporarily). Sondra exemplified this response when she stated, “I’m just like, ‘ugh, if it’s hyped, it must be bad.’” Several marathoners, including Sondra, initially resisted hype, but eventually caved in to the collective pressure. For example, Roberta was adamant about not reading The Hunger Games series when it was at the top of its media hype. She remembered, “Dystopian future, post-apocalyptic—that’s usually a deal breaker for me to start with. That’s not anything I want to read.” However, Roberta admitted that she “trusted” her friends’ opinions and finally read the series. Thanh demonstrated an initial resistance to the Twilight series, but not because she didn’t like its genre. Instead, she reported, “I don’t like to follow trends. . . . But then because my friends keep asking me to read it, I give it a try.” The hype that is tied to media franchises may result in viewers resisting or ignoring certain texts, only to give in to them eventually—particularly if the media hype is reinforced by trusted word-of-mouth recommendations. High Art and Complexity Hype undoubtedly inspires people to seek out certain texts and having a reputation for being intellectual or cutting-edge can fuel that hype. Matt Hills describes the high art versus low art distinction among television programs as one of art versus commerce.54 Many recent shows are renowned for being complex, nuanced, and thought provoking. Sylvia, a television marathoner, summarized the divide this way: “Studio 60 vs. Two and a Half Men: bliss vs. ignorance.” Other marathoners used the words “high art” (Greta), “quality story” (Torin), “well done” (Jillian), and “lofty” (Ana Lucia) to refer to complex texts, thus linking their complexity to reverence for the text’s artistry. An overview of the commonly marathoned texts’ narratology reveals that most can be classified as complex and cultish. These are texts designed for niche audiences, desirable for their quality rather than readership. Jason Mittell documents complexity as a recent shift in television programming, writing in 2006 that “American television of the past twenty years will be remembered as an era of narrative experimentation and innovation.”55 He notes that “many complex programs expressly appeal to a boutique audience of more upscale educated viewers who typically avoid television.”56

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Interviewees were attuned to this hierarchical programming distinction, with Dominick citing AMC—home to commonly marathoned texts Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and Mad Men—as his favorite channel. He said, “they’ve come out with a lot of shows recently in the past three years that are really, really quality shows and they’ve won a lot of awards,” and explained “they don’t necessarily just go after whoever is a popular actor for casting so they get ratings.” Jim used high-art hype to determine what to watch, acknowledging that he was more likely to marathon a show that was “critically acclaimed.” Like word-of-mouth recommendations, awards and critical acclaim vouch for media texts. Others found value in experiencing the text and elevated it above other stories with their endorsement. Unlike word-ofmouth recommendations, the awards and critical acclaim operate through formal, impersonal, elitist channels. They are not customized to individual readers but rather offer an alternative to mass culture, a way to mark a media experience and its experiencers as unique. For several television marathoners, that unique or special quality was a way to justify their dedicated and rapid engagement with a series. Both Nathan and Greta experienced guilt as a result of sitting on their couch for so long and watching television. When asked how he ignored his guilt to

Figure 0.3  Quality Television Cartoon. Source: Cartoon reprinted with permission from Mark Anderson ©

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continue with a television marathon, BBC viewer Nathan explained, “Well, if I’m gonna watch TV, at least it’s damn good TV.” Similarly, after listening to much program hype, Greta settled in for a Mad Men marathon because “this ‘high art’ quality is one I had been searching for, and one that makes me feel more accomplished and less ashamed about marathoning.” In contrast to a more “mindless marathon,” the texts provided more than mere entertainment, according to viewers like Nathan and Greta: they were appreciating the artistry of a well-crafted series. Newman and Levine clarify how these types of explicit praise for quality television implicitly delegitimize the medium: “Convergence-era discourses of legitimation make particular programs, styles, technologies, or practices the exceptions to the rule of television as a whole. . . . [T]hey can only achieve their stature by lending credence to the long history of the TV-as-corrupter-of-all-that-is-good theme.”57 According to Newman and Levine’s logic, Nathan and Greta’s labeling their chosen shows as “damn good” or “high art” implicitly distances these unique programs from the traditional (poor quality) television offerings, thus reinscribing the traditional medium bias. Due in part to television’s delegitimization through discourses of commercialization, dailiness, and feminization, film has long enjoyed a reputation for being a medium of higher artistic quality. Film is also a medium in transition, and its aesthetic stock may also be rising, with several film marathoners expressing appreciation for the complexity and deeper meanings of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The films inspired Lou to read Tolkien books: “I really like Lord of the Rings and knew that Tolkien had written other books [and] histories. I wanted to know more.” Coming in at over eleven hours for the three extended editions, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the lengthiest and most complex of the commonly marathoned film series. This type of complexity would be very challenging if the story was not premised on an extensive book series—one that can be studied and learned in preparation for viewing the films. In her treatise on the films, Kristin Thompson states that the fans of Tolkien’s novel were “better educated” and that the filmmakers “managed to convey something of the complexity of Tolkien’s created world.”58 In the case of the Lord of the Rings films, the complexity was likely part of the trilogy’s success as it appeased existing Tolkien fans by capturing many of the nuances of the literary world and presented an exciting challenge to filmgoers who were new to the series. A complex film series can be covered within twelve hours, a challenging time frame in which to consume even a simple book trilogy. The constraints of my study required that readers consume three or more books in a series in a month or less, thus discouraging participation from those who read extremely lengthy and involved series. Young adult literature may be more marathonable than more complex forms of literature if Victor Nell’s argument holds

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up. He argues that simpler passages of writing are more immersive because they “fill cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult ones.”59 However, even when their book series were relatively brief and contained simple sentences, marathoners appreciated the challenges of the texts they read. The Hunger Games’ complexity of ideas drove Josie’s marathon. She recalled, “there was this political bent to that book that was really intriguing to me.” Harry Potter, another young adult literature series, presented many interesting layers of meaning for Sondra who considered author J. K. Rowling an excellent writer “just because she’s able to pull in so much like history, and references, you know, mythology, their cultures, and languages, and linguistics.” Several study participants also completed the challenging task of marathoning three or more A Song of Ice and Fire books, including Justin who voluntarily took notes on the extensive genealogies, histories, and plot points. There was a clear reward for the readers who worked hard to master an author’s extensive or detailed story world. Fan and Reader Empowerment Convergence culture, of which the media marathoning trend is an indelible part, is altering traditional media power structures. Jenkins explains that the “new media environment” and its purported democratic quality have inspired consumers to fight “for the right to participate more fully in their culture.”60 Fan communities have enjoyed several perceived victories as a result of their fights to shape programming decisions. Marathoner Dominick described how a social media campaign helped save Community from cancellation, commenting, “Community is like the new Freaks and Geeks, whereas in 1999, 2000 if they would have had social media, that probably wouldn’t have happened”—a reference to the cancellation of cult favorite Freaks and Geeks after one season. Like Community, Arrested Development and Firefly/Serenity were also fan-resurrected. Netflix released a fourth season of Arrested Development seven years after Fox initially cancelled the series. Yahoo! TV’s content producer, Dave Nemetz explains Arrested Development’s rebirth as follows: “In today’s TV landscape, with so much audience fragmentation and the power of social media, a passionate fan base is more important than ever. That passion is what got ‘Arrested Development’ back on the air.”61 Although Firefly was never welcomed back to television, creator Joss Whedon was able to cap off the series with a film. Reporting on a Firefly Comic-Con Reunion, Noelene Clark writes, “Fox canceled the show short of a full-season run, but the feature-length sequel ‘Serenity’ hit theaters in 2005, largely because of relentless support from singularly devoted fans who call themselves ‘Browncoats’ after the former resistance soldiers in the series.”62

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Responding to fan communities who raise a collective voice through social media and other avenues is one way in which producers can keep pace with viewer behaviors and trends. As the Browncoat’s organized campaign suggests, communication among fans is important in the changing climate of media economics. In addition to finding fault with the current Nielsen ratings system for failing to capture streaming activity, Vanderbilt points out in Wired that the system has a blind spot in failing to account for Twitter trending. Television audience rating methods are struggling to capture the use of digital technologies to access and discuss a text, so advertisers and network executives are on their toes and willing to experiment with new measures. Vanderbilt claims that this “all adds up to a potentially thrilling new era for television, one that values shows that spark conversations, not just those that hook us for 30 minutes.”63 A study by the Nielsen-affiliated Council for Research Excellence found that “those who engage on social media about the shows they’re watching tend to be more likely to binge watch programs,” suggesting that immersive media practices like marathoning promote greater reader interactivity.64 Dominick is a prime example of the digital native who becomes conversationally involved with his media texts: He recounted that on his Facebook page “There’ll be like a thread that’s like 39 comments that are just [responses to] a gripe from the episode that I just watched.” Karl was also drawn into hype through social media, recalling that he would follow Breaking Bad actors on Twitter and turn to that microblog if “there’s just that major ‘holy crap, what just happened?’ moment [because] the actors are always right there. They’re just like: ‘What’d ya think of that?’” The last part of Karl’s statement, the actors Tweeting “What’d ya think of that?” presents the semblance of a reciprocal exchange between character/actor and reader. This practice can make viewers feel as if their voices are valuable, and that their experience with the text shapes its construction. Undoubtedly, these opportunities for conversation can collapse the perceived distance between reader and text. Although convergence culture can create bottom-up communicative opportunities and encourage producers to bend to fan pressure as they craft the text, June Deery writes that “this kind of interactivity is still relatively rare. . . . Fans cannot directly write comments to the production staff and expect a reply; they can only float ideas online and hope something comes of it.”65 I argue that the real power afforded by marathons and convergence is the power to shape the experience of the narrative, not to mold or extend its official diegesis. In his book chapter about the unique experience of watching downloaded shows, Brooker describes Fox network’s decision to initially air Firefly out of its intended order and fans’ use of agency to “reorder the episodes to retain the intended narrative” when watching the downloads.66 Hills uses Firefly to make a different point about power hierarchies and

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convergence culture: Because the box set placed the episodes in their originally intended order, Hills argued that the box set “symbolically removes Firefly from the interventions of Fox execs, re-contextualising it as the realization of Whedon’s authorial vision.”67 Although Hills positions Whedon as the text’s auteur, I see the fandom as an also-powerful auteur in the case of Firefly and other cult texts. Whedon draws his power from both his artistic skill and the rabid fan base that warrants his artistic visions. We can better see the argument for a fandom auteur using Star Wars as a case study. The Phantom Edit, a fan-edited version of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, coursed through fan communities and the internet with the following explanation on its edited opening crawl: “Being someone of the ‘George Lucas Generation’ I have re-edited a standard VHS version of ‘The Phantom Menace,’ into what I believe is a much stronger film by relieving the viewer of as much story redundancy, Anakin action and dialog, and Jar Jar Binks as possible.”68 In this crawl, Mike J. Nichols, who eventually claimed responsibility for the text, thus draws from the ethos of being a long-term fan, “someone of the ‘George Lucas Generation,’” and one who shares the concerns of the broader fan community—namely the pains of hearing what Anakin and Jar Jar have to say (and how they say it). Derek Johnson’s unique perspective on media franchising supports my reading of The Phantom Menace as evidence of a fandom auteur as he positions the products of media franchises as “contested grounds of collaborative creativity” among “networked stakeholders.”69 The accessibility of digital technologies offers fans greater opportunities for collaboration and the ability to assert their rightful place in media’s creative sphere. With The Phantom Edit, Nichols drew from his training as a film editor and producer, but on a smaller scale, fans repurposed the original six Star Wars films with a unique form of non-linear chronology shifting. Media marathoner, David, appreciated a fan site’s suggestion to situate episodes I, II, and III as an extended flashback or backstory just before the series concludes. Viewing the films in the order of IV, V, I, II, III, VI, David noted in a March 20, 2013 comment on the Media Marathoning blog, “Was a cool new look at text I basically know by heart and saved me from starting off my pilgrimage wading through the cheezy swamps of Naboo.” This fandom auteur move preserves the diegetic components but alters the text’s official chronology, thus maximizing fan moments of enjoyment and burying disappointments in less critical narrative moments. Readers can also have a more enjoyable narrative experience through greater choice in selecting their means of reception. Many television marathoners have been empowered to throw off their cable shackles. The popular press refers to this decision as “cutting the cord,” and the Nielsen Company estimates that over five million households have cut the cord as of 2013, up

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from two million in 2007.70 My family got rid of cable in 2008, opting to replace it with a combination of technologies and services: My husband set up a digital antenna for over-air reception, we subscribed to Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime at various times for additional content, and experimented with connecting a Roku player, a desktop computer tower, and a laptop to our television before settling on a Blu-ray player and Google Chromecast combination in 2013. The TV show a la carte that is possible through streaming enables narrow customization, time shifting, and chronology shifting. We can still graze on network television for a few minutes of down time or background noise, but we are most often targeting particular programs for streaming in the evening to meet our need for engaging, relaxing television entertainment experiences. Our changing relationship to television and the prevalence of insulated flow is illustrated by our oldest child’s request to watch commercials, something she considers a rare treat. BOOK OVERVIEW The next chapter elaborates on the thesis that marathoning practices take place in a liminal space between lived and fictive experience, advancing a unique theory of media marathoning as a walk through the wardrobe (of the C. S. Lewis variety). Chapter 1 draws from existing scholarship about media immersion and clarifies the ways in which marathoning overlaps with and differs from already studied interactions between reader and text. This comparison is structured by the framework of ludic media engagement. In addition to helping understand the process of engaging with media, the ludic lens also clarifies why both audience and textual analysis (the two parts of the book) are necessary to understand the media marathoning phenomenon. The book’s two parts map the changing relationship between reader and text in this era of media marathoning. Reader and text are interrelated components in the marathon experience, but the book emphasizes one at a time to highlight their unique contributions to the relationship. Chapters 2 through 4 draw from extensive discourse gathered from media marathoners, analyzing the behavioral, affective, and cognitive components of media marathoning. Whereas the first half of the book analyzes marathon experiences as related by readers themselves, the second half of the book looks at marathoned stories from the viewpoint of characters and, by extension, their authors. The textual analysis of commonly marathoned stories captures crescendos and denouements of mediated moral questions, explicating trends in character actions and the circumstances in which characters find themselves. These two parts of the book together chart the cultural implications of the media marathoning trend.

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NOTES 1. All marathoners who participated in this study have been given pseudonyms. 2. James Hibberd, “Netflix Touts Binge Viewing: Is Waiting Better?” Entertainment Weekly, January 31, 2013, accessed January 31, 2013, http://insidetv. ew.com/2013/01/31/netflix-binge-viewing/; Hannah Goldfield, “For Love and Television,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2013, accessed September 30, 2013, http:// www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/for-love-and-television.html; Brian Stelter, “New Way to Deliver a Drama: All 13 Episodes in One Sitting,” The New York Times, January 31, 2013, accessed February 1, 2013, http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/media/netflix-to-deliver-all-13-episodes-ofhouse-of-cards-on-one-day.html?_r=0; Frank Bruni, “The Land of the Binge,” The New York Times, February 9, 2013, accessed February 10, 2013, http://www. nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-land-of-the-binge.html; John Jurgensen, “Binge Viewing: TV’s Lost Weekends,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2012, accessed August 1, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142 4052702303740704577521300806686174; Tom Vanderbilt, “The Nielsen Family is Dead,” Wired, March 19, 2013, accessed March 19, 2013, http://www.wired. com/underwire/2013/03/nielsen-family-is-dead/; Jim Pagels, “Stop Binge-Watching TV,” Slate, July 9, 2012, accessed October 1, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/ browbeat/2012/07/09/binge_watching_tv_why_you_need_to_stop_html 3. Pagels, “Stop Binge-Watching.” 4. Alexandra Field, “Why Do We Binge-Watch TV?” CNN Online, June 14, 2014, accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/offbeat/2014/06/14/tv-binge-watching.cnn.html 5. Brenton J. Malin, Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 35. 6. Hibberd, “Netflix Touts.” 7. Linda Holmes, “How Should You Watch and Read and Listen? However You Want,” NPR, July 10, 2012, accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.npr.org/ blogs/monkeysee/2012/07/10/156552900/how-should-you-watch-and-read-and-listen-however-you-wanthttp:// 8. Brian Stelter, “Netflix Finds Plenty of Binge Watching, but Little Guilt,” CNN Money, December 13, 2013, accessed December 16, 2013, http://money.cnn. com/2013/12/13/technology/netflix-binge/ 9. Dina Gachman, “Breaking Bad, House of Cards Most Binge-Watched Shows,” Forbes, June 25, 2014, accessed July 2, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/dinagachman/2014/06/25/breaking-bad-house-of-cards-most-binge-watched-shows/?utm_ campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social 10. Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies, (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 13. 11. P. David Marshall, “Screens: Television’s Dispersed ‘Broadcast,’” in Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, eds. Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay (New York: Routledge, 2009), 44. 12. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 7.

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13. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 71–72. 14. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, eds. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 2. 15. Tim Cushing, “The DVD is Dying,” TechDirt, August 23, 2012, accessed June 15, 2014, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120821/19130920119/dvd-isdying-hollywoods-plan-do-nothing-cede-ground-to-file-sharing.shtml 16. Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: The Textual Valorisations of Television on DVD,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5, no. 1 (2007): 45. 17. John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 306. 18. Lincoln Geraghty, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2014), 4. 19. The shelfie is also an effective and unpaid means of marketing a story world. See Caldwell, Production Culture, 306. 20. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2012), 139. 21. Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 21–22. 22. How I Met Your Mother, “Trilogy Time” episode no. 156, first broadcast April 9, 2012 by CBS. Written by Kourtney Kang and directed by Pam Fryman. Netflix. 23. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2. 24. Quoted in Michael Gibbons, “Better Call Saul: Breaking Bad Comes to Film Society,” The Film Society at Lincoln Center, July 2, 2013, accessed September 17, 2013, http://www.filmlinc.com/daily/entry/breaking-bad-marathon-cast -favorite-vince-gilligan-bryan-cranston 25. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 6. 26. Geraghty, Cult Collectors, 130. 27. Number of users cited in Brandon Griggs, “Last Chance to Stream ‘Titanic,’ ‘Top Gun’ on Netflix,” CNN, December 31, 2013, accessed December 31, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/30/tech/web/netflix-streaming-purge/ 28. Jurgensen, “Binge Viewing.” 29. Although this section focuses on television marathoning, streaming technologies are also predicted to have a strong impact on the film industry with Arianna Bocco, Vice President of Acquisitions for Independent Film Channel Films, stating that “streaming rather than actual DVD releases is probably the future for home video” (quoted in Lucas Hilderbrand, “The Art of Distribution: Video On Demand,” Film Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2010): 28). This study’s discourse did not capture this trend, with the majority of film marathoners using a blend of DVD (rented, borrowed, or owned) and theater viewing to complete their marathons. A substantial minority also watched their complete film marathons on television.

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30. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 91. 31. Williams, Television, 94. 32. Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television,” Television & New Media 7, no. 4 (2006): 340. 33. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 116. 34. Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 314. 35. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 13. 36. William Uricchio, “Television’s Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 176–77. 37. Will Brooker, “Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows on Download,” in Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 53. 38. Jurgensen, “Binge Viewing.” 39. Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” in Play, Games and Sports in Cultural Contexts, eds. Janet C. Harris and Roberta J. Park (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 1983), 147. 40. Quoted in Rachel Edidin, “HBO Still Doesn’t Get It: Game of Thrones Again the Most Torrented Show,” Wired, December 30, 2013, accessed December 31, 2013, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/12/game-of-thrones-piracy-hbo/ 41. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 116. 42. Mark R. Levy and Edward L. Fink, “Home Video Recorders and the Transience of Television Broadcasts,” Journal of Communication 34, no. 2 (1984): 58. 43. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 130. 44. Vanderbilt, “Nielsen Family.” 45. Jurgensen, “Binge Viewing.” 46. Caldwell, Production Culture, 305. 47. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 136. 48. Quoted in Angela Watercutter, “Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan on Why Binge-Watching Saved His Show,” Wired, June 4, 2013, accessed September 10, 2013, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/breaking-bad-season-5-dvd/ 49. Dorothy Pomerantz, “More ‘Harry Potter’ Movies on the Way,” Forbes, September 12, 2013, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ dorothypomerantz/2013/09/12/more-harry-potter-movies-on-the-way/ 50. Quoted in Todd Leopold, “Summer Movies 2013: Fantastic or Fatiguing?” CNN, August 30, 2013, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.cnn. com/2013/08/30/showbiz/movies/summer-movies-mixed-season/ 51. Laura Hudson, “Well, at Least the Second Hobbit Movie Isn’t as Bad as the First,” Wired, December 13, 2013, accessed December 31, 2013, http://www.wired. com/underwire/2013/12/hobbit-desolation-of-smaug-review/

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52. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 114. 53. Gray, Show Sold Separately, 5. 54. Hills, “From the Box in the Corner,” 56. 55. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (2006): 29. 56. Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” 31. 57. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 18. 58. Kristin Thompson, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 55, 59. 59. Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 77. 60. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 18. 61. Quoted in Hollie McKay, “‘Arrested Development’ Fans Geeking Out Over Netflix Return,” FOX News, May 22, 2013, accessed September 10, 2013, http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/05/22/arrested-development-fans -geeking-out-over-netflix-return/ 62. Noelene Clark, “Comic-Con: Joss Whedon Thanks Browncoats at Tearful Firefly Reunion,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2012, accessed September 10, 2013, http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/comic-con-joss-whedon-browncoats-firefly-reunion/ 63. Vanderbilt, “Nielsen Family.” 64. “Twitter Buzz Doesn’t Make Us View TV Shows,” The Daily Mail, April 12, 2014, accessed June 16, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2603197/ Twitter-buzz-doesnt-make-watch-tv-shows.html 65. June Deery, “TV.com: Participatory Viewing on the Web,” The Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 2 (2003): 177–78. 66. Brooker, “Television Out of Time,” 60. 67. Hills, “From the Box in the Corner,” 54. 68. Cited in Daniel Kraus, “The Phantom Edit,” Salon, November 5, 2001, accessed July 2, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2001/11/05/phantom_edit/ 69. Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 7. 70. Ben Keough, “Are You Ready to Cut the Cord?” USA Today, May 28, 2013, accessed October 10, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/28/ reviewed-cut-the-cord-tv/2156677/

Chapter 1

A Walk through the Wardrobe

This chapter develops a metaphor for the media marathoning experience that is based on C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In Textual Poachers, Jenkins advances a “velveteen rabbit” analogy to describe participatory media fan cultures. Drawing from the classic children’s text, Jenkins explains, “The boy’s investment in the toy will give it a meaning that was unanticipated by the toymaker, a meaning that comes not from its intrinsic merits or economic value, but rather from the significance the child bestows on the commodity through its use. . . . [O]nly the boy has the power to bring the toy to life and only the boy grieves its loss.”1 As we will see in the first half of this book, these life-giving and life-mourning properties are apparent in readers’ cognitive and emotional involvement with mediated texts. Yet I find weakness in the velveteen rabbit metaphor: the metaphor adequately describes the process of life-giving, but it doesn’t capture the mutualistic relationship in which the rabbit also gives new life to the boy. I, instead, describe the marathoning experience as a walk through the wardrobe—of the C. S. Lewis variety. Just as the wardrobe links the fantasy world of Narnia to the children’s lived world in Professor Kirke’s English home, the marathoning experience is a two-way passage between the real and the fictive.2 Jenkins gestures toward the suitability of the wardrobe metaphor when he writes in Convergence Culture: “Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extruded from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.”3 We give life to texts when we make the decision to enter them fully (through a marathon or any other immersive pattern of engagement) but still remain grounded in a “real” 1

2

Chapter 1

framework comprised by the collection of our life experiences. The relationship between reader and text is buoyed by each reader’s own experiences that are brought to bear on the text and are simultaneously shaped by it. The mutualistic relationship sustains not just reader and text, but also social relations. In other words, this life-giving dialogue occurs not only between reader and text, but also between readers. As we make our way through life and process its various stimuli, we weave together a series of lived, mediated, and communicated discourses to shape our sense of self and reality. A text can be given life in any space: a theater, living room, bedroom, coffee shop, or, essentially, anywhere media engagement or media-based conversations take place. Each space can uniquely shape the media experience, but the figurative space of the wardrobe transcends the particular locality of media engagement. As the liminal marker between real and fantasy worlds, the wardrobe is a composite space that is relatively unconstrained by the reader’s physical setting. As Professor Kirke warns the children that entrances to Narnia can be found anywhere in the house, he captures the a-spatiality of the immersive media experience. Roger Aden writes that the liminal is bracketed not by fixed places, but by spaces from which movement begins and ends: “departure and return mark not only points in time outside of the liminal but points in a cultural space where one’s place or position is settled.”4 The settled state is temporary, rather than enduring; spatiality and temporality are, thus, unable to exert a strong influence on the media experience. The wardrobe (and the marathon) are decidedly unsettled and unsettling spaces, capable of shifting their location and ours. The experience can “move us” as we travel through the story world in collaborative imaginative work between reader and authors. The marathon experience can also “move us” by introducing new discourses that indelibly alter the way we see and experience the world. Something about the story has drawn us in so strongly that we emphasize the story world over the lived experience for a temporary stretch, dedicating time and effort to understanding its discourses as they mingle with our existing experiences and enduring discourses. Most marathon experiences hold the inter-related qualities of being immersive, memorable, and formative, capable of lingering on, being picked up again, and being molded to our new needs and frames after the initial experience of narrative closure. C. S. Lewis’ young female protagonist Lucy Pevensie recognized the gravity of the wardrobe’s powers upon her first discovery. She clung, albeit briefly, to her place of departure. Lewis wrote, “Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of the empty room from which she had set out.”5 Lucy can see both Narnia tree trunks and the empty room of the Professor’s house from her vantage point. After that glimpse back



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to the empty room, she moves forward into the possibilities that await. It is this liminal wardrobe, and the walk through it, that has the power to transform a displaced child of the Blitz into the revered Queen Lucy the Valiant. After their epic experiences in Narnia, the Pevensie children temporarily forget England. This form of amnesia models Green and Brock’s argument that during narrative transportation “parts of the world of origin become inaccessible.”6 That world objectively exists, but it is temporarily outside our realm of consciousness as we make cognitive room for the influx of new stimuli. The children are reminded of their world of origin when they encounter the semiotic marker of liminality: the lamppost that marks the transitional space from magical forest to coat-filled wardrobe to English manor house. Marathoning practices are immersive, but even if we’re not paying full attention to the world of origin, it is still part of our cognitive framework through which we filter, sort, and make sense of the mediated discourses. The Pevensie children, for example, recognized Father Christmas because “though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world—the world on this side of the wardrobe door.”7 The dialogue between the lived and the fictive experience—even if the lived experience is “quieter” during our immersion— is essential to give both meaning. Paul Booth likens fan activities to playing an alternate reality game, noting that a pleasurable component of mediated game play is determining the ontological significance of the events.8 If we choose to stay in Narnia, it becomes the reality, not an alternate—and we lose the enjoyment of ontological discernment that Booth describes. Lewis even wrote that Lucy knew “it is indeed silly, and possibly unhealthy to shut oneself in completely.”9 The real world always beckons in this alternate reality experience—although content delivery technologies work to obscure the lamppost, to encourage readers to ignore its existence until the lived world will no longer stay at bay. Finding the lamppost gives the Pevensie children “such desire to find the signification of this thing” that they all choose to return to their English lives.10 Each world gives the other significance, so one world must not be lost in the exchange. And the fictive world never leaves us even if we temporarily leave it. On the book’s final page, Professor Kirke confirms the ever-available and transformative nature of the walk through the wardrobe, reassuring the children, “of course you’ll get back to Narnia again someday. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia.”11 LUDIC MEDIA Scholars in cult media studies, fan studies, narratology, media psychology, and media effects have advanced numerous theories and claims about media

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immersion (using a few different labels that I will soon discuss).12 The upcoming pages contain my meta-analysis of scholarship on immersion that is structured using a ludic framework. Ludic media systems, Craig Lindley explains, have their origins in game studies, but they can aptly describe other media experiences that incorporate narrative, simulation, and game play.13 Booth argues for the salience of this game-based approach to new media studies, opining, “The contemporary media scene is complex, and rapidly becoming dependent on a culture of ludism: today’s media field is fun, playful, and exuberant.”14 Even contemporary entertainment texts Inception and The Matrix series offer an in-depth meta-commentary on the ludic. Inception’s protagonist Dom Cobb refers to narrative, game play, and simulation, respectively, when he explains the process of world building as a means of introducing new ideas into a person’s memories: “You create the world of the dream, you bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.”15 The realistic dream experience then becomes part of one’s repository of memories that invite active engagement and correspondingly shape one’s future. Although Cobb describes the ludic as a step-by-step model and I see it as a system, I do agree that the narrative is the foundation for the ludic experience. The Field of Dreams saying, “If you build it, he will come,” holds true for the ludic, with the narrative creating the space in which we play. What happens after that is the activation of a complex system, an interaction among narrative, simulation, and reader game play. Narratives that invite a ludic experience will have some combination of several key characteristics: longform story arcs (Mittell), endless deferment (Hills), world building (Jenkins), overflow (Brooker), and textual excess (Gwenllian-Jones). What unites these narrative components is their openness, their abundance of symbols that cannot be contained or readily ordered, that mark entry points for reader activity. The play space may be objectively the same for multiple users, but their experiences will differ so dramatically—based on the personal salience of various stimuli, their “choices” of what signs to engage throughout the game play, and their interpretations of those signs—as to customize the perceived contours of that space. I discuss each of these features more in depth in Chapter 4, “Cognitive Involvement,” because these narrative features are what inspire active audience engagement and immersion. This type of immersive, ludic experience with television is likely on the rise, if we are to believe Jeffrey Sconce’s claims that television texts are increasingly adopting complex narrative patterns, which “create worlds that viewers gradually feel they inhabit along with the characters.”16 In an interview with Michael Schneider of TV Guide following the release of Arrested Development’s fourth and final season, writer Mitch Hurwitz stated, “The audience may . . . want to watch it a lot and have fun digging out all of the



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subtext and connections. It seemed like fun to use the new medium as something people can play with. Like an Arrested Development toy.”17 The wardrobe’s features beckon—its enveloping stature, its depths, its concealment of what lies ahead. These features are akin to the narrative qualities that draw readers in and invite the play. Once we accept that invitation to dig out subtext and enjoy the media “toy,” we have immersed ourselves in the game play. Whereas the second half of the book analyzes the narrative components of commonly marathoned texts, the first half captures the game play by analyzing the performative and interactive aspects of immersion. The collection of three chapters analyzing marathoners’ experiences accounts for prominent dimensions of media enjoyment. Robin L. Nabi and Marina Krcmar proposed a tripartite model of media enjoyment as attitude that encapsulates behavioral, affective, and cognitive dimensions. In explicating their model, the authors describe interconnectedness among the constructs. For example, they position cognition as a foundational component for affect because readers use cognitions to form the lens through which they decide whether or not to relate emotionally to the characters.18 These cognitive frames may be predicated on morality, similar experiences, or character backstories. In another point that is particularly salient to media marathoning research, Nabi and Krcmar describe behavioral components of parasocial relationships, noting that the emotional connection between reader and character can result in consumption of more of the story (marathoning behavior) or in speculation about the lives of characters (cognitive involvement).19 In sum, the behavioral, affective, and cognitive components of marathoning covered in the book’s opening chapters establish an interconnected foundation of media enjoyment through marathoning. Throughout this enjoyable media experience, we are engaged in ludic game play that draws from all of our mental faculties. The final component of the ludic system, simulation, links the narrative and the game play. I see the simulation as the platform on which the interaction between the real and fictive worlds takes place. The simulation involves our real world experiences and our imaginations—our interpretation of what has been and our speculation of what may be. Gwenllian-Jones uses simulation to bookend her explanation of the “virtual reality” experience of engaging cult media: Fictional worlds, of necessity, always exceed the texts that describe them, relying in large part on the reader who must import exterior information to and imaginatively engage with the text [simulation] in order to actualize its latent aspects. The recovery of the fictional world from its fragmented and partial textual presence [narrative] is a dynamic cognitive process [game play] in which textual data [narrative], knowledge of the real world, and imagination are all marshaled [simulation].20

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As Gwenllian-Jones illustrates, the ludic components are an interactive system, not a neat and tidy process. This is an interaction between reader, text, textual excess, reader’s cognitive skill, reader’s imagination, and reader’s lived experiences. Several prominent theories on media immersion highlight different dimensions of this system. After describing several salient immersion theories, I’ll clarify what can be learned from their commonalities. MODELS OF IMMERSION Green and Brock’s empirical narrative transportation theory is one of the most developed and widely studied. They write that narrative transportation is a holistic sensorial and embodied experience: “Following Gerrig, we conceived of transportation as a convergent process, where all of the person’s mental systems and capacities become focused on the events occurring in the narrative.”21 Various studies by Green and colleagues have identified key reader behaviors or traits that positively correlate to transportation: both reader predisposition to like or sympathize with a character and reading a story before seeing a film based on the story led to greater transportation.22 Most relevant to media marathoning are the researchers’ hypotheses that being able to self-pace one’s journey through a story and spend a greater amount of time with a story contribute to transportation.23 Operating from a humanistic perspective, Aden uses the phrase “symbolic pilgrimage” to capture the process of engaging popular stories, which he defines as “individuals ritualistically revisiting powerful places that are symbolically envisioned through the interaction of story and individual imagination.”24 In a pithy recapitulation of his symbolic pilgrimage concept, Aden writes, “we use the technology of mass-mediated stories as our vehicles and our imaginations as our fuel.”25 In likening the immersion in a cult text to a virtual reality experience, Gwenllian-Jones’s description is similar to Aden’s: it positions the cult television experience as an “an alchemical effect of text and imagination . . . that transports the reader into another realm.”26 According to both Aden’s and Gwenllian-Jones’s explanations, narrative harbors latent potential that we activate with our minds. Reader and narrative are both constitutive of the story world journey. In all these articulations of immersion, a reader/player/traveler enters the narrative environment and engages with the proffered playscape. The words transportation, revisiting, and pilgrimage capture the perceived movement involved in the reader/text interaction that constitutes media immersion. We choose to enter the narrative playscape, but the narrative can’t do all the work for us. Just as kids must use choreographed movements, arm strength, and perhaps bravery to traverse monkey bars, we need our imaginations, senses,



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and cognitive and emotional capacities to play in and with the narrative. We are not immersed and static, watching a story unfold before us. Rather, the immersion is an active experience in which our engagement and decisions extends us beyond our lived space. Even in a familiar narrative, the interaction of reader/traveler, imagination, and vast narrative will never play out the same. Just as you can’t step in the same river twice, or play the same game of monopoly twice, this ludic experience is ever-changing. This is why Gwenllian-Jones’ metaphorical interaction is imbued with the magic of alchemy rather than the science of chemistry. And therein lies the transformative potential of narrative: the transportation effects transformation as we bring a different self to the game play, attend to different aspects of the narrative during each visit, imaginatively craft a different experience using our available resources, and thus find ourselves entering a different “realm” with each narrative engagement. The experience can be thought of as having a self-driven, boundless Rashomon effect—one that evokes a different self and story each time. HOW IS THE MARATHON EXPERIENCE UNIQUE? If the previous explanations of ludic media aptly describe the marathoning experience, what then sets marathoning apart from traditional practices of media engagement? The primary difference between the experiences is pacing, which results in several notable implications for our media immersion. Enabled by digital content delivery technologies, our travel to the fictive realm is through hyperdrive. We enter the wardrobe and quickly come out on the other side—much like Harry and Ron running through platform nine and three-quarters for the first time in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This pace enables marathoners to both gain and lose temporal control. They gain temporal control over the narrative by keeping the story fresh in their minds (and by not having to remind themselves of what happened previously) and also by constructing insulated flow. When exercising temporal control, television viewers skip commercials through many of the most common means of marathoning (streaming, downloads, or DVDs) and they evade programming constraints. Book marathoners will chronology shift and wait for an entire story to be out in full before downloading or purchasing physical copies of the entire series. Movie marathoners will select a box set from their shelf or take part in a more public, communal theater marathon. These are all examples of temporal control predicated on reader-inspired narrative pacing. Marathoners sacrifice temporal control in their world of origin, however, as many marathons push out typical patterns in life’s dailiness—cutting into sleep and work time, for example. It is that loss of temporal control

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that actually strengthens the immersiveness and intensity of the marathon experience (as well as the exciting sense of media novelty). This see-saw of temporal agency results in the fictive world taking precedence over the world of origin. Despite competing pressures and needs, we actively give ourselves to the ludic space. The marathoning practice marks the intersection of lived and fictive worlds, but the fictive world holds greater power in marathoning than in other media engagement patterns. Victor Nell describes the ludic experience of losing oneself in a book as a combination of “the world-creating power of books, and the reader’s effortless absorption that allows the book’s fragile world, all air and thought, to maintain itself for a while, a bamboo and paper house among earthquakes.”27 Although Nell crafts an image of a delicate simulated experience and the film Inception showcases striking visual effects as the simulated worlds are blown apart following the loss of narrative fidelity, media marathoning creates a more stable and solid world. The commonly marathoned texts create engaging worlds that more completely absorb readers. The marathon version of Nell’s delicate house would be an entire world made of narrative brick and reader mortar to create the stronghold in which readers blissfully play. And our marathon experience in the co-created world is often one of nearly immediate naturalization. Like the Pevensies, marathoners commonly become residents who get to know the geography, laws, and other citizens of the fictive world. Marathoners were rarely tourists who gained only a superficial understanding of the culture before moving onto their next destination. The marathoner-as-resident goes on a temporally-collapsed and intense adventure in one realm. When watching A Game of Thrones for the first time, Ivy struggled to learn the new world, but she worked hard to do so: “So much is going on it’s getting hard to follow but I am writing down each character as I go, to make sure I keep them straight.” In Chapter 4, “Cognitive Involvement,” I discuss how the internet enables mastery of these complex texts, with extensive information to catch up new initiates—and interactive spaces for them to pose story world questions and contribute their own understanding. If there is a citizenship test for a fictive world, it is one administered by fellow fans. And marathoners were highly motivated to pass that unspoken test. Many ideas expressed in the preceding paragraphs can aptly describe fan experiences. The intensity and immersiveness of marathoning can, indeed, be a gateway to fandom, but marathoning does not predetermine fan identification or behaviors. Marathoners temporarily adopt fan practices and behaviors—frequently discussing, researching, and thinking about the story with which they are engaged. Less frequently, but nonetheless important, they will also form rituals around the media engagement, memorialize



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their identity with media-related purchases, and undertake pilgrimages to sanctioned fan sites. Geraghty analyzes all the aforementioned behaviors in support of his argument that fan culture is grounded in meaningful, personalized memories.28 For marathoners, the temporal length of these attachments varies greatly—perhaps because the memories were not always meaningful. Some marathoners were be “one and done,” like Roberta, who marathoned the Twilight book series, promptly removed the books from her home, and did not plan to see the films. Others try on the fan behaviors and decide they want to be part of that subculture. For initiates or new fans, marathons are like professional development—the acquisition of useful, relevant knowledge to enhance one’s ability to engage in a meaningful activity. Like Hermione reading Hogwarts: A History before boarding the Hogwarts Express, marathoning provides a useful introductory experience to a subcultural world. In her marathon journal, Lena claimed to be on the way to “full-fledged fandom” as she was compelled to seek information about the writers and directors of Damages. Lena and others periodically dipped back into the real world to find information existing outside the diegesis. This move is a walk back through the wardrobe (home to England) so we can come back to Narnia for a different experience. This time, we are more informed about the context and better-prepared to make meanings with the stimuli we encounter. Although fan communities often informally police their borders, the line between viewer and fan can be self-defined. Lena considered her preoccupation with both the diegesis of Damages and its behind-the-scenes work to signal that she had crossed the line into fandom. Lena was a rare marathoner who reflected on her status as a viewer or fan, but other study participants were more self-reflexive if they re-marathoned a story world of which they already considered themselves fans. Marathons can mark both a rite of passage for newly-minted (or pledging) fans and a ritualized performance of fandom (in the case of re-marathons). Lotti re-marathoned her beloved Sherlock series before engaging in online fan activities, and David took what he called periodic pilgrimages back into the Star Wars film universe, both exhibiting ritualized reaffirmation of fandom. Their love for the series went on for years past their initial exposure to the stories, suggesting an enduring quality to the relationship, a characteristic Hills cites as a defining feature of cult fandom.29 Drawing from her qualitative study of film re-watchers, Klinger argues that re-engaging the familiar “brings enjoyment via a combination of both mastery and solace: mastery of the narrative and one’s own world; solace in the sense of control that predictability brings and in the way the screening of the same narratives can transform a space into a secure environment.”30 The ludic space of the re-view or re-marathon is one of less uncertainty and, thus, less anxiety. The solace that Klinger discusses thus frees up the player’s cognitive capacities to reach for greater

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mastery, another pleasurable component of the ludic experience. The ongoing nature of fan engagement offers an explanation for why Aden focuses on how popular stories help fans construct a vision for the future: these stories offer enduring equipment for living, not just helping us to cope with the present, but also offering us something to strive for. And that ideal future is not simple, static, or easy to achieve: its pursuit requires prolonged fannish activity. Because marathons keep a single story world fresh in readers’ minds, the marathon experience can easily infect imaginations and conversations—even long after a book is closed or a screen is shut down. We can see this impact in Dominick’s recollections following his Trailer Park Boys marathon: “It’s all I could think about; I didn’t care about anything else.” When immersively engaged in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, Adam reported that story thoughts translated into conversations: the books were “a topic of conversation mainly because I spent so much time engaged with the books that they were often on my mind.” Rather than peppering one’s daily media time with several different stories—engaging a few different television shows and a segment of a book before going to bed, for example—marathoners usually focus intensely on one narrative. Their insulated flow pushes out other media stimuli, and that one story world is the primary entertainment space to which marathoners escape. The narrative dimensions that promote immersion can keep one’s brain churning long after the marathon experience. After marathoning Sherlock Seasons 1 and 2, concluding with “The Reichenbach Fall” episode, my husband and I discussed various theories about Sherlock’s method of plausibly faking his death. Our speculative discussions that took place over several days following the Season 2 conclusion illustrate Gwenllian-Jones’ claim that “the reader must play an active part in creating and sustaining [a cult text’s] integrity, drawing on memory as well as imagination to reinforce its perceptual substance.”31 We wanted to make the story work, to have it stay in the realm of the ludic and to have that narrative integrity. And, drawing from our knowledge of the story canon, rudimentary physics, and human nature, we pieced together what we considered to be a few satisfactory explanations. This collaborative work thus reinforced Sherlock’s perceptual substance, giving life to the text. Our work was all the more rewarding because the show has not definitively answered how Sherlock faked his death. Our explanations, combined with a few possibilities presented on the show, plug that diegetic hole, thus making our imaginations a constitutive component of the narrative. We harbor the imaginative scaffolding upon which the narrative is premised and our minds are the hard drive memorializing that story. When we dedicate that space in our hard drive is when we become fans. It is because the fictive world becomes so prominent in our lives for the duration of a marathon that mental space is already rented out, thus paving the way for the fandom to take up residence.



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NARNIA FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR To extend the wardrobe metaphor, the two halves of this book can be seen as a view of Narnia from both sides of the door. The audience portion of the book analyzes marathoners’ accounts of their journey through the wardrobe. Think of this perspective as sitting in the English countryside hearing the Pevensies tell of Narnia. The textual analysis portion of the book is like journeying through Narnia, mapping the terrain of the fictive world, interacting with its people, and learning its rules and values. This coordinated view from both sides of the door gives us a stronger sense of marathoning’s ludic qualities: the first half of the book maps the game play of marathoners and the second half delves into the narrative foundation of the game play. Both pieces are in dialogue throughout the book—with narrative analysis coursing throughout marathoner articulations of their experiences and marathoner observations informing my interpretations of the narratives—but the separate halves of the book have their own emphases to provide a well-rounded understanding of the simulated experience this media engagement pattern enacts. Starting at a chronological first step, Chapter 2 describes behavioral patterns of media marathoning. In this chapter, I explicate commonalities among marathoners’ initial motives for picking up and rapidly engaging with their chosen texts, along with the marathoning routines they developed. As noted in the introduction, a major motivation to marathon is the release of a new text in a series: those who have already engaged with the earlier parts of the series will “study” the text to remind them of the story world’s nuances and others who are new to the series will “catch up” on the story’s earlier content to feel fully prepared for the new release. These activities have a strong social context, enabling marathoners to strengthen their relationships with other fans or story enthusiasts as they have built the popular culture cache to engage in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication about the texts. Chapters 3 and 4 address the affective and cognitive inner workings of the marathon experience, explaining what keeps marathoners committed for the long (but sometimes brief) haul. I argue in Chapter 3 that media marathoners take an intense, albeit compressed, journey with their characters, developing strong emotional bonds along the way. These bonds can be seen through the emotional reactions of readers to stories and their endings. The marathoned texts evoked not just complex emotions, but complex thought processes. In Chapter 4, I explain how the nuanced texts asked much from readers and readers obliged by giving up time and mental energy to make meanings with the texts. The relationship between reader and text was so strong and rewarding that readers often prolonged their contact with the text by engaging in forensic fan practices. Many marathoners were motivated to immerse

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themselves in their text and even research it because the text met an important need they had at the time of the marathon. Several marathoners even consciously articulated how the text provided them with knowledge to confront difficult situations or comfort when coping with uncertainty. The second half of the book then presents the findings of the textual analysis of the dozens of commonly marathoned texts (see Table 0.1 for a list of texts). Chapters 6 through 9 explicate character types and formations that capture trajectories toward evil and righteousness. The character patterns include a specific profile for villain and hero, a benevolent but deceptive puppeteer who pulls the hero’s strings, and an unlikely alliance. Chapters 10 through 13 extend the focus on morality by capturing common plot themes. The repeated themes address powerful love and friendships, untenable positions, moral ambiguity, and postmodern textual devices that destabilize meanings and invite reader engagement. Collectively, these themes encourage readers to place themselves in the texts, to negotiate their meanings, and to engage in intrapersonal, interpersonal, and mediated conversations about morality. The concluding chapter offers a full-bodied look at media marathoning by proposing a media marathoning paradigm and expounding on its current and future implications for media industries, audiences, stories, and the culture that shapes and is shaped by those forces. While engaged in the practice of media marathoning, most viewers are active and focused, sustaining a depth of thought and commitment to a series. Although the great commitment involved in marathoning does carry a potential risk to readers, the emphasis that these stories place on questions of morality suggests that they offer productive equipment for living, helping us meaningfully confront complex questions. Marathonable stories can help us fine-tune our moral compasses— and that is a pursuit worth our time, attention, and emotion.

NOTES 1. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 51. 2. I use the terms real world and fictive world loosely, acknowledging that there is no objectively real world and that our schema are always shaped and shifted by imaginative forays through mediated worlds. In various places throughout the book, I use Green and Brock’s phrase “world of origin” to more aptly describe the “real world.” Melanie C. Green and Timothy Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye: Transportation-Imagery Model of Narrative Persuasion,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, eds. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 325.



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3. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 3–4. 4. Roger C. Aden, Popular Stories and Promised Lands: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999), 81. 5. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1950), 7. 6. Green and Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye,” 325. 7. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, 116. 8. Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010), 14. 9. Ibid. 10. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, 204. 11. Ibid., 206. 12. I purposely use the word immersion because it has not been definitively claimed and defined by one scholar. Rather, immersion is used by scholars of various disciplines who have used it to fittingly describe the same phenomena, but not yet wrangled over its precise meaning. In the upcoming pages, I address some of the more precise terminology related to immersion. 13. Craig A. Lindley, “The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design,” Game Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): http://www. gamestudies.org/0501/lindley/ 14. Booth, Digital Fandom, 2. 15. Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2010). 16. Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, eds. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 95. 17. Michael Schneider, “Arrested Development Creator Mitch Hurwitz on Early Reactions to Season Four,” TV Guide, June 4, 2013, accessed December 23, 2013, http://www.tvguide.com/news/arrested-development-season-4-mitch-hurwitz-1066262.aspx 18. Robin L. Nabi and Marina Krcmar, “Conceptualizing Media Enjoyment as Attitude: Implications for Mass Media Effects Research,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 294. 19. Nabi and Krcmar, “Conceptualizing Media Enjoyment,” 295. 20. Sara Gwenllian-Jones, “Virtual Reality and Cult Television,” in Cult Television, eds. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta Pearson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 92. 21. Green and Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye,” 324. 22. Melanie C. Green, “Transportation Into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism,” Discourse Processes 38 no. 2 (2004): 260; Melanie C. Green, Sharyl Kass, Jana Carrey, Benjamin Herzig, Ryan Feeney, and John Sabini, “Transportation Across Media: Repeated Exposure to Print and Film,” Media Psychology 11, no. 4 (2008): 527.

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23. Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 312; Green et al., “Transportation Across Media,” 533. 24. Aden, Popular Stories, 10. 25. Ibid., 89. 26. Gwenllian-Jones, “Virtual Reality,” 84. 27. Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 1. 28. Lincoln Geraghty, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2014). 29. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 28. 30. Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 155. 31. Gwenllian-Jones, “Virtual Reality,” 84.

Chapter 2

Behavioral Patterns

“I would reward myself. I would watch an episode and then I would write for two hours, and then I’d watch an episode and I’d have to go to the little video store and get the DVD. But, now, with Netflix and all this stuff, like I just watched Dexter, and I watched the first three seasons like kind of all in a row and it just became this wonderful revelation: I could find out what happens.” —Ellen, media marathoner

My operational definition of marathoning specifies that all study participants must have consumed their stories within a particular time frame—one week for the film or television series and one month for books—but marathoner experiences differed greatly within that time frame. From Ellen’s comment above, we see that her marathoning collapsed temporally as streaming technologies enabled instant gratification. Seth’s marathon experience had a different shape to it: he went on a Harrison Ford bender, taking one Saturday to watch the original Star Wars trilogy and dedicating his next Saturday to the Indiana Jones films. In Chapter 1, “A Walk through the Wardrobe,” I set the foundational understanding of marathoning experiences as story world immersion. Chapter 2 digs deeper into the nuance of the marathon experience answering the question, “What patterns of media engagement do marathoners commonly adopt?” When analyzing patterns of marathoner media engagement, I questioned why readers selected a particular time in their life to marathon, what their primary motivations were, what rewards they experienced, and how they situated marathoning in comparison to more traditional, slower-paced media experiences. The answers to these questions reveal that many marathoning behavioral patterns exist as dichotomies. Some people marathon a series for 15

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the first time to catch up with early adopters and others re-marathon a familiar story world before a new installment is released. Sometimes marathoners are purposeful and know that a story will captivate their attention. Other times, readers surprise themselves by getting caught up in the story, and fall into an accidental marathon. In all these situations, a media marathon can be considered a media-focused floating holiday, one that affords a break from everyday drudgery through an immersive escape to the fictive world. The media-focused floating holiday of media marathoning can be usefully compared to the “media event”—a phrase coined by media scholars Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz to describe the significance of the Super Bowl, the Olympics, Princess Diana’s funeral, and other spectacular media experiences. Dayan and Katz explain: Conquering not only space but time, media events have the power to declare a holiday, thus to play a part in the civil religion. Like religious holidays, major media events mean an interruption of routine, days off from work, norms of participation in ceremony and ritual, concentration on some central value, [and] the experience of communities.1

Both media-focused holidays and media events are a break from the mundane, typical patterns of behavior. They are pleasurable in their temporary suspension of normal patterns, encouragement to consider collective values, and community feel. Where the experiences primarily differ is in their temporal structure and relationship to ritual. The media events Dayan and Katz cite are predicated on real (and often live) media events. And these media events do not have a long shelf life. Certainly one may DVR the Olympics to watch hours later, but viewers are unlikely to store their Olympics coverage to watch a month or a year later. Media marathoning, in contrast, often involves time shifting or chronology shifting. These texts have a longer shelf life and a more enduring community of viewers. Going back to the Olympics example, few people will likely want to talk about the biathlon’s stunning conclusion a month after the event, but The Soprano’s finale can be a topic of engaged conversation even years after it aired. The temporal maneuvering involved in marathoning involves reduced ritual opportunity because large swaths of the population are not engaging with the same text at the same time. These media-focused holidays are not predictable or cyclical, hence the floating holiday label. Ritual opportunities are reduced but not lost, however, as re-marathons can be ritualized with some planning and marathoning may also pave the way for future ritualized consumption of newly released media texts. The primary shared feature between media events and media-focused floating holidays—the disruption of routine—evokes the predictability/novelty



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dialectic described by communication scholars Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery.2 Although Baxter and Montgomery’s theory is focused on personal relationships, the tensions they describe can apply to other human behaviors, including media use. The predictability/novelty dialectic captures humans’ seemingly contradictory needs to be not only creatures of habit but also seekers of unique experiences. Media marathoning takes some of the most normal and usual experiences—settling in with a book, plopping on the couch for some TV, going to see a movie—and turns them into something remarkable. I use the word remarkable purposely, for we often remark on or communicate about the unusual experience. With new content delivery technologies, we need not wait for programmers or special events to meet our needs for novelty: we can orchestrate our own special events. Media marathoning and its relationship to community reflect a second dialectic: the need for both autonomy and connectedness.3 Some marathons can happen in groups, but others are completed alone, thus socially isolating the marathoners for a time. However, from both experiences comes the opportunity to be part of a lifelong community of fellow fans. And being a part of a community presents much-needed opportunities for story world conversations. Marathoning is an intense experience that often demands communicative processing. We may internalize the pathologizing of marathoning in the popular press and use others as an audience to confess our media sloth. Alternately, we may brag among fellow media enthusiasts. We may also effuse about a series in an attempt to encourage others to engage in the enjoyable experience, thus creating more communicative opportunities surrounding the text and perhaps diffusing our guilt regarding media sloth through communion with other marathoners. Media events such as marathoning are just one type of “event” that evokes these dialectics. One of my most vivid memories of my freshman year at Wake Forest University was becoming absorbed in a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with my friends, staying up all night to make the seascape take shape. As I made my way to an 8 a.m. class in a blurry-eyed fog, I was still pleased with my decision to finish the puzzle because I had accomplished something with my friends (connectedness), and I had a unique story to tell (novelty). Media marathoning offers the same rewards of companionship, prideful perseverance, and unique accomplishment. In the next sections I discuss what spurred readers to see their own (media) puzzle unravel. PREPARING FOR NEW RELEASES This section offers nuance to the introduction’s discussion of hype and chronology shifting as two key pieces of the marathoning experience.

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New releases in a series were one of the most common marathon exigences for any medium as they created a media event around an exciting new text. Put differently, the new release high holiday inspired floating holidays. The terms “catch up” and “revisit” emerged in much of the marathoner discourse to explain marathon motives and timing. Those familiar with and unfamiliar with a story world all felt they had work to do to be ready for a new release. Chronology shifting—described in the introduction as going back to the very beginning of a series—was essential for those who joined a series late. This trend occurred across all media, with marathoners wanting to preserve the integrity of the storytelling experience. Patricia, who marathoned The League with her husband, stated, “[W]e were trying to catch up on season one so we could start watching season two, which had already begun.” Even with the opportunity to watch the new installments of the series, Patricia and her husband opted to preserve the integrity of the story and go in “proper order.” Ingrid also expressed a compulsion to preserve the chronology: “Normally, when I marathon a show, I watch it up until whatever season it’s on. . . . I can’t watch season six on TV without knowing what happened on season five.” Karl labeled himself “very OCD” before saying, “If I miss an episode of any series I have to watch the episode I missed before I can . . . see what happened from there.” My public library in Fairport, New York, even recognized and encouraged this behavior in the summer of 2013 as it set out a table full of television DVDs, with a sign giving viewers the encouragement to “catch up” before the new fall television season began. Marathoning in these chronology shifting cases was methodical rather than impulsive, more closely mimicking running marathon training that involves building a strong mileage base before the big event (such as a new season premiere or finale). Chronology shifting before a new season’s release is another media marathoning dichotomy, representing both reader agency in creating their floating holiday experience with a story and observance of a paternalistic delivery system’s high holiday. This experience is also individualistic and collectivistic as the marathon catch up may be solo, but it paves the way to being a part of a community of viewers experiencing a premiere, finale, or other new release. In relation to catching up, participants who were new to a series wanted to pick it up from the beginning before consuming the newest iteration. When book story worlds were adapted to film or TV, going back to the beginning meant reading the books, and not just viewing the first films. I consider this pervasive marathoning pattern a form of cross-media chronology shifting. Kayla explained her motivations for rereading The Hunger Games and Twilight series because “the movies were coming out and I wanted to be prepared for the movies,” later clarifying, “I like to have it in the front of my mind when I go to the movie.” Alina felt a similar pressure to “read before



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watching” with both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, explaining her motivation as one of not “cheapening” the experience. Because the books are an integral part of the film’s meaning-construction, the failure to read them first would empty the films of the substantial additional meanings that are available only to those who consume the story through both media. Narrative transportation research from real world and laboratory settings even confirmed that “filmgoers who had previously read the book version of a story were more transported into the movie version of that story.”4 To be prepared for the film release media event and to pave the way for enjoyable transportation, Kayla, Alina, and others needed to catch up and familiarize themselves with the broader diegesis. The main motivation to catch up was that it preserved the story line and allowed readers to remove gaps in understanding. Instead of reading episode summaries online, however, they had to see and experience the story for themselves, thus immersing themselves in the richness of its detail. It is one thing to hear Dumbledore tell stories and quite another to jump into his pensieve and live those stories with him. Abby, a True Blood marathoner said that her marathoning motivation was linked to the text’s narrative structure: “If there is going to be an ongoing story which requires the audience to remember detailed information from episode to episode, I think marathons allow me, personally, to stay hooked or involved in the series without losing interest.” Ali, too, thought the level of detail was important, stating, “shows like Gossip Girl, where there are so many details, like even the smallest thing can change someone’s entire demeanor in that show. You have to know every little thing.” Without marathoning, the appreciation for subtle details can be lost. Jason Mittell’s analysis of audience interactions with the complex text, The Wire, applies here: “The show demands audiences to invest their diegetic memories by rewarding detailed consumption with narrative payoffs.”5 I would not have enjoyed How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) as much if I had watched week by week rather than by chronology shifting. Jokes begun in season one were carried through to season seven, thus rewarding viewers who have amazing memories or who have marathoned. The early viewers know the significance of Robin Sparkles, the olive rule, Marshmallow, and red cowboy boots. These examples clarify the “narrative payoffs” Mittell links to the preservation of diegetic memories: these payoffs can include increased attention, understanding, and amusement. I became interested in HIMYM the summer prior to the final season, which was perfect timing. The culmination of a popular series is one of the most exciting times for a long-term fan or bandwagoner. Knowing the full storyline allows one to participate in, and possibly contribute to, the hype surrounding a text. The timing of my study overlapped with the hype cycle for several story worlds, including Toy Story, Harry Potter, and The Hunger

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Games. Far surpassing any other media series, the hype was most relevant and memorable for Harry Potter readers and viewers. The release of the final book and final film in the series inspired no less than a dozen marathons from the study’s population. For example, all four marathoners in the Harry Potter book focus group agreed that the release of a new movie is what inspired them to reread earlier books. Katie and Maggie, felt like they “needed to prepare” for the last movie by rereading the books. This manner of studying a text pleasurably extends the once-in-a-lifetime experience of closing out a beloved series in both book and film form. These Harry Potter fans savored the story world, choosing to visit it in preparation for their final journey into a new diegetic installment. Like brushing up on the language or customs before visiting a foreign country, these preparatory strategies can maximize one’s enjoyment of the journey. Excitement surrounds not just new book and film releases, but television season premieres as well. Karl timed his Game of Thrones season one marathon perfectly, watching one of the ten first episodes a day for the ten days preceding the season two premiere. His excitement was enhanced by multimedia exposure to the story world: “I was also in the process of reading the books, and I was excited for the second season.” The season premiere of True Blood, as well as its cliffhanger nature, motivated Abby: “I watched this season so rapidly because I was anxious to see what would happen and season four is starting soon so I needed to get caught up on seasons two and three (since I had never seen them) in time for the season four premiere.” Both the need to know what happened in her chronologically shifted portion of the diegesis and her need to participate in the premiere’s hype motivated Abby to rapidly engage in True Blood. Marathoning in order to be prepared for a season premiere is a way to participate fully in the ceremony and ritual of the media event. The “revisit” theme in the discourse describes the practices of those who knew the text but wanted to study it before reading or watching a new installment in the series. Preserving diegetic memories was essential for Karl. He cited revisiting as the impetus for most of his marathons, stating, “There was either a new component to that series or those related books, TV shows, and movies that was coming out, so I wanted to kind of revisit things that I maybe had watched, or read, or seen before.” Tessa had already seen The Walking Dead but watched the television marathon of the episodes leading up to the new season premiere because it gave her a chance to “remember everything.” For those studying an already familiar text, strengthening diegetic memories enabled a better understanding and enjoyment of the latest installment. In addition to helping marathoners immerse themselves in the show’s story world and hype, the marathons that precede a premiere also helped fill the



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void of a show’s absence. Natalie and Dominick felt they had gone a bit overboard in their love for their texts, but they could not help themselves. Natalie and her roommate obsessed over Dexter: We’ve been like watching ‘em all, all the seasons again and being all hyped up and every time we see each other we’re like: “Oh my god, seven days . . .” or whatever. So, but you just kind of seem like a freak addict and like: “Oh my god, I’m obsessed with this show. I’m obsessed with these characters. I have to see what happens.”

Just as Dexter occupied a noticeable place in Natalie’s thoughts and roommate conversations, The Walking Dead was for Dominick a compulsion that he couldn’t shake. He admitted, “I’ve actually marathoned the first two seasons probably about seven times since the show ended just because I feel like there’s a void missing.” Experiencing a show’s absence had behavioral, affective, and cognitive components. Natalie’s media viewing and conversations revolved around what was and what would be on Dexter. Dominick filled the void left by The Walking Dead by studying and re-experiencing the available story installments. THE ACCIDENTAL MARATHON Although many marathoners planned their rapid engagement with a text, some were surprised by their affinity for a series. Some of these accidental marathons were producer-inspired—such as Howard and his family falling into a James Bond marathon over Thanksgiving. Most marathons, however, were begun when readers sought out the texts. The rapid engagement of the story may have been accidental, but the entrance flow was user-directed In a March 20, 2013 comment on the Media Marathoning blog, David poignantly captured the warp-speed immersion that sometimes happens when one engages a new story world: I sit down, usually with my wife, to check out the show everyone’s talking about or that has received critical acclaim and 6 episodes later we’re saying, “How about another?” at 3 in the morning. The “Battlestar Galactica” episode of Portlandia depicts this perfectly. While intense, these marathons rarely sustain themselves as rationality creeps in with the rising sun and the spell is broken.

Dave’s explication of his marathon process captures essential patterns shared among marathoners: critical acclaim that elevates the show’s cultural status, communication surrounding the text (both covered in this book’s introduction), schedule shifting in the form of marathoners pushing back bed time,

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and the struggle between rationality and the ludic space. I develop the latter two ideas further in the upcoming pages. Although readers had the power to stop or continue the marathon, they sometimes felt as if the decision had been made for them and they could not stop. Rationality was no match for the ludic spell David cites above. Ingrid divorces herself from agency as she explains, “It’s not like marathoning is something that I have to consciously do. It’s something that kind of happens on accident [sic] if a show can get me hooked.” These marathoner explanations for their viewing patterns echo the machine rhetoric Brenton Malin discusses in his analysis of A.I.: The machines have “rational” technological power that serves their “irrational impulses.”6 In this case, however, with the help of Netflix’s post-play and other technologies promoting insulated flow, this discourse represents the marathoners as the machines: illogical or unthinking and overly feeling. SCHEDULE SHIFTING No matter how readers found themselves embroiled in a marathon, many quickly began altering their daily schedule to accommodate the marathon, a practice that I label schedule shifting. Jenkins explains that schedule shifting and temporal disorientation are a common experience in fan communities, because fans “are so emotionally engaged by the on-screen action that they seem oblivious to other household activities and actively ignore other family members’ demands for their attention.”7 Marathoners did not necessarily identify as fans of their series when they sat down to consume it, but many began exhibiting fan-like behavior. We see this trend illustrated in Wendy’s immersive experience with Breaking Bad: “I just get so excited by the thought of being able to see what happens next in the program that I lose my focus on my daily life. Maybe it’s as if I feel I am a part of the show and I need to see what happens next, or because I’m slightly addicted to the show.” In Wendy’s immersive marathon experience, two boundaries between the real and the fictive blurred: the boundary between narrative time and real time and the boundary between self and character. As these boundaries blur, we see Wendy welcoming Breaking Bad into her life and identity, suggesting she’s on the pathway to fandom. In Chronicles of Narnia, Professor Kirke informs the children, “I should not be at all surprised that the other world had a separate time of its own.”8 Marathoning did seem to have a separate time of its own, but real life did not pause—rather, it was pushed aside—in accommodation. The marathon schedule shifting affected several prominent aspects of daily life: sleep, interpersonal communication, eating patterns, and work productivity. Adam, who



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marathoned the existing Song of Ice and Fire books and the Dark Tower book series, changed his behaviors in almost all of these areas: My wife would get annoyed that I was choosing my books over activities that involved her and the kids. I would tend to stay up later reading, and wasn’t as on top of household chores like cooking and dishes and such during that time period. I’d often choose to read over lunch rather than engaging with co-workers.

Megan found the marathon equally disruptive as she read the three Millennium series books in 48 hours, noting, “I read them almost non-stop.” The book marathons were perhaps the most disruptive to readers’ daytime schedules because the medium is more portable, reading is less intrusive on others’ solitude than watching a video, and books have a more culturally elevated status. Regarding the last point, some marathoners were better able to overcome their schedule shifting guilt because they were reading a book. Despite the risk of pathologizing marathoners and their fan-like behaviors, I consider it essential to address these schedule shifting experiences and provide a holistic picture of marathoning practices. Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larson observe that “there has been a welcome trend in the past several decades shifting the focus of study away from pathologizing fandom and instead to examining its benefits,” which includes community, identity negotiation, and play.9 Throughout this book, I describe many ways in which marathoners built community and co-crafted their identity with their story, while engaged in this ludic practice. I acknowledge that the behaviors of schedule-shifting marathoners can be seen as pathological, but I encourage readers to interpret the upcoming sections through the rosier lens of fandom benefits. Marathoning is a gateway to fandom (and all its social and individual benefits). Regarding fandom, Zubernis and Larson note, “whenever a group of people comes together, there are issues of social standing, popularity, norms, and identity. . . .”10 Marathoners’ seemingly obsessive behaviors are like a ticket that allows them to permeate the fan communities’ boundaries to assert their legitimate fan identities. In essence, a marathoner’s schedule shifting represents a temporal sacrifice to gain cultural capital. Like the bumper stickers that announce “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could,” marathons are a way to quickly demonstrate a commitment to a series, and to secure fandom belonging. Unlike sports fandoms that deride the influx of bandwagoners when a team is hot, fan communities seem to have more flexible enrollment periods, embracing those who demonstrate a commitment to a series at any time. Marathoning a book series before the franchise’s film premiere, for example, is a way to be in the know—and in the group.

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Losing Sleep Although several book marathoners pulled all-nighters, sacrificing a few hours of sleep was by far the most prevalent marathoning act of schedule shifting. Ingrid’s experience with television marathons was representative of the general process for many people who did not intend to stay up so late: I always tell myself ahead of time that I’m going to go to sleep, and I’m only going to watch a few episodes, but then at the end I’m like, “Oh that was a really good ending. Okay, maybe I’ll just watch one more.” And then I end up in bed really, really late.

Katie had a similar experience with her accidental loss of sleep when marathoning the Harry Potter book series: “I would read just before going to bed, and then it would be 3 o’clock in the morning. And then, ‘Whoops, ha ha. This is not supposed to be happening!’” Vera consumed the four-book Twilight series in six days, often staying up until 3 a.m. even though “I knew I should go to bed because my son was going to wake up, but I just didn’t.” Donna, too, knew the consequences of her late-night Grey’s Anatomy marathon, writing in her journal, “I normally don’t stay up until 1 a.m., but this

Figure 2.1  South Park Meme. Source: Derived from http://memeguy.com/photo/50368/ the-downfall-of-binge-watching-great-tv-shows-like-breaking-bad



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show is so intriguing that I can’t press pause or stop!” Mary was so intentional with her marathon that she burned the candle at both ends, watching into the night and waking up early to squeeze in a few more episodes of Mad Men before going to work. Eating Poorly Describing the experience of narrative transportation, Green and colleagues note that “Individuals may lose track of time and are focused on the activity rather than the self. The activity (in the case of transportation, reading or watching) requires concentration, but feels subjectively effortless.”11 This focus on activity (and story) rather than self can be seen in some marathoners’ habits of prioritizing reading or watching over their bodies’ needs for rest and sustenance. In addition to losing sleep, food was a low priority for marathoners who were eating only when they had to or were multitasking by eating and marathoning together. While reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series, Marissa noted, “Instead of eating at common meal times I only stop when I am very hungry.” Karen grabbed food only during online commercials: “When I watched 24 there was a little tic-tic counting down the online commercials so I would run around to cram in the bathroom, food, whatever.” As the 24 characters face a terrorist threat signified by the ticking clock, Karen was consumed by the commercial clock threat of missing some of the captivating story. Book readers did not have the benefit of commercial breaks, so Emily would read while “making food, say, pasta. I would stand stirring or boiling water with one hand, the book open in another.” Justin fit his reading in whenever he could “like reading during dinner.” Twilight author Stephenie Meyer both wrote a marathonable text and engaged in her own multitasking while consuming The Hunger Games. The book jacket of The Hunger Games contains her quote: “I was so obsessed with this book I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table so I wouldn’t have to stop reading.” Meyer’s self-selected label of “obsessed” and her accounts of hiding the book under the table impart an incredible strength to the ludic spell— one not seemingly broken by hunger, social pressure, or needs to socialize. Ignoring Family All the late-night book marathons, and nearly all the late-night film and television marathons were solo enterprises. Several marathoners also reported ignoring friends and family to marathon during the daytime as well. Sondra summed up her several book marathons by saying, “It really is like I’m neglecting family, friends, and showering just to finish these books because they are so good.” Both Karl and Melissa considered family events

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a marathon interruption. Karl resented a wedding scheduled for the same day as the final Harry Potter book release: “The first time I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I think it took me maybe a day. And that was because I had to go to a wedding and I had to, you know, socialize with my family and all of those other distractions that were in the way of me reading.” Karl was not remorseful about prioritizing book over family, nor was Melissa who drew laughs from the Twilight book focus group when confessing, “I spent my dad’s birthday reading it. I said happy birthday to him, but [laughter] I was just at home so I spent the whole time in my room.” The Twilight group’s laughter seemed predicated on a shared understanding of the antisocial experience. Even if they didn’t act on the same impulse, other marathoners could understand Melissa’s need for privacy and refuge within her immersive narrative. Putting off Work In the Portlandia marathoning mise-en-scène David cited in his blog comment, protagonist Claire loses her job when she chooses to keep watching Battlestar Galactica instead of showing up at work. No marathoners reported job loss, but several noted drop-offs in productivity as a direct consequence of marathoning. Several students struggled to stay on top of their work, such as Maggie who “read The Hunger Games [series] instead of studying for Senior Comps,” and Felix who let homework take a backseat to Revenge for a few days despite reminding himself, “I have to get this [work] done.” Several other study participants confessed to marathoning on someone else’s dollar, at their jobs. Sondra and Harper read when their load at work was light. Dominick did not have a light workload, but instead “did not do any of the work I was supposed to do at work” while watching “all seven seasons and all three two-hour movies [of Trailer Park Boys] within 48 hours.” Greta used Mad Men as mood management during struggles at an internship: “I was getting frustrated, bored, and overwhelmed by a monotonous project I was working on and found myself turning to Mad Men to alleviate those feelings and distract me from them.” Sarah “read compulsively,” but transformed work time into personal time as she called “out of work on more than one day to read.” Although the marathoner experiences cited in the previous paragraphs can be seen as unhealthy or disruptive, I see this as the nature of holiday and novelty. We alter our schedules and traditional patterns. We indulge and enjoy ourselves. We assert control over our time. Marathoner discourse suggests that the pleasurable consequences of story advancement outweigh the discomfort of being tired in the morning or of giving oneself an artificially collapsed work deadline. If these were everyday experiences, they would be unhealthy



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and perhaps stultify our growth as people, students, and professionals—but an everyday marathon would also lose the appeal of novelty. SCHEDULED MARATHONS: PREDICTABLE HOLIDAYS Despite the previous examples of disruptive media marathoning behavior (which the popular press has emphasized), many marathoners gave pause to ignoring or putting off responsibilities, purposely structuring their marathons around lulls in their schedules. Marathoning, in these examples, was specifically planned around extended breaks in one’s work or school schedule, weekends, or times of the day when work was finished. In all these examples, marathoning could be seen as a form of intense relaxation after a stressful work period or as a reward for working hard. In some of these examples, the media-filled floating holidays aligned with religious or national holidays. In others, an hour or several of marathoning capped off a regular day with a holiday feel. Marathoners capitalized on their ability to chronology shift, creating their own media queues to work through when their time was freed up. Mateo chronology shifted because he was a college student who worked full time. He recalled that the “spring semester finished, and I had the time to watch the entire season [of South Park] I had missed due to work and studying.” Television marathoner Lynn felt that she had to cram The Wire into a busy work year: “I was on break so had plenty of time to watch TV, which I usually don’t, so in part we were trying to fit it all in while I had time to watch it.” Jennifer, a teacher, also used a work break to catch up on her backlog of recommended books, including a few series marathons: “I don’t get to read for pleasure during the school year (if I do, it is usually audio) so I always read 5–10 books during the month of May and 5–20 books during July– August.” Graduate student Jessica marathoned Twilight during a break in classes because she found marathoning to be the only way to finish a book series, explaining, “If I read leisurely I would get through maybe a half a book on a weekend and then I might not be able to read again for two more months because of projects, clinical rotations, test schedules, things of that nature.” A slower, more fragmented reading pattern, she found, was very inefficient as it would force her to reread what she had already covered just to remember what happened. Marathoning enhanced her diegetic memory, enjoyment, and efficiency. The streaming convenience was particularly important to several parents. After Josie and her wife had twins, the parents enjoyed a Glee marathon to unwind in the evenings: “We started off watching the first and second without having to stop. We [could] watch it whenever we wanted to and that was

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good for us at the time.” When asked what would motivate him to do another television marathon, Arthur factored his family and streaming capabilities prominently into the decision, enumerating: 1. I now have streaming video to make this possible. 2. My schedule is so demanding I rarely have time to watch TV normally, and I can almost never catch a show during its usual time slot. My children have equally full schedules, so we often have to play “catch-up” on TV shows we’ve heard about from others.

Parents are perhaps drawn to media marathoning and the convenience of streaming because of their kids’ social lives, sleeping schedules, and eating demands. Because children place so many demands on one’s time, streaming and using other time shifting technologies are ways for parents to recover a much-needed sense of agency and temporal control. Even the best-laid plans went astray and marathons sometimes spilled over from breaks into busy work periods. Carol noted that she watched Friday Night Lights “During the last half of holiday break for seasons 1-3. As soon as available for season 4. Season 5, I started around 8:00 pm and watched until around 6:00 am the next morning.” She noted that her all-night marathon “was on a week day.” Concerned about marathon ooze, college student Ana Lucia told herself, “I don’t want to start [The Hunger Games] now [because] finals are coming up” and “ordered the book from the library then to make sure it would be at home when I got there [for winter break].” By denying herself access to the text until her schedule abated, Ana Lucia was a schedulesensitive marathoner. In addition to media marathoning during breaks from work and school, study participants reported TV marathoning when they had time off from their regularly scheduled programming. Most new television programming takes a winter and summer break, and viewers used that time to find new series or revisit old favorites. These time periods represent an alignment of media programming holidays and work holidays because new programming cannot draw a captive audience when people are traveling and party-hopping during winter holidays, or vacationing and spending time outside during the summer. Ali marathoned Dawson’s Creek because “all my shows are on a hiatus so at that point I have to find an old show to watch.” Charles also capitalized on the winter programming break, explaining, “I actually watched Arrested Development during the winter [television] break. So I got through all the seasons and now I’m back to watching my regular shows.” Regularly scheduled programming takes seasonal breaks during times when the audience is less committed to maintaining a viewing schedule. Breaks between television seasons represent an opportunity to chronology shift and form



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user-created media holidays. They are also a chance to clean out one’s DVR, digital queue, or mental list of must-see series and must-read books. For those with yearly work schedules that didn’t have marked ebbs and flows, weekends and evenings were marathoning prime time. Charles was a busy graduate student studying for qualifying exams, with work that could be done all the time if he wanted. He purposely “planned to take one day off a week, which is generally Sunday. So I do my long run, come home, and sit down all afternoon. And that’s generally how I make it through a show.” Just as weekends are a reward following a busy work week, marathoners also used their media evenings to reward themselves after a long day, thus creating a mini-media holiday. Karl stated that because he could watch “Netflix all day,” he would put his television watching last in the day when he didn’t “feel obligated to be productive.” He looked forward to the peacefulness of his media fortress and its insulation against daily work pressures: “I can’t wait until eleven o’clock when I have nothing else to do, and I’m just gonna sit here and watch TV and nobody can bother me.” Lena and Greta specifically cited the relaxing nature of this routine. Greta wrote in her Mad Men marathoning journal, “The season finale becomes a sort of mini-media event for me. I get all of my work done ahead of time so I can unwind and end my day with the finale.” Discussing her Damages marathon, Lena wrote, “It is that ritual at the end of every day. It’s what I reward myself with once I have finished my studying, reading and homework. I think that’s how I have become emotionally attached to the text. I associate it with the happy, fun part of the day.” Lena’s quote illustrates the interrelated nature of the behavioral timing, holiday feel, and pleasant emotions. Marathoning can be a way to decompress after a long day, letting the engaging fictive world temporarily push out realworld concerns. SICKNESS, AN AIR-TIGHT EXCUSE It sounds strange to call sickness a holiday, but an illness can be reframed as a forced holiday with its mandate to rest, ignore responsibilities, and rely on others to keep our work and home lives afloat. Cataloguing her Breaking Bad marathon in The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield wrote, “In my defense, I was home sick, but that doesn’t account for the fact that the third episode of the morning was the thirty-sixth of the past month.” Goldfield also mentions that she marathoned the first season of Gossip Girl while recovering from the flu, but writes, “that’s no excuse.”12 When work was not physically possible or healing rest was needed, marathoning provided respite. And the healing powers of the marathon may go beyond quiescence, affording a mental break from tragedy or hardship. In a follow-up to her initial media marathon

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interview, Roberta was compelled to share one more experience: “A number of years ago, I had a miscarriage. During my week of rest and recovery, Hogwarts is where I went for solace.” Although Roberta’s experience was certainly not a holiday, the immersive journey back through the Harry Potter world, through character vicissitudes and triumphs, helped slowly prepare her to be part of the real world following her own tragedy. The marathoner discourse contains many examples of people using their texts to cope with illness or recover from surgery. The immersive media experience helped them carve out a healing space. Karl recalled, “I had a week where I got sick. I had the flu. And it’s like: ‘What else am I gonna do? I’m stuck laying on the couch all week so I’ll just watch House all week.’” Dave, too, recalled that “a bout with the flu provided me with the perfect timing to revisit all 6 of the Star Wars movies.” Meghan was drawn into the Millennium book series because a family member had given her the first book to entertain herself as she recovered from surgery. Vanessa selected a re-marathon of Battlestar Galactica to get through a time when she was “sick and on medication, which makes me tired but keeps me awake.” Although marathoning books was less guilt-inducing than television and film marathons, Lara still felt compelled to provide a justification for her Hunger Games book marathon: “I did have work to do, but . . . being sick, I probably would have put off the work anyway just because I didn’t feel up to getting around and functioning. Therefore, it gave me the perfect excuse to read.” Although some marathoners recalled having their media consumption habits judged by partners, friends, and family, illness was indeed the “perfect excuse.” Beleaguered bodies can’t allow the real world creep back in on this media holiday. CEMENTING SOCIAL BONDS In addition to providing healing respite for the sick, marathoning was beneficial because it promoted social connections and created opportunities for social engagement. There was a clear community quality to marathoning, with many marathoners watching television or films together, and some even reading books together. Even if people did not read or view together, conversations about the story were an essential social aspect of marathoning. Dominick noted that, compared to weekly television viewing, marathoning gave him a stronger motivation to be involved with and communicate about a text: “If I watched like you know, three episodes a month, I don’t think I would care as much, I don’t think I would be as talking about it to people as much as I do.” Condensed watching, and its cultivated effusion of in-series thoughts, may compel marathoners to communicate about their chosen texts to help process the narrative experience, with its influx of new information and fresh emotions.



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Marathoning almost always involves chronology shifting (the exceptions being Netflix’s all-in-one releases of television seasons), which Brooker frames as an impediment to participation in fan communities. He, Matt Hills, and Michael Newman resist the idea of media marathoning as a valid method of engaging with a television text, notably because of the loss of fan ties. Comparing varying temporal patterns of viewing Lost as a download, Brooker writes: “[T]he Lost follower who downloads a season in bulk for ‘binge’ viewing may find him or herself isolated and out of time, with no obvious place within an online community.”13 Hills describes time shifting as “watching when the case has gone cold,” explaining that “such viewings may enact and accumulate (fan) cultural capital, but this will be weakened and attenuated by virtue of being ‘old news,’ hence lacking in the intensifications of temporal capital.”14 In a January 23, 2009 FlowTV blog post dedicated to the “TV Binge,” Newman describes a few reasons for his uneasy relationship with binging, including the observation that “we lose our connection to the larger viewing audience as community and to the temporality of broadcasting that unites a program with the moment of its airing.” Despite risking cultural and temporal capital, Brooker acknowledges marathoning’s inevitability. Analyzing Lost viewer posts on the Barbelith popular culture discussion board, he writes about a gradual erosion of fan adherence to network scheduling: “If the networks fail to keep to the narrative’s intended rhythm, then fans will have to find that rhythm for themselves, opting, according to their own tastes, between immersive ‘binge’ sessions and more leisurely, weekly doses that respect, and try accurately to reproduce the producers’ intended cliffhangers and paced arcs.”15 Note that Brooker’s language pegs binge sessions as a sign of narrative or auteur disrespect, his academic work thus policing viewing patterns. I argue, instead, that media marathoning can enhance narrative enjoyment by allowing readers to engage with the text when they are able to give themselves fully to the story. The ludic nature of the marathon experience promotes engaged pleasure and unique experiences, no matter how “cold” a text seems to be. In contrast to Brooker and Hills’ arguments, marathoners in this study did not reference a feeling of loss when they missed out on television’s liveness. Many marathoners were pleased to have found a story late and to have experienced the joy of sustained and holistic engagement with a series. Even if a fan community is not in its heyday, one can almost always find other like-minded fans with whom to cavort and communicate. Because time shifting is so common, fan communities can experience punctuated revivals when the latecomers catch up with a series and want to seek fan organization involvement or communion. The upcoming paragraphs describe varied means of communications marathoners used to connect with other readers and fans.

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Communing In Person Although the extensive time commitment makes it difficult to coordinate a marathon with others, marathoners who pulled it off appreciated the ability to spend time with friends and family as they bonded over a text. Charles adopted a pattern of watching a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica with his roommate in the evening, beginning as they ate dinner. Nathan used the winter holidays to orchestrate a Kingdom marathon with his extended family, recalling, “We really did do two episodes probably a day together, and we were all excited.” Maria enjoyed marathoning as it enabled her to “spend quality time” with her husband and son. For Mary, watching with others made her feel less guilty about the marathon: “I definitely like watching marathons with people rather than alone. . . . Then I don’t feel like such a nerd, and I have someone to enjoy it with.” Watching solo evoked the lonely nerd archetype for Mary, but creating a social experience around the marathon equated to less guilt and more enjoyment. Even when the marathons did not take place in the same shared space, text messaging enabled viewers to feel connected. Karen watched The Walking Dead and “texted many people asking what they thought about certain parts.” She described the experience as follows: “They were watching it with me at their own house.” The combination of text messaging and synchronous viewing collapsed the perceived distance between Karen and her friends, enabling them to feel as if they were truly watching the show together. New romantic relationships can also be buoyed by marathoning, as exemplified by Sondra who watched the Harry Potter films with her boyfriend because “it was such a great way to spend time together in a world we both loved.” Potential romantic relationships can also be stunted by marathons. During college, one of my friends was invited on what she thought was a standard movie date—only to find out that her date had planned for them to watch all three Godfather movies together that day. My friend did not end up seeing “Godfather boy” again. Couples can build on a relationship foundation with the shared experience of a story world, but the undertaking is risky if no foundation yet exists—and both parties didn’t agree to the same viewing experience. Media marathons demand such a great commitment that one should perhaps be in a committed relationship before embarking on that journey with another person. Rituals and Gatherings At times, marathoning evolved into rituals and routines organized around collective viewing experiences. In his March 20, 2013 Media Marathoning blog post, David described planned marathons that he labels “pilgrimages,” which



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“require timing, snack supplies, and happen with other devotees (if they can be coerced). . . . These pilgrimages are usually re-re-rewatchings of favorites like The West Wing and of course the Star Wars saga.” Familiarity was also important to both Ingrid and Dominick who would gather with friends to watch the newest episodes of The Walking Dead after they had marathoned earlier seasons. These examples illustrate the media-marathon-as-fandomticket because the rituals and experiences would not be accessible (or as enjoyable) if one did not already know the story world. Ingrid appreciated the opportunity to discuss the show with her fellow fans during commercial breaks, and Dominick enjoyed their routine of drinking Bloody Marys and playing zombie video games before show time. Catherine was drawn into The L Word when she was first coming out and enjoyed attending “L Word parties” where she and fellow fans would talk about characters “like they’re our friends.” I write this on the day that my husband and I will be watching the season four premiere of Downton Abbey at our local independent theatre a week before its TV broadcast. It is not the early viewing that appealed to us, but rather the community of dedicated fans all sitting together, entranced by a favorite show, and bursting to discuss their impressions afterward. Participating in these rituals can be an outward expression of an inner sentiment, a way to perform one’s fan identity. Communing Asynchronously Synchronous marathoning or rituals offered the pleasure of immediate conversations, but asynchronous marathoning (marathoning a story at a different time than friends or family) offered the enjoyment of re-visiting beloved story worlds and comparing interpretations and perspectives with others. After Christine and one of her roommates had read The Hunger Games trilogy, they roped their third roommate into the series. The fan recruitment was enjoyable for all as the veterans of the series waited in anticipation for the newbie to catch up: “The two of us would be sitting there like, ‘oh my God, wait until you get to this part’ and she’d be like, ‘guys don’t say anything!’ Then she’d run in the room and be like, ‘oh my God, this just happened!’” This experience illustrates how recruiting a new initiate can help existing fans “re-live” the pleasurable unfolding of the narrative. They cannot unlearn what they have learned about the story world, but they can recall their former emotions and feelings while watching a friend go through her mediated journey. Collapsing both space and time, college student Natalie would follow TV recommendations from a friend who went to school in a different city. She explained, “I would be a few episodes or even a few seasons behind her but we would always, ya know, have something to talk about. When I would finish an episode I would call her and say: ‘Oh, I can’t believe this

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just happened.’ Or if I finish a season I say: ‘Oh, I can’t believe it ended like this.’” Asynchronous marathoning may not seem social on the surface, but it promotes bonding by giving people that “something to talk about” together. It’s a shared, but temporally separate, experience that reactivates latent memories. Computer-Mediated Communing Lena illustrates the importance of collaboration and evaluation when she laments its absence: “I am so close to finishing the season, I wish that there was somebody marathoning Damages with me. I am craving to discuss the characters and the plot lines with someone, but no one I know watches it.” Lotti and Karl also experienced a need to communicate about and process what they had watched, but they chose to reach out to unknown others through the internet. Karl was looking to compare his interpretation of Breaking Bad with other fans and critics. He liked to “prowl the message boards” to “read what other fans of the show are thinking. Or even these television critics or film critics and what they think of, especially with TV cause it’s a long term investment. It’s not a two hour movie. . . . So that’s so much more critiquing you can [do].” Jenkins’ explanation of collective intelligence fittingly frames Karl’s compulsion to communicate: Jenkins argues that “television for the Internet age [is] designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued.”16 Survivor fans he consulted were motivated to engage in these behaviors because “They were looking for ways to prolong their pleasurable engagement with a favorite program, and they were drawn toward the collaborative production and evaluation of knowledge.”17 In Karl’s discourse and Jenkins’ analysis, we see more support for the idea that marathons often promote behaviors that extend and deepen one’s engagement with and corresponding enjoyment of a story world. Lotti, a fan of BBC’s Sherlock, explained, “I follow blog sites and read fan posts about it. I have had a conversation with someone I have never met in person about Sherlock.” She also went online to communicate about Dr. Who, because “There is no one better to talk to about Doctor Who than other Whovians, and no place better to find Whovians than on the internet. I feel a sense of fulfillment when I branch out and connect with these fans that enjoy what I enjoy.” Lotti’s and Karl’s sense of fulfillment illustrates that there is a pleasurable feeling that comes from keeping the text alive through communication with fellow fans—whether in person or through the internet. June Deery explains that computer-mediated communication about entertainment media “foregrounds the process of viewing and the status of being a viewer.”18 That work of keeping the text alive through communication is labor that strengthens the fan’s identity through the communicative performance.



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Fan Pilgrimages Physical pilgrimages to fan events, special exhibits, or theme parks represent a stronger way to cement social bonds with people who share a love for a given story world. Fans do not just have conversations about texts, but rather combine those conversations with physical or embodied shared experiences. Stella, for example, attended a Star Wars event in Florida and marathoned the films before traveling so she could “refresh [her] memory” of the story world. The other examples of fan pilgrimages all came from Harry Potter fans—and they all involve reference to the real relationships that were strengthened through the pilgrimage. Nora attended Leaky Con, an annual Harry Potter convention, with a friend to view the final Harry Potter film. She recalled, “it was really intense to see the movie with die-hard fans. . . . It sounded like people were to trying to out-fan each other with like how much they could either sob or laugh or cheer, or whatever, but it was a once in a lifetime experience.” Nora seemed put off by experiencing fan norms on full display and hierarchies in a rapid process of negotiation through emotional enactment at the film premiere. Yet, she reflected back positively on the novelty of her Leaky Con experience. Harry Potter-related travel was common for Sondra who both traveled to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter to celebrate her birthday and met a friend in Toronto to visit a museum exhibit of Harry Potter movie props. Maggie did not travel with friends, but she was thinking of them while visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios. She returned with wands, pumpkin juice, and a butterbeer cup as visible markers of her fan status, and bestowed a Tri-Wizard cup on her friend, a fellow fan. Discussing fan pilgrimages in relation to the boundary between the real and fictive worlds, Couldry writes, “Action taken during the visit will allow you retrospectively to confirm your encounter with that boundary when you get home.”19 Bringing merchandise back from the visit is a tangible confirmation of the boundary—and a way to “prove” the experience to others. These pilgrimages are a proud badge for fans who sacrifice time and money to make the journeys. The motivation to travel with friends and family (or at least bestow gifts on them upon return) suggests that sharing the love of a story with others is an important feature in marathoning enjoyment.

CONCLUSION A common thread that holds the behavioral chapter together is that marathoning is a media-filled floating holiday that meets human needs for novelty and connectedness. The release of a new installment of a series activates hype

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and many people desire to be part of an exciting and rewarding fan community. The excitement is enough to incite people to change their normal habits and routines. Those who are new to a series will scramble to catch up to the point where the new installment picks up. Those who have read a series before may re-marathon as a way to study the story world and its nuance, thus strengthening diegetic memories and maximizing enjoyment. At times, marathoners expected that they would be rapidly consuming an extensive story world, and they built that into their life’s work, school, or traditional television season breaks. Others were surprised by their level of immersion in the story and quickly thrust responsibilities and obligations aside to continue their media consumption. Although the latter experience sometimes isolated marathoners—if they ignored friends, family members, or co-workers in order to finish their story—the long-term outcome of most marathons is one of community-building. Marathoners engaged in conversations with fellow fans both in person and through computer-mediated settings. Some passed their love of a story on to others, encouraging friends and family to marathon and conversing with their converts throughout the process. Others showed their enthusiasm for a story by ritualistic practices surrounding new installments—such as hosting The Walking Dead parties to watch new episodes or forming film premiere traditions with friends and family. Pilgrimages are an embodied form of demonstrating one’s fandom, and potentially memorializing the experience and its place in one’s identity with tangible story world artifacts. This collection of communication practices allows a marathon experience to live on in one’s life and to suture the fictive world into one’s lived existence. The communities that form around media events are a prominent piece of support for this book’s thesis. The lived and fictive worlds come into contact through the collective excitement that motivates us to consume these stories and through our communicative methods of processing the experience with others. Consider Lucy Pevensie’s distress when her siblings don’t initially believe her Narnia tales, and her elation once Edmund enters Narnia: she dreams of “what wonderful adventures we shall have now that we’re all in it together.”20 While interviewing marathoners, I was made acutely aware of who joined them in the wonderful adventure: who introduced them to the series, whom they called when a plot twist happened, whom they passed the series onto, and how the shared love of a series influenced their conversations and experiences. To critics who see marathoning as an antisocial behavior, I respond that they fail to see the full picture of marathon motivations and their aftereffects. Don’t focus only on the girl who spent a whole weekend watching all the Harry Potter movies. Focus on the girl who went to the bookstore



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at midnight with her father to pick up the last book as it was released. Focus on the girl who made new friends when she joined her college Quidditch team. Focus on the girl who learned web design and communicated with fellow fans around the world by creating a fan site. Focus on the girl whose real life was made richer by her love of a fictive story. NOTES 1. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, “Defining Media Events: High Holidays of Mass Communication,” in Television: The Critical View, 6th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 410, emphasis in original. 2. Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, Relating: Dialogues & Dialectics (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), 115. 3. Baxter and Montgomery, Relating, 84. 4. Melanie C. Green, Sharyl Kass, Jana Carrey, Benjamin Herzig, Ryan Feeney, and John Sabini, “Transportation Across Media: Repeated Exposure to Print and Film,” Media Psychology 11, no. 4 (2008): 531. 5. Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic,” in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, ed. Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 435. 6. Brenton J. Malin, Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 9. 7. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60. 8. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1950), 54. 9. Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larson, Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 117. 10. Ibid. 11. Green et al., “Transportation Across Media,” 513. 12. Hannah Goldfield, “For Love and Television,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2013, accessed September 30, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/for-love-and-television.html 13. Will Brooker, “Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows on Download,” in Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 58. 14. Matt Hills, “When Television Doesn’t Overflow ‘Beyond the Box’: The Invisibility of ‘Momentary’ Fandom,” Critical Studies in Television 5, no. 1 (2010): 106. 15. Brooker, “Television Out of Time,” 60. 16. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 25. 17. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 57.

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18. June Deery, “TV.com: Participatory Viewing on the Web,” The Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 2 (2003): 168. 19. Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (New York: Routledge, 2003), 89. 20. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, 45.

Chapter 3

Affective Involvement

“I am devastated. I can’t imagine how the show can even continue without him. . . . Even writing this now, I am mourning his death. . . . I am so angry that the people in the crowd watching actually believe Eddard Stark to be a traitor, and I want to scream to all of them that they have no idea what they are talking about. . . . I felt like I had nothing in common with him, yet his death has shattered my world.” —Ivy, Game of Thrones marathoner

This chapter addresses affect and how media marathons correlate with strong emotional responses from their readers. Exploring affect is challenging through any methodology because affect subsumes many other constructs and is, therefore, difficult to pinpoint. Markus Appel and Tobias Richter write that “Emotion and affect are conceptualized in a broad sense that includes moods, emotions, preferences, and related evaluations with an affective component.”1 The excerpt from Ivy’s marathoning journal that opened this chapter exhibits all these affective components: she had a strong emotional response to fictional character Eddard Stark’s death, realizing how integral he was to her experience with the story. This preference for Stark and sense of injustice at his death resulted in strong feelings of mourning and anger at those characters she believed mistakenly supported his death. Perhaps more importantly, we see Ivy’s life, her lived reality, impacted by this fictive death: her world was “shattered.” This chapter encompasses the extensive wave of emotion a media marathon can evoke: narrative immersion is correlated with readers’ experiences of empathy, identification, sadness, anger, and guilt. The qualitative discourse analyzed here resonates with Oatley’s media psychology claims that emotions are the primary site of narrative engagement: “As the simulation runs, 39

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emotions occur to readers or watchers that depend on psychological process such as identification with a protagonist, sympathy for story characters, and activation of emotional autobiographical memories that resonate with story themes.” 2 Readers’ enjoyment of the narrative game play is predicated on their ability to draw from their real emotions and experiences to enhance the verisimilitude of characters and their journey. The connections that readers formed with characters often made everything else in the story matter. In other words, cliffhangers, plot twists, genre violations, action, and mystery were empty if readers didn’t care what happened to the characters. Vera, an avid reader, explained her technique of prioritizing characters over all other textual elements: “You flip forward a few chapters and you skim for the [character] name. ‘OK, they’re still alive. I’ll keep reading.’” Journaling during her marathon of the television series Strike Back, Maria developed such a strong connection to “one of the characters. I now feel like I have to keep watching to make sure that he is okay.” Roberta similarly noted that she kept reading the Millennium series “simply because [main character Lisbeth Salander] was a compelling character, and I wanted to find out what happened to her.” Roberta’s emphasis on “her” suggests that she did not care about other characters’ outcomes or the narrative resolution: Roberta simply wanted to know the end of Salander’s portion of the tale. As with Vera and Maria, Roberta’s attachment to a particular character suggests that she had formed a parasocial relationship with Salander, caring about what happened to this fictional person. Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl’s concepts of parasocial interaction and parasocial relationships—the process of “getting to know” a media character (parasocial interaction) leads to readers feeling a sense of closeness to or friendship with the media character (parasocial relationships)—constituted the most robust coding category.3 Numerous marathoners reflected that they understood characters, related to characters, or had strong emotional responses to what the characters were going through. The marathoner discourse suggests that media marathoning and parasocial interaction are mutually reinforcing: media marathons encourage parasocial interaction and parasocial interaction encourages media marathons. Characters may draw us into the narrative or the narrative journey may help us bond with characters. The emotions of empathy, sadness, and anger were often by-products of parasocial relationships, the ludic emotional entanglements yielding palpable reactions. The plethora of parasocial interactionrelated discourse suggests that parasocial interaction is more prevalent in the media marathoning experience compared to traditional patterns of temporally stretched media engagement. This positive relationship between marathoning and parasocial interaction is one of immersive attachment that activates characters as pseudo-avatars. These pseudo-avatars do not need reader input to make decisions, but they do



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need reader’s affective investments to make those decisions matter. Rather than forming the traditional parasocial relationship that is described as a pseudo-friendship, the immersive attachment was so strong that marathoners journeyed along with the characters, meeting their vicissitudes with as much emotional investment and impact as a member of the story world would. The phrase pseudo-avatar captures the interactive nature of this relationship. Character and reader are not just friends: They are a company, a fellowship, a team. Based on my analysis of the study’s discourse, I argue that media marathoners take an intense, albeit compressed, journey with their pseudo-avatars, developing strong emotional bonds along the way. These bonds can be seen through the emotional reactions readers have to stories and their endings. According to the discourse, media marathoning largely provided an enjoyable emotional experience. I consider mourning the end of a series or a character to be positive because the feelings of loss suggest that strong attachments once existed (or continued to exist) and the marathoning journey was therefore worthwhile. Even Ivy, whose world was shattered by Eddard Stark’s death, could not resist continuing the journey with the remaining characters on the Game of Thrones television series. Marathoning does not predetermine strong or positive emotional connections, however, with several readers failing to bond with characters because of strong plot orientation or alternately being turned off by their text’s poor writing. Out of the 176 marathoners included in this study, only about a dozen cited adverse emotional reactions to their text or their media experience that can be blamed on marathoning. The adverse emotional reactions included regret over picking up a particular text and reading it so rapidly. To fully explore the diverse emotional components of marathoning, this chapter first provides an overview of parasocial interaction and other affective dimensions of media engagement. The next section explores the strong and positive emotional connections between reader and text. The latter sections analyze the “dark side” of marathoning—readers’ lack of fulfillment when reflecting back on a marathoning experience—before concluding with a reflection on the implications of the relationship between affect and media marathoning. RELATIONSHIPS AND EMOTIONS IN A MEDIATED WORLD Jenkins classifies television audience members as zappers, casuals, and loyals, organized on a continuum from perfidious to dedicated. He describes loyals as those who actually watch fewer hours of television each week than the general population: they cherry pick those shows that best satisfy their interests; they give

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themselves over fully to them; they tape them and may watch them more than one time; they spend more of their social time talking about them; and they are more likely to pursue content across media channels.4

Because of the agentic and immersive nature of marathoning, most of this study’s participants can be seen as loyals to their texts. In Chapter 2, “Behavioral Patterns” and Chapter 4, “Cognitive Involvement,” I discuss marathoners’ accounts of other behaviors Jenkins associates with loyals: remarathoning, discussing texts within social circles, and tracing textual extensions through other media iterations. What is most relevant to this chapter is the emotional attachment between loyals and their texts, a factor that can actually fuel re-marathoning, story world conversations, other forms of conversations, and other forms of continued engagement with the narrative. These practices of loyals can all prolong the simulation and sustain the feelings involved in the ludic experience. Even if the characters have “nowhere else to go,” if their story has concluded, reader actions can sustain the pseudo-avatars and recall some of the game play emotions that loyals once experienced. Capturing the idea that readers are closely involved with their texts and characters, Horton and Wohl forged the concept of parasocial interaction to describe the “seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer.”5 Horton and Wohl explain that parasocial interaction is created not by “the mere perception of it, but by the role-enactment that completes it.”6 Parasocial interaction represents an active and involved form of emotional media engagement. For several decades, parasocial interaction has played an important role in explaining how viewers respond and relate to mediated texts, with much research focusing on television programming. Rick Busselle and Helena Bilandzic’s narrative engagement scale includes an emotional engagement subscale that is highly relevant to marathoner discourse. As readers will see in the quotes throughout this chapter, many marathoners would select high Likert scores for the following measures Busselle and Bilandzic include: (1) “The story affected me emotionally.” (2) “During the program, when a main character succeeded, I felt happy, and when they suffered in some way, I felt sad.” (3) “I felt sorry for some of the characters in the program.”7 Anyone who has speculated about the outcome of a text by analyzing a character’s personality, yelled at a character for making a life-altering mistake, or empathized with the plight of a character has experienced parasocial interaction. Production aspects, including camera close-ups and clarity of visual images, can create an aura of interpersonal intimacy that encourages parasocial interaction.8 Other textual features and reading situations that encourage the formation of parasocial-relationships with characters from films, books, and television are the perceived realism of the character and the opportunity



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to discuss the character with others.9 Dexter marathoner Natalie was conscious of the narrative devices that promoted her connection with the eponymous main character: “I think the show sets it up in such a way that you feel like you’re with him because he is the narrator of the show, and he has a lot of monologues. . . . I think that his direct connection and his um closeness with the viewer make it more so that you are encouraged to feel connected to him.” According to Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor, repeated exposure to media personae encourages viewers to understand the “personalities, preferences, and habits of characters,” consequently leading viewers to “feel that they know the characters as well as friends or neighbors.”10 Perhaps someone like Dexter Morgan doesn’t exist in the real world, but through their time spent together and the intimate narrative devices, Natalie knows how this fictive man thinks, feels, and operates. In contrast to Hoffner and Cantor and Horton and Wohl’s comparison between parasocial relationships and friendships, I see an even stronger connection between reader and character, which is captured in the pseudo-avatar concept. Because Natalie and other readers have journeyed with their characters so closely, their knowledge of character intricacies and experiences gives credibility to and warrants future plot twists and character development. The readers’ knowledge and interpretive work is thus foundation for narrative and character fidelity, its sense-making and meaning. This pseudo-avatar relationship involves a coordinated journey that blurs the line between reader and character. With the proliferation of media convergence and Web 2.0 technologies, readers now have greater opportunity to interact with texts and characters in a digital environment, a practice that can nurture emotional attachments. Megan Wood and Linda Baughman describe an instance in which a fan sent a tweet to a Glee character about a narratively consistent fictitious event and received a direct in-character response.11 In this experience, the fan not only interacted with a character, but was able to add to the show’s diegesis by extending the preexisting storyline. With social media, the traditional one-way nature of parasocial relationships (as something experienced by the media consumer but not reciprocated by the character) is transforming into more of a two-way relationship that enables extended and deeper contact. Through these forms of communication, the lines blur between reader/character and reader/author. With this seemingly interactive relationship, the reader can feel like she or he is not just participating in game play but also engaging in narrative construction. Web 2.0 technologies not only encourage reader/character interactions, but also allow for more robust reader-to-reader (or fan-to-fan) interactions. Reader-to-reader digital conversations can be particularly useful when processing complex texts that involve many characters, each with their own detailed histories that overflow the traditional diegesis, detailed fictitious worlds, plot twists, and intersecting storylines. Reading or contributing to

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internet analysis of favorite texts and characters has the power to increase a text’s presence in one’s mind, making the story world feel more realistic and lived-in. Just as clapping rejuvenates Tinker Bell and makes the Peter Pan audience a part of Neverland, reader conversations about a text give life to characters and facilitate textual immersion. Audience members are motivated to clap for Tink at the end of the play because we have just spent a significant amount of time getting to know her. The following analysis explores that journey (the voyage readers and characters take together) that nurtures a relationship between reader and character. The second section explicates the journey’s potential emotional impacts on the reader. These emotional connections are a precursor to the tangible fan activities—research, collaboration, analysis—emphasized in Chapter 4, “Cognitive Involvement.” MARATHONERS’ RELATIONSHIPS WITH CHARACTERS In the practice of media marathoning, relationships between reader and character(s) are formed through taking an extensive mediated journey together, one that involves fewer world-of-origin disruptions because of the temporal intensity. Marathoners’ strong sense of control over the pace of their narrative journey enhanced the realism of the experience and also strengthened reader/character connections. Book marathoner Marissa highlighted the character connection as the essential difference in reading quickly compared to a more leisurely pace: “I feel that you are more aware of the characters when you marathon a series. You don’t have the long wait where other books or entertainment interrupts your time with the characters. Instead, you experience their journey in what seems closer to ‘real time’ for them.” Twilight marathoner Kerri agreed that through marathoning “you feel like you’re right along with that person.” These professed feelings of moving together or being in real time with the characters support the idea that marathoners have pseudo-avatars. They are not static during the journey but are rather supporting the story and its characters by traveling together. And the pace of that journey, or the game play, is determined by the marathoner. In James’ view, the marathoner essentially gives life to the characters by continuing engagement with them instead of “putting them to rest” periodically: “Reading a series in a short period of time intensifies the experience by keeping the story fresh and the characters more alive.” Roberta expressed a similar sentiment that “there’s a distance you feel with a character when you’re picking up a book and putting it down. . . . But when you’re marathoning . . . you’re living with those people because you’re spending so much time with them so quickly.” The temporal intensification involved in marathoning collapses the perceived distance between real and fictive world,



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between self and characters. We’re spending more uninterrupted time in Narnia, and this intensity of engagement encourages the world of origin and the wardrobe to fade more into the background. When putting down a story following a period of intensive engagement, there’s a sense that the characters are waiting on us. They are paused in anticipation of our reactivation of the game play. It is only fair that we don’t keep the characters (or our narratively inquisitive minds) waiting for too long. Going on the journey with characters enhanced many readers’ diegetic memories, helping them to keep certain events, chronologies, and character traits clearer in their minds, an effect that is particularly important when they are visiting complex narrative universes. Comparing a week-by-week traditional television viewing schedule to a marathon, Betty said, “Not waiting makes it much easier to follow plot twists and make sense of character developments (or inconsistencies for that matter).” For readers, however, these inconsistencies did not seem to be a source of discomfort, but rather a proud sign of “insider knowledge”—knowing the text even better than its creators. Clare, a book marathoner, weighed media marathoning’s pros and cons thus: “I think that you notice plot holes more acutely, but you also get more thoroughly invested in the characters.” Getting to know the characters well through marathon reading didn’t provide enough understanding for Justin, A Song of Ice and Fire fan, who began taking notes on the books to have even greater mastery of the story world and its residents. Justin explained, “I took notes so I could categorize it all ‘so this is Arya Stark’ and quickly ‘this is what she did.’” As an example of the intersection between this chapter and Chapter 4, “Cognitive Involvement,” Justin’s affective ties with the characters were strong enough to make them put in the cognitive effort to understand the characters and the world to which they belong. Character complexity may also be positively related to media marathoning enjoyment. If readers are forced to work hard to understand characters, the detailed understanding may yield more pleasures from the media experience and a stronger sense of accomplishment. For example, A Song of Ice and Fire note-taker, Justin, found his orientation toward certain characters constantly adapting as he learned new information: In the first book with Jaime Lannister, [I] hated his guts. I couldn’t wait till someone killed him or something. Then as the series went on I was like, ‘I actually can relate to him so much’. . . . Someone who I couldn’t wait to be killed, now he’s like my favorite.

Justin orchestrated a complex affective response to the book series’ evolving characters, transitioning from hatred to identification with Lannister. Preserving a fluid perspective of the text allowed Justin and the characters to evolve together.

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This discourse suggests that readers encounter greater realism and opportunity for identifying with characters when marathoning because the intense engagement allows them to observe character development. Discussing The Sopranos and Lost, Julian thought that “you almost know the people you’re watching” and appreciated that “in a good show the characters develop. . . . As the characters grow you’re going to see that, and you can definitely see that when you watch it continuously back to back to back to back.” Marathoning’s enhancement of diegetic memory helps readers see more clearly where the characters began and how they morphed over time. The collapsed temporality of reader engagement promotes recognition of a new perspective. And, as we’ll see in Chapter 12, “Ambiguous Morality,” complex narrative devices, including flashbacks and retrospectives, afford an ever-shifting perspective to readers, promoting the understanding of why certain characters are who they are, and why they act how they act. SIGNS OF PARASOCIAL INTERACTION AND PLOT IMMERSION Much marathoner discourse indicated the formation of parasocial relationships not by readers talking about those relationships directly, but by readers telling of their strong emotional responses to the stories. The most common affective responses noted among study participants were being mad at the characters, being sad for them, experiencing anger and sadness all at once, and identifying with the characters. Study participants readily recalled reacting to their texts with tears, verbalizations, or intense feelings of frustration with what they perceived to be character mistakes. Joli’s comment provided an overview of the empathy that signals a parasocial relationship had formed: “I could relate to the [Twilight] characters during emotional or awkward or very happy moments during the story. When the characters were hurt or sad, I cried.” Many marathoners were so immersed in the story worlds that they experienced the events like an additional character, responding the way they would when faced with a “real” situation of that nature. The Hunger Games understandably evoked many emotions for numerous marathoners, with Christine feeling anxiety about Peeta’s life-threatening leg wound and urging Katniss to save him: “I seriously was crying, I was so upset I was like ‘oh my God she has to help him. She has to go get [the medicine].’” James Polichak and Richard Gerrig describe the act of talking to characters or verbally urging particular narrative moves as “participatory responses.” These participatory responses “do not fill gaps in the text,” but rather enhance the text with readers’ verbal contributions.12 The participatory responses are just another avenue for readers to feel like they are part of the



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story, journeying with the pseudo-avatars and coaxing them to make certain decisions. If characters do make those decisions we urge, the participatory response is a pathway to diegetic trust. Diegetic trust, a concept I develop further in the next chapter, involves the sense that the narrative is unfolding all according to a plan that will please us, the readers. The trust helps fuel the marathoning experience because we want to feel as if our great investment in the text will ultimately pay off in a pleasurable way. If our participatory responses align with the unfolding narrative, we have a stronger sense that the author “gets us” and that the marathon will be a rewarding experience. Both Roberta and Samantha wept when Hunger Games tribute Rue died. Samantha even admitted she could not calm her emotions in the face of social pressure: “I cried when Rue died so bad. I was on a train home from NYC, and I was on a public train bawling my eyes out. Everyone was looking at me. I was like, ‘I can’t stop, I’m just so sad.’” Samantha’s experience supports Murray’s point that “our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us.”13 Offering a character-based explanation for this elision of the world of origin, Green, Brock, and Kaufman note that “Central to the process of identification is the adoption of a character’s thoughts, goals, emotions, and behaviors, and such vicarious experience requires the reader or viewer to leave his or her physical, social, and psychological reality behind in favor of the world of the narrative and its inhabitants.”14 Samantha was aware of the world around her (as evidenced by her observation “everyone was looking at me”), but she could not make her mind and body stop responding to the media stimulus. The emotions of the narrative experience kept her tethered to and immersed in the fictive world. In the immersive narrative experience of marathoning, our real world needs and pressures take a backseat to the fictive world’s game play requirements. Rue dies. And if Samantha has activated pseudo-avatars who are mourning that death, she will bolster the realism of their emotions with her response. Marathoners also did not need to be surprised to react strongly to the characters’ fates. Even upon re-watching or rereading the Harry Potter series, Maggie had the same emotional response: “I still cry every time. I cry every time Dobby dies [and] every time Fred dies.” The marathon experience’s immersiveness allows us to reexperience the loss as we travel through the narrative with the characters. Those who have already read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies know that Dobby and Fred die, but as we travel through the story again, we are with the family and friends who newly experience the loss. Re-marathoners are not necessarily mourning for the characters they know are lost. Rather, they are mourning with the characters who are newly grieving.

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Marathoners exercised different coping mechanisms when dealing with the fallout of their parasocial emotions. These coping strategies represent a negotiation between the real and the fictive worlds. The Hunger Games series evoked layers of emotions for Jake whose tears were mixed with anger at the circumstances: “I cried in the second book when you found out they were going back, and I was like, ‘I can’t read this right now.’ I was so mad.” Jake’s sadness and anger compelled him to journey back through the wardrobe, and settle into his world of origin for a time. Some readers, including Steve, used a homeopathic coping mechanism of re-immersing themselves in the sad parts. Steve recalled: “[In] Gossip Girl when Chuck got shot, I cried. I thought my life was over. . . . And then I bought the seasons, seasons 4 and 5, so I could watch it and cried again.” In contrast to Jake’s need for distance, Steve’s way of managing his emotions was to reexperience the sadness and come to terms with his mourning. Torin, on the other hand, tried to continue with his narrative journey but fight his emotions and reestablish the divide between the real and fictive worlds. Following the surprise death of a Sons of Anarchy character, he recounted, “I really felt bad that this character was dead, and I had to tell myself she wasn’t real and that no one actually died. I just connected a lot to the fact that now, at least in the story, two kids are going to grow up without a mother.” Torin empathized not with the victim but with her young family. This emotional marathon experience is about the emotional ripples in the story world, and not solely the impact on reader or victim. Although Torin attempted to reason with his emotions, he recognized the many changes that would take place in his beloved characters and story. This recognition kept him interpreting the fictive world through a lens of realism, despite reminding himself that “no one actually died.” Mary wasn’t able to shut out the fictive world even hours after watching her show. She found it difficult to be Mad Men’s secret keeper, knowing about important revelations that other characters didn’t see coming. After marathoning, Mary would experience an aversion cycle that flowed from Don Draper to herself: “I’m like, ‘God damnit why did he do that?! I’m so mad at him!’ Haha. And I’m like, ‘Why the fuck am I mad at him?’” Mary caught herself being angry at Draper and was then angry at herself for caring so much. When the text stays so long in our minds and we keep replaying and analyzing the vivid narrative world we’ve recently lived in, the emotions— whether pleasurable or not—can stick around. These emotional responses may fuel marathons because the fresh narrative content (as we reimmerse ourselves in the story world) may resolve, transform, or replace the emotions that lingered when we last came back home through the wardrobe. After each ludic journey, we will feel like different people when we return to the other side of the door.



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One need not feel like an advertising executive of the 1960s, a wizard, or Hunger Games tribute to respond to these characters realistically. What was most instrumental in forging Roberta’s connections with the characters was their meaningful time spent together: Do I identify with any of the characters? No, but I like them and want to spend time with them. After seven books, I feel as though I know them and care deeply what happens to them. I still experience an almost maternal pride every time Harry stands up to Voldemort; I still cheer every time Molly Weasley blasts Bellatrix Lestrange; and I still cry every time Dumbledore dies.

Millennium series marathoner Ana Lucia also formed a connection to main character Lisbeth Salander that was not rooted in identification. Ana Lucia realized after a very emotional scene in the series, “‘I am connected to this character’. . . . It was a weird connection because it wasn’t like I identified with her . . . but it was like I really felt for her.” Through experiencing the emotional buffet of pride, elation, and tears, these marathoners were strongly bound with characters who were very different from themselves. The pseudo-avatars may not look or act like us, but we’ve given them a piece of ourselves—our time, our emotions, our cognitions—through the marathon process. Unlike Roberta and Ana Lucia, several book and film marathoners stated that they shared essential features with their text’s characters. Mark latched on to positive identity characteristics when he stated that he liked “smart and funny characters in particular—Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, Spider Man, Columbo” because he could “relate to them.” Jillian took the identification a step further, not just relating to a main character but also stating, “I am Buffy” after she marathoned the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer while running on her treadmill. The act of running and media marathoning perhaps drew Jillian and Buffy closer together considering the show’s focus on Buffy’s athletic training and physical battles. Harper was self-deprecating in her physical identification with Hermione Granger of the Harry Potter series, but ultimately translated the identification into a positive connection to Hermione’s strengths. The particular characteristics she identified with were the following: “I was also a straight ‘A’ student, and I had like the bushy hair . . . the kind of kid that other kids would make fun of. . . . But also because she was really smart and was really courageous . . . and I felt like well, ‘I have A’s. I can be Hermione.’” In Harper’s example, the realistic blend of appearance flaws and character strengths helped her to both identify with Hermione and positively reframe her self-concept. Oatley observes that the connection of emotion and meaning during narrative transportation may help the reader to “reach an insight, and build a new piece of his or her model of the self.”15 The examples of marathoners comparing

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themselves to characters show that the media experience can help us learn how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how we could see ourselves. PARASOCIAL MOURNING In addition to crying over unfortunate events in the story, readers were moved by the story ending (even when it achieved a positive closure), which often carried its own measure of loss and sadness for them. The main explanations marathoners gave for their mourning were that they missed the characters and the media experience. At times both these forms of mourning were blended, as reflected in Kaitlin’s comments: “I was sad that the story and the experience [were] over. I felt like I had made friends with the main characters, and I was sad I wouldn’t be immersed in that ‘world’ anymore.” Overall, this theme of mourning is not surprising given the commitment marathoners make to their series. Many structure their days, thoughts, and feelings around the text. To have that yanked away so abruptly creates a need for painful readjustment. The experience of mourning and readjusting can be strong motivation for the forensic fan practices described in Chapter 4. By having conversations about the characters, poring through textual details, and consuming character paratexts, forensic fandom can make us feel like we’re building new memory of the “deceased” and the experiences we shared. For some marathoners, characters’ deaths were blended with mourning the end of a series, thus magnifying the sorrow. Maggie, for example, vividly remembered her response to the end of the Harry Potter book series: “My shirt was wet I was crying so hard at the end of the series. I was crying because it was over, and I didn’t have it to read anymore and nothing to look forward to. It was all ending. People had died!” As a dystopian tale, The Hunger Games series pulled few punches, which angered Antonia, who felt “incredibly pissed off that (spoiler alert) Collins killed the younger sister three chapters from the end of the last book, as she was one of the only things I liked about the series.” Complaints about series endings—The Hunger Games, Dexter, Divergent— may truly flow from feelings of mourning the death of characters or the ending of series. Put differently, series-end sadness may masquerade as displaced anger toward the author(s). Because readers often cultivate diegetic trust to reassure themselves of the payoff of investing in the marathoning experience, they place faith in the author’s ability to craft a gratifying ending. During the narrative journey of reader and character, readers may cultivate the sense that they know the author and the author knows them. The author would therefore never want to really hurt the (important) characters or the reader. The faith placed in the author may blind readers to the possibility that they are not “on



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the same page,” that the author’s ending may violate expectations or readers’ needs for gratification. Even if characters still lived on in a story world, it was not enough to prevent readers from mourning their loss. In other words, the death of a series was felt just as strongly as the diegetic death of a character. This emotion was the strongest for book and television marathoners—perhaps because the time commitment of marathoning in those media was greater than that in marathoning films. The words “depressed,” “sad,” and “lonely,” peppered several interviewees’ comments. Nathan, for example, struggled with the end of the BBC drama Touch of Frost: “Some friends [the characters] were no longer gonna be a part of my life. . . . When it ended, I was like, deeply depressed. ‘Oh, my friends are gone.’” In an example of fictive experience bleeding over into lived reality, Ellen leaned on a real person to cope with the loss of her pseudo-friends, announcing to her partner, “I miss my friends at Sacred Heart” at the culmination of her Scrubs marathon. Marathoners expressed the feeling of missing not just the characters and their worlds, but also the actual media experience that filled their time. These feelings of mourning may arise from the sharp shift in life’s novelty/predictability dialectic. Marathoners may experience a loss of the media novelty in their lives, one that may have become a temporary routine that transformed days, weekends, or evenings into the floating holidays discussed in Chapter 2. They may also be mourning the characters’ presence and they excitement they brought. Maude was “tired of the characters” after reading The Hunger Games series but still experienced “mourning” because “the characters aren’t ‘alive’ anymore, in that they won’t be doing anything new.” As we walk back home through the wardrobe, the mundane greets us, the comparison thus enhancing our longing for the exhilarating experience in the fictive world. Two book marathoners and one film marathoner explicitly contrasted the commitment they made to a series with the magnitude of loss at its end: Lara [The Hunger Games books]: There is a sense of accomplishment when you finish a trilogy, but also a sense of loss of that very thing that sucked you in. Joelle [The Hunger Games and Twilight books]: There is always a let-down after getting really involved with something like this, and then it comes to an end. Alice [Lord of the Rings films]: After we finished the third movie, I actually felt a little sad—both because of the plot and because watching the trilogy was something I looked forward to and something that had consumed our “entertainment time.”

This discourse, particularly Alice’s, notes that the trilogy consumed her entertainment time, suggesting that readers are not splitting their time between

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fictive worlds: they are holistically engaged in one story world. Because they are not diversifying their media investments, the end (or loss) of the captivating story world is magnified. The reward of the marathoning experience seems to be positively correlated with readers’ discontent upon the experience’s conclusion. “Sad” and “disappointed” were the most common words TV marathoners used when answering the question, “How did you feel when you finished watching the season?” Six Feet Under viewer Julie poignantly noted, “I felt kind of sad when we finished the final season because the show actually became a part of our lives for the short period of time that we watched it.” Although marathons may not take up a lot of the total time in one’s life, the experience seems to temporarily take over media or leisure time, thus making it more memorable than a casual viewing or reading experience that may stretch over several years. This discursive theme of experiencing great loss after a whirlwind media courtship dovetails with the Most Interesting Man in the World meme (see Figure 3.1). Both Nathan and Josie followed up their mourning by asking themselves, “What do I do now?”

Figure 3.1  Most Interesting Man Meme. Source: Derived from http://www.quickmeme. com/meme/3r4rr0



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NOSTALGIA: A FAN FOR AND THROUGH LIFE Just as Harper connected her adolescence to Hermione’s evolution over the course of the Harry Potter books, many of the readers recalled their coming of age along with their characters. For others, marathoning (or re-marathoning a text) was like revisiting positive childhood memories—even if they were adults when they consumed the texts for the first time. The characters’ coming-of-age stories were enough to evoke feelings of nostalgia in readers. This discursive thread exposes a unique, secondary mediated relationship: the readers were not forging connections with characters, but rather with memories of their former selves. In other words, the texts facilitated interactions between the present-day reader and his or her past self. References to “memories” and feeling “nostalgic” commonly emerged when movie viewers were asked how they felt at the end of the marathon. These responses were much more common for movie marathoners compared to book or television marathoners. It is likely that the more ritualized and communal experience of movie viewing helped the initial movie experience stay more strongly in memory. The following terse quotes exemplify marathoners’ reactions: Chloe [Toy Story]: It brought back childhood memories! I loved every moment. I felt joyous and like a kid again! Dylan [Star Wars]: Reflective, due to my many memories of watching the movies as a child. Charlotte [Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter]: I liked remembering when we had originally seen them in the theater, so I guess that counts as feeling nostalgic.

This thread is one of the most overt instances of real and fictive worlds coming into contact as readers anchor the text temporally to the first time they consumed it. In essence, our initial enjoyable reading or viewing experience freezes the text for us within that space in our life. Re-marathoning or rereading the meaningful text thus becomes a way to recall that past. This thread capturing nostalgia for film-viewing memories suggests that the contact between the real and fictive worlds forged by the walk through the wardrobe extends far, not just into the immediate temporal space, but also into our pasts to reactivate latent memories. Marathoners reported different triggers or connections forged between their former self and the media experience. The nostalgia had social group, family, and even spatial anchors. Marathoning Kevin Smith movies evoked Byron’s younger years because “I kind of just associate [the movies] with my

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group of friends from high school because they would kind of like remind me of the characters. . . . It takes me back to high school.” For fifty-year-old Lara, it was resonance between her teenage years, her daughter’s teenage years, and Katniss’ character that enabled The Hunger Games series to speak to her: “I relate more to her, Katniss, in terms of having a teenage daughter with many of her qualities at a similar stage in her life. I think I was both as independent and rebellious as both of them when I was a teenager.” Setting, and not character, was essential to Carol’s connection to television drama Friday Night Lights: “The show reflects my memories growing up in a small Texas town where football and high school life is what the town circulates around. I could personally relate to the show this way.” Marathoners drew from deep wells of personal memories and experiences when processing their stories, transporting themselves into both the stories and their own pasts that shaded the ludic experience. Although a series may have been anchored to the reader’s age when he or she initially consumed it, readers’ perspectives were still mutable. Readers showed a great capacity for reflection upon re-marathoning. For Josie, a thirty-something interviewee, Clan of the Cave Bear was the nostalgic series that helped her reflect on the many changes she had undergone since childhood: “I read when I was like between five and seven so that was my first big girl kind of thing, adult book. So [marathoning that series] is just pure comfort in terms of like appreciating where I was and where I am now. So, things change when I read it.” Rereading a series at a different age can certainly offer a new perspective as critical lenses grow and develop. Maggie, a Harry Potter fan, noticed the conjoined evolution of readers, characters, and writing quality with her latest series rereading: “The first book is not as well written as the last book. [Rowling’s] writing almost improves as the books go on. And it kind of goes along with our age. The first one is more of an adolescent book where the last one is more of an early adult book.” The book series referenced in these quotes seems to offer readers not just a comforting sense of nostalgia, but a pleasing evolution from unsure adolescent to confident adult. In his analysis of the role nostalgia plays in Lego fandom, Geraghty rejects the view of nostalgia as sentimental and falsified, as something that keeps us grounded in a past that never was. He offers a forward-looking view of nostalgia as an “active agent, reflective and exerting a shaping influence on the past and present; bringing the two periods in an individual’s memory together, making a new and more fulfilling experience of history and the possibilities it holds for the future.”16 Maggie and Josie’s nostalgic reflections on their texts are not just about seeing the past through a presentist lens, but also about a comparison between past and present that enables appreciation for changing perspectives that are predicated on new experiences and personal growth.



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Readers and characters growing and learning together was a discursive thread that took off in the Harry Potter book focus group, with adults in their early 20s. After Emily noted, “When [the Harry Potter series] came out we were pretty much the same age as the characters,” Katie responded by inserting herself in the text: “The big question was always, ‘Am I ever going to get my letter [to attend Hogwarts]?’” Readers could experience what it would be like to receive their Hogwarts letter because of various storytelling devices. Sondra attributed narrative transportability to the structure of the Harry Potter series that gradually introduces readers to the wizarding world through Harry’s muggle lens: We’re kind of in Harry’s shoes, learning all these things along with him. So when he hears his first spell or has to go get a wand and a caldron, it’s like “What do we do? OK. Where do we go the next?” And thank God these guides [are here] to help us along the way—like Hagrid. We’re like, “Okay, he can explain things to us.”

A similar effect can be seen in True Blood when Sookie Stackhouse gets to know her first vampire. She bombards vampire Bill with questions to establish the rules of their fictive world: “Can you turn into a bat? . . . Can you levitate? . . . Turn invisible?”17 Sookie’s string of questions quickly establishes the boundaries of their story world, allowing the story to advance without spending much time to catch up viewers who had not done their homework (by reading the book series). I label this narrative device the novice identification strategy whereby authors purposely insulate the main character from the rules of the fictive world so that the world can be unveiled for reader and main character at the same time. The unveiling often occurs through the novice’s conversations, experiences, and travels with a trusted guide who knows the “new world’s” intricacies. Harry has Hagrid, Sookie has Bill, and, after Rick Grimes wakes from a coma in The Walking Dead, he has Morgan to teach him the ways of the zombie apocalypse world. This strategy promotes reader identification as readers do not feel like they are behind in the story: they are in the present, moving along with the main character and matching that main character’s level of understanding.

THE DARK SIDES OF MARATHONING The final section in this chapter addresses the “dark side” of marathoning, which encapsulates reduced or negative affect. In contrast to the many parasocial interaction indicators in the marathoners’ discourse, several

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interviewees reported diminished parasocial interaction as a result of their whirlwind relationship with the text. Several also experienced guilt or regret about their marathoning behaviors. The guilt thread revolves around the shame of consuming so much screen media so quickly. Book marathoners rarely experienced this guilt, suggesting that the guilt is shaped in part by medium biases. Some marathoners were also upset with themselves for “wasting time,” although they found the marathoning experience enjoyable. Others were disappointed with their marathonining experience and realized (retrospectively) that their diegetic trust was misplaced. The common thread among these three sections of diminished parasocial interaction, intense guilt, and regret is that readers did not have enough time to reflect on their stories and reading practices. Like pre-graduation senioritis, these marathoners just “wanted to be done.” They were racing through the content and not maximizing their pleasure of engaging with or learning from the narrative. Had they digested the content more slowly, parasocial interaction would likely have increased, they may have had more balance in their daily activities, or they may have given up on the series before getting in too deep. Diminished Parasocial Interaction The discourse from study participants overwhelmingly established a correlation between marathoning and parasocial relationships, but several interviewees made the opposite argument: that marathoning hindered their connection with characters. This discourse focuses on two primary threads: (1) hunger for the plot shortchanged character analysis; and (2) marathoning did not allow the reader to keep a critical distance from the characters. Introspective television marathoner Angela made this parasocial interaction comparison between marathoning and weekly television viewing: “Marathon watching is more like an intense new relationship where you spend as much time as possible together. Traditional watching is more like developing a lifelong friendship. I feel more invested with traditional watching.” This thread rejects a “love at first sight” model in favor of a parasocial relationship that grows over time. Slate’s Jim Pagels chided marathoners in a similar vein, arguing that “TV characters should be a regular part of our lives, not someone we hang out with 24/7 for a few days and then never see again.”18 Even with the slower pace that book reading demands of its users (compared to television viewing), book marathoner John felt a diminished connection with the characters: There was “less time to get invested in the characters. Ultimately, gorging on the books spoils the possibility of anticipation building.” Put differently, John argued that absence makes the heart grow parasocially fonder. The process of speculating on character motives, plot twists, and story directions deepens the bonds of parasocial relationships, an idea echoed by



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several marathoners who said rapid consumption of a series cut into their time for reflection. Both a TV marathoner and a book marathoner agreed: “[Television marathoning] doesn’t give a person as much time to speculate on what might happen or think about the characters as much” (Ethan), and “there is less time to reflect on the characters and story [when book marathoning], but I feel more drawn into the story” (Stephanie). It is likely that the hunger to find out what happens to the characters can supplant attentiveness to character nuance and development. Arthur, a TV marathoner, noted that the reverse can also happen: “I feel like I connect more with the characters in a marathon as I see them longer [and] faster as compared to disconnecting over a week break. However, some of the finer plot points get missed, as I’m not giving myself as much time to digest them.” Depending on a specific reader’s practices, marathoning may leave less total time for both following the plot and understanding the characters; therefore, attention to either plot or characters has to give. Marathon Guilt Nathan was one of the study’s most conflicted marathoners who described many reasons for his guilt. He considered himself “addicted” to marathoning, and his primary concern was that he could have spent his time doing things that are deemed more productive by society’s standards: There was one rainy summer where I did three [episodes of Midsomer Murders] in a row. . . . And afterwards, I got off the couch like, “I am a horrible human being. I have just spent four plus hours in front of the television.” And I think, “Wow, I cannot believe I just did that. I could have read a book. I could’ve worked at a homeless shelter.”

Nathan’s confession of guilt also includes the medium bias in which reading a book is akin to working at a homeless shelter. Like Nathan, other television and film marathoners felt ashamed of not having anything tangible to show for their time. Ben, an X-Files marathoner, said he “would also feel guilty for spending so much time watching, rather than working on other, more important things (i.e., my dissertation).” Even if marathoning was not taking the place of paid work or school work, there was still a sense that marathoning resulted in lost time that would never be regained. Television marathoner Marsha was “slightly embarrassed that I killed so many hours that way.” Re-marathoning also upped the ante on guilt. George, a Back to the Future and Toy Story marathoner remarked, “Looking back at the time spent doing something you’ve already done a number of times before and not having really accomplished anything with that time

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is always frustrating.” A first-time marathon can be guilt inducing, but perhaps less so than a re-marathon, because the initial reading experience is a foray into an unknown mediated world, one that will expand reader horizons. Despite all of his misgivings, Nathan did take value from his marathoned experiences and did not intend to reform his behavior because, “if it’s gonna be slightly addictive behavior, at least it’s not destructive addictive behavior. It’s not a drinking problem.” Marathon Regret Several marathoners had notably strong feelings of regret that they had wasted time on a series that was not ultimately pleasurable or entertaining. The regretful texts they cited were Lost, Battlestar Galactica, the Pillars of the Earth miniseries, the Twilight book series, and the Legally Blonde film trilogy. Alina, Nathan, and Charles enjoyed the earliest installments in their series but were increasingly disillusioned as the stories continued: Alina [Legally Blond]: I loved the first movie. The second movie was like “It’s cute, but they didn’t have to make it.” And I saw the third movie and I was like . . . “Why did they make this?” Nathan [Lost]: Season six, it’s like, “Oh, gosh, I’m committed, but I just hate this series now.” So, I was just so grateful when that ended because it was painful by the end. Charles [Battlestar Galactica]: I think there are four seasons of it, so I’m on four. Yeah so like first season—fantastic—second and third and half of the fourth—awful.

Charles also grew to loathe Lost and Heroes. Asked why he continued with a series he obviously disliked, Charles surmised about Battlestar, “I guess maybe it was because my roommate was watching with me” and with Lost “it was something everybody else watched.” Social pressure can be a strong factor in encouraging readers to continue with an unfulfilling series, as can the “need to know how it ends.” After too many experiences of being burned by a show, Charles cut his losses with Heroes and stopped watching the show when he determined it had jumped the shark. For other marathoners, breaking up with a series was hard. They wanted to recoup “sunk costs” and retained the hope that the media experience would take a turn for the better. These marathoners were losing diegetic trust but remained sanguine. Perhaps future marathoners would benefit from pausing to assess their parasocial relationships when considering whether or not to continue with a series, using the parasocial-relationship-based “hit by a bus” test Ana Lucia described: “[I]f you’re one third of the way through a book



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and the main character gets hit by a bus, are you mad or not? And, if you’re not that upset, then stop reading.” The test implicitly elevates the character/ reader connection as the most meaningful point of engagement with a story world. If that emotional component is lacking, then the characters are not really the readers’ pseudo-avatars. The reading experience is therefore more of a passive ride than a journey together. CONCLUSION This chapter explored the various emotional investments readers made when marathoning. Marathoners take a compressed, yet intense, journey with the characters of their texts, often developing strong emotional bonds along the way. The marathoner discourse suggests that media marathoning is largely a positive emotional experience for readers. Marathoners described intense feelings of happiness, anger, and sadness as the characters in their texts encountered the vicissitudes of life. Identifying with characters, their experiences, or settings helped marathoners learn about themselves, sometimes evoking nostalgia as lived past and fictive present hummed along together. The powerful emotions marathoners experience transform the reader/ character relationship. Characters become marathoners’ pseudo-avatars who gain shape, texture, and life through the readers’ emotional investments. During the ludic experience, marathoners are not just “friends” with the characters, but members of the narrative’s fellowship, the group that journeys together through the unfolding events. The pleasurable marathoning experiences, of course, had to end. Many marathoners recounted strong feelings of mourning at the conclusion of the marathoning experience because of (1) the loss of their novel, yet temporarily ritualized, media engagement pattern; and (2) the story’s end marking a perceived end of the characters, even if they had not died in the narrative. Despite the pain that mourning brings, I frame the feeling of mourning as an indicator of the value of the marathoning experience: marathoners would not suffer a profound loss had they not gained something from the media journey. I also noted examples of an inverse relationship between emotional attachment to characters and the pace of consuming the text: several marathoners reported feelings of diminished connections to the characters because their marathon experience was plot-driven. In addition, marathoning had a dark side, with some marathoners recalling their feelings of guilt and regret at the end of a series. Despite these diminished affective connections or displeasure when reflecting back on the media experience, it is evident that emotional attachment constitutes an important and prevalent aspect of the media marathoning experience, yielding many of its pleasures. Had readers journeyed

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at a slower pace in their stories, those who experienced “the dark side” of marathoning may have had more time for narrative reflection and exited the game play earlier. What this discourse demonstrates is that media marathoning is a practice that encourages readers and viewers to, as Jenkins observes, “give themselves fully” to texts, immersing themselves in the stories and character relationships. After giving so much to a story, the reader can feel a great sense of loss at its conclusion. When reflecting back at the end of their narrative journey, however, most marathoners would agree that it is better to have loved and lost than never having loved at all. And when the feelings of loss are overwhelming, readers can channel them in many directions: re-marathons, reboots, or the cognitive playscapes described in the next chapter. NOTES 1. Markus Appel and Tobias Richter, “Transportation and Need for Affect in Narrative Persuasion: A Mediated Moderation Model,” Media Psychology 13, no. 2 (2010): 107. 2. Keith Oatley, “Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, eds. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 41. 3. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” in Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, eds. Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 4. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 74. 5. Horton and Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction,” 32. 6. Ibid., 39. 7. Rick Busselle and Helena Bilandzic, “Measuring Narrative Engagement,” Media Psychology 12, no. 4 (2009): 337. 8. Horton and Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction”; Joshua Meyrowitz, “Television and Interpersonal Behavior: Codes of Perception and Response,” in Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, eds. Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Mary S. Piccirillo, “On the Authenticity of Televisual Experience: A Critical Exploration of Para-Social Closure,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3, no. 3 (1986). 9. David C. Giles, “Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research,” Media Psychology 4, no. 3 (2002): 291–292. 10. Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor, “Perceiving and Responding to Mass Media Characters,” in Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes, eds. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillman (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 90.



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11. Megan M. Wood and Linda Baughman, “Glee Fandom and Twitter: Something New, or More of the Same Old Thing?” Communication Studies 63, no. 3 (2012): 334. 12. James W. Polichak and Richard J. Gerrig, “‘Get Up and Win!’ Participatory Responses to Narrative,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, eds. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 72. 13. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 98. 14. Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 318. 15. Oatley, “Emotions and the Story,” 54. 16. Lincoln Geraghty, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2014), 164. 17. True Blood, “The First Taste,” episode no. 2, first broadcast September 14, 2008 on HBO. Written and directed by Alan Ball. Netflix. 18. Jim Pagels, “Stop Binge-Watching TV,” Slate, 9 July, 2012, accessed October 1, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/07/09/binge_watching_tv_why_ you_need_to_stop_.html

Chapter 4

Cognitive Involvement

“I felt that there was such great detail in the plot (the language of the Elves, the many lands of Middle-earth and their customs, etc.) and wished to know more. I felt that I could better understand what I had just watched if I knew more about the context of varying scenes.” —Leah, Lord of the Rings film marathoner

This chapter is placed last in the audience section of the book because it serves as a meaningful bridge between the first and second halves. Chapter 4 addresses how marathoners’ minds engaged with the marathoned texts, laying the essential groundwork before explicating what equipment for living the stories offer in the book’s second half. This chapter continues to map the changing relationship between reader and text that is captured in the marathoning trend, explaining how the narrative creates a strong appetite for the text that the reader acts upon. Marathoners responded in two primary ways to their strong textual appetite: either being tourists through the texts and sacrificing some of the engagement and quality of the media journey or experiencing the story world as a resident, soaking in the many engaging details and nuances. The latter experience of behaving as a resident was more common. Taking up residency in the text and with the characters means strong mental involvement, to the point of muddying the real and fictive boundary. The complex texts asked much from readers and readers obliged, willingly giving their time and mental energy to have a holistic, fulfilling media journey. The relationship between reader and text was so strong and rewarding that readers often did not like it to end when they closed their book or turned off their screen, preferring instead to participate in fannish practices that kept the simulation running. In this chapter, I argue that commonly marathoned texts exhibit many forms of narrative complexity that invite 63

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and even demand interactivity for readers to gain pleasure from the media experience. The interactive invitation, combined with the story world insularity of marathoning, promotes a greater depth of story world experience. Marathoning enhances one’s diegetic memory, thus magnifying the reward of further engagement, analysis, speculation, research, and communication. The detailed story world is at the forefront of one’s mind during the marathon experience, and additional reader work easily prolongs the engagement and yields greater pleasure. GAME PLAY INVITATION Having a strong appetite for a text explains why readers often found themselves “making room” for a marathon. As I discuss in Chapter 2, “Behavioral Patterns,” the marathon’s pull was strong enough to make readers ignore other obligations. Divorcing themselves from agency, marathoners often used the phrases “need to watch” or “can’t stop” to describe the way the text sucked them in and pulled them along. Hunger Games reader Sam exemplified this theme with her statement, “I had to marathon read it because you couldn’t stop. Something happened at the end of the chapter and you’re like, ‘I can’t wait to find out!’” The Walking Dead viewer Dominick felt a similar compulsion, explaining “I wanted more. I got to the end of the episode and I needed to find out what would happen next.” Whitney was more dramatic about her involvement with Lost, reviling the traditional television schedule as she recalled, “I couldn’t wait to see what happened next! The suspense and action is marvelous. I honestly don’t know how people watched that show when it was on TV. I would have committed hari-kari if I’d had to wait between seasons.” As readers explained their marathoning motivations, they exposed that the “need to know” was a driving force in their insulated flow. Although the need to know clearly had a cognitive dimension, it does not preclude an implicit affective connection as well: I needed to find out what would happen next (to these characters). Marathoners told a common story that their initial consumption of the text created an appetite that could only be satiated by finishing as much of the text as was available or by giving as much time to the narrative as they could squeeze out. This compulsion to consume the text rapidly was fueled not only by reader/character connections, as discussed in Chapter 3, “Affective Involvement,” but also by the suspenseful plots. The characters provide color or life to the text, and the plot provides the exciting backdrop. Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Millennium series book marathoner Sydney united character and plot to explain her fast-paced reading motivation: “When you book marathon you experience the plot and character development at a much



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more rapid pace. You are sucked in and NEED to know what happens next.” Sydney’s quote suggests that marathoning promotes a quick initial investment between reader and plot and reader and characters. It is likely that narrative immersion or transportation happens quicker when one is marathoning than when one is involved in a more leisurely pace of engagement. Marathoners on their first journey through a particular story world rushed to commit to the series and wanted some payoff from that commitment. We also see the lure of character and plot united through Lena’s experience marathoning the television program Damages: “All I want to do is keep watching and trying to figure out what these characters will do next.” Lena’s “trying to figure out” comment positions the text as a mental puzzle to solve or a game to finish, but the game has a lot of unknowns, with the outcome dependent on others’ actions. The characters had more life-like and agentic qualities to Lena, and instead of her asking the more passive question, “What happens next?” she wanted to know what the characters would do next, treating them like pseudo-avatars in this simulation they moved through together. NARRATIVE CARROTS Although this chapter is part of the audience section of the book, analyzing marathoners’ cognitive involvement with their stories highlights the interrelatedness between reader practices and textual terrain. (This book’s labels of “audience section” for the first half and “textual analysis section” for the second half should really be seen as emphases rather than solid delineations.) In his work to trace the cultural theory underpinnings of the “cult” classification, Matt Hills poses a causal link between narrative and reader engagement: “The fact that many cults possess ‘sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail,’ also leads us to consider the possibility that certain textual and iconic forms predispose their audiences toward cult ‘devotion.’”1 The first half of Hills’ statement—the “overall similarities” and “similarities of detail”—draws from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances” (discussed with more detail in Chapter 5) to capture the nature of cult texts’ commonalities. It is these commonalities that invite fan devotion (and, I would argue, engagement). The narrative at once invites the game play and comprises the foundation on which the simulation is run. This chapter will address some of those “overall similarities” in marathoned narratives to better understand the invitation for cognitive engagement. In complement to the broader narrative strategies analyzed in this chapter, the textual analysis chapters will address some of the “similarities of detail” that collectively comprise the “family resemblances.”

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We can better understand marathoners’ compulsions to know how the narrative game plays out when we see the narrative “carrots” laid out more clearly, the term carrots referring to the storytelling devices that piqued readers’ curiosity and motivated them with the promise of a reward for continuing with the simulation. Mittell’s definition of narrative complexity from the book Complex TV provides an overarching frame for many of these narrative devices: At its most basic level, narrative complexity redefines episodic forms under the influence of serial narration—not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms, but a shifting balance. . . . Complex television employs a range of serial techniques, with the underlying assumption that a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time, rather than resetting back to a steady-state equilibrium at the end of every episode.2

Drawing from these serial techniques, the media simulation of complex texts is not stopping or resetting: it is building. The player may have just finished one installment of the “text,” but she or he has just amassed notable experiences and knowledge. The player can only cash in on those experiences and knowledge if she or he keeps playing. The greater emphasis on serial techniques seen in complex television aligns with what seems like increasing emphasis on serial storytelling in films and books. The popularity of the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, The Hunger Games, and the Divergent franchises all suggest that modern audiences are embracing serial narratives told through multiple media. The broad common pattern of these serials is creating suspense and maintaining that suspense through careful pacing of clues, answers, and new mysteries. Narratives that have the greatest emphasis of serial over episodic can be classified under Hills’s terminology of “endlessly deferred.” These narratives, he explains, are premised “around a singular question or related set of questions.”3 We want to know how Ted Moseby finds happiness. We want to know if Katniss will overthrow Panem’s government. We want to know why the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 are on the island. We want to know what caused the zombie apocalypse, the Reavers, the Cylon attack on humans. Along their travels through these ongoing narratives, readers not only collect small clues toward the big answer, but also amass new unknowns. In television, film, and book series with endlessly deferred narratives, the phrase “to be continued” is redundant. Hill contrasts the “unfinished/focused” endlessly deferred narrative to the “unfinished/unfocused” serial form of soap operas.4 In addition to making us care about their one big question, creators of unifinished/focused endlessly deferred narratives need to convince us that there is an end game. Marathonable endlessly deferred narratives need to cultivate readers’



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diegetic trust. In order to commit to marathoning, readers need to feel that the story will eventually make sense and the work they are doing to engage with the narrative will pay off. This trust may derive from a reliable source’s media recommendation—a friend, a family member, or a content provider algorithm. Once we’re involved in the narrative, the game play must also feel as if it is unfolding according to the author’s master plan—a plan that readers may not always like, but one that will ultimately cohere. The author will do what has to be done with the characters, in the world we all share during the media experience. The television show Lost includes an endlessly deferred narrative that had the following effect on Julian: “One of the reasons why I marathoned Lost is because after you watch it, you just can’t stop watching it. . . . It always leaves you hanging.” Although Lost initially created engaging suspense for both Julian and Nathan, the show eroded Nathan’s faith: “In the first four seasons, I was like, ‘This is great. This is so tight.’ Season five, I was like, ‘Ooh, they do not know where they’re going.’” A big appeal to media marathoning is that readers expect to story to build toward a meaningful ending. Most marathoners are not engaging in primarily episodic television shows. Because they are deferring some of the gratification, they expect a bigger pay off at the conclusion of their long-term investment. Authors of successful endlessly deferred narratives need to cultivate that investor confidence in the form of diegetic trust. The long-form story arc is a mode of complex storytelling similar to the endlessly-deferred narrative, but it does not have such an extensive serial nature. The long-form story arc can delay closure for several episodes, a whole season, or several seasons, in contrast to the endlessly deferred narrative that keeps readers pondering the same overarching question for an entire series. As I engaged with long-form story arcs, I noticed that several series have a more specific form of skillful clue accumulation. Veronica Mars and Dexter, for example, are miserly about providing clues to their first season’s overarching mystery in the beginning episodes, emphasizing the episodic over the serial. They thus gratify the audience by resolving smaller mysteries to demonstrate their protagonist’s detective prowess but always keep the big question in the background. As the season gets closer to the end, there is a clue crescendo for the overarching mystery—a shifting of emphasis to the serial from the episodic. Just like experiencing an endlessly deferred narrative, readers of the long-form story must also place faith in the writers’ ability to gratify their curiosity. The clue crescendo picks up the main story’s pace, ideally building investor confidence in both the pseudo-avatars and the authors. In addition to an endlessly deferred diegesis or long-form story arc, complex stories can draw from more microscopic narrative strategies that enhance suspense, and correspondingly encourage marathons. In these complicated narrative forms, endings are sometimes beginnings, story closure is delayed,

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events may be told out of chronological order, and readers have to work hard to follow (or resist) the story. Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins was one of the most successful manipulators of reader attention throughout her threebook story. A quick look at some of her chapter-ending sentences reveals one source of her marathon-inducing power: “It would be hard to miss the wall of fire descending on me.”5 “For a moment, everything seems frozen in time. Then the apples spill to the ground and I’m blown backward into the air.”6

Clearly, Collins’s endings are more accurately described as beginnings, as she uses the conclusion of Chapter 10 to announce “Ladies and gentlemen, let the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games begin!”7 These textual details yield greater understanding when united with the discourse from Sam, a Hunger Games marathoner quoted earlier, who remarked, Something happened at the end of the chapter and you’re like, “I can’t wait to find out!” Collins’s work mimics television writing as her chapter breaks are really perfect spaces for commercial breaks. These teasers ring in readers’ heads compelling them to turn the page, the reader’s version of tuning back in. Readers like Josie and her wife June wanted to explore the new beginnings Collins set out for them: When reading the story aloud together, Josie recalled that June would say “‘we have to stop at the end of this chapter,’ and then she would be like ‘just a little bit more, just until 10:50 or just to 11 or 11:30’ and so she would keep saying it.” When reading Collins’ series, Roberta showed a strong will in resisting the end-of-chapter cliffhangers: “It took me quite a while to realize I’m going to be up at 2 in the morning unless I stop in the middle of a chapter.” When authors make beginnings out of their chapter endings, adaptive readers like Roberta can make endings out of middles. Like Collins, the writers of AMC anchors Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead can be considered experts in introducing new, intriguing textual elements at unexpected times. The Breaking Bad opener piques attention by showing what would normally be the episode’s climax—a dangerous, high-stakes action scene—and then backtracking to show viewers how the protagonists got in that position. Closure of the opening drama was delayed until episode two, yet a new conflict had already been introduced. In addition to its captivating openers, Breaking Bad contained compelling endings, introducing a new plot twist at the temporal end of an episode. For example, just as Walt and Jesse have settled on a seemingly feasible plan to murder the sadistic drug dealer Tuco, the first episode of season 2 ends with Tuco kidnapping the protagonists. Their plan to poison Tuco, although extreme and precarious, was of the variety that Walt had pulled off before; therefore, I felt



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lulled into a false sense of ease when watching the episode—only to be jolted to a heightened anxiety level with the kidnapping. Another attention-maintaining narrative strategy is the introduction of a new, questionable character. The zombie fighters of The Walking Dead meet a potential savior, Dr. Jenner, at the close of their quest to reach the Center for Disease Control in the fifth episode. Viewers likely suspect that Jenner will not present the solution to their problems (otherwise the series would be short-lived), but wonder how much help he will give or what harm he will cause. The complexity of the series extends not just to the storytelling devices but to the character constructions as well. No one, not even familiar faces, can be trusted. Nor can familiar faces be permanently mistrusted—consider Lost’s Ben Linus, Star Wars’ Lando Calrissian, and other “redeemed traitors” covered in Chapter 12, “Moral Ambiguity.” In the world of complex narratives, neither stories nor characters let readers’ minds rest.

COMPLEXITY BEGS CLOSURE Complex texts ask for deeper investments from readers who then crave a payoff after giving so much time and mental energy to the text. The riskiness of picking up the long-form story arc troubled Mad Men marathoner, Greta, who noted: I felt unsettled about choosing this particular series because the conflict resolution is much more long-term than previous marathons I have done. On one hand, I feel less satisfied with such drawn out conflict resolution. However, on the other hand, this style inspires me to continue watching to find out as much as I can over time.

Greta responded to her narrative uncertainty by controlling what she could control: learning as much about the story as was available. Seen through Greta’s experience, Mad Men’s complex narrative issues a challenge to viewers. Authors must coax readers to keep their faith while suffering in suspense. Greta was wise to be wary, according to Caleb who was “burned in the early 1990s by Twin Peaks,” because the show was canceled before presenting him with a fulfilling resolution. Referencing the possibilities for cancellation or a lengthy extension, Hills (2007) notes that pre-packaged, DVD iterations of TV shows offer “a more ‘trustable’ or ‘ontologically secure’ re-versioning of Broadcast TV.”8 Greta did not have a complete Mad Men series in her grasp, but with a TV-on-DVD box set, viewers know they have a conclusion in their hands—and they will reach that conclusion if they just dedicate enough time to the story. This security explains why several marathoners—Steve, Jeff,

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Becky, and Sondra—confessed to waiting for a series to be complete before picking it up. This is a practice the popular press calls stockpiling, but I refer to it as chronology shifting, to capture the interactive relationship between reader and text. Stockpilers are not mindlessly hoarding content; rather, they are mindfully choosing to engage the content in a time and manner that will enhance their gratification. Readers are assuming a programmer’s role and also redrawing narrative boundaries to treat the ontologically secure, holistic narrative (not a single season, film, or book) as the “text.” These adaptive behaviors acknowledge the pull and rewards of insulated flow, adaptively controlling entrance flow in response. Although I have primarily described insulated flow in relation to television, it can also be applied to books and film series. Insulated flow embraces a narrative’s serial nature, representing readers’ efforts to cultivate a holistic, well-rounded perspective of the extensive story world. Burt marathoned Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III, appreciating their diegetic contribution while acknowledging the Star Wars fan community’s troubled relationship with the films: “I feel that it’s the end of a journey and the story has gone full circle and all the loose ends are tied up.” Josie, a book and television marathoner, thought of marathoning as “getting the whole story, or, you know, completing that whole circle of someone’s creative process.” This discourse suggests that marathoners derive satisfaction from the completeness of the narrative journey. It brings order and closure to their experience rather than the disorientation of putting down a story and picking up another (or several other) separate stories before the first journey is complete.

RESPONDING TO A TEXTUAL APPETITE Tourist A strong appetite for the story caused readers to interact with their texts in divergent ways. Some raced through the text quickly (in terms of both time spent and mental energy expended), visiting the fictive world like a landmarkhopping tourist who is not interested in interaction. Although the popular press prefers the phrase “binge-watch” and I prefer “media marathon” to label this phenomenon, I concede that the “tourists” adopted binge-like behaviors. Notably, they were mindlessly racing through the text without much pause to digest and reflect on the experience. Marathoners who fell into the tourist category were classified as such because they professed diminished narrative engagement as a result of their rapid reading pace. For some, the binging came with notable losses in the meaningfulness of the reading experience. Erica, a Hunger Games and Outlander series tourist,



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confirmed that the texts’ suspense encouraged her to read quickly, which meant she had less time for critical analysis: For me, book marathoning is much more plot-driven or driven by plot devices and anticipation. At least that is certainly the case in this instance. In a slower, more traditional reading experience I may be less engrossed but take more time to think about the symbolism, literary devices, characterization, etc.

Julianna echoed this idea, saying, “When doing the marathon, it is more intense compared to reading more slowly. However, you can have more time to digest the plot and characters when you take your time.” In other words, both women found the marathoning experience to be very engrossing or intense, but less reflective, an idea that Natalie also expressed when she said that a television marathon doesn’t allow her to form as many “critical” or “educated” thoughts about the text. These quotes suggest that some “binge readers” are thinking about, and reflecting on, the text, but find that their time frame for reflection is as condensed as their reading experience. In addition to collapsing the critical, temporal distance between themselves and the text, their race to the finish made some marathoners miss the minutiae and intricacies of their texts. Kaitlin covered both of these points in her recollection about marathoning The Hunger Games and Millennium series. I rushed through the series faster, and probably missed a lot of the descriptions. I also probably more quickly forgot about details and specific scenes than if I had read each one slower. I also didn’t have much time between the books to reflect about how I expected/wanted the characters to react in the next book— I just kept reading. Those who waited for each book to be released probably had more fully-formed expectations and anticipation for the story line and character development.

In terms of losing details, Millennium book series marathoner Ana Lucia observed that “when you do marathon, there are things that you might miss,” and avid science fiction marathoner Arthur stated that he “glossed [over] some episodes/plots, combining them in my head due to rapid consumption.” Noting and scrutinizing textual details, speculating about plot twists, and anticipating character responses are higher-order forms of thinking that may hinder some marathoners’ experiences. However, as we see in the “Diegesis Mining” section of this chapter, it is possible that marathoners are able to use these cognitive skills after consuming the text or while remarathoning or rereading the text. Some of the tourists blamed the text’s weaknesses (either by being a shallow text or by being unpalatable in some way) for their quick visit. Reflecting on her experience marathoning The Hunger Games, Maude speculated,

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“I think there are only certain types of books that I would read at the extreme pace I read The Hunger Games series. They are plot-centered texts and these are works that I would be unlikely to savor even if I did allow myself more time to read them.” In essence, if Maude didn’t think the text asked for an in-depth read, she considered it marathonable. Sarah marathoned the Twilight and Millennium series “because the books were so terrible that I needed to read them as fast as possible to end the pain.” Readers may be wondering why Sarah would go through such “painful” experiences: both series Sarah mentioned were on bestseller lists and hyped through mass media coverage and watercooler talk—and she wanted to be part of the conversations. She explained, “I refuse to give an opinion on a book unless I have read the entire book or series.” Reading a “terrible” series may, therefore, be the price you pay to be part of the conversation. Being a tourist does not always mark the end of one’s relationship with a place. Several marathoners raced through their texts the first time and were entertained enough to want to consume them again, paying more attention to detail the second time around. The first reading established their love for the series and the subsequent readings allowed them to marvel at its artistry. Karl noted that anticipation of a newly released book will lead him to “rip through it,” but he will go back and re-marathon the earlier books in the series. This pattern happened when he read the Harry Potter series: “When the last three books of the series came out I went and reread all the books that came before up until that point because I would go through them so fast and read them so fast that I feel like I would miss something.” Roberta was also highly involved with the Harry Potter series through a re-marathon. After the final Harry Potter book was released, she wanted to prolong her experience with the text, recalling, “[W]hen I finished the 7th book, I immediately went back to book one and read them all again because . . . I didn’t want to leave those characters and the world and everything.” The practice of re-marathoning may be about reliving the enjoyment of that first time of consuming the text, pulling out the nuance and detail that was missing in a first-time marathon, or prolonging a pleasurable foray into a fictive realm. If marathoning is a gateway to fandom, tourist visits to a fictive world can be a gateway to residency. Resident I classify most marathoners as residents because they used the temporally collapsed pattern of narrative engagement to better remember, understand, and analyze the fictive world. Their journey through the text may have been of a relatively short duration, but residents gave much mental energy to the story during and, often, after the marathon. The fictive world was a place they cared about, were invested in, and contributed to. The words “involved,”



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“immersed,” and “engaged” commonly emerged in marathoners’ descriptions, thus giving the experience a residential feel. In these experiences, the world of origin is subordinated to the story world. Joelle clearly deserves resident status as she praises the sensory depths of a marathon experience: I like to dive in and experience a different world for awhile, tasting, smelling, just feeling the way this character or others perceive each other and the choices they make. If I don’t have time to read marathon-style, I tend to have a harder time connecting with the world the author is presenting to me, I think because I’m always interrupted by the needs of the world I’m living in.

In Joelle’s experience, the immersiveness of marathoning helped her feel and think like a resident in the story world. The marathon helped her mind fend off the world of origin and maintain a more meaningful simulation for longer than a slower-paced reading experience would allow. Television marathoners who participated in one of this book’s qualitative surveys were asked, “When comparing a television marathon and the traditional television viewing experience (watching each episode as it first airs), how do you think your experience with the show, plot, and characters differs?” Book marathoners in a separate survey were asked a similar question that describes the “traditional” reading experience as “reading at a slower pace and perhaps even waiting for a new book in the series to be released.” A handful of participants in each survey noted that they did not perceive a difference; however, the vast majority cited enhanced connections to the story and its characters as a result of marathoning. After coding for the language that suggested enhanced or diminished story world connections, residents outnumbered tourists six to one in the television study. Book marathoners were more likely to report diminished story connections during their marathons, but the ratio was still four residents to every tourist. Book marathons are perhaps a stronger tourist trap because readers can skim the content and skip words, compared to television and film viewers who would have had to tune out their minds and multiple senses if they stayed in the simulation and somehow missed large portions of the media journey. In the upcoming pages, I analyze “resident indicators”—the enhanced diegetic memories and diegesis mining—that suggested strong cognitive engagement with a story world. RESIDENT INDICATORS Diegetic Memory Whereas the “tourist” discourse included reference to a loss in the intensity of the media experience—whether through missing key themes or trends,

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failing to attend to character nuance, or otherwise sacrificing a full-bodied understanding of the story world—the resident discourse reflects enhanced diegetic understanding, memory, and engagement that are positioned as a motivation for the marathon experience. The residents accepted the invitations for textual interactivity, giving of themselves to understand and engage with the text. The tourist marathon experience was like seeing the local attractions before heading on to something new. The resident marathon experience was an immersive journey that readers didn’t passively take on a narrative tour bus. Rather, they were on the ground, learning the people, culture, and customs to the point of feeling as if they were taking part in the narrative—like Joelle who used the story to “experience a different world for a while.” The most basic indicator of resident status is diegetic memory. Simply being able to pay attention to more textual details and remembering the diegesis is essential to fully engaging with the story world. As Stella prepared to travel to a “Star Wars event,” she marathoned all of the first six movies, a process that she said “refresh[ed] my memory” and helped episodes one through three make “more sense.” And that sense making or faith in the narrative can help fuel excitement when one is attending a fan event. One may feel a greater appreciation for the narrative’s artistry, knowledge of its nuance, and belongingness in the fan community, collectively leading to a sense of preparedness for a fan event. Two television marathoners noted that marathoning enabled them to notice more of the textual nuance, with Abby stating, “If there is going to be a ongoing story, which requires the audience to remember detailed information from episode to episode, I think marathons allow me, personally, to stay hooked or involved in the series without losing interest.” Whitney journeyed through the “detailed” lands of Lost and Battlestar Galactica, stating that marathoning allowed the stories to feel “more immediate and controllable.” When authors craft detailed texts that ask a lot of readers, readers can feel a semblance of control by marathoning and keeping the known details fresh in their minds as they amass new information that fleshes out the story world. The ability to process new diegetic knowledge depends on remembering what one has already learned from the text’s previous installments, and situating new information in relation to the known. Several marathoners cited enhanced diegetic knowledge because of their rapid reading pace. Lily enjoyed marathoning Arrested Development, stating that if she watched an episode a week, she would “spend half the time trying to remember what happened the week before.” Marathoning Arrested Development helped the characters “seem more real because there is more continuity in their development.” Ingrid expressed a similar sentiment when comparing marathoning to traditional viewing: “there’s no potential memory loss from week to week,”



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which makes her “more engaged” and “more familiar with the characters.” Although the “drip by drip” form of traditional television broadcast can create more space for processing complex details, it can present challenges for viewers with respect to remembering and carefully sorting textual detail.9 The same applies to book series or film series that have new installments spaced years apart. The marathon experience allows readers to be awash in diegetic detail. Lily and Ingrid’s experiences suggest that having a fresh memory of the story, familiarity with its world and its inhabitants, helps encourage involvement and intimacy with the text. These factors collectively help a well-constructed text take on more life-like qualities, disguising the simulated nature of the experience. The fictive world is what you know—and know well—for the time being. Diegesis Mining Diegetic memory refers to one’s knowledge of the bounded narrative—the “known” story world. Diegesis mining can go beyond the stated textual boundaries to explore meanings that the text suggests or hints at, story lines that are briefly referenced but not fully explored, creative processes that may shed light on textual meanings, or other background information that may re-frame one’s understanding of the story. Three scholarly terms—hyperdiegesis, transmedia storytelling, and textual excess—capture notable features of complex texts that invite reader work and pleasurable engagement through diegesis mining. And two additional terms—forensic fandom and narractivity—capture readers’ work to dig out meanings circulating within and around those complex texts. In his case study of American Idol as an exemplar of the complicated, shifting relationships between audience desire and programmer response, Jenkins brings narrative structure into the mix when he notes that “serialization rewards the competency and mastery of loyals.”10 These loyals share the features of the residents I’ve described above. The cognitive work they do to earn the resident (or loyal) label enables these readers to boast a greater understanding of characters, more intricate plot knowledge, and a more full-bodied experience with a serial text, that extends beyond the text’s traditional borders. Many commonly marathoned texts build their own seemingly limitless story world that readers must do much cognitive work to comprehend, let alone master. Hills refers to this complex, spider-webbing narrative quality as hyperdiegesis, which he defines as “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension.”11 The Chronicles of Narnia narrator evokes the notion of hyperdiegesis when describing the Professor’s house: “It was

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the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places.”12 We can have a good sense of the floor plan once we complete the narrative journey, but the hyperdiegetic narrative has such nuance that we can continue exploring its details through our own diegesis mining or engagement with extratextual resources. Some hyperdiegetic narratives are so dense as to extend beyond their medium of origin into transmedia storytelling. Jenkins describes transmedia storytelling as the integration of “multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium,” citing The Matrix franchise as a transmedia storytelling exemplar.13 He explains the relationship between the constellation of texts as such: “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.”14 Transmedia storytelling is not the adaptation of one text to a different medium. Rather, it represents an extension of that story world that, like hyperdiegesis, aligns with the core story’s “internal logic.” Writing before The Matrix and before Jenkins, Janet Murray cited existing examples and new possibilities for story world expansion in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. She notes that the extended possibilities for narrative in cyberspace enable readers to customize their experiences: “The digital narrative environment extends the fictional universe of the television shows and films in a way that is consistent with the canonical version of the story but personalizes it for each of the players.”15 In line with Hills and Jenkins, Murray notes that these story extensions must be consistent with the story canon or story world logic, but she clarifies that consistency of narrative does not promote uniformity of reader experience. The narrative’s great depth sustains personalization, reader selection of and attention to particular narrative detail to shape their ludic experience. Extensive story worlds, which may include hyperdiegesis or transmedia storytelling, have what media scholars term “textual excess.” Textual excess refers to the many symbols a work contains—symbols that readers cannot easily apprehend and organize. This excess, therefore, does not promote one clear meaning of a plot point, a moment of dialogue, or any other story component. In Gwenllian-Jones’ theorization, textual excess demands reader work and thus leads to interactivity. Jenkins clarifies how transmedia texts invite reader/text and reader/reader engagement because the layers of meaning create “gaps and excesses [that] provide openings for the many different knowledge communities that spring up around these cult movies to display their expertise, dig deep into their libraries, and bring their minds to bear on a text that promises a bottomless pit of secrets.”16 Murray positions the web as a wardrobe of sorts, marking the site for exploring textual excess: “in the context of a worldwide web of information these intersecting stories can twine around and through the nonfictional documents of real life and make



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the borders of the fictional universe seem limitless.”17 Perhaps more so than other media engagement patterns, the immersive marathon experience of detailed story worlds involves ongoing dialogue between the vast real and fictive worlds. This dialogue erodes textual boundaries or borders, and in the process gives meaning, order, and new life to the worlds on either side of the wardrobe door. Several remarathoners implicitly cited textual excess as a reason for their re-engagement with a story. Byron considered The Matrix the type of movie series that “deserve[s] multiple viewings [because] you don’t catch everything.” He enjoyed “finding something new every time” he viewed it. Kenneth remarathoned science fiction texts, including the Stargate and Star Trek series, because “every time you watch it you pick up something different.” Using Jenkins’ language, Byron and Kenneth’s experiences involved cognitively exploring that bottomless pit of secrets to extend their mental diegetic libraries. Because each installment of a transmedia story needs to be narratively consistent and yet self-contained, reader work to mine additional meanings is not required to understand the story. Brooker positions textual excess that leads into “online overflow” as “a bonus feature, an Easter Egg that offers the dedicated fan a treat on the side rather than the meat of the narrative.”18 It is that treat on the side that separates readers from fans, differentiating between those who understand the basic story and those who both understand the story and earn its many treats through online research. Several marathoners cited an interest in their text’s connection to history, culture, or language as a cultural capital “treat on the side” and a big part of the text’s appeal. Nathan stated: One watches Downton Abbey because [of] its high production value, its good acting, but, it’s also a window into a different place and time. The house itself is the character: it’s maybe the main character. . . . I’ve been to England several different times, and I remember going to great houses. [The show] is sort of a way to like, “Ooh let’s explore the great house visually.”

Nathan, a well-traveled historian, linked the text to his personal interests and integrated his experience with Downton to tours of similar homesteads. In Nathan’s example, the walk through the wardrobe enabled a spatial resonance between mediated and lived experiences. In another example of accruing cultural capital, two participants drew additional enjoyment from their texts because the stories were inspired by classic works of literature. Torin found it interesting that Sons of Anarchy is “loosely based on Hamlet,” which allowed him to make an informed guess about a future plot twist. Nora enjoyed the fact that House was based on the Sherlock Holmes books with the House/Holmes and Wilson/Watson parallels. These

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canonical textual forebears enable forensic fan practices by constituting another space for productive narrative mining. The cultural capital accrued by learning the two separate but related stories also promotes diegetic trust. There will be answers to the questions the text raises, and we have hints of those answers through knowing the narrative’s text of origin. These story connections potentially reassure readers that the newer narrative’s creative forces have a solid plan, that the narrative will harbor an even greater payoff of order and sense making because it artfully connects two disparate texts. To see the familiar unfold in an unfamiliar context holds the exciting appeal of gratifying both sides of the predictability/novelty dialectic. Even if a narrative does not have a disparate literary foundation or transmedia iterations, the strength of marathoning’s insulated flow encouraged marathoners to redraw the traditional boundaries around the texts, seeing a book or a film not as a solitary entity but as an installment in one broader story. Kaitlin said that reading The Hunger Games series “felt like one long book, since I read one right after the other.” Debra, another Hunger Games marathoner, cited an enduring shift in her reading practices and story delineations, noting, “Series books to me are just one long book, so I find I can’t read just one.” Mark, who marathoned a diverse collection of films from Toy Story to Star Trek, captured this holistic look in his confession, “I like to see how the films stand alone as well as how they tell a complete, larger story.” This discourse and the attitudes represented therein normalize marathoning as a fitting and thorough method of engaging with a story world and its extensions. Marathoning potentially offers readers greater enjoyment because it enables them to experience a denser, more detailed, composite play space. Feeling that one has a full understanding of a world can not only yield pleasure in the initial immersive moment, but also enable greater enjoyment from learning a new perspective on that world. Drawing from the ludic terminology, we can say that marathoning’s holistic method of game play reshapes the narrative’s contours. Marathoners found that using their diegetic memories to see the text from new perspectives was often pleasurable, despite the fact that they saw some narrative weaknesses from their well-informed vantage points. Lena felt like she knew Damages even better than its creators because she found herself “catching little plot inconsistencies and mistakes when marathoning,” which she said she would have missed with a traditional viewing experience. Kenneth even enjoyed finding plot holes in the science fiction television shows he watched. This discourse suggests that just because marathoners often engage with their texts through imaginative immersion, they are still using critical faculties to assess the narrative fidelity. During the simulated game, readers can and will assess the narrative by alternately selecting real world or story canon logic. Marathoners can acknowledge the simulation but



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still take pleasure in the game play. Marathoners even enjoy their superior knowledge and ability to keep the authors honest. Keeping the authors honest may also involve getting into the authors’ heads and trying to know as much as the creators do about the story world. Elio Garcia, who runs A Song of Ice and Fire’s fan site, westeros.org, is an extreme example. The Telegraph’s Jessica Salter learned during her 2013 interview with series author George R. R. Martin that Martin “emails Garcia in Sweden if he can’t remember a fact about his imagined world.” Martin said of Garcia, “He has a photographic memory. I think that he lives in that world more than I do.”19 Although Garcia’s level of mastery is unusual, the impulse toward more fully understanding a text’s diegesis is not: marathoners often take agentic and informed stances in relation to their texts, seeking out as much information as possible about their story worlds, creative histories and agents, and symbolism. This practice is more specific than marathoners having conversations about their stories, a thread I discussed in Chapter 2. This communication is motivated by shared love for a story, but it is focused on gleaning new text-related information. Forensic fandom, a term coined by Jason Mittell, incorporates not just narrative interpretation, but also research and collaboration. In an argument that could be applied to other similarly structured texts, Mittell claims that Lost’s endlessly deferred narrative “demands a hyper-attentive mode of spectatorship” in which readers are encouraged to “parse” out the narrative in online fan communities.20 Supporting his argument that “[P]opular television shows— and to a slightly lesser extent, popular films—have also increased the cognitive work they demand from their audience,” Steven Johnson advances a claim similar to Mittell’s as he describes the mental faculties contemporary television needs from viewers: “attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads.”21 Although marathoning’s culture of instant gratification may not initially seem to cultivate patience, the immersive experience can promote the patience to learn and potentially master a fictive world. Marathoning’s particular brand of patience also encourages and rewards readers’ attention, retention, and narrative discernment. Paul Booth’s term “narractivity” is related to forensic fandom and the aforementioned cognitive exercises, capturing the work fans do to “assimilate individual units of narrative knowledge and, as a community, reenact and reform them in new ways within the database.”22 In his explanation of narractivity, Booth goes beyond narrative discernment to capture the transformative impact of fans’ practices: notably, their work to collate and interpret narratives results in a reformation of the narrative. The processes I’ve mentioned of redrawing textual boundaries or reframing one’s understanding of a story can be seen as examples of reformation. Marathoner discourse suggests several prominent motivators for forensic fandom and narractivity, including (1) depth—the density of marathonable

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texts also makes them suited for further exploration; and (2) breadth—readers seek out extratextual information that extends their engagement because the immersiveness of marathoning often makes it challenging and disappointing to disconnect from the story world. This further narrative exploration is, at the very least, enjoyable “work,” according to Mittell, who resists making a claim that forensic fan practices improve readers’ cognitive faculties, but says that it undoubtedly provides “mental pleasures.”23 We see that “mental pleasure” illustrated in Leah’s quote at the beginning of this chapter about researching Middle-earth to have more context for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. While watching Game of Thrones, B. J. was concerned about meanings that he missed. He turned to internet fan fora, which Mittell describes as the “natural home”24 of forensic fan practices, to learn if any other viewers were writing, “‘Hey, story lines one and three actually tied together here in this particular episode and this is what happened with it.’” This example of computer-mediated fan communication about narrative threads aligns with Murray’s observation that “the Internet functions as a giant bulletin board on which long-term story arcs can be plotted and episodes from different seasons juxtaposed and compared.”25 Johnson calls these fan-created open documents “evolving works of popular scholarship,”26 which are an internet-enabled byproduct of the interaction between contemporary content delivery technologies and narrative complexity: “As technologies of repetition allowed new levels of complexity to flourish, the rise of the internet gave that complexity a new venue where it could be dissected, critiqued, rehashed, and explained.”27 The internet enables this collaborative fan communication, and evolving narrative trends and reader habits leave many marathoners wanting to extend their cognitive engagement. Forensic fandom and narractivity are focused on unfolding narratives— stories that continue to have official installments—but the transformative impact of these fan practices means that both terms can also apply to extant narratives. Even if there is no hope for a prequel, sequel, new series, spinoff, or multimedia companion text, the viewer work with an extant narrative still changes its shape and texture, potentially yielding new pleasures. Laura Hudson’s comment about The Hobbit film trilogy, cited in the introduction, applies to forensic fandom and narractivity as well: “Sometimes when you really love something, all you want is more.”28 Fans are willing to make that “more” for themselves with the internet as the agar for their collaborative creativity. Marathoners’ research often concentrated on character depth and artists’ creative processes. Character depth is what motivated Angelo to read news sources and websites about his marathoned television shows if he wanted to analyze how “a character changes during the course of the series.” Also seeking a comprehensive look at characters, George consulted internet sources



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about the Back to the Future series to get “the back stories of the characters that were not explicitly explained through the films themselves.” Burt felt compelled to research a Sith Lord’s death on “wookiepedia” because the Star Wars: Episode II “movie didn’t explain that at all and that really confused and annoyed me.” Sondra enjoyed various Harry Potter websites “where you can find out, you know, what the meaning is behind certain words or certain names,” citing the light bulb moment of “I should have known that Remus Lupin is a werewolf. I mean Lupin, Lupus, wolf, the Latin.” The common thread among these character explorations is that the characters had a greater depth than readers were able to learn on their own, by studying the self-contained text. Some information could be found in narrative extensions—like the Sith Lord’s death Burt mentions. Other information was available only to readers who had the knowledge to piece together the clues—as in Sondra’s internet-based etymological discovery. Our character researchers, Angelo, George, Burt, Sondra, and Natalie, did not need to begin their work from scratch because the information had already been compiled by social media users, fan communities, entertainment journalists, and others who recognize that fellow fans have great interest in researching character backgrounds. Newly indoctrinated fans or work-ready readers can enjoy, share, and potentially build on the existing, publicly available information. Researching these forms of character excess afforded readers more opportunities to cognitively play in the ludic space. Many marathoners were also researching the creative processes behind the text that captivated their attention for so long. Jeff described The Sopranos as “intellectually and creatively engaging.” His marathoner survey clarifies the different forms Jeff’s extra-textual engagement took, along with his motivations to find out such information: he read news stories and non-news websites about The Sopranos because of “curiosity about the show’s creation, location of filming, plot devices, and interest in reviewing how certain aspects of the show are related to other facets of popular culture.” Lena also craved greater story world depth when marathoning Damages. She found herself “concerned about what goes on behind the camera, as well as what happens during each episode,” explaining that the information gave her “a 360-degree view of the show.” This 360-degree view brings behind-the-scenes information into dialogue with the fictive world, thus providing more real world anchors for the text’s meanings. These practices can be described as frequent trips back and forth through the wardrobe that draw the real and fictive worlds closer together. These shows had to be filmed in “real” spaces and created through the work of real people. These “real” elements that Jeff and Lena researched encourage the suspension of disbelief and the transportation into a more life-like world. Researching the story’s constructed nature does not foreground its falseness but can, alternately, enhance its realism.

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Because media marathoning is immersive, marathoners often find it difficult to say goodbye to the story world once they have consumed all the central texts. Instead, many choose to expand the story world and get that 360-degree view Lena mentioned. This point gels with Jenkins’ claim that “Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.”29 We don’t want the text to leave our lives, so we prolong our contact through cognitive engagement. Harper was one of many Harry Potter marathoners who set up a “Pottermore” account, which, according to the “About Pottermore” page on the website is “the place to explore more of the magical world of Harry Potter than ever before and to discover exclusive new content from J.K. Rowling.” Visiting the website was gratifying to her because Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling gave users “a lot of background about how she wrote the story and the characters in the story,” which allowed Harper to experience a “more in-depth kind of world for the story to take place in.” When one knows a story well through marathoning and studying the text, seeking extratextual information and expanding the textual boundaries are the next logical steps in enhancing the world’s depth and cultivating a greater understanding. If readers exhausted an existing story world they sometimes sought works by the same authors or by other related artists. Jillian moved from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Angel to Firefly and Serenity once she was sold on Joss Whedon’s brand of storytelling. Recalling her Firefly marathon, she enjoyed that she “already kind of knew the characters. . . . It already felt familiar to me.” In a reversal of the aphorism about familiarity breeding contempt, media familiarity breeds contentment. Jillian explained her Whedonverse experience this way: “You find a good author, a good story teller of any sort and you want to read the next things as quickly as possible because you trust them.” Jillian’s entertainment preferences have strong notes of auteurism. Hills observes that “auteurism brings with it an ideology of quality” in which the formulaic nature of mass culture is elided by the reputation of the “trusted Creator.”30 We thus see a mutualistic relationship between auteurism and diegetic trust: we trust that the Creator will take the narrative in a compelling and pleasurable direction. If we have a sense that the Creator “gets us” and gets our needs, we’re more likely to shape our entrance flow based on the auteur. Because directors often choose to work repeatedly with particular actors, these actors can also benefit from derivative auteurism. This connection offers a potential explanation as to why Charles, a four-time Firefly marathoner, was motivated to check out lead actor Nathan Fillion’s more recent show, Castle. Firefly fans could be gratified with the follow-up movie, Serenity, and even its star’s new show, Castle. Justin, however, had to bide his time patiently waiting for new installments in A Song of Ice and Fire. In the



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meantime, Justin would read author George R. R. Martin’s website to find the “chapters from the upcoming books” that would help him understand the basis for fan speculation about major plot twists. Kenneth was disappointed that Star Gate: Atlantis and SG-1 “ended so abruptly” and undertook forensic fan practices to see if there would be any form of story continuation: “You want to find out where are [the characters] today? . . . [Are] there any more plans of them maybe bringing back something new with the same characters in there?” Like writing letters to a childhood friend who has moved away, forensic fan practices ease the pain of parting, helping us learn more about our companions and their world, and possibly put a reunion on our calendar. CONCLUSION Taken together, the sections in this chapter have traced the many cognitively involved pathways that marathoners commonly follow when engaging with their chosen stories. Marathons are often fueled by a strong appetite for the story, which authors can cultivate through hyperdiegesis, endlessly deferred narratives, long-form story arcs, complex characters, and complex temporal narrative structures. Although some of the marathoners behaved as tourists, quickly visiting their text’s main attractions, most of the marathoner discourse indicates resident status. The collapsed temporality of a marathon media journey may squeeze out time for readers’ critical reflection, but the intensity of that temporally collapsed media experience may propel marathoners into more sites of cognitive engagement surrounding their narrative. By enhancing diegetic memories, the marathon experience can promote feelings of narrative mastery that cultivate marathoner confidence and interest in reading information from fan sites, joining fan communities, and drawing from other resources. Cultivating strong diegetic memories through marathoning may also free time and cognitive space to enhance one’s experience with the story world: I learned the basic diegesis so quickly, I wonder what else I can learn? Marathoners were often thoroughly and thoughtfully engaging with their story worlds, redrawing their textual boundaries by engaging in the practices of forensic fandom and narractivity. These reader practices gave them a greater understanding of the story world, its origins, creative forces, and themes, thus drawing together their perspectives from both sides of the wardrobe door. Continued travels through the wardrobe helped readers form more real world anchors for the narrative. This collapse of real and fictive perspectives enhances the realism of the simulation, offering readers more pleasure in the narrative game play. The findings presented here suggest that

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in contrast to binging’s connotations as a mindless experience, most media marathons are mind- and life-filling. NOTES 1. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 131. 2. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, pre-publication edition (MediaCommons Press, 2012–13), http://mcpress.mediacommons.org/complextelevision/. 3. Hills, Fan Cultures, 134. 4. Ibid., 137. 5. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008), 171. 6. Collins, Hunger Games, 221. 7. Ibid., 147. 8. Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: The Textual Valorisations of Television on DVD,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5, no. 1 (2007): 58. 9. Will Brooker, “Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows on Download,” in Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 58. 10. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 78. 11. Hills, Fan Cultures, 137. 12. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1950), 4. 13. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 95. 14. Ibid., 95–96. 15. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 86. 16. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 98–99. 17. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 87. 18. Brooker, “Television Out of Time,” 69–70. 19. Jessica Salter, “Game of Thrones: Interview with George RR Martin,” The Telegraph, March 25, 2013, accessed December 23, 2013, http://www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/tvandradio/game-of-thrones/9945808/Game-of-Thrones-Interviewwith-George-RR-Martin.html 20. Jason Mittell, “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies),” in Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 128. 21. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 62, 64. 22. Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010), 104. 23. Mittell, “Lost in a Great Story,” 129.



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24. Ibid. 25. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 85. 26. Johnson, Everything Bad is Good, 169. 27. Ibid., 168–69. 28. Laura Hudson, “Well, at Least the Second Hobbit Movie Isn’t as Bad as the First,” Wired, December 13, 2013, accessed December 31, 2013, http://www.wired. com/underwire/2013/12/hobbit-desolation-of-smaug-review/ 29. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 97. 30. Hills, Fan Cultures, 133.

Chapter 5

Equipment for Living Morally

The previous chapters have elucidated some common structural features of immersive, transportative narratives, but I haven’t yet covered their substance, the values contained therein. The second half of the book is premised on the idea that it is not just the questions raised, but also the answers proffered that are a great part of the narratives’ appeal—and a force in the changing relationship between reader and text. My analysis of marathoned texts’ moral codes is framed by Kenneth Burke’s theory of literature as equipment for living. Classic works of literature, Burke argues, distill “a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it.”1 In other words, some life experiences are universal and timeless, thus inviting literary representation of both the situations and their possible solutions. Barry Brummett extends Burke’s theory to other forms of mediated discourse, not just literature. As Brummett explains “fears and hopes confront society and people turn to mass media for the symbolic means to encompass those situations. The media are equipment for living because they recast this world, its hopes and fears, into anecdotal form.”2 Patterns in mediated discourse help equip us with orientations or ways of confronting recurring social patterns, thus providing us with the symbolic resources to face problems and make effective decisions. The “marathonability” of the texts I analyzed suggest that these examples of mediated discourse provide superior equipment for living.3 Their messages resonate within and among individuals, captivating reader attention and providing fodder for intrapersonal and interpersonal conversations. This section uncovers and analyzes the character and plot themes of commonly marathoned texts. By asking what characteristics these texts share, I elucidate specific codes and patterns that collectively comprise the equipment readers 87

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receive from these texts, equipment that may be used for confronting common problems. My purpose in explicating this equipment for living aligns with Doc Brown’s goals for using the Delorean time machine, which he eloquently explained to Marty McFly in Back to the Future II: “The intent here is to gain a clearer perception of humanity: where we’ve been, where we’re going, the pitfalls, the possibilities, the perils, and the promise.”4 When immersing ourselves in pre-Christian Middle-earth, present-day Sunnydale, California, or futuristic dystopian Panem, we are also time traveling. Spatiality and temporality do not matter when assessing the value of equipment for living. No matter what their settings, the popularity and marathonability of these stories suggest that their messages have contemporary relevance. This is the stuff of human nature, of widespread appeal and applicability. (CONSCIOUS) EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING This section addresses how marathoners connected their lives to the text. The arguments in the second half of the book represent my analysis of the equipment for living embedded in commonly marathoned texts, but this chapter captures marathoners’ conscious articulations of how they drew inspiration or comfort from their chosen stories. Some of these points can be considered both cognitive and emotional. Green, Brock, and Kaufman unite the emotional component of parasocial interaction and the cognitive work of learning from media when they write that “Individuals are able to use characters’ situations and experiences to understand their own lives, and they tend to evaluate characters using criteria typically applied to individuals they meet in their daily lives.”5 As we’ll see in the upcoming paragraphs, readers commonly focused on the characters’ vicissitudes and learning experiences when describing what they had gained from the marathoning experience. Compared to a protracted media journey or our own life journey, the stakes are not as high, and the consequences not as regrettable, when experiencing vicissitudes in the ludic space of media marathoning. Marathoning differs from a traditional, slower-paced narrative journey, in part because its condensed temporality means we may not have to suffer as long with our characters. We may recover more quickly from hardships, experience a modicum of closure, or more vividly witness gratifying transformations of our pseudo-avatars. In the narrative’s condensed space—playing out in collapsed, but seemingly “real” time—we do go on transformative journeys with characters, but our rapid pace through the narrative assures us that some resolution is forthcoming: we may take comfort from characters coping, moving on, growing from, or finding closure to whatever challenges they faced. In the contemporary media environment that embraces narrative depth and density,



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the marathon experience can help us see more clearly the complex resolution that sutured multilayered conflict. Complex media journeys can seem more real because they mimic the intricacies of the lived experience. In his Textual Poachers chapter “How Texts Become Real,” Jenkins writes, “Only by integrating media content back into their everyday lives, only by close engagement with its meanings and materials, can fans fully consume the fiction and make it an active resource.”6 Marathoners were clearly making sense of the texts through their own life experiences, using the sum of their socialization influences to select and interpret salient textual features or particular character experiences. Katniss Everdeen even covers this process as she observes her stylists’ commentary on the first Hunger Games: “even though they’re rattling on about the Games, it’s all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred.”7 Our reception of the text is colored by our past experiences and our future experiences can be colored by the text. This view of media engagement positions the wardrobe door as always open, always facilitating an interactive flow of real and fictive discourses. Marathoner Natalie explains the importance of finding this equipment for living through media: “I feel like TV shows and books are experiences. I definitely look at them that way because I put so much into them. . . . I feel like I grow from them and I learn a lot from them.” Readers choose to engage with the texts and that experience can be most meaningful, memorable, and useful when personalized through integration with the reader’s life. Although we don’t always know why a text “speaks to us,” these marathoners were able to make explicit connections between life and story. Marathoners connected their lives primarily to three themes they saw in their chosen stories: coping with difficult events, life transitions, and relationships. Collectively, this equipment encourages readers to accept that life is a journey in which struggles yield growth and new understanding. Marathoners’ “equipment for living” discourse suggests that the stories fortified them to face challenging life circumstances. Catherine was actively seeking equipment for living when selecting her entertainment texts, marathoning The L Word “because I was coming out myself.” She prolonged her connection to the story world, engaging in forensic fan practices to discover if the show’s actresses were lesbians in real life, the real life connections potentially enhancing the authenticity of the actresses’ portrayals and perceived value of the equipment for living they provided. Ivy took more widely applicable equipment for living from the television adaptation of Game of Thrones. She appreciated Tyrion Lannister’s advice that Jon Snow should “wear his name with pride,” explaining, “Wearing your flaws with pride is something that I believe everyone should learn how to do.” Taking a narrative journey can thus coach marathoners to soldier through their own real-life

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journeys. Mediated stories cannot tell us what our experience of coming out will feel like, or how to wear our flaws with pride, but they may give us inspirational models and encourage us to take comfort from others’ experiences and wisdom. Like a parasocial support group, these mediated lessons encourage readers to feel that we are not alone in our struggles and that these challenges harbor greater value or purpose than we now realize. After readers had found a sense of comfort, mediated reminders of struggle helped them to be proud of how far they had come. Alyssa felt that the Twilight books ushered her through a teenage identity crisis: “I think because I read it when I was 16 or 17 it kind of helped me come into myself like figure out who I am.” Reading Twilight was so profound that Alyssa wanted a permanent reminder of her self-discovery—in the form of a Twilight tattoo. Donna’s media experience was less transformative, but she, too, took solace from her marathoned story. After watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that featured “young relationship drama,” Donna wrote in her journal, “I liked this episode because it took me back to what I think of as a difficult time in my life and it makes me happy to think about because I know that everything is so much better than before.” Donna’s example represents a pleasurable form of media empathy and identification between her old self and the characters. In Donna’s marathon journal, she captures her process of activating the equipment for living: she relived her own challenging relationship experience while witnessing the characters’ struggles, felt comforted by the common experiences depicted in the show, and enjoyed the reminder of her personal growth. In the journal she kept while marathoning The Hills, Brenda found catharsis in experiencing the relationship struggles of the main characters, Lauren and Jason, when Jason “wants to go out and party every night and not be tied down by her.” Brenda saw herself and her peer group in the text, learning from it: “So many girls, myself included, can relate to [Lauren and Jason’s] situation, so for me it helps me feel less alone. It also serves as a way to better comprehend how to deal with such relationship/friendship issues.” Another reality TV marathoner, Catherine, was enamored with tattoo artist Kat Von D. One particular piece of dialogue was a light bulb moment for Catherine and compelled her to seek out a paratext: [Kat] was talking about how she has such an exciting life and knows so many people but then said that her sister was the only one who knew how lonely she really was. And I was like, “Oh my god, sometimes it doesn’t matter how many people are around you, you can feel lonely”. . . . So when I saw that episode, yeah, I bought her book. I just wanted to learn more about her so I could grow.

Both these equipment for living examples—from Brenda and Catherine—are about loneliness and about finding not just lots of people to surround oneself with, but the right people. Marathoning can create a network or community



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of pseudo-avatars that populate our social support network, offering implicit advice as they make mistakes or come to new realizations in their lives. These particular pseudo-avatars—Lauren, Jason, and Kat—helped Brenda and Catherine come to terms with past relationships and learn how to have more meaningful future relationships. Transitions or “growing pains” are a particular subtype of struggle that the participants referenced (although none of the participants had marathoned Growing Pains). Several people reflected on transitions they had gone through or were going through while marathoning. Uncertainty reduction is the common thread that unites much of the transition discourse: marathoners took comfort in journeying with characters as the characters find their way in the world. While reading 50 Shades of Grey, Tessa connected to the experiences of the main character Ana in negotiating her identity during a life transition: “[Ana is] going onto the next phase of life, which I just went through, going on from high school to college. . . . Each experience she goes through helps her find herself more as the character, and I am finding myself doing the same thing in college.” Natalie took comfort in the television show Girls, which also featured the college-to-real-world transition. She explained that the main character and her friends are “doing the best they can, and I guess that kind of resembles me right now just graduating. I’m living with a bunch of friends, and we’re kind of just figuring things out.” Figuring out next steps in life can be disconcerting, and marathoners seemed to have a homeopathic response to witnessing that struggle and the resolution mediated texts commonly offer. The overarching “lesson” Brenda learned in The Hills can be applicable to all these transitions as people find themselves in changing circumstances, with changing priorities: she interpreted The Hills to be about how the main characters “struggle to balance friendships, relationships, and college/work.” These themes helped Brenda feel as if she was going through a normal transitional process: “It ensures [assures] me that I am not the only one encountering these problems and that perhaps it is all just a part of growing up.” Feeling that one is not alone in encountering a transitional struggle can help readers take comfort from their texts, whether “reality TV” or fictional. And that process of growing up continues throughout life as circumstances, surroundings, health, finances, and relationships change. Marathoned texts can remind us to embrace our current journey and our potential for growth—rather than clinging to what was or what could have been. MARATHONING MORALITY Readers commonly derived the conscious equipment for living described above from texts that were close to reality—reality television shows and dramas. Even fantasy and science fiction texts, however, offer salient equipment

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for living. The characters’ vicissitudes and outcomes in all genres have the potential to help readers navigate their own journeys and choose life pathways that will ideally promote personal growth and minimize regret. The upcoming chapters analyze the unconscious equipment for living harbored in marathoned texts, bound together by their common thread: morality. Each character study suggests an ideal way of being, through expounding upon regretful decisions, capturing the consequences of morally questionable actions, or idealizing particular character traits. The common plot devices offer cautionary tales of corrupted power, suggest ways to effect social change, and draw from storytelling devices that invite readers into the texts so that they can more actively make meanings with these fictive worlds. These plot devices and character traits transcend the texts themselves. Identifying these forms of equipment for living (or, the related term, “representative anecdotes”) is to “sum up the essence of a culture’s values, concerns and interests.”8 We see the theory of equipment for living modeled in Firefly when the morally ambiguous outlaw Jayne finds himself idolized by an impoverished community. Jayne’s wise captain, Mal, presents an equipment for living lesson, telling baffled Jayne that the peoples’ devotion, “ain’t about you, Jayne. It’s about what they need.”9 Jayne was an accidental Robin Hood who supplied people with hope. Our heroes and their marathonable journeys can do the same. Commonly marathoned texts suggest that contemporary readers need hope—hope that social change is possible and that our world is moving in a positive direction. And, just as Firefly transformed a selfish rogue into a folk hero, the collection of commonly marathoned texts also suggests that readers want to see the real world’s messiness—not just simplistic representations of good and evil. Marathoner Dominick was attuned to the moral lessons in marathoned texts as he observed that contemporary television shows are “not necessarily teaching you a lesson,” rather they “allow you to see a certain moral dilemma. . . . It lets you step back and see it from a different perspective.” These “messy” marathoned texts aren’t teaching readers what to think, they’re encouraging readers to think. The sum of these themes suggests that readers recognize that life is comprised of difficult situations and decisions. As we prepare to face those situations—or recover from them—we want our moral compasses tuned and strengthened so that we can strive to be better and do better. Media psychology research has found that readers who experience narrative transportation demonstrate “more story-consistent beliefs and opinions than their less transported counterparts.”10 Although the transportation research could apply to the immersive experiences of media marathoning, the arguments in the second half of this book are not meant to be a linear causeand-effect argument about how marathoners are impacted by the stories.



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The focus is rather on explicating the perspectives offered by the texts. These chapters analyze the themes that are present in the stories and the dilemmas they invite readers to consider. The textual invitations are proffered, but that does not mean that every reader recognizes or consciously accepts the same invitation. To uncover the lessons in morality that commonly marathoned texts provide, Chapters 6 through 9 explicate character themes. These themes include specific profiles for villain and hero, a well-meaning but deceptive puppeteer who pulls the hero’s strings, and an unlikely (and often interspecies) alliance. In almost all cases, the villain functions as the plot’s exigence, the hero responds to the exigence (although the puppeteer has slowly been preparing for the villain’s moves), and the unlikely alliance is needed for the hero to ultimately vanquish the foe. Chapters 10 through 13 capture common plot themes. The repeated themes include powerful love and friendships, untenable positions, moral ambiguity, and postmodern textual devices that invite immersion and interactivity. The aforementioned themes are united under the postmodern umbrella of boundary transcendence. Morality is not black and white; decisions are not simple; power resides in unlikely places; and texts are not self-contained. Collectively, this octet of characters and themes presents a holistic look at the texts’ equipment for living by capturing agents and situations. Our orientations toward common struggles are shaped by learning the texture and nuance of those situations and discovering how agents’ decisions within those situations can yield varying outcomes. Although many of the marathoned texts are from the science fiction or fantasy genres, repeated themes and character types cut across both genre and medium, suggesting that these story elements are uniquely located within the constellation of commonly marathoned texts. Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances” helps explain the value of analyzing the commonly marathoned canon. He uses the term “family resemblances” because genetic relations are not copies of one another; rather, they have some collection of features and/or traits in common.11 Using a weaving analogy, Wittgenstein explains, “the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.”12 We won’t find one model or narrative pattern that makes a text marathonable, but identifying commonalities can tell us we’ve found the source of their power and strength. As we see in Table 5.1, commonly marathoned stories can have a combination of these elements, or a greater emphasis on just one or two. Several television shows, for example, feature ambiguous morality and untenable positions related to the characters’ competing allegiances. Seen through Wittgenstein’s lens, the upcoming chapters can be considered the start of a marathoned text genome, mapping those family resemblances.

24 Arrested Development Battlestar Galactica Breaking Bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer Dexter Downton Abbey Firefly/Serenity Glee Gossip Girl How I Met Your Mother Lost Mad Men The Walking Dead Weeds

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Table 5.1  Marathoned Texts, Character Types, and Themes

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Film Series The Avengers The Godfather Harry Potter Indiana Jones James Bond Lord of the Rings The Matrix Star Wars Toy Story

Book Series A Song of Ice and Fire 50 Shades of Grey Harry Potter The Hunger Games Lord of the Rings Outlander Twilight

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6: The Technocrat Villain

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7: An Unlikely Hero

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11: Untenable 12: Moral Position Ambiguity

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13: Postmodern

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Some texts that are not in a series (e.g., a stand-alone book or film) or that are not found in an often-marathoned series can still contain some of these story elements. However, the prevalence of these character types and themes in marathoned stories suggests that this particular content is one piece of their immersive appeal. Compared to one-off films or books, these themes and character types can be thoroughly developed in extensive, serial, marathonable texts. Marathoners can also give more focused attention to the nuances of character construction and theme development, thus gathering a well-rounded collection of equipment for living that accounts for many decisions and eventualities. FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY Key tensions course through the upcoming chapters, which require explanation. From the character types to the plot themes, there is a strong tension of deontological versus teleological ethics and collectivism versus individualism. Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative is the cornerstone of deontological ethics, an ethical philosophy that makes decisions based on inviolable ethical principles. Whereas deontological ethics emphasizes prescriptive decision making, teleological ethics focuses on the consequences of decision making. Drawing from the basic principles of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, teleological ethics promotes making decisions that maximize happiness and minimize pain for all concerned parties (not just the decision maker).13 In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant explains that teleological ethics “says only that an action is good for some purpose or other, either possible or actual” and deontological ethics “declares an action to be objectively necessary in itself without reference to some purpose.”14 President David Palmer of 24 captures teleological ethics when he states, “sometimes you have to do the wrong things for the right reasons.”15 The episode featured Palmer authorizing the use of illegal action in the attempt to prevent the outbreak of a deadly disease—an amoral action for the greater good. To contrast these principles using a modified aphorism, in teleological ethics, the ends justify the means and in deontological ethics, the means must be justified. The hero is our purest deontological ethical figure, holding true to a moral code that emphasizes mercy and forgiveness, even when that merciful stance puts the hero and her or his friends at a greater risk for physical harm. Kant explains that these deontological ethics, this metaphysic of morals, “is indispensably necessary . . . because morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking.”16 Although deontological ethics might yield an unfortunate immediate outcome, they are a necessary reminder of the core principles of humanity. When several



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characters from The Walking Dead want to kill a captured teenager who might be a threat to their group, Dale represents the deontological voice of reason as he appeals for mercy: “So the answer is to kill him to prevent a crime that he may never even attempt? If we do this, we’re saying there’s no hope. Rule of law is dead. There is no civilization.”17 Dale’s defense of the teenager is more than an appeal to protect an individual life: it is an appeal to preserve a humane way of life. We see teleological ethics illustrated most clearly through the role of the benevolent puppeteer, explicated more fully in Chapter 8. The puppeteer uses manipulative and often dishonest strategies to guide the hero to ultimate victory over evil, thus saving the world. And saving the world is what all figures of good are working toward—no matter if they take a deontological or teleological pathway to get there. No one philosophy is purer or more ethical than the other, for both are needed to maintain balance in the real or fictive world. Harry Potter needed the puppeteer’s guidance and the puppeteer Albus Dumbledore needed his moral “puppet” who would use any powers solely for the good, thereby restoring the balance of good and evil. Implicit in this deontological and teleological tension is a balance of collectivism and individualism. When expert fighter pilot, Lieutenant Thrace, crashes her jet and goes missing in episode five of Battlestar Galactica, President Roslin verbally spars with Admiral Adama and Captain Adama about the best course of action: Should the military use the precious resources of fuel and pilots continuing a search for Thrace, or should they keep those resources for the thousands of others who need them? President Roslin makes her collectivist stance clear, asking Admiral and Captain to call off the search for Thrace: “You’re both officers, and you’re both honorable men, and you’re both perfectly aware that you are putting the lives of over 45,000 people and the future of this civilization at risk.”18 This challenging situation dovetails with the tensions between deontological or teleological ethics. Roslin calls the Adamas “honorable men,” gesturing toward their deontological stance of respecting the sanctity of life by committing to the search for Lieutenant Thrace. With the military undertaking that search, however, thousands of people were vulnerable to enemy attack. Therein lies one primary weakness of teleological ethics: thousands were vulnerable to enemy attack, but the decision makers did not know if the population was under immediate threat. Put more broadly, teleological ethics are fallible because we can never be sure of the outcome of our actions. As Dale of The Walking Dead points out, his group would be killing a young boy to “prevent a crime that he may never even attempt.” Any teleological move is therefore just a best guess. The Cylons may not attack during the search for Thrace. Even if the military does find Thrace, she may not be alive. The search may also yield positive individualist and collectivist outcomes

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if Thrace is found alive and she goes on to protect their civilization against future Cylon attacks. The only clear conclusion from these tales of morality and the tensions they evoke is that “right” and “wrong” are gross simplifications. Recognizing the complications of morality, these stories don’t provide us with answers: rather, they present possible pathways, feature multiple perspectives, and encourage readers to make their own decisions. A note before proceeding: The second half of this book analyzes a fair number of story turning points and endings. I’ve supplied a chart (see Table 5.1) to note which television shows, films, and books are cited in which chapters. Using this chart, readers can potentially insulate themselves from plot twists or series endings they wish to avoid. NOTES 1. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 300. 2. Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1, no. 2 (1984): 174. 3. The list of commonly marathoned texts is largely drawn from the responses from marathoners who participated in this study from 2010 to 2012. Participants were instructed to draw from their marathon experiences up to two years prior to the study. As such, the equipment for living may be seen as particularly relevant to the time period of 2008–2012. 4. Back to the Future II, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 1989), DVD. 5. Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 319. 6. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 62. 7. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008), 354. 8. Brummett, “Representative Anecdote,” 164. 9. Firefly, “Jaynestown,” episode no. 7, first broadcast October 18, 2002 by FOX, written by Joss Whedon and Ben Edlund and directed by Marita Grabiak. Amazon Instant Video. 10. Green et al., “Understanding Media Enjoyment,” 312–13. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), section 67, page 27. 12. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 67, page 28. 13. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), 16.



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14. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 3rd ed., trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956), 82, emphasis in original. In this passage, Kant does not use the phrase “teleological ethics,” but rather speaks of a “hypothetical imperative” in which an action is seen as a means to something else. 15. 24, “4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.,” episode no. 52, first broadcast November 18, 2003 by FOX. Written by Stephen Kronish and directed by Ian Toynton. Netflix. 16. Kant, Metaphysic of Morals, 57. 17. The Walking Dead, “Judge, Jury, Executioner,” episode no. 17, first broadcast March 4, 2012 by AMC. Written by Angela Kang and directed by Greg Nicotero. Netflix. 18. Battlestar Galactica, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” episode no. 5. First aired February 4, 2005 by Sci-Fi. Written by Carla Robinson and directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan. Netflix.

Chapter 6

The Technocrat Villain

The villains of commonly marathoned stories take many forms: emperor, dark lord, totalitarian government, computer program, and renegade robot. Despite their varied appearances and forms, villains use similar means to execute their dastardly plans. The villain must be willing to do his own dirty work. More commonly, however, the dirty work is accomplished by creating—through the use and abuse of technology—minions, an army, and weapons to do one’s bidding. The technocrat villain will use dangerous and unstable magic, genetic engineering, dramatic displays of cruelty, weapons of mass destruction, manipulative mass communication, drugs or chemicals, and other forms of unscrupulous social control to achieve his ends. These technological innovations are often the antagonists’ undoing, making them capable of being destroyed although their creator considers them indestructible. In other cases, the fallibility of these technocratic tools doesn’t just mark the enemy’s failure, but sometimes also results in the mutual destruction of tool and creator. Writer Colin Duriez explains that the Lord of the Rings and other texts featuring technocratic evils help their readers “come to terms with the horror of palpable evil revealed in modern, global warfare.”1 The villains embody author and reader anxieties surrounding power—power that is situated within both humans and their man-made tools, which are extensions of the self. If used morally and purposefully, power can yield a more harmonious society. If left unchecked and used for selfish, angry, or hateful purposes (all the emotions Yoda warns Luke against), power may devastate populations, worlds, and galaxies. Without witchcraft, Munchkins wouldn’t have to suffer under the rule of the Wicked Witch of the East—but they also wouldn’t have the protection of benevolent, Glinda. 101

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Philosopher Martin Heidegger offers one explanation for human anxieties surrounding industrialization, criticizing modern technology for putting “to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.”2 Heidegger cautions against seeing nature and living creatures only in terms of the energy that may be derived from them, an attitude that imbues both nature and humans with “objectlessness.”3 Treebeard, the eldest of the Ents, an ancient race of tree-like creatures from Lord of the Rings, illustrates the risk of exploiting natural resources and being consumed by the pursuit of technical innovation when he describes evil wizard Saruman: “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”4 Obi-Wan Kenobi issues a similar judgment on Darth Vader, proclaiming, “He’s more machine now than man. His mind is twisted and evil.”5 Darth Vader is a more complicated example, but I take Saruman to exemplify Heidegger’s state of objectlessness: he sees the Ent’s Forest of Fangorn only as fuel for his machinery furnaces. Viewed through the composite lens of Duriez and Heidegger, a magic ring, a clone army, a powerful wand, an armored space station, and a rogue computer program are all thinly veiled critiques of the perils of industrialization, modern warfare, unchecked individualism, and power. One’s use of technology or magic may be predicated on good intentions, but even seemingly beneficent endeavors can be corrupted. Battlestar Galactica’s moral compass Commander Adama makes this point after human-created Cylons massacre millions of humans: “You cannot play God and then wash your hands of the things you’ve created.”6 Commonly marathoned texts attempt to draw a boundary between merely living one’s life (or gently shaping one’s world) and hubristically playing God. The ends of several epic, marathonable tales support pastoral ideologies as the antithesis of playing God: the Jedi’s force—an energy field created by all living things—is restored to its balance upon the Emperor’s defeat in Star Wars; Samwise rebuilds and recultivates the Shire with Galadriel’s Elven magic in Lord of the Rings; the highly specialized world of Panem gives way to district self-sufficiency and farming (rather than their antebellum specialization of coal mining or electronics production) in The Hunger Games. Katniss’ love triangle decision of Peeta over Gale reinforces The Hunger Games’ pastoral focus. She explains, “[W]hat I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction.”7 In this passage, Katniss captures the essence of the pastoral. Both battle-scarred revolutionaries and readers are hungering for a back-tobasics rebirth. We have damaged our world so much that we feel we must start back at the beginning, with the ancient flower that heralds the start of the growing season.



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Now that we know the ideal pastoral ending of these epic tales—the “glorious summer”—we must explore the “winter of our discontent” more thoroughly. This chapter takes a chronological strategy of first examining the characteristics villains share. These essential traits include the power of ultimate destruction, a distorted or grotesque humanness, and a cadre of minions with a uniform appearance. The second section of the chapter addresses what happens when human can no longer control machine. The chapter closes by analyzing the villain’s greatest weakness that leads to his ultimate demise: hubris. EVIL FORCES Some of the most prominent evil creations from marathoned stories are the two Death Stars from Star Wars, the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, the Death Stick in Harry Potter, and the Capital-created Hunger Games that use many forms of technology to torture adolescents. Two defining features of these evil technocratic devices are that they must be all-powerful and widereaching. In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a psychoanalytic critique of world mythology with the purpose of promoting “human understanding,” he describes the hero in opposition to the villain, the “figure of the tyrant-monster.”8 This tyrant-monster is a “hoarder of the general benefit” whose “havoc wrought” is “universal throughout his domain.”9 In Star Wars IV: A New Hope, a commander on the first Death Star describes it as “the ultimate power in the universe.” We see the technocrat villain even in Gossip Girl where social media functions as a panopticon through which to conduct reputation warfare. Narnia’s White Witch is perhaps the literary precursor to Gossip Girl as Mr. Tumnus remarks that “The whole wood is full of her spies. Even some of the trees are on her side.”10 As we see with Gossip Girl, the White Witch, and even Sauron’s eye, these villains employ collective intelligence to be all-knowing and all-powerful. Our heroes also employ weapons in their battles, but the heroes’ weapons are more closely connected to their human makers and wielders. Heidegger again helps us see the divide between hero and villain more clearly as he embraces modern technologies, such as the windmill, that use only the energy they have harnessed in the moment. In contrast to her enemies who use “military satellites, cell disintegrators, drones, [and] biological weapons,”11 Katniss uses a rudimentary bow that is operated by the power in her arm and directed by her gaze to attack one target at a time. Like Katniss and her bow, Buffy the vampire slayer’s stakes are wielded solely by human resources. Luke Skywalker, too, is in command of his agentic weapon, the lightsaber, which Obi-Wan describes as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age” in

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comparison to a “clumsy or random blaster.”12 Eddard Stark makes a similar point in the opening pages of A Game of Thrones when he insists upon raising his own sword to execute a deserter. He instructs his son, “If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes. . . . A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.”13 Commonly marathoned texts do not take a black and white look at violence, but rather paint with shades of Geneva Convention gray as some warfare technologies and some violent methods are deemed more moral than others. Violence is seen as a necessary part of civilization; yet, in contrast to our age of smart bombs and military drones that are seemingly divorced of human agency, marathoned stories tell us that ending a life should always be an owned, sensory experience whose magnitude the executor fully feels. Just as the weapons of “ultimate destruction” violate nature, so do the evil entities and their minions. They are often rooted in humanness and naturalness, yet they take on a grotesque appearance to match their twisted morality. The Walking Dead’s one-eyed, sadistic “Governor” exemplifies this theme, and a quick look at a list of James Bond or Batman adversaries reveals many additional examples of this grotesque quality. In the Bondverse, Blofeld’s piercing blue eyes and facial scar mark him as the enemy, while Jaws’ stainless steel grill clearly signifies his insidiousness. In the Batman films, the Penguin has characteristics of both man and bird, Poison Ivy is physically stained by her own bioterrorism, and the Joker uses makeup to mask his own disfigurement. Two Face may be seen as the embodiment of this tension between the natural and unnatural as his one side preserves the human face (a reminder of his humane past) and the other side is deeply disfigured by acid (a reminder of his turn to the dark side). A change in appearance often occurs as the result of evil actions. Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine and Harry Potter’s Voldemort exemplify these transformations. When Palpatine’s evil lightning is reflected back to him during battle, he adopts his hideous countenance—and takes the mantle of Darth Sidious. Voldemort was once the handsome Tom Riddle, but Dumbledore explained that, through dark magic, “Lord Voldemort has seemed to grow less human with the passing years, and the transformation he has undergone seemed to me to be only explicable if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call ‘usual evil.’”14 This quote is illuminating not just in its reference to Voldemort’s shrinking human connection, but also in the emphasis on his extraordinary evil. The tools wielded by the evil entities also adopt this unnatural, human hybrid quality. In Tolkein’s The Two Towers, Treebeard speculates about the genetically engineered origins of Sarumon’s Uruk-Hai: “Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!”15 In The Hunger Games, Peeta and Katniss face deadly



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“muttations”—genetically altered animals—with the eyes of deceased competitors. Katniss recounts in horror, “The green eyes glowering at me are unlike any dog or wolf, any canine I’ve ever seen. They are unmistakably human.”16 Peeta’s concern that he wanted to be “more than just a piece in [the Capitol’s] Games” foreshadows this conversion from competitor to weapon.17 Tributes who die in the Games literally become pieces in the Games. These mutations indelibly tether humanity to our maniacal creations, reminding us of the devastating consequences of anger, cruelty, and hubris. The human component reminds humanity of what we may become if we abuse power. The technocrat villain draws from polar opposites in visual communication, marked either by grotesque difference or absolute uniformity. This absolute uniformity can be seen primarily in the villain’s minions. The fully uniformed Stormtroopers of Star Wars are the quintessential example. Because of their head-to-toe armor encasements, no differences can be detected among these villains—and prequels reveal that the Stormtroopers are, indeed, clones of one human. Their numbers and uniformity drain them of personhood and make their lives seem easily expendable. The white hand of Saruman that marks his Oruk-Hai, the hooded cloaks and dark marks of Voldemort’s Death Eaters, Blair’s minions in Gossip Girl wearing variations on the same one look, and the virus-like replications of Agent Smith in The Matrix series are other examples of villainous uniformity. Heidegger cautions that this uniformity is a natural outcome when humans view objects only as standing reserves of power: “he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”18 In other words, man has become a mere part of the machine. These symbols not just mark the belonging to a group, but also give their evil leaders “ownership” over the minions. Given this pattern’s prevalence in film and literature, readers of The Hunger Games series should have known that the residents of District 13, with their uniform appearance, were marked as pawns in a villain’s game. They do not have a “dark mark,” but their lives, living spaces, and bodies are molded into conformity: their “white living compartments” and clothing were “identical,”19 and every morning their arm was tattooed with a schedule for the day.20 The residents of District 13 allow themselves to be unwittingly trained to be an army in a war that is different from the one they thought they were fighting. The cautionary tale of this total institution encourages readers to be skeptical of rigid uniformity, regimented living, and blind conformity. These collective marks of villainy can be considered an outward manifestation of an inner reality: the grotesque villains have an ugly visage that reveals the monster within and the minions’ uniformity reveals their mindlessness. Drawing from the writings of Leo Marx, however, the appearance of our villains can be seen as not an inner reality, but an external reality: the villains

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are stand-ins for our modern machines. Marx explains that pastoral tales appeal to readers because of “the machine’s increasing domination of the visible world. . . . It discloses that our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning.”21 Commonly marathoned stories highlight what is ugly—the grotesque and the uniform—to advance a case for what is beautiful: that which is “engineered” by nature or by hand. FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER In Frankensteinian fashion, many of the evil minions or weapons are so powerful that they are beyond their creators’ control. Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas Frentz analyze this mythological theme in American films, charting instances in which the weapon “becomes technologically perfected, and, in a final profane reversal, turns against the very hand that used to wield it.”22 When “The Initiative,” a U.S. military operation, tries to use demons as weapons in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the experiment ends in death and destruction—but not the intended kind of death and destruction. As a military commander explains, “The Initiative represented the government’s interest in not only controlling the otherworldly menace but in harnessing its power for our own military purposes. . . . [The] vision was brilliant, but ultimately insupportable. The Demons cannot be harnessed, cannot be controlled.”23 Neo makes a similar speech to “the Source,” the Matrix’s command center, in one of the final scenes of The Matrix Revolutions: “The program Smith has grown beyond your control. Soon he will spread through this city, as he spread through the Matrix. You cannot stop him. But I can.”24 As Neo points out, even some villains need the hero’s help to save them from the monsters they create. The film Serenity, commonly marathoned with its companion TV series, Firefly, cruelly illustrates monsters turning on their creators. In a video message, a representative of the Alliance (Firefly’s version of the Empire and the Capitol), explains how they unwittingly created vicious monsters, the Reavers: the chemical we added to the “air processors was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression—well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. . . . About a tenth of a percent of the population had the opposite reaction to the packs. Their aggressor response increased beyond madness. . . . [T]hey’ve killed most of us.”25 The opposing reactions to these chemical packs—debilitating passivity and unbridled madness—capture two essential sides of technocratic villainy: mindless conformity and unfettered evil are to be feared equally. The woman who tells the story of the Reavers’ origin reiterates the Alliance’s good intentions with the chemical—“we meant it for the best, to make people safer”—before



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the Reavers brutally end her life. Like Battlestar Galactica’s human-created Cylons, Reavers are the Alliance’s punishment for “playing God.” There is hope of disabling or destroying these Frankenstein’s monsters. Many of these evil weapons can be vanquished by a strong hero who does not crave their power or desire to exploit them. Hocker Rushing and Frentz view these “seeds of hope” as encouragement to “recognize the soul link between humanity and its machines.”26 In response to Boromir’s foolish suggestion to use the One Ring to defend Middle-earth, Elven Lord Elrond explains, “Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart.”27 The Ruling Ring’s corrupting power is contrasted with Elrond’s pastoral description of the three Elvish rings: “Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained.”28 Put differently, the power of the Elvish rings is one of collectivism that protects the land and its peoples’ natural state. These magical tools emphasize preservation rather than destruction. In both the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, one’s intentions and desires also determine whether a tool will ultimately be used for good or evil. We have the foreshadowing of Harry’s self-control when he is able to retrieve the Sorcerer’s Stone from the magical mirror of Erised (the reversal of desire) because, as Dumbledore explains, “only one who wanted to find the Stone—find it, but not use it—would be able to get it.”29 Harry again proves incorruptible as he decides to re-bury the most powerful wand, the Death Stick, and not use it, thereby supporting Dumbledore’s posthumous claim that “those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it.”30 To hubristically seek absolute power is a death sentence. EVENTUAL DEFEAT Heidegger describes humans’ “precipitous fall” at the hands of technology in the following way: “man . . . exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. . . . This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”31 Seeing “only himself” renders the technocrat villain myopic and, therefore, capable of being blindsided by forces that exist outside the self. Gandalf’s assessment of Sauron could be applied to almost all of our other evil entities: “[H]e is very wise, and weighs all this to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts.”32 Sauron was blinded to the Ring-bearer’s quest because he could not fathom anyone wanting to destroy the great power. The Lord of the Rings

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captures two key threads in the eventual demise of villains in commonly marathoned texts: (1) Even the works of the greatest power and evil are fallible and (2) Technological hubris can ultimately be the villain’s undoing. The evil forces plan mostly malicious actions—and do not count on selfless reactions. They do not see the world as a complex system of interrelated parts, nor do they learn lessons from history. Echoing Gandalf’s critique of Sauron, Dumbledore explains to Harry, “That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend.”33 Just before his death, Voldemort still chalked Harry’s survival up to “accident and chance.”34 Because he never understood Harry’s “weapons”—of love and selflessness—Voldemort had no idea how to combat them. Alone among the technocrat villains, Darth Vader shows a well-rounded perspective on technology as he cautions a commander who boasts about the first Death Star, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”35 This dialogue foreshadows Vader’s eventual repentance, perhaps indicating that he was more man and less machine than Obi-Wan thought. EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY The technocrat villain chapter illuminates perils as well as promise to frame the relationship between technology and morality. Seeking ultimate power for personal gain is a peril the One Ring, Death Stick, Death Stars, and other weapons of mass destruction warn readers against. These weapons nearly always lead to the enemies’ undoing. Just as the first Death Star had a tiny weakness that could be exploited, we can count on our bands of heroes to find a weakness, no matter how small, and fight against all odds to destroy or deactivate these ultimate weapons. The villains’ power-hungry myopia conceals these weaknesses, paving the way for the forces of good to prevail. Uniform minions are also no match for the agentic heroes and allies who are fully committed to their cause. The lines between good and evil are not solidly drawn, and the villain almost always contains vestiges of humanness that caution readers of what they may become. In order to live morally in a world that boasts many temptations of abusing technology and power, the protagonists model restraint, agency, humility, and mercy. What these lessons tell us is that we can use technology or assume a mantle of power, but not to the degree that we lose sight of ourselves. We must have a well-rounded view of self that acknowledges strength and fallibility, and balances individual with collective. The mantle of power should ideally be used for protection and preservation.



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Staying true to these principles will result in the victory of good over evil— even sometimes saving the villains from their evil creations. The prevalence of the technocrat villain theme in marathoned stories that were created in different decades (from Tolkien to Collins) suggests that this theme has great resonance with contemporary fears. The technocrat villain theme reflects our continued, troubled relationship with technology. Technological fears range from life-ending (e.g., our weapons of modern warfare) to life-constraining (e.g., our mobile work devices). We have the agency to drive where we want to go but the helplessness of not being able to stop climate change on our own. The United States has the technology and resources to be a world power, but lack the ability to fully protect our citizens once our nation becomes a target. Individuals struggle to balance the freedom of “I can work anywhere” and the oppression of “I can work anywhere.” In sum, we want our technology-enabled freedoms but fear the shackles created by our purported technological liberation. Describing popular stories as a form of escapism, Aden clarifies that “escapism through imagination is purposeful; it allows us to move from an unsatisfactory material place to a fulfilling place of the imagination, a promised land of our own creation.”36 The technocrat evil theme suggests that we have not only a shared sense of dissatisfaction with our technologically ambivalent material place, but also a shared vision of the promised land—and it involves the land. The pastoral endings of many commonly marathoned texts reject the new world order in favor of a back-to-basics way of life. We dream of stepping away from our power-craving, over-scheduled, overwrought lives and focusing only on what we need for true sustenance. Getting back to basics—“peace, quiet, and good-tilled earth”—will bring exactly what we crave: order, predictability, and a rebirth of faith in humanity. NOTES 1. Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring Books, 2003), 200. 2. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 296. 3. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 308. 4. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 494. 5. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand (Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1983), DVD. 6. Battlestar Galactica, “33” episode no. 1, first broadcast January 14, 2005 by Sci Fi. Written by Ronald Moore and directed by Michael Rymer. Netflix.

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7. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 388. 8. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 15. 9. Campbell, The Hero, 15. 10. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1950), 22. 11. Collins, Mockingjay, 130. 12. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, directed by George Lucas (Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1977), DVD. 13. George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 14. 14. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (New York: Scholastic, 2005), 502. 15. Tolkien, Two Towers, 495. 16. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008), 333. 17. Collins, The Hunger Games, 142. 18. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 308. 19. Collins, Mockingjay, 8. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 364. 22. Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg Hero in American Film (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. 23. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Primeval,” episode no. 77, first broadcast May 16, 2000 by The WB. Written by David Fury and directed by James A. Contner. Amazon Instant Video. 24. The Matrix Revolutions, directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2003), DVD. 25. Serenity, directed by Joss Whedon (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2005), DVD. 26. Hocker Rushing and Frentz, Projecting the Shadow, 5. 27. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 285. 28. Tolkien, Fellowship, 286. 29. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1997), 300 (emphasis in original). 30. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (New York: Scholastic, 2007), 718. 31. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 308. 32. Tolkien, Fellowship, 287. 33. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 709–10. 34. Ibid., 738. 35. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, DVD. 36. Roger C. Aden, Popular Stories and Promised Lands: Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimages (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999), 6.

Chapter 7

An Unlikely Hero

When the Oracle reveals the motives and essence of Neo’s archenemy, Agent Smith, she highlights the integral connection between hero and villain: Oracle: “Very soon he’s going to have the power to destroy this world, but I believe he won’t stop there; he can’t. He won’t stop until there’s nothing left at all.” Neo: “What is he?” Oracle: “He is you, your opposite, your negative—the result of the equation trying to balance itself out.”1

Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke articulates a synecdochal relationship between hero and villain, in which the part stands for the whole and the whole stands for the part.2 Hero cannot exist without villain, for they both define and are defined by the other: The hero would never have been put in the place to prove himself or herself if not for the villain’s precipitating evil, and the villain might not have been marked as evil if no one challenged his or her power. If not for Sauron, Frodo’s strength, heart, and wits might never have been tested. And if not for Frodo, Middle-earth might not have rallied to both identify and defeat their collective enemy. Media marathoner Ellen was fascinated by this type of synechdochal relationship, observing, “there would be no Beowulf if there weren’t a Grendel. . . . [There’s a] balance of the hero and the monster.” Because hero and villain are interrelated, explicating the key characteristics of the villain implicitly previews the key characteristics of the hero (the villain’s opposite and negative). To summarize the previous chapter, the key characteristics of the villain are a distorted humanness, a cadre of expendable 111

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minions, and a fatalistic, technological hubris. The hero negates these characteristics by being of blatantly ordinary humanness, seeking to protect and preserve lives (no matter what their allegiance), exhibiting a healthy fear of power and technology, and being willing to sacrifice self to the cause.

ABSOLUTELY ORDINARY (ON THE SURFACE) AND RELUCTANT Many heroes start with an ordinary persona and may even be below average in terms of stature or physical strength. Wise Lord Elrond acknowledges, however, that Frodo’s small hobbit stature does not predict the outcome of his quest. In a lesson that could have been intended for fantasy writers everywhere, Elrond remarks, “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”3 Frodo is in good company. J. K. Rowling introduces readers to Harry Potter with the diminutive description that he has “always been small and skinny for his age.”4 Twilight heroine Bella Swan similarly adopts an unexceptional persona, confessing that she “made the Cowardly Lion look like the terminator” and later defining herself as “absolutely ordinary.”5 This construction of the “average” hero was apparent to some readers, with Twilight marathoner Jessica citing Bella’s “normalcy” as part of her appeal. Teenager Buffy Summers also appears unexceptional on the surface and uses her deceptive appearance to thwart foes who do not anticipate her vampire-slaying strength. Marathoner Jillian, a woman in her 40s, felt empowered by this theme, stating: I always loved it when she surprised people. The big vampire doesn’t know who she is, and then gets into trouble because of it. Or they think she is just a petite, little weakling girl. . . . That sort of element of surprise I know, really appeals to me—as does, in general, transformation.

The idea of transformation is not unique to Buffy with all our “ordinary” heroes ultimately proving their exceptionalism, sometimes through discovery of unique skills, but often through remarkable courage. Perhaps it is their diminutive stature or their lack of combat experience that makes these characters reluctant to pick up their hero mantle. Lord of the Rings’ hero Frodo, a “Halfling,” frets to wise Gandalf, “I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?”6 Gandalf’s answer inspires little confidence: “‘You may



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be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.’”7 Believing Frodo to be dead toward the end of their quest, Frodo’s hobbit companion, Samwise, wrestles with his reluctance to continue the mission in his friend’s stead, evoking the essence of Gandalf’s “you have been chosen” speech. Sam ultimately convinces himself, “you haven’t put yourself forward; you’ve been put forward. And as for not being the right and proper person, why, Mr. Frodo wasn’t as you might say, nor Mr. Bilbo. They didn’t choose themselves.”8 Both Gandalf’s and Sam’s logic places faith not in the heroes themselves, but in the supernatural forces (the “destiny”) that selected them. Campbell notes that the hero’s refusal of the call is common to mythology, representing “a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest.”9 The refusal signifies a presentist, individualist orientation that will eventually give way to a collectivist, future-focused orientation. Through the process of submitting to the quest, the hero’s fearfulness gives way to conviction. Tolkien, speaking through Sam, Frodo, and Gandalf, set the stage for other reluctant heroes. Unremarkable farm boy Luke Skywalker also feels helpless at the start of his quest, initially telling his mentor (and puppeteer) Obi-Wan Kenobi, “I can’t get involved. It’s not that I like the Empire—I hate it—but there’s nothing I can do about it right now.”10 The Empire’s murder of Luke’s Aunt and Uncle quickly catalyze his hatred of the Empire into heroic action, perhaps shaking his present, individualized world so much that he is compelled to cope by adopting a future-oriented, collectivist mindset. In contrast, The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen takes two-and-a-half books of convincing to take on her role as the face of the Panem rebellion, railing against her many attempted puppeteers, the last of whom are “designating me to be their Mockingjay, and then having to recover from the shock that I might not want the wings.”11 Katniss is a collectivist, but she does not see a clear path ahead to act on that orientation. Wary of being manipulated by anyone, including those morally ambiguous puppeteers who profess good intentions, Katniss perhaps deserves the title of most reluctant hero. This reluctance we see in many heroes is an essential counterpoint to the hubris of the technocrat evil. The reluctance is not a lack of commitment to the cause of saving the world, but it can be seen a sign of humility: Am I the right person for the job? The heroes acknowledge their own character flaws and are wary of power’s corruption. Just like Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised’s lesson referenced in Chapter 6, “Technocrat Villain,” the hero needs to be the one to seek powerful weapons, but not use them for personal gain. Instead, the hero is often a safe haven for powerful weapons, thus protecting others from their weaker impulses to exploit a powerful tool. As brilliant as he is, Dumbledore is not suited to be the wizarding world’s hero because he sought

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power for power’s sake. Confessing to Harry that he coveted the Deathly Hallows so that he could be “Master of Death,” Dumbledore asks, “Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?”12 As we see in Chapter 8, “The Puppeteer,” Dumbledore considers humble Harry to be the “better man.” Through this dialogue between heroes and puppeteers, we see the continuum of selfishness to selflessness that runs from technocrat evil, to puppeteer, to hero. The forces of technocratic evil demonstrate the most single-minded pursuit of power and domination. Unlike the technocratic evil, puppeteers have good intentions, but like the technocratic evil they are not much concerned with the means they use to achieve their goals: they are sometimes corrupted by the pursuit of power. The heroes, on the other hand, represent purity of goal, deed, and motive. The heroes’ merciful acts illustrate the deontological ethics of applying set moral standards to every interaction. Even if anger and aggression seem justified by the story lines, giving in to such impulses would make the heroes no better than the villains, thus conflating hero and villain rather than making them two parts of an integral whole. As vampire Edward explains to Bella, “just because we’ve been . . . dealt a certain hand . . . it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above . . . to try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.”13 Through merciful practices, whatever their outcomes, our heroes maintain their individual dignity. They “play the game” on their terms and do not give in to hypocrisy and cruelty, ultimately creating a better world through their merciful actions, and stemming the proliferation of the dark side of humanity. FINDS EXTRAORDINARY TALENT Battlestar Galactica’s Gaius Baltar captures the hero’s transition from ordinary to extraordinary when he states that many leaders throughout history “have come from the most humble beginnings and have risen to meet the challenge posted by cataclysmic events.”14 It often takes a cataclysmic event to convert reluctant hero into extraordinary hero. Campbell describes the answering of the call as “a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes.”15 Heroes can be compelled to act when they realize a normal life no longer seems possible because of the villain’s vast, dastardly influence. Through confronting many challenges on their journey, heroes activate the strength they possessed all along. These talents come in many forms, including agility, magic, or an extensive capacity for mercy. Luke and Katniss are both sharpshooters with their weapons of choice. After informal training of bullseyeing “womp rats in [his] T-16,” Luke Skywalker takes out the first



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Death Star with a shot a fellow rebel pilot describes as “impossible, even for a computer.”16 Katniss has remarkable talent with the bow and arrow, delivering a precision hit to the apple in a roast pig’s mouth that at once impresses and frightens the people who have organized the Hunger Games and all their torture devices. This dangerous move emphasizes Katniss’s skill and bravery as she defies those who wish to make a spectacle out of her death. Although sharpshooting is certainly a valuable characteristic, other characters possess a broader strength of agility that can apply to many combat situations. Buffy Summers’s size belies her skills as she kicks and stakes her way to victories over much larger foes. Like Buffy, Harry Potter did not know he was a wizard, let alone the “chosen one,” until he reached adolescence. Even with no opportunity to practice his flying skills as a child, Harry becomes Hogwart’s youngest “seeker” in a century—a position in the wizarding game of Quidditch that requires him to spot and catch a small, crafty winged ball while perched atop a flying broom. To the delight of martial arts fans, Neo uses his body as his most effective weapon, fighting off foes with moves derived from a cornucopia of fighting styles in The Matrix trilogy. In his first “test” as a combatant in the simulated Matrix, Neo impresses his operators, Tank and Mouse, who are akin to video game controllers: Tank calls him “a machine” and Mouse remarks, “Jesus Christ, he’s fast. Take a look at his neurokinetics. They’re way above normal.”17 Neo is introduced to his audience as a bored computer programmer and talented hacker, but his greater skills are revealed when he is finally tested in the Matrix. Our heroes are often introduced with non-threatening appearances, but their skills soon earn them the respect of readers, allies, and foes. In addition to agility, some heroes have sixth senses that are instrumental in their quests. Frodo’s instincts, in terms of whom to trust, where to go, and when to go are essential in the completion of his mission. Just as Frodo eventually realizes he must leave the Fellowship and set off on his own, The Matrix’s Neo realizes what he must do to destroy his archenemy Agent Smith. Neo initially struggled with a lack of direction, lamenting, “I just wish, I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do.”18 Later, however, Neo firmly settles into the hero’s role and his mentor Morpheus explains, “Neo is doing what he believes he must do . . . I do know that as long as there is a single breath in his body he will not give up.”19 Although our heroes may hesitate along the way or pause to consider their direction, they ultimately find their true path. EXTENSIVE CAPACITY FOR MERCY Ordinary woman Bella Swan saves the day at the end of the Twilight saga. Whereas many of her vampire allies have special powers to wound enemies

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or exploit their weaknesses, Bella’s strength lies in enveloping friends in her invisible protective shield. Her special power thus incorporates mercy, the next integral facet of heroism. What sets the heroes apart from the villains (and even from the heroes’ allies) is their steadfast compassion. Demonstrating this moral strength, the heroes of commonly marathoned texts heed Yoda’s immortal words to “beware anger, fear, aggression. The dark side, are they.”20 Marathoner Roberta enjoyed The Hunger Games trilogy for this reason: I think it has to do with the character that these people were showing. I mean these are people who are put in terrible circumstances but they’re acting out of their best truest self they can be. . . . There’s a sense of . . . honesty and integrity and strength and tenacity, all worthy of admiration.

Our heroes indeed showcase admirable integrity, commonly treating others charitably even at great personal risk. The heroes are merciful toward many, but most notably they do not take vindictive action against their enemies. Despite Saruman’s acts of torture, violence, and destruction in Tolkien’s The Return of the King, Frodo expends a great deal of energy protecting Saruman from the army of angry hobbits: “his chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons.”21 He later warned the crowd of angry hobbits, “It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing.”22 Frodo is not concerned with temporary vengeance against Saruman, but with long-term peace and prosperity. True, lasting peace cannot be achieved through hypocritical, vindictive actions. Even threatened with a wand duel to the death, Harry Potter maintains his commitment to mercy. In the final battle scene, Harry Potter insists on using the “expelliarmus” disarming spell against Voldemort instead of a more violent, active strategy of defense. It is ultimately Harry’s mercy (and Voldemort’s cruelty) that yields Harry’s victory: Voldemort’s “aveda kedavra” killing curse meets Harry’s expelliarmus and rebounds. Voldemort is thus killed by his own hand—without putting any blood on Harry’s. Blame is also removed from Han Solo in the controversial revision of Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Han initially “shot first” when engaged in a blaster battle with bounty hunter Greedo, but creator George Lucas nudged Han into a more heroic role when he revised the scene to have Greedo shoot first. Self-defense is thus a way out of the untenable position of being dead or being a cold-blooded murderer. In the television world of more ambiguous morality (also see Chapter 12), Gossip Girl’s Serena van der Woodsen and Arrested Development’s Michael Bluth are often their respective show’s saviors in the earlier seasons,



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exhibiting the selflessness described in the hero profile. Both “save” others who have wronged them. In the Manhattan upper-class world where image is everything, Serena admits to a drug problem she doesn’t have in order to take peer focus off her brother’s mental health struggles.23 Using the experience as a teachable moment, Serena makes a public speech with a message directed at Blair, who had vindictively leaked the rumor: “[I]n order to move forward with our future, we must forgive those who have wronged us in the past and we must ourselves ask for forgiveness from those we have wronged.”24 After the two teens reconcile, Serena again commits social suicide by allowing pregnancy rumors to be pinned on her and not on their real target, Blair.25 These acts are as close to altruism as one can get in their superficial, imagecentered social circle. Just as Blair consistently wrongs Serena, but Serena often works to defend her frenemy in the earlier seasons, Michael Bluth often acts in his family’s favor even after they have manipulated and sabotaged him. Michael almost gives up and leaves town with his son in the second season, but has a change of heart when his son George Michael asks, “Don’t you always say family first?” Michael responds, “Yes, I do. But that is not a family, OK. They’re a bunch of greedy, selfish, people who have our nose.”26 George Michael warns his dad about being “too proud”—another path toward evil—and Michael ultimately reconciles with his family. Our heroes show time and again that mercy and altruism can yield beneficial outcomes. Katniss finds an ally in fellow competitor Rue, presenting a glimpse of humanity despite their fight-to-the-death competition. Later, in a position to end Katniss’ life, Rue’s friend Thresh, spares Katniss “just this one time . . . for the little girl [Rue].”27 A similar merciful exchange can be seen with Harry Potter when he spares the life of Wormtail, his parents’ former friend who essentially gave their lives to Voldemort. Toward the end of Harry’s journey, Wormtail’s merciful impulse ultimately saves our hero. In an example with a different tone, Frodo’s merciful treatment of wretched Gollum ultimately yields a successful quest. The mere fact of their completing the journey together enables Gollum to save Frodo from the ring’s yoke. These examples collectively illustrate a commutative property of mercy at work in commonly marathoned texts: in a moral reversal of “an eye for an eye,” readers often see a “life saved for a life saved.” SELF-SACRIFICE AND SELFLESSNESS Self-sacrifice is the epitome of collectivism, for it is the ultimate loss of self and gift to others. Many of the heroes live on in our stories’ conclusions, despite risking their lives many times. Media psychologists observe

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the common trend that “transportation via narrative to the dark side entails broaching and overcoming risks and being safe in the end.”28 Victor Nell calls this narrative device the “immortality delusion” that appeals to readers by flattering the ego.29 These themes allow readers to dabble with the fear of loss, and of mortality, but they have their faith reaffirmed upon the successful conclusion of the hero’s journey. When readers are less than 100 pages into Frodo’s quest, Elf Gildor accurately reads Frodo’s thoughts: “You are leaving the Shire, and yet you doubt that you will find what you seek, or accomplish what you intend, or that you will ever return.”30 Readers are less than 100 pages away from the end of the Harry Potter series when they learn of his fate. After learning that he must die in order for Voldemort to be defeated, Harry unquestioningly states that “he would not let anyone else die for him now that he had discovered it was in his power to stop it.”31 This willingness to die for their cause frees our heroes from compromising their morals along their arduous heroic journey. Protecting friends, allies, and the world are all factors influencing the hero’s decision to make the ultimate sacrifice. “As long as I stay, I’m endangering the group and our mission,” says Luke Skywalker before he goes alone to reclaim Darth Vader from the Dark Side.32 Neo is unable to protect his beloved Trinity after he is blinded in battle, but he can honor her by continuing the mission. With Trinity flying their spaceship, the couple faces danger together to defeat Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions. As Trinity lies dying, she acknowledges Neo’s fatalistic mission and her willing participation: “I know. You don’t think you’re coming back. I knew it the moment you said you had to leave. I could see it in your face.” In the end, Neo allows virulent Agent Smith to infect him (resulting in an ambiguous, possible death), just as Harry Potter, Aslan, and others allow themselves to die for their cause. The reigning thought for these heroes seems to be the same as Gale’s advice to Katniss: “It can’t be about just saving us anymore.”33 The heroes give their lives willingly and fully to the rebellion. Even when our heroes survive, they are never the same person who set out on the arduous journey. Frodo no longer feels at home in the Shire, explaining to Sam, “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”34 Frodo’s example illustrates that even if a hero survives a quest, he or she will be irreversibly changed. Katniss captures this strain in the latter pages of Catching Fire: “Peeta and I grow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me.”35 Our heroes often start their journey as ordinary persons, and the story often concludes with their open-ended quest to regain a sense of normalcy.



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EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY The heroes’ characteristics craft an idealistic version of the life worth living. Maggie described the Harry Potter series’ morals as the “things you want your kids to grow up with: facing adversity, having to deal with good vs. evil, being brave, being loyal. . . . [It’s] a story about standing up for what you want, what you believe in.” Readers meet heroes, like the brave Harry, as ordinary figures. Their special skills and strengths are revealed as they encounter a series of informal challenges that test their wits, strength, and agility, and above all, their moral convictions. Heroes may even go against the advice of trusted friends in order to maintain their strong moral compass. The merciful impulse is a consistent character trait, with the heroes willing to make the ultimate sacrifice of life. In The Idea of Epic, J. B. Hainsworth argues that the hero’s success is not about the success of the individual but rather the “victory of civilization.”36 These stories can restore our faith in humanity and refine our moral compasses as the stories weigh deontological and teleological ethics—and deontological ethics win out. The morality contest is stacked in favor of deontological ethics, however. As a companion to the immortality delusion Nell observed in dark narratives, commonly marathoned stories contain a morality delusion not always found in real-world experiences. The moral tone of intentions and outcomes matches: Good deeds and sacrifices will most often lead to struggle, but yield ultimate success. Selfless intentions may not always yield rewarding outcomes in real life, but this morality delusion is valuable in promoting an optimistic view of the world. A key lesson learned is that if the hero (or reader) makes moral decisions, even decisions that seem to have dangerous or scary initial consequences, he or she will ultimately be rewarded with a good life, with the preservation of society, with the cultivation of that merciful impulse in others. In other words, loyalty to self, to one’s own moral compass equates to loyalty to society. The kernel of truth in the morality delusion is this: these heroes teach us that with our actions, we create the world in which we would like to live.

NOTES 1. The Matrix Revolutions, directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2003), DVD. 2. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 507. 3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 287.

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4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1997), 20. 5. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 30, 210. 6. Tolkien, Fellowship, 74. 7. Ibid., 74–75. 8. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 759. 9. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 60. 10. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, directed by George Lucas (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1977), DVD. 11. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 59. 12. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (New York: Scholastic, 2007), 713. 13. Meyer, Twilight, 307. 14. Battlestar Galactica, “Colonial Day,” 11, First broadcast March 18, 2005 by Sci-Fi. Written by Carla Robinson and directed by Jonas Pate. Netflix. 15. Campbell, The Hero, 65. 16. Star Wars IV: A New Hope, DVD. 17. The Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1999), DVD. 18. The Matrix Reloaded, directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2003), DVD. 19. The Matrix Revolutions, DVD. 20. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1983), DVD. 21. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 1053–54. 22. Tolkien, Return of the King, 1056. 23. Gossip Girl, “Poison Ivy,” episode no. 3. First broadcast October 3, 2007 by The CW. Written by Felicia D. Henderson and directed by J. Miller Tobin. Netflix. 24. Ibid. 25. Gossip Girl, “The Thin Line Between Chuck and Nate,” episode no. 13. First broadcast January 9, 2008 by the CW. Written by Felicia D. Henderson and directed by Norman Buckley. Netflix. 26. Arrested Development, “The One Where Michael Leaves,” episode no. 23, first broadcast November 7, 2004 by FOX. Written by Mitchell Hurwitz and directed by Lee Shallat-Chemel. Netflix. 27. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008), 288. 28. Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 316. 29. Victor Nell, “Mythic Structures in Narrative: The Domestication of Immortality,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, eds. Melanie C. Green,



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Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 2002), 19. 30. Tolkien, Fellowship, 96. 31. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 693. 32. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, DVD. 33. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic, 2009), 180. Unlike Gale, however, our true heroes, Katniss and Peeta, continually refine and reassess their sense of right and wrong, and never adopt a single-minded, teleological pursuit of “victory.” 34. Tolkien, Return of the King, 1067. 35. Collins, Catching Fire, 388. 36. J. B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 5.

Chapter 8

The Puppeteer

This chapter describes a prominent character type that could be represented by the imagery of The Godfather logo: the strong hand with a tight grip on the marionette crossbar. Unlike the self-serving Godfather, the puppeteer figures in fantasy and fiction texts seek to accomplish a much greater task: saving the world (or at least making it a better place). To do so, the puppeteer may either directly or indirectly control the actions of armies, double agents, animals, and other nonhuman creatures, but his or her main role is to direct the heroes. After the battle dust settles in Middle-earth, Aragorn, the returned King, acknowledges Gandalf’s role as puppeteer, praising the wizard, “for he has been the mover of all that has been accomplished, and this is his victory.”1 From Gandalf to Dumbledore to the Dowager Countess of Grantham to Barney Stinson, a “mover” is encountered in many marathoned texts.  Despite Aragorn’s wizard kudos, the puppeteer, string puller, and manipulator has earned the many negative connotations that come with these labels. If the deontological ethics of truth telling and “do no harm” are applied, the relationship between puppeteer and hero demonstrates many amoral dynamics. One of the puppeteers who exist apart from the world of science fiction, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, makes her loose standards of truth telling perfectly clear when she states, “Lie is so unmusical a word,” and “There can be too much truth in any relationship.”2 The puppeteers have fewer flaws when viewed through the lens of teleological ethics, which focuses not on their treatment of their “pawns” but on their achieving their ultimate end goal of maximizing others’ happiness. To explore the puppeteers’ questionable morality, the chapter begins by discussing their information gathering and duplicity that enables them to steer the hero. Morality cannot be assessed solely by actions; it also needs to account for reactions. The second part of the chapter focuses on the other characters’ varied responses to their puppeteers. 123

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Although many heroes give themselves over to the puppeteer’s ministrations, I conclude by analyzing instances in which the hero questioned his or her treatment or even severed the puppeteer’s strings. THE DANGER OF SELECTIVE INFORMATION GIVING Puppeteers must be well-versed in lore, magic, history, medicine, social relations, or other “weapons” that can be used to outsmart the enemy. These puppeteers are often among the eldest of our cast of characters, resting in part on years of wisdom to promote what they think is the best course of action. Dumbledore, Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Matrix’s Oracle, and The Hunger Games’ Panem rebellion all have knowledge or skills that their blinded-by-power enemies do not know they possess: Dumbledore knows about Voldemort’s soul-splitting and life-preserving Horcruxes; Gandalf knows how to destroy the One Ring; Obi-Wan knows about the existence of Vader’s children and trains Luke in “the Force”; the Oracle can rebel against her programming; and the Panem rebellion is crueler and more cunning than the Capitol expects. Surprising one’s enemy is essential in battle, but the puppeteers enter the gray area of morality when they also keep secrets from those on their side, on their team. Many of these puppeteers are dedicated information gatherers and steadfast secret-keepers. The Fellowship of the Ring film includes a montage of Gandalf collecting information from Gondor’s library to help him identify the ring of power. Faramir, Steward of Gondor, captures Gandalf’s surreptitious habits, noting, “[Gandalf] never spoke to us of what was to be, nor did he reveal his purposes.”3 Future King, Aragorn, accepts the necessity of Gandalf’s secretive ways as he resignedly notes that Gandalf continues to “speak in riddles.”4 The results of Dumbeldore’s information-seeking labors are captured in his pensieve—a stone basin in which liquid forms of memories are poured to be viewed. Dumbledore shares many of these memories with Harry, ostensibly to equip Harry to carry on the quest following Dumbledore’s calculated death. What Dumbledore does not tell them becomes Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s bane when they lose their puppeteer. In a fit of rage about the opaque quest set before him, Harry yells, “Look what he asked from me, Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don’t expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I’m doing, trust me even though I don’t trust you!”5 We see a similar rage in Dexter when the eponymous main character learns he had a brother—one notable piece of information, among other things, that his foster father, Harry, kept from him. Dexter calls this lie a “betrayal” and asks, “What do I really



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owe [Harry] after that?”6 His trust in his foster father shaken, Dexter most often continues following “The Code of Harry”—a prescription for a vigilante serial killer lifestyle. And although Harry Potter expresses frustration at Dumbledore’s methods, he also chooses to continue the mission his mentor has set before him. Severus Snape, another of Dumbledore’s puppets, rages when the elderly wizard finally reveals a crucial piece of information in the fight against Voldemort: “I have spied for you and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you. Everything was supposed to be to keep Lily Potter’s son safe. Now you tell me you have been raising him like a pig for slaughter.”7 It is at this moment in the story that Snape and readers learn that Harry must die in order to defeat Voldemort. In a quote that could have been applied not just to Gandalf, but to Dumbledore as well, evil wizard Saruman taunts the hobbits at the conclusion of the trilogy, “When [Gandalf’s] tools have done their task he drops them.”8 Although Harry and Snape at times resent being their puppeteer’s tool, they ultimately choose to continue the job laid before them. It is in this choice that Harry and other heroes differ from the villains’ minions, who are blindly obedient. Heroes eventually learn that their puppeteers have not told them everything; nonetheless, they choose to put their faith in their puppeteers’ motives and wisdom. Out of the two puppeteer wizards, Dumbledore is the most repentant, as we see in his pleas to Harry: “Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you? Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”9 Gandalf, on the other hand, seems to revel in his power of information, telling Frodo, “Many folk like to know beforehand what is to be set on the table; but those who have laboured to prepare the feast like to keep their secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder.”10 Yet Gandalf’s selective revelation of information has real and dire consequences not captured by the feast analogy. After leaving Frodo in possession of the Ring without revealing the Ring’s suspected power, Gandalf admits, “Of course, my dear Frodo, it was dangerous for you; and that has troubled me deeply. But there was so much at stake that I had to take some risk.”11 Yet this risk is calculated only by Gandalf. Retaining most of the essential information allows him to be the group’s sole decision maker: “I had to take some risk.” Although their manipulation is not as large in scope as that of the aforementioned wizards, Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars, Morpheus of The Matrix, and Haymitch Abernathy of The Hunger Games all conceal information from their allies. Obi-Wan is selfless, sacrificing his life to save the hero. His greatest ethical flaw, however, was telling Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader “betrayed and murdered your father”—instead of honestly informing

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Luke that Vader is his father.12 When Luke repeatedly asks Obi-Wan “why didn’t you tell me?” Obi-Wan responds callously and evasively, “What I told you was true—from a certain point of view.”13 A difference in perspective can also be seen in The Matrix when traitor Cypher rails against puppeteer Morpheus: Cypher: “[Morpheus] lied to us Trinity. He tricked us. If you would have told us the truth we would have told you to shove that red pill right up your ass.” Trinity: “That’s not true. He set us free.” Cypher: “Free? You call this free? All I do is what he tells me to do.”14

Seen through Cypher’s lens, freedom rests in knowing not partial truths but rather the closest version of reality that a wise figure is capable of communicating. Just like Obi-Wan, Hunger Games’ past victor and current tribute mentor, Haymitch, provides selective information to his heroes in order to ostensibly protect them (and to further the rebellion’s mission). This teleological approach, however, does not treat the heroes as autonomous beings. Peeta and Katniss alternately condemn Haymitch’s manipulation, with Peeta expressing hurt that Katniss’s affection for him was not genuine but rather “just some strategy.”15 Katniss herself is both Peeta’s player and pawn when she is unwittingly used to start a rebellion in Catching Fire: “It’s an awful lot to take in, this elaborate plan in which I was a piece, just as I was meant to be a piece in the Hunger Games. Used without consent, without knowledge. At least in the Hunger Games, I knew I was being played with.”16 As this quote illustrates, truth telling is a strong force in Katniss’ moral compass. Puppeteering may save lives, but does so at the expense of agentic personhood, a value Katniss holds dear, particularly after being under the Capitol’s authoritarian rule throughout her young life. The divisive impact of deception is also a prevalent theme in The Walking Dead as the puppeteer role passes between Dale and Rick, both of whom eventually repent for their overt lies, lies of omission, and other techniques of manipulation. Season two of The Walking Dead picks up with Dale pretending that his vehicle is broken so that the rest of the group will continue to look for Sophia, a little girl who has been lost. When caught in the ruse, Dale explains, “Sooner or later if she’s not found, people will start doing math. I want to hold off the, the ‘needs of the many versus the needs of the few’ arguments as long as I can.”17 Rick did not overtly lie to the group but rather used a lie of omission in his puppeteering. In the season two finale “Beside the Dying Fire,” Rick reveals a crucial clue in the show’s endlessly deferred narrative (of figuring out what caused the zombie apocalypse and what can



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stop it), telling them that they are all infected by the zombie virus. This newly revealed piece of their story world logic means that those who have not been bitten or scratched by a walker will still turn zombie once dead. When Rick defends his omission, asking, “Would [knowing] have made a difference?” Glenn counters by saying “That’s not your call.”18 Dale’s apology to Andrea for another act of puppeteering applies to the ethics of all these puppeteering examples as it separates intentions and methods: “I care about you so I made a choice for you, choices. I know why I did it, but . . . the choices that I made for you were not mine to make.”19 Puppeteers make decisions to conceal and strategically reveal information, thus restricting the choices of those around them. The puppeteers’ freedom thus inhibits others’ liberties. Although their methods are morally suspect, the ministrations of other puppeteers including Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess and How I Met Your Mother’s (HIMYM) Barney Stinson are motivated by group unity. The Countess surreptitiously sends money to her estranged granddaughter, Sybil, to unite the family before a wedding.20 She later encourages the family doctor to lie about Sybil’s untimely death so that family members would not blame one another for failing to seek medical intervention.21 In both examples, the Countess uses her powers of money and social standing to promote her agenda of family harmony. In season two of HIMYM, puppeteer Barney uses his greatest strength—picking up women—to unite his friends. Although it initially looks to viewers that Barney is stealing his friend Marshall’s potential hook ups, Barney’s scheme is later revealed in his speech to Marshall’s true love, Lily. Barney appeals to Lily, “You and Marshall belong together. . . . Marshall is one of the best people I know. And it won’t be long until someone else realizes that, and you’ll lose him forever. I can’t stand the thought of that happening—and I cannot keep stealing chicks from him forever.”22 Although Barney is not a beacon of morality, he is at times a benevolent cupid. We see this role not only when he helps Lily and Marshall, but also when he helps himself: Barney’s greatest ruse spans several episodes, culminating in his successful proposal to Robin. From wise wizards to wealthy countesses to skilled “players,” all puppeteers use their knowledge and specialized skills to set their own plans in motion, often without anyone (sometimes even readers) suspecting their moves until the desired outcome is achieved. THE HERO’S RESPONSE Although Harry Potter expresses frustration with Dumbledore’s methods, he is indeed “Dumbledore’s man,” a phrase used throughout the books and movies. Harry takes up Albus Dumbledore’s mantle, even speaking in defense of the late wizard to his brother, Aberforth Dumbledore. The

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exchange between Harry and Aberforth lays bare all of the dynamics I have heretofore discussed in the puppeteer/hero relationship: selective information giving, dangerous missions, and tensions of collectivism versus individualism. When Harry reveals that he is carrying out Albus’s mission, Aberforth pointedly asks, “And did he tell you everything, was he honest with you?” before warning Harry, “My brother Albus wanted a lot of things . . . and people had a habit of getting hurt while he was carrying out his grand plans.”23 Aberforth concludes the lengthy exchange by questioning the balance of collectivism and individualism in the puppeteer’s role: “How can you be sure, Potter, that my brother wasn’t more interested in the greater good than in you?”24 Looking at this debate from a different angle, one might see the value of autonomous personhood as the greater good. Dumbledore’s honesty may have helped Harry complete his mission and let him walk knowingly and willingly into danger. Rowling’s word choice in this passage (and series conclusion) casts Harry as a Christ-figure and Dumbledore as prophet: Harry “made his choice while he dug Dobby’s grave, he had decided to continue along the winding, dangerous path indicated for him by Albus Dumbledore, to accept that he had not been told everything that he wanted to know, but simply to trust.”25 Facing death willingly was the final test our hero needed to pass. An honest answer to Aberforth’s question above is that Albus was more interested in the greater good than in Harry Potter’s life. The hero was kept partially in the dark until he could come to terms with his self-sacrifice in his own time. Harry, Sam, Frodo, Neo, and others went willingly into what they saw as certain death because they had faith in their prophetic puppeteers, believed in what they were doing, and cared more for those around them than for themselves. The female heroes of marathoned texts make self-sacrificial, world-saving decisions, but they are less likely to acquiesce to their puppeteers, alternating between faith and skepticism. The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen constantly struggles for freedom: to be free of the Games, to be free of romantic expectations, to be free of those who seek to use her for their political purposes. Katniss reminisces about all her (attempted) puppetmasters in this passage from Mockingjay: First there were the Gamemakers, making me their star and then scrambling to recover from that handful of poisonous berries. Then [President] Snow, trying to use me to put out the flames of rebellion, only to have my every move become inflammatory. Next, the rebels ensnaring me in the metal claw that lifted me from the arena, designating me to be their Mockingjay, and then having to recover from the shock that I might not want the wings. And now Coin, with her fistful of precious nukes and her well-oiled machine of a district, finding it’s even harder to groom a Mockingjay than to catch one.26



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Faced with the chance of publicly executing the Capitol’s President Snow, Katniss transforms the spectacle into an opportunity to assassinate who she sees as a more dangerous puppeteer, rebellion President Coin. Despite Coin’s professed purposes of uniting the districts, Katniss mistrusts Coin’s teleological ethics and dangerous power grabs. Katniss’ decision to assassinate Coin reveals that she is concerned not just with the rebellion’s end goal, but with its methods. Buffy Summers is also an autonomous heroine. All vampire slayers are subjected to the ministrations of “The Council,” a slayer governing body that appoints a “Watcher” to train, advise, and aid the slayer. The slayer’s governance system falls apart in season three when The Council has Buffy’s Watcher, Giles, surreptitiously inject her with a substance that reduces her physical powers to isolate and test her wits. Troubled by the deceptive and dangerous game he has played, Giles reveals the test to Buffy and relinquishes his role as second-puppeteer-in-command.27 Buffy’s already fractured relationship with The Council leads to a clean break when they fail to aid Angel, her vampire boyfriend, who has been poisoned. Buffy severs her puppeteers’ strings, telling her new Watcher, “I don’t think I’m going to be taking any more orders. Not from you, not from them.”28 Katniss and Buffy resist their puppeteers not just to protect themselves, but also to protect other pawns in the game. EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY The puppeteer character taps into many human desires. We desire to learn from others, trust in others, believe there is a higher power, and believe we can contribute to the greater good. These human desires are instrumental in human cooperation and progress. We may not know what our lives hold in store for us, but we take comfort in thinking that we are being unknowingly guided on a difficult, yet ultimately worthwhile, path. The puppeteer is the modern iteration of what Campbell calls the “protective figure,” who represents “the benign, protecting power of destiny” that functions as “a reassurance” to the audience.29 Our heroes should not be condemned for what amounts to blind faith at times, but should be ultimately commended for their selfless efforts to help humanity—and their perpetuation of readers’ feelings of “reassurance” in the existence of a higher power. While the heroes should be blameless, the puppeteers’ work is morally questionable, sometimes employing overt lies, but more commonly, lies of omission. The puppeteers may appear to be all-knowing, but they are certainly not all-telling. Our commonly marathoned stories often end well and the heroes often survive, but we must ask if there could have been another way. Employing

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the principle of deontological ethics rather than teleological ethics, puppeteers would no longer be puppeteers but advisors. They would treat people as autonomous beings, presenting all the relevant information they have and encouraging their allies to make their own decisions. And even if puppeteers are to divulge all the information in their heads (picture Dumbledore baptizing Harry in his entire pensieve of memories), heroes and readers need to recognize that advisors have knowledge and insight but not infallible foresight. Put differently, while we need to have faith in our advisors, we need to have more faith in ourselves to make the right decisions. As the hero gradually learns to question the puppeteer’s omniscience and may eventually sever the puppeteers’ strings, he or she is forced to trust his or her own wits, wisdom, and instincts when faced with a difficult decision or situation. Borrowing the words of The Matrix’s Oracle, this chapter’s equipment for living can be summarized thus: puppeteers teach heroes and readers that they may rely on others for guidance, but it is ultimately important to “make up your own damn mind.”30 NOTES 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 265–66. 2. Downton Abbey, episode no. 21, first broadcast January 27, 2013 by PBS. Written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Jeremy Webb. PBS.org; Downton Abbey, episode no. 26, first broadcast January 5, 2014 by PBS. Written by Julian Fellowes and directed by David Evans. PBS.org. 3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 313. 4. Tolkien, Two Towers, 104. 5. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 362. 6. Dexter, “Born Free” episode no. 12, first broadcast December 17, 2006 by Showtime. Written by Daniel Cerone and Melissa Rosenberg and directed by Michael Cuesta. Netflix. 7. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 687. 8. Tolkien, Return of the King, 324. 9. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 713. 10. Tolkien, Return of the King, 269. 11. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 66. 12. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, directed by George Lucas (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1977), DVD. 13. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1983), DVD.



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14. The Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1999), DVD. 15. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008), 372. 16. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic, 2009), 385. 17. The Walking Dead, “What Lies Ahead,” episode no. 201, first broadcast October 16, 2011 by AMC. Written by Ardeth Bey and Robert Kirkman, and directed by Ernest Dickerson and Gwyneth Horder-Payton. Netflix. 18. The Walking Dead, “Beside the Dying Fire” episode no. 19, first broadcast March 18, 2012 by AMC. Written by Robert Kirkman and directed by Ernest Dick­ erson. Netflix. 19. The Walking Dead, “Save the Last One” episode no. 9, first broadcast October 30, 2011 by AMC. Written by Scott Gimple and directed by Phil Abraham. Netflix. 20. Downton Abbey, episode no. 17, first broadcast January 6, 2013 by PBS. Written by Julian Fellowes and directed by Brian Percival. PBS.org. 21. Downton Abbey, episode no. 21. 22. How I Met Your Mother, “The Bachelor Party,” episode no. 41, first broadcast April 9, 2007 by CBS. Written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas and directed by Pamela Fryman. Netflix. 23. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 561. 24. Ibid., 568. 25. Ibid., 563. 26. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 59. 27. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Helpless,” episode no. 46, first broadcast January 19, 1999 by The WB. Written by David Fury and directed by James A. Contner. Amazon Instant Video. 28. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Graduation Day Part I,” episode no. 55. First broadcast May 18, 1999 by The WB. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Joss Whedon. Amazon Instant Video. 29. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 71. 30. The Matrix Reloaded, directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2003), DVD.

Chapter 9

An Unlikely Alliance

This chapter is a logical extension of the kind, merciful hero discussed in Chapter 7. Whereas Chapter 10, “Love and Friendships,” addresses close personal relationships formed between hero and fellowship, this chapter addresses the broader collection of allies the hero must also cultivate. Although these relationships may be more transient than the enduring friendships, they are no less important to the stories’ outcomes. What Chapters 9 and 10 collectively reveal is that being a hero is not an isolated role: each hero takes up his or her mantle against the villain, for others, and with others. Although the presence of bodies is certainly an asset, the benefits of these allies are not simply in terms of having “numbers.” More specifically, the alliance of various beings sends a message of accepting, appreciating, valuing, and drawing strength from diversity. The diverse knowledge and skill sets of various people and creatures helps the hero to successfully complete a mission or a task, particularly a mission that seeks to preserve a threatened way of life. The technocrat villain’s quest for world domination threatens not just humans, but also the existence of all life in the story world. A reputation for being kind and merciful helps draw allies to the hero’s side in preparation to take on a dastardly foe, but the call-to-arms persuasion is more challenging than simply having a good reputation. People and creatures often have contentious relationships predicated on historical conflicts, of which the heroes may not even be aware. Successful heroes must respect those histories that often get dredged up and negotiated as various parties rally around the heroes to battle a common foe.

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NUMBERS GAME Having “numbers,” or a strong physical presence, is essential in many of the conflicts seen in commonly marathoned texts. While Sauron and Sarumon of the Lord of the Rings manufacture their own armies through dark magic, the race of humans has a more difficult challenge ahead of it to cultivate naturalborn, independent-thinking allies. Faramir, the wise son of Gondor, explains to Sam and Frodo that a great weapon is no match for a great alliance: The sword of Elendil, if it returns indeed, may rekindle [hope], but I do not think that it will do more than put off the evil day, unless other help unlooked-for also comes, from Elves or Men. For the Enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn.1

Gandalf echoes Faramir’s need and foreshadows possible alliances on the horizon as he illustrates the gravity of the situation to Theoden, King of Rohan: “For not only the little life of Men is now endangered, but the life also of those things which you have deemed the matter of legend. You are not without allies, even if you know them not.”2 The unlooked-for help seen throughout the trilogy—in the form of Men, Elves, Ents, and the dead—gives the allies hope at crucial battle moments. Maintaining faith and optimism in collectivism is integral to victory: one must have faith in the things of legend and the possibilities of unforeseen alliances in order to maintain the hope that good will ultimately prevail. As the battle of good versus evil spreads throughout the wizarding community in the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film, Sirius Black gives Harry the ominous warning, “We think Voldemort wants to build up his army again. Fourteen years ago he had huge numbers at his command—not just witches and wizards but all manner of dark creatures.”3 As Harry and his allies make their last stand in the battle for Hogwarts, they appear to be outnumbered. Death Eaters, Acromantula, and giants assault the castle. These creatures are powerful and ruthless, yet their numbers do not swell even as the taste of victory appears near. Because of Voldemort’s cruelty and inability to understand love, Death Eater Narcissa Malfoy even assists Harry in an effort to protect her son, Draco. Only the moral cause can continue to recruit allies throughout the arduous battle because they seek not personal gain and power but personal freedoms and peace. Within these unlikely alliances, right makes might. After Harry’s rallying rebirth, the tide turns, with wizards and other magical creatures amassing to fight Voldemort’s army. Rowling writes, “And now there were more, even more people storming up the front steps . . . the families and friends of every Hogwarts student who had remained to fight, along with



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the shopkeepers and homeowners of Hogsmeade. The centaurs Bane, Ronan, and Magorian burst into the hall with a great clatter of hooves.”4 The importance of this description can be found when digging deeper into the context and recognizing that these forces were the same type of “unlooked for help” that Faramir referenced. Students, their families, residents of Hogsmeade, and the forest-dwelling centaurs could all have fled. They chose, instead, to join the thick of the battle. It was the people and places they loved that drew them to fight with Harry and the freedom he represented. And the mass of allies made a difference in the battle as “Death Eaters were folding under sheer weight of numbers.”5 Unlike the various Death Eaters who fled, including the Malfoy family, Harry’s allies believed in their cause and purpose, fighting for love, not power, and drawing from internal motivation rather than external fears of punishment. The importance of “numbers” can be seen not just in the epic stories of Tolkien and Rowling, but also in stories for all ages—from Star Wars, to Toy Story, to Gossip Girl, Glee, and The Walking Dead. In the first Toy Story film, Sheriff Woody must rely on Sid’s “mutant toys” to help him save Buzz Lightyear. Like the technocrat villain in Chapter 6, the toys form a motley Frankensteinian crew that turns on its creator. The common enemy in The Walking Dead is at times a human monster, but most often a zombie. As in Sid’s dangerous house, the world of the zombie apocalypse demands collectivist survival strategies. Leader Rick communicates this message to his very first ally, Morgan, “There’s just a few of us now so we got to stick together. Fight for each other. Be willing to lay down our lives for each other if it comes to that. It’s the only chance we’ve got.”6 With the need to watch for danger, fight against threats, and also meet the basic needs of food and shelter, The Walking Dead survivors have a hard time going it alone. Also uniting in the face of a common enemy, Gossip Girl’s Blair and Chuck set aside their sordid history to protect mutual friend, Serena, from blackmail. Gossip Girl narrates, “Blair and Chuck reunited to defend Serena’s honor. With friends like these, who needs armies?”7 Fighting the Empire required both friendship and an army in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. We see the interspecies alliance poignantly toward the end with catfish-like Admiral Ackbar at the helm during battle and a portrait of diversity in the intergalactic celebration following the second Death Star’s destruction.8 Glee can be considered a portrait of modern diversity as the club incorporates students of many subject positions and cliques. Teamwork and differences are essential to the show, according to the Wikipedia description that states that the club “competes on the show choir competition circuit while its disparate members deal with relationships, sexuality, social issues, and learning to become an effective team.”9 Glee’s song-and-dance numbers function as an artistic expression of the show’s ultimate message of togetherness.

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In the Twilight saga’s final confrontation, numbers are the essential first step to make the sinister Volturi vampire clan accept the diplomatic overtures from Bella, Edward, and their benevolent vampire family. When Bella asks Edward about the chances of the Volturi listening to them, he responds, “If we find enough friends to stand beside us. Maybe.”10 When speculation arises about further conflict with the Volturi, Irish vampire Siobhan promises that they would all “stand together” if the time ever comes when their “world is ready to be free of the Volturi altogether.”11 Numbers can create a collective voice with potential discursive power, but the commonly marathoned texts almost always end in a large-scale, interspecies battle. TALENT POOL At the end of the Twilight saga, it was ultimately a combination of numbers and powers that enabled the “good” vampires and werewolves to declare victory over the “bad” vampires. Writing from Edward’s perspective, Meyer states, “[W]e stood, ready, waiting, outnumbering them, with gifts of our own while their gifts were rendered useless by Bella. . . . There was even a good possibility that they would lose. They’ve never deal with that possibility before.”12 Bella’s special skill of being able to protect her allies from the Volturi vampire’s talents (such as inflicting pain, altering social relationships, and reading minds) was the trump card in the battle, and it was one of the most moral “powers” we see. She was feared for her ability to protect rather than destroy. The unique strengths of both defense and knowledge are showcased throughout the Hogwarts battle. Scatter-brained divination professor Trelawney heaves her crystal balls at the Death Eaters. “Looney” Luna Lovegood’s beliefs in myth and legend are instrumental in helping Harry both identify and locate the final Horcrux he must destroy. Bumbling, brave, green-thumbed Neville Longbottom throws ear-splitting mandrake plants at the Death Eaters and eventually destroys elusive snake Horcrux, Nagini, thus paving the way for Harry and Voldemort’s final duel. The battle is decided on the diverse, collective sum of the strengths each different person and creature brings. Several members of the zombie fighters’ group from The Walking Dead also boast defensive powers or survival skills. They can aid their group in unique ways and help them escape dangerous situations. Country boy Daryl hunts for food and uses his tracking skills to help the group on numerous occasions. Dale has the mechanical expertise to keep their means of protection and escape, their vehicles, running. Hershel keeps their bodies running by drawing from his knowledge of animal science. And while the women are



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often relegated to doing laundry and cooking in the beginning of the show, even Jacqui, who appears only in a few initial episodes, draws from her specialized knowledge as an employee of the Atlanta zoning office to help the group navigate a hairy escape through the city sewers. We see the unique contributions of Men, Dwarves, Wizards, and Elves in the defense of Middle-earth more visually as each group boasts varying appearances and weapons: swords, horses, axes, staffs, and bows. In the Two Towers film scene that elicits cheers from my “Hobbit Day” friends, Elf Haldir arrives with a team of archers just in time to defend the Helms Deep stronghold, declaring: “An alliance once existed between Elves and Men. Long ago we fought and died together. We come to honor that allegiance.”13 Although the film series’ poignant scene of interspecies cooperation is not part of Tolkien’s books, Elf Legolas foreshadows this film adaptation when he tells Dwarf Gimli at the battle of Helms Deep: “I wish there were more of your kin among us. But even more would I give for a hundred good archers of Mirkwood. We shall need them.”14 Haldir ultimately gives his life to the cause, dying “proud to fight alongside Men once more.” This exchange signifies both the erosion of old biases and the rebirth of old allegiances. These budding allegiances signify a collectivist mentality that acknowledges that all beings are at risk and all must work together for the greater good. Working together is essential for transforming a group from a loose collection of individuals to a strong, unified force. Those who boast extraordinary skills on their own can become an insurmountable power when joined with others. This theme is prevalent even in non-marathoned texts, including stories for children: Voltron (named after the giant robot created by members of the Voltron Force), My Little Pony (with their Elements of Harmony), and the Care Bears (with their powerful “stare”). Transformative collective power courses through stories for people of all ages, and is the basis of the Avengers Initiative. As Nick Fury explains, “The idea is to bring together a group of remarkable people, see if they could become something more. See if they could work together when we needed them to fight the battles we never could.”15 Togetherness is not easy to cultivate. Fury foreshadows the group’s teamwork struggles when he announces to the World Security Council, “These people may be isolated, unbalanced even, but I believe with the right push they can be exactly what we need.”16 After experiencing some initial fits and starts that lend credence to their labels of isolated and unbalanced, the Avengers unite to become that “something more.” In other words, they forsake their individualist mentalities in pursuit of powerful collectivism. Each Avenger has his or her unique talents to help defeat the enemy, Loki: The Black Widow uses her skills in psychological manipulation to figure out Loki’s plan; Iron Man’s technological expertise helps him anticipate the execution of that dastardly plan; Hulk uses his strength to subdue Loki; Hawk

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uses his sharpshooting skills to take down the aliens in Loki’s army. Most powerful, however, are the maneuvers that the team execute together, which are showcased in the film’s finale. And what helps the individuals transform is kindness and love. Bruce Banner comes to terms with his alter ego when told that the Hulk tried to save them as they fell from the sky. The Black Widow expresses her debt of gratitude to Hawk by helping him find selfforgiveness after he is corrupted by the enemy. These scenes foreshadow the transformative power of love covered in the next chapter, and illustrate a connective thread between these two chapters. OVERCOMING HISTORY The Avengers all have pasts to overcome and history is often an impediment to unity in other marathoned texts. In the Harry Potter series, wizards have a cruel history of oppressing other magical beings, including house-elves. Many of the unlooked-for allies Harry finds in his fight against Voldemort are drawn to his side because the muggle-raised wizard discards historical hierarchies, treating all manner of creatures humanely and kindly. One of Harry’s earliest acts of interspecies kindness is to free house-elf, Dobby, from serving the abusive Malfoy family. Dobby remained willingly in Harry’s debt and gave his life to save Harry’s. Following the fatal rescue and Dobby’s poignant burial, the goblin Griphook praises these heroic qualities of Harry’s: “‘If there was a wizard of whom I would believe that they did not seek personal gain,’ said Griphook finally, ‘it would be you, Harry Potter. Goblins and elves are not used to the protection or the respect that you have shown this night.’”17 That respect encourages Griphook to help Harry with a dangerous mission that is necessary to defeat Voldemort. Harry’s respect also inspires churlish house-elf Kreacher to rally others to Hogwarts’ defense. Kreacher issues this battle cry: “Fight! Fight! Fight for my Master [Harry], defender of house-elves.”18 Acts of compassion earlier in the series also paved the way for future alliances. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and Hermione literally turned back time to save Buckbeak, the hippogriff, from a death sentence, and in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hagrid literally took many lumps to rehabilitate his giant brother, Grawp. Kindness and compassion were rewarded with Buckbeak and Grawp later coming to their aid and fighting Voldemort’s giants. The house-elves from Harry Potter and the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi are both examples of diminutive beings who offer indispensable help. The Emperor’s hubristic assurance of his victory blinds him to the power the Ewoks have in helping the rebels deactivate the Death Star’s shield generator. Ewoks give the Rebel Alliance access to a secret entrance to the shield



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generator, rescue Han and Leia from Stormtroopers, and effectively battle mammoth AT-AT Walkers while using the rudimentary tools of rope, rocks, and catapults. They coordinate the whole battle with their dialect that prim robot C-3PO labels “primitive.” The house-elves similarly draw from their strengths and use their familiar weapons when fighting Death Eaters. In the midst of the most dangerous battle, they swarm into Hogwarts “screaming and waving carving knives and cleavers.”19 The house-elves draw their tools of domestic servitude to battle with their “masters” against a common enemy. In this example, the master’s tools preserved the master’s house. The Rebel forces and the wizards had not always treated Ewoks and house-elves with respect, yet these unexpected allies made all the difference in battle, by drawing from their unique tools, skills, and strengths. Ideally, compassion should not be motivated by the need to cultivate allies, nor should it be discarded once the battle is over. After Buzz Lightyear’s rescue, Sheriff Woody delivers the following edict to the neighborhood toytorturer, Sid: “From now on you must take good care of your toys, because if you don’t, we’ll find out.”20 Although kindness need not be a reciprocal exchange, it ought to be. Woody risks “breaking character” to talk to human Sid and protect his new mutant toy friends. This collectivist mentality—built on kindness, compassion, and love—is a guiding principle in the deontological ethics of commonly marathoned stories. In Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, Elf Celeborn positions forgiveness as a bellwether when he welcomes Dwarf Gimli to the Elven land of Lothlorien after years of animosity between their races: “May it be a sign that though the world is now dark better days are at hand, and that friendship shall be renewed between our peoples.”21 Universal kindness, compassion, and love will keep the new world order strong, capable of withstanding inevitable future villainy. EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY The primary lesson of the unlikely alliance theme is to clarify what the antithesis of the technocratic minions would look like. The people and creatures of the unlikely alliances aren’t forced into battle by the threat of punishment (or single-minded programming). They also don’t take a vote to go to war. They cast their votes with their bodies and their willingness to fight, and sometimes die for the cause. In the absence of a vote or the collective assent of “so say we all” seen in Battlestar Galactica, joining the battle is an endorsement of the mission. Free-willed individuals recognize the importance of the cause and willingly join to preserve collective freedoms. Their motive is not individualistic, but rather a sacrifice made for the collective good.

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Although the reference to the greater good or collective good evokes teleological ethics, the decision to prioritize group over self is often deontological. Rick illustrates this principle in The Walking Dead when he is faced with a decision to deliver one member of the group to a murderous sociopath in exchange for the promised protection of the rest of the group. Deciding to preserve the sanctity of life, he explains: I couldn’t sacrifice one of us for the greater good, because we are the greater good. We’re the reason we’re still here. Not me. This is life and death. How you live and how you die. It isn’t up to me. I’m not your Governor. We choose to go. We choose to stay. We stick together.22

After he dabbles in puppeteering, giving others free will—the choice to decide how they will live and die—is a deontological principle that eventually forms the cornerstone of Grimes’ leadership. Allies in commonly marathoned texts may die, but they do so on their own terms, by choice, for the greater good. NOTES 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 321. 2. Tolkien, Two Towers, 168. 3. Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yates (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2007), DVD. 4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (New York: Scholastic, 2007), 734. 5. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 735. 6. The Walking Dead, “What Lies Ahead,” episode no. 7, first broadcast October 16, 2011 by AMC. Written by Ardeth Bey and Robert Kirkman, and directed by Ernest Dickerson and Gwyneth Horder-Payton. Netflix. 7. Gossip Girl, “Woman on the Verge,” episode no. 17, first broadcast May 12, 2008 by The CW. Written by Joshua Safran and directed by Tony Whamby. Netflix. 8. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1983), DVD. 9. Glee (Television Series). Wikipedia, March 5, 2013, accessed March 5, 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glee_%28TV_series%29 10. Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 581. 11. Meyer, Breaking Dawn, 743. 12. Ibid., 745. 13. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, directed by Peter Jackson (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2002), DVD. 14. Tolkien, Two Towers, 147.



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15. The Avengers, directed by Joss Whedon (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2012), DVD. 16. The Avengers, DVD. 17. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 488. 18. Ibid., 734. 19. Ibid. 20. Toy Story 1, directed by John Lasseter (Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Pictures, 1995), DVD. 21. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 398. 22. The Walking Dead, “This Sorrowful Life,” episode no. 34, first broadcast March 24, 2013 by AMC. Written by Scott Gimple and directed by Gregory Nicotero. Netflix.

Chapter 10

Love and Friendships

Although I’ve spent two chapters describing the nuance of what sets the heroes apart from the villains, it can be summed up in one word: love. Commonly marathoned texts reveal that the ability to give and receive love imbues people, creatures, and objects with a soul. This soul can be described as an immaterial entity that transcends the living, breathing body. The soul is the positive impact one has on the world, which lives on even after one’s body dies. The form of soul-giving and soul-nurturing love that we see in marathoned stories is primarily evinced through friendships. A hero must surround herself or himself with friends in order to defeat the evil force that threatens their way of life. As those friends choose to follow the hero into unspeakable danger, readers and viewers see that the building blocks of those friendships, those loving relationships, are loyalty, selflessness, and honesty. What this love accomplishes is without boundary: it is a transformative old magic that gives the hero insurmountable power. We see the strength of love-infused power in vampire Spike’s indignant reaction to Buffy’s support network, “A slayer with a family and friends? That sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure.”1 DECLARATION OF LOVE AND LOYALTY Marathoned storytelling convention demands that before heroes and their friends undertake a dangerous mission together, heroes should try to convince their friends not to come along, to remain safe instead. Sam is clearly Frodo’s most loyal companion in the Lord of the Rings films, but the books emphasize the broader collection of friends who support Frodo on his journey. Brave hobbit Merry exemplifies this loyal, loving friendship as he reassures 143

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Frodo, “You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin—to the bitter end. . . . But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. . . . We are horribly afraid—but we are coming with you.”2 Hermione Granger is more blunt than Merry, but the sentiment is the same. When Harry Potter announces his solo journey at the conclusion of the film The Half-Blood Prince, Hermione responds, “I’ve always admired your courage, Harry, but sometimes you can be really thick. You don’t really think you’re going to be able to find all those Horcruxes by yourself, do you? You need us, Harry.”3 Indeed, Harry did need not only Hermione and Ron, but also Neville, Luna, and other unlooked-for help along the way. A key piece of these “I’m going alone/I’m coming with you” exchanges is that the hero must seek to insulate friends from the danger they would collectively face. The heroes’ full disclosure in these conversations runs counter to the puppeteers’ selective information giving. Like the puppeteers, the heroes are looking out for the greater good, but they are also following the most ethical pathways in their pursuit of victory over evil. Merry’s commitment to Frodo comes after pages of dialogue in which Frodo emphasizes the known and unknown risks their quest involves. After his friends commit themselves to him and the mission, Frodo protests, “But I could not allow it. I decided that long ago, too. You speak of danger, but you do not understand. This is no treasure-hunt, no there-and-back journey. I am flying from deadly peril into deadly peril.”4 The brave hobbits are aware of the risks and the odds, but they stand strong, with Merry firmly stating, “We know the Ring is no laughingmatter; but we are going to do our best to help you against the Enemy.”5 At several turning points in their journey, Frodo does not accept his friends’ loyalty, but rather tries to protect them from the new harms ahead. When Frodo realizes he must disband their Fellowship to make his way to Mordor, Sam chases (or rather, swims) him down, pleading, “All alone without me to help you? I couldn’t have a borne it, it’d have been the death of me.”6 After Frodo again exercises his honesty and tells Sam that he is going to certain doom at Mordor, Sam replies knowingly, “Of course you are. And I’m coming with you.”7 Sam’s loyalty overrides Frodo’s concern for his friend, eliciting a laugh from the ring bearer as Tolkien writes, “A sudden warmth and gladness touched his heart. . . . ‘So all my plan is spoilt!’ said Frodo. ‘It is no good trying to escape you. But I’m glad, Sam. I cannot tell you how glad.’”8 Through these exchanges between Frodo, Harry, and their friends, we also see that being a friend cuts both ways: a hero has the impulse to protect the friends that he or she loves, and the loyalty of friends almost always overrides the hero’s protective impulse. Friends must stick together and draw strength from one another.



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Buffy Summers’ life as a vampire slayer does not involve one extensive quest, but rather a series of foes to be vanquished through nearly nightly missions. In the third season, heroine Buffy uses her tongue-in-cheek humor in an attempt to persuade Willow, her right hand witch, to skip a mission. Buffy: You shouldn’t come tonight. Is that cool? Willow: Sure. Makes sense. You’ll be facing big hairy danger. Buffy: Biggest. Very hairy. Willow: You’ll be risking your life. Buffy: Right. And why risk yours? Willow: ‘Cause I’m your friend.9

Buffy’s friendships, which are featured in this and nearly every episode, were essential to marathoner Kayla’s enjoyment of the show. She appreciated that Buffy “has a close-knit group of friends who she can rely on for everything. But, at the same time, she’s independent.” And therein lies the balance: heroes must be independent enough not to put their friends in needless danger, but humble enough to accept friends’ honest offers of help. Maggie of The Walking Dead is an exemplar of this humility as she first issues the “I’m going alone” ultimatum to her allies in season four and surreptitiously leaves without them to seek her husband, Glenn. She is one standout example of violating this dialogue convention, however, as she eventually waits for her friends and tells Sasha, “I thought that I couldn’t ask you to risk your life, but I can—‘cause I know what you’d be risking it for.”10 During the zombie apocalypse, humans risk their lives every day. Although Maggie is initially concerned about putting her friends in further danger, her speech to Sasha emphasizes the importance of fighting to preserve relationships. To stay safe, they all need each other. And to preserve their humanity, they need to need each other. Friends are sometimes parted because of various factors, but these departures pave the way for renewed commitments of friendship and timely reunions. Ron leaves Harry and Hermione toward the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but he perseveres in returning to his friends, arriving just in time to save Harry’s life and make an important breakthrough in their Horcrux quest. A timely return also happens in Firefly’s eighth episode titled “Out of Gas,” after spaceship captain Malcolm Reynolds sends the crew away when an accident leaves them with limited oxygen. As we see in commonly marathoned stories, loyalty overrides risk: the crew ignores their peril and returns just in time to save their captain. Mal reveals his gratefulness that

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their loyalty overrode his orders as he drifts off to rest and recover from the ordeal, making sure, “You all gonna be here when I wake up?”11 At times we see heroes successfully sneak off on their own. A hero leaving his or her group almost always comes at the end of the story, after friends have worked together to weaken the villain and get the hero in “check” position. This move is the last statement of the hero’s bravery—the willingness to strike out solo and face the archenemy if it becomes clear that the showdown of good versus evil will end in a duel. This move of deception (sneaking away from one’s friends) is a risk that often pays off because of the hero’s ultimate return. It is the one example of the hero employing teleological ethics. When Harry Potter leaves his friends to confront Voldemort and face what he expects to be a certain death, Rowling writes, “This was a journey they could not take together, and the attempts they would make to stop him would waste valuable time.”12 It is the greater good that motivates Harry to act alone. Another key example of this solo mission is when Luke Skywalker tells Leia that he must face Darth Vader alone at the culmination of Return of the Jedi. She pleads, “Luke, run away, far away!” But like a true collectivist, Luke runs into danger rather than away from it. It is also Luke’s love for his absentee father that draws him out of the relative safety of his friends’ company to pursue his confrontation with Vader. He explains to Leia, “I can save him. I can turn him back to the good side.”13 In this exchange, we see the hero’s traits of not just honesty and bravery, but also optimism. Following his willing self-sacrifice, Harry Potter chooses to leave the warmth and light of his near-death state and reenter the battleground. Harry makes this choice after the repentant puppeteer Dumbledore finally gives him an honest answer that captures the complications of the situation and puts the well-informed choice into the hero’s hands: “[I] f you choose to return, there is a chance that [Voldemort] may be finished for good.”14 Heroes cling to the hope that good will prevail over evil and are willing to risk their lives—or their comfort and relative peace—to pursue that victory. LOVE IS TRANSFORMATIVE Harry’s great capacity to love is what motivates many of his actions. This love gives life meaning. It transforms an individual life into a collective life, and in doing so, it gives greater significance to what could be a solitary existence. This collectivism is evident in the Lost finale: a group of disparate people, many of whom have confronted morally challenging questions together, exemplify forgiveness and togetherness as they assemble to transition from purgatory to heaven in concert. We also see the transformative quality of



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love exemplified in Frodo’s ability to recall Smeagol from his ring-possessed alter ego, Gollum. Despite being captive to the One Ring’s malicious spell, Smeagol still retained a glimmer of that capacity to love. Upon seeing Frodo sleeping like a child in Sam’s lap, Tolkein writes: The gleam faded from [Gollum’s] eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. . . . For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.15

Even after decades of a tortured existence, simply seeing the love of others and recognizing its value has the power to call Smeagol back to himself. Smeagol’s fleeting transformation supports Frodo’s claim that finding unlooked-for friendship “turns evil to great good.”16 Like Smeagol’s internal struggle, Peeta’s fight is to preserve his soul despite being thrust into the soulless Hunger Games. Peeta makes a commitment to a life worth living (despite the harshest circumstances) when he expresses his desire to play the brutal Games on his own terms, confessing to Katniss, “I want to die as myself. . . . I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.”17 Peeta’s decision to stay “himself” means his prioritizing his love for Katniss over his own life. Katniss initially mocks Peeta’s plans for a noble death, but readers eventually see her deal with the tension between survival and love as she explains her complex emotions surrounding the death of Thresh, another teenager sent to kill her in the Hunger Games: “I should be happy, right? One less tribute to face. And a powerful one, too. But I’m not happy. All I can think about is Thresh letting me go, letting me run because of Rue, who died with that spear in her stomach.”18 What readers can take from Katniss’s story is that love and survival are not at odds; rather, love is essential to survival. Thresh and Katniss’s shared love of Rue convinced Thresh to save Katniss’s life. More importantly, her complex emotions following Thresh’s death are what mark Katniss not just as alive, but also as human. We can also see the transformative power of love in the relationship between person and object. When Sheriff Woody has a crisis of purpose in Toy Story 2, Buzz Lightyear reminds him, “Somewhere in that pad of stuffing is a toy that taught me that life is only worth living if you’re being loved by a kid.”19 This Velveteen Rabbit parable teaches us that the objects of our love and the sources of our love may change, but the life worth living must always maintain the capacity to give and receive love. Serenity’s Captain Mal evokes this theme as he explains his relationship with his spaceship (what he calls a “boat”):

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Love. You can learn all the math in the ‘verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don’t love. She’ll shake you off just as sure as the turn of the world. Love keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down. Tells you she’s hurting before she keens. Makes her a home.20

In the latter part of this quote, viewers can glean the significance of this “boat.” It is more than a ship, more than an object of transportation. Rather, it is a home—a metonym for the family of unrelated but dedicated crew members she harbors. If she falls down, if she keens, she fails to protect the family within. Mal Reynolds may love his ship, but the true sources and recipients of his love are the occupants within.

LOVE AS THE ULTIMATE WEAPON Although it feels exploitative to call love a “weapon,” it functions that way in many marathoned stories. Rather than being a weapon that harms, however, it is a weapon that protects. And this defensive weapon is all the more powerful because the technocrat villain is often blindsided by love’s old magic. When Luke Skywalker warns the dastardly Emperor in Return of the Jedi, “Your overconfidence is your weakness,” the Emperor replies simply, “Your faith in your friends is yours.”21 At the conclusion of the original trilogy, we see that the Emperor’s hubris was indeed his undoing and Luke’s faith in his friends was his strength. The Emperor’s cruel command of those who served him did not earn unbreakable loyalty, a key strength on which Luke relied. Human connections and kindness build the enduring loyalty that tips the scales in an epic battle. In the words of Gandalf from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (the first installment of a soon-to-be-marathoned trilogy), “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay, small acts of kindness and love.”22 As we see with the Emperor and evil wizard Saruman in the book The Return of the King, all-powerful relationships of friendship and love are often mocked by the villains whose hubris prevents them from forming the same bonds and from seeing the danger love poses to their dastardly plans. Arguably, no villain is blindsided by love more than Voldemort. Dumbledore highlights Voldemort’s contemptuous ignorance when he tells Harry, “Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing.”23 This theme is part of several books and also courses throughout their film adaptations. In one filmic example, Harry emphasizes his mother’s love as he tells weak-willed Professor Slughorn the story of his miraculous survival: “Do you know why



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I survived, Professor? . . . Because her love was more powerful than Voldemort.”24 Despite their similar backgrounds and their shared souls, love is what sets Harry apart and protects him from Voldemort as well. Although Harry Potter did not have the love of blood relatives throughout his young life, each installment of the series progressively builds his family of friends who are no less dedicated to him than a biological family would ideally be. Harry draws strength from the memories of those he loves to vanquish Voldemort from his body after Voldemort possesses him in the film The Order of the Phoenix. As viewers are treated to a montage of Harry’s moments of ebullient laughter with his friends, he issues a compassionate challenge to Voldemort, “You’re the weak one. And you will never know love or friendship. I feel sorry for you.”25 In Voldemort’s threat, “You are a fool, Harry Potter, and you will lose everything,” viewers see the key difference between hero and villain: Harry can have something to lose only because he loves. The faith of love is what makes his magic stronger than Voldemort’s. Unlike Voldemort, some villains do see the power of love. As this chapter’s opening quote illustrates, vampire Spike keys in on Buffy’s friends as the source of the slayer’s power. The season four conclusion vividly features the strength of Buffy’s friendships. Spike coaches “Big Bad” Adam, “The Slayer’s got pals. [If] you want to even the odds in a fight, you don’t want the Slayerettes mucking about.”26 Spike’s warning foreshadows the “Slayerettes” final move: They cast a spell to fortify Buffy with the power of her friends. Buffy’s ally Xander explains that “combo Buffy” has her “slayer strength, Giles’ multi-lingual know-how, and Willow’s witchy power.”27 In the combined voices of all her friends, Buffy taunts blindsided villain Adam: “You never hoped to grasp the source of our power.” Villains overestimate their abilities to grapple with this ineffable, intangible magic of love. Adam, on the other hand, had a typical technocrat evil power—nuclear power—which was easy for combo Buffy to identify and disable. Love is the clear tipping point in television show Firefly’s companion movie, Serenity. Viewers are brought into the dystopian future by witnessing Simon Tam’s daring rescue of his sister, River, from a high-security prison in which the Alliance was conducting neurological experiments on her. When reviewing the images of the escape, the site’s scientist proclaims Simon’s act “madness,” but “The Operative” sent to find Simon and River sees things differently: “Madness? Have you looked at this scan carefully, doctor? At his face? It’s love. In point of fact. Something a good deal more dangerous.”28 Like Darth Vader, The Operative’s ability to observe love and respect its power seems to have a domino effect in the movie’s culminating events. After being on the receiving end of a merciful act, The Operative pays that kindness forward, ultimately saving the protagonists.

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EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY Love and loss go hand in hand in marathoned texts, but our characters endure. The characters may not have any living blood relatives. They may not have a lifelong partner or spouse. But these fictive people and their real readers can all cultivate friendships. These friendships can be as strong and enduring as families. Through the conversations friends have before embarking on dangerous quests or journeys, we learn that these friendships are premised on loyalty, selflessness, and honesty. In comparison to the birth-right obligations of families, all these gifts of friendship and love may be stronger because they are willingly given—with no strings or DNA strands attached. The impact of friendship and love on story outcomes is without rival. Friendships are transformative and powerful. They are the building blocks of humanity, both maintaining a sense of humanity despite the most inhumane conditions and imbuing inanimate objects with sincere humanness. The ability to love and to cultivate relationships is what sets us apart from the creatures and machines spawned by the technocrat villain. And we must hold on to those abilities if we are to defeat the villains. Love maintains our heroes, keeps them dedicated to their quests, and ultimately tips the scales in favor of “good” when the showdown between good and evil eventually takes place. What this theme in the marathoned stories tells us is that the latest My Little Pony reboot has it right: friendship is magic. NOTES 1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “School Hard,” episode no. 16, first broadcast September 29, 1997 by The WB. Written by David Greenwalt and directed by John T. Kretchmer. Netflix. 2. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 118. 3. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, directed by David Yates (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Picture, 2009), DVD. 4. Tolkien, Fellowship, 117. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 457. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Bad Girls,” episode no. 49 first broadcast February 9, 1999 by The WB. Written by Doug Petrie and directed by Michael Lange. Amazon Instant Video. 10. The Walking Dead, “Alone,” episode no. 48, first aired March 9, 2014 by AMC. Written by Curtis Gwinn and directed by Ernest Dickerson.



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11. Firefly, “Out of Gas,” episode no. 8, first aired October 25, 2002 by FOX. Written by Tim Minear and directed by David Solomon. Netflix. 12. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (New York: Scholastic, 2007), 693. 13. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Directed by Richard Marquand. (1983. Los Angeles, CA, 20th Century Fox) DVD. 14. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 722. 15. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 366. 16. Tolkien, Two Towers, 342. 17. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic, 2008), 141. 18. Collins, Hunger Games, 307. 19. Toy Story 2, directed by John Lasseter (Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Pictures, 1999), DVD. 20. Serenity, directed by Joss Whedon (Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2005), DVD. 21. Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. DVD. 22. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, directed by Peter Jackson (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2012), DVD. 23. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 710, emphasis in original. 24. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, DVD. 25. Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yates (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2007), DVD. 26. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Yoko Factor,” episode no. 76, first broadcast May 9, 2000 by The WB. Written by Douglas Petrie and directed by David Grossman. Netflix. 27. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “The Yoko Factor.” 28. Serenity, DVD.

Chapter 11

Untenable Position

The idea for this chapter began with love triangles, an undeniable feature in commonly marathoned texts. Love triangles figure prominently in The Hunger Games, Outlander, and Star Wars series, in addition to the blood-lust series Twilight and Vampire Diaries. Although love triangles are an important plot thread, they are but a small piece of a larger storytelling device: the untenable position. This narrative theme explores choice—one of the most difficult aspects of being a moral human. We must learn how to decide between two equally unappealing (or equally appealing) alternatives. What’s more, as A Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin illustrates through Master Aemon’s advice to Jon Snow, we must make the decisions ourselves and enduringly bear their consequences: “Choosing . . . it has always hurt. And always will. I know. . . . You must make that choice yourself, and live with it all the rest of your days.”1 The quote captures Snow’s struggle, which marathoner Ivy laid out this way: “Is it better to have honor, or to have the love of your family? How do we choose the lesser of two evils in the world we live in today?” The untenable positions covered in this chapter are what Arrested Development’s precocious teen George Michael Bluth calls “a problem without an answer”2—or at least they are problems without a purely positive or simple answer. The dialogue from some commonly marathoned texts obscures the importance of choice, although their plots say otherwise. For example, Elf Lord Elrond Malaprop from the Lord of the Rings series tells the Council of the Ring: “You have only one choice: The ring must be destroyed.”3 (Perhaps there is no Elvish translation for the world “choice.”) In addition, the narrator’s consistent introduction to Arrested Development mistakenly announces that Michael Bluth “has no choice but to keep the family together.” Yet, we see throughout the seasons of Arrested Development that Michael repeatedly 153

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makes choices to support the family, to let them self-destruct, or to manipulate their decisions. In contrast to his older brother G.O.B. who often laments, “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” without taking corrective action, Michael usually falls back into a collectivist mentality of supporting his family even if he initially strays when faced with difficult choices. In the upcoming pages, I analyze the tensions of love versus love, and love versus duty, also capturing the thread of collectivism and individualism that courses through many of these untenable positions. TRIANGLE OF LOVE The untenable position is time-travel romance writer Diana Gabaldon’s bread and butter. The Outlander series opens with protagonist Claire choosing between eighteenth and twentieth century lives and loves. Starting the series as Claire Randall of the twentieth century, she settles on being Claire Fraser of the eighteenth century for a time, guiding the reader through her decisionmaking process using reason, emotion, and duty as her criteria. These criteria, however, are futile in Claire’s weighing of her choices of two centuries and two husbands. She opts to turn the landscape into an Ouija board and put faith in her feet—making her decision based on which man she walks toward. After choosing her life with Jamie Fraser, Claire holds him and weeps “because the choice was so freshly made, and because my joy for the man I held in my arms was mingled with a tearing grief for the man I would never see again.”4 In this situation, the celebration of love is tempered by the grief of loss. Once the protagonist decides, readers begin the long narrative journey to see if or how the protagonist comes to terms with the decision. Although their experiences were not as dramatic as Claire’s, two interviewees noted that a love triangle was part of the explicit appeal of the texts they marathoned. Danielle was intrigued by the Vampire Diaries’ character interactions because “the girl is dating one of the guys and the boyfriend has a brother and they both love this girl, and I’m going through that now.” Lara related to “feeling torn in relationships and with loyalties” in The Hunger Games series. Although the love triangle may be flattering, Danielle and Lara’s quotes suggest that the gravity of making that final decision is what resonated most with their lives. The choice itself is a challenge, and so is the process of learning to live with the choice. The difficulty of the love triangle decision is as much about love chosen as it is love forsaken. Edward, Twilight’s Romeo vampire, recognizes his power to literally and figuratively break his lifetime love, Bella. He captures this struggle in the first book, saying, “I want you to be safe. And yet, I want to be with you. The two desires are impossible to reconcile.”5 Edward’s inability



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to say goodbye to Bella activates Twilight’s compelling vampire-humanwerewolf love triangle. In commonly marathoned stories, the character at the apex of the triangle is most often a woman. To escape this triangle and its competing pulls, she must make a decision that will unavoidably hurt someone she loves (or at least likes and respects). Placing the woman in the decision-making role paves the way for male one-upmanship and emotional cliffhangers as the woman struggles with the prospect of cutting an important person out of her life. Bella struggles with love’s impact in the next book of the series, New Moon, as she befriends werewolf Jacob and doesn’t want to hurt him the way Edward once hurt her by leaving: “Even more, I had never meant to love [Jacob]. One thing I truly knew . . . was how love gave someone the power to break you.”6 Heroine Katniss Everdeen, too, suffers pain from her ability to hurt her two loves, Peeta and Gale: “Our romance became a key strategy for our survival in the arena. Only it wasn’t just a strategy for Peeta. I’m not sure what it was for me. But I know now it was nothing but painful for Gale.”7 In both stories, love and risk of life are intertwined. Edward’s love for Bella put her in peril and Peeta’s love for Katniss saved her. However, both of this paragraph’s book quotes elide the physical danger, focusing on emotional pain and the lingering hurt of unrequited love. Neither Bella nor Katniss has a magic ring or wand, but both recognize the power one wields by being loved. More than the immediate loss of love, the love triangle is also training for the eventual loss of love. Dragonfly in Amber, the second book of the Outlander series, reveals that both Frank and Jamie will precede Claire in death. Our protagonist must cope with the eventual loss of both men. Choosing Jamie over Frank and mourning the loss of Frank is essentially practice for coping with the eventual loss of Jamie. As she faces this latter prospect, Claire acknowledges that her fate is worse than death: “I didn’t mind dying— not with him. But to have to go on, to live without him—he was right, I had the worst of the bargain. But I kept it, because I loved him.”8 Ellen and her mother discussed this Outlander theme when facing their own loss. Ellen explained, “[M]y father is really sick. He has Alzheimer’s and he’s fading, it’s getting worse and worse. . . . When you love somebody it’s such a stupid thing to do. It’s stupid because we know like this is going to end either with a breakup or death. We know it, and we do it anyway.” Despite love being a “stupidity,” it is an emotion we can’t do without. The ability to give and receive love is a key difference between human and machine in Battlestar Galactica, with Cylon #5 observing of lovelorn human, Helo, “Even in his anguish, he seemed so alive.”9 If love is life, to love is to live. The film Return of the King highlights the inevitable loss of love when Elrond’s foresight shows his daughter, Arwen, that there is “death” but “there is also life” in her future with her love, Aragorn.10 In Elrond’s vision, Aragorn

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withers and dies while Arwen remains ageless. Arwen makes her choice in the film Fellowship of the Ring as she tells Aragorn, “I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the other ages of this world alone. I choose a mortal life.”11 Sheriff Woody faces a surprisingly similar choice to Arwen’s as he could be “adored by children for generations” in Toy Story 2 as part of a museum (a toy’s land of immortality), yet chooses to stay with his lifetime love, Andy, and his friends in Andy’s toy collection. The film series’s theme song “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” plays on a television in the background, reminding Woody of his loyalties before he forsakes the museum. Because of mortality, circumstance, and the fickleness of emotion, love is impermanent (unless one marries a vampire and converts to vampirism). The love triangle’s untenable position thus helps guide characters and readers through the eventual loss. CALL OF DUTY Friendships, families, and romantic relationships often create untenable positions by being at odds with one’s duty. The danger and self-sacrifice inherent in a hero’s journey are complicated by personal attachments. Self-sacrifice becomes a collective sacrifice when it means losing a loved one. Perhaps these complications are the reason many heroes are orphaned and the Jedi were initially forbidden to marry. For those of ambiguous morality, attachments can either unveil their sinister secrets or present leverage that others can use against them. Dexter Morgan makes many of his decisions based on “The Code of Harry,” which discourages emotional involvements. Jack Bauer of 24 also illustrates this point when he tells another Counter Terrorism Unit agent that his job has “ruined every relationship I had,” before stating “You cannot have a normal life and do this job at the same time.”12 The trajectory of 24’s narrative reinforces this point many times over. Luke Skywalker feels twice-orphaned, losing both his biological and adoptive parents. Perhaps because he cherishes his remaining relationships, Luke prioritizes love over duty when faced with the most difficult decisions. When Luke decides to cut his Jedi training short to rescue Han and Leia from Darth Vader, Master Yoda counsels him to keep the larger mission in mind and not make decisions based on individual people: “Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.”13 Yoda witnesses how the love for one person blinds Anakin Skywalker to the perils of the dark side. Despite Yoda’s centuries of wisdom, adhering to a collectivist mission is not always the moral path. Luke takes a risk to save his friends and furthers the Rebellion’s collectivist mission. In this example, Luke’s deontological



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ethics, rather than Yoda’s teleological ethics, yield the best outcome for the greatest number—and Luke is right in shrugging off the puppet’s attempted puppeteering. Unlike Luke, Ned Stark’s untenable position in A Game of Thrones does not receive a humane or tidy ending. His choices also involve weighing family, friendships, and duty. When he is asked to be the prestigious Hand of his friend, King Robert Baratheon, Ned’s wife Catelyn urges him to take the position (to assume the duty) to defend his family. Although he desires to refuse the position because his “duties are here in the north,” his wife Catelyn convinces him of the catch-22: “[Robert] will not understand that. He is king now, and kings are not like other men. If you refuse to serve him, he will wonder why, and sooner or later he will begin to suspect that you oppose him. Can’t you see the danger that would put us in?”14 This exchange marks the start of Ned’s family members being used as bargaining chips in A Game of Thrones. Ned loses his life in an effort to protect them. In characters of ambiguous morality, such as vigilante serial killer Dexter, attachments are shunned because they can be at odds with one’s terrible duty. In the fourth episode of Dexter, our protagonist explains the importance of maintaining his privacy and semi-solitary existence: “Human bonds always lead to messy complications, commitment, sharing, driving people to the airport. By the time I’d let someone get that close, they’d see who I really am, and I can’t let that happen.”15 Dexter’s mission is to maintain his anonymity, his secret life, which would be endangered by personal attachments. And we see personal attachments creating many challenges for Dexter in the first season finale as he chooses from among his vigilante code, the love of his biological family, the love of his adoptive family, and his desire to “be himself” in front of others. Ultimately, Dexter chooses his code and adoptive family over his other desires. The decision, however, clearly troubles the serial killer as Dexter informs his final season one victim “You know this isn’t easy for me,” before collapsing to the floor, wracked with emotional pain.16 Examining Dexter’s victim, a forensic analyst identifies “hesitation” in Dexter’s life-ending knife stroke. Dexter and other characters are often shown making decisions because of necessity, not out of clarity. Characters may not be confident in their decisions, but they always have to learn to live with the consequences. Families represent not just a potential loss of anonymity, but also a loss of control. One can do what one pleases in life, but having a family means that consequences and burdens must be shared with others. Jack Bauer began 24 with a family and attachments, but the antagonists quickly used those attachments as leverage against Bauer. As the series progressed, we saw the erosion of Bauer’s inner circle and increasing secrecy and anonymity as he undertook more covert, dangerous, and governmentally unsanctioned missions. Lori

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Grimes of The Walking Dead is another character whose family represented a potential liability. As she wrestled with the choice between terminating a pregnancy and bearing a child during the zombie apocalypse, she explained her hesitation to her husband: “You want me to bring a baby into this? To live a short, cruel life? . . . We can’t protect the son we have.”17 Because of the zombie apocalypse, pregnancy made the basic duty of survival and the duty of motherhood all the more challenging. In Grimes’ case, the pregnancy represented less control and more potential pain. Buffy Summers, too, must struggle to weigh (romantic) love against duty. Upon first recognizing her feelings for ancient brooding vampire, Angel, Buffy counsels herself, “I need to get over him . . . I’m the Slayer and he’s the vampire.”18 Their love is as unlikely as that of lion and zebra. The vampire/ slayer relationship goes through many notable ups and downs: Angel loses his soul and becomes a monster after taking Buffy’s virginity;19 Buffy regretfully pushes him into the mouth of hell to save the world;20 when he surprisingly comes back from hell as his old soul-full self, Buffy saves him from a curse by allowing him to feed on her.21 It is this last sacrifice that definitively changes and ends their relationship. In the stories of most heroes, duty and love are reconciled. However, for heroine Buffy and most ambiguously moral characters, duty often wins out over love. THE WAY OUT Some marathoned texts offer a tidy resolution to the untenable positions they propose and exploit throughout the story arc. Circumstances change or are not what the characters and readers initially expected. Stephenie Meyer finds convenient “outs” for two difficult choices she poses in the Twilight series. Should/Could Edward sentence Bella to the eternal damnation of vampirism so that they could be together forever? Circumstances demand that Edward convert her to a vampire because Bella will otherwise die from giving birth to their child. Problem solved. In terms of the love triangles in Twilight and other stories, an alternative partner may be found to break the love triangle into neat pairs. For example, a heartbroken werewolf might discover he is destined to unite with his former love’s half-vampire child. A relationship possibility might also be taken off the table. For example, a love triangle might be eradicated when a character discovers that she is related to a potential mate, thereby freeing her up to be with the handsome guy who is a better actor. Bella Swan even evokes this Star Wars storytelling device as she wishes “that Jacob Black had been born my brother, my fleshand-blood brother, so that I would have some legitimate claim on him that still left me free of any blame now.”22 In contrast, if the untenable position is



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one of being in love with a relative (a la cousins George Michael Bluth and Maeby Fünke in Arrested Development), the problem may be solved by a deus ex machina that the narrator self-reflexively mocks: “artlessly explaining that the two leads weren’t biological cousins.”23 And in situations where cousins are encouraged to marry cousins, love triangles can also be ended by convenient deaths. When Matthew struggles to juggle his cousin Mary and unrelated fiancé Lavinia in Downton Abbey, Lavinia is stricken with the devastating Spanish flu. Knowing that Matthew prefers Mary over her, Lavinia tells Matthew on her death bed, “Isn’t this better, really? . . . You won’t have to make a hard decision.”24 Such plot twists often seem too convenient to be realistic, but if readers are gratified with the couple that they were rooting for, disbelief can be easily sublimated to diegetic trust. Duty also has its own “outs.” In the Christ stories of Narnia, Harry Potter, and, to some extent, Lord of the Rings, a hero’s impending death can be reversed because he has willingly made the moral, selfless choice. Old magic will allow lions to rise again, stone fauns can be brought back to life by the little girls for whom they sacrifice, and dead wizards can take a train out of King’s Cross station and back into a magical warzone. Frodo was saved several times—by his faithful friend Sam, by Gandalf-deployed Eagles, and again by Arwen Evenstar who gave him her place on the Elven boat to the Undying Lands of Valinor. Arwen’s generous gift perhaps eased the pain of her own untenable position: choosing her love Aragorn and their future son over spending a lonely eternity with her immortal Elven family. Arwen’s self-sacrifice was perhaps one of the decisions made with the greatest moral gravity. By forsaking her immortal life, she was able to give the gift of life twice-over (to her son and battle-scarred Frodo) and to bring joy and love to her life and Aragorn’s. A consistent theme among marathoned texts, which we see in this chapter and Chapter 7, “An Unlikely Hero,” is that selflessness is to be prized above all other traits. EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY The common untenable positions seen in marathoned texts are choosing between two loves or love and duty. Yet, before these difficult decisions are made, protagonists may find themselves with a convenient “out.” Authors may want readers to squirm for a time, but then ease their pain by presenting a tidy solution. Relationships may change and choices may become clear or obvious. One can never predict the outcome of decisions, so a sacrifice made for duty may not ultimately be at odds with love. Although readers and viewers may not find themselves in love triangles or situations that involve a dangerous duty, the difficulty of making decisions

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certainly resonates with common life experiences. People, obligations, and desires pull us in many (sometimes incompatible) directions. A more realistic iteration of the love triangle might not be one of comparing one person to another, but one of comparing the relationship available to the relationship expected. Because of built-up expectations, parents may not approve of their adult child’s love interest. Or, when children are involved, single parents may struggle to make romantic love compatible with family love. Employment opportunities may take partners in different directions (and different geographic regions), sometimes ending in the dissolution of a relationship. Even if difficult situations don’t present themselves right away, we must prepare ourselves for the eventuality of all loves and lives being ultimately lost. In many of those cases, we won’t be able to make a choice. We just have to learn to accept the outcome. And accepting outcomes—whether made by choice or by circumstance— is a key piece of the untenable position’s teaching. Gandalf oversimplifies the magnitude of these choices when he tells Frodo in the film The Fellowship of the Ring, “All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”25 The untenable position equipment for living is more developed in Outlander when Claire Fraser/Randall continues to struggle with the morality of her love triangle decision. Her religious counselor attempts to allay Claire’s regrets and guilt, explaining that because God created both good and evil, good people will “encounter greater confusion and difficulties in their lives.”26 Difficult decisions, it seems, are a religious and moral necessity. We need to first figure out our values and decision-making process predicated on those values. Then we must learn to accept our decisions and the persons who made them. NOTES 1. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Books, 2011), 553–54. 2. Arrested Development, “The Cabin Show,” episode no. 41, first broadcast September 19, 2005 by FOX. Written by Mitchell Hurwitz and Jim Vallely and directed by Paul Feig. Netflix. 3. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2001), DVD. 4. Diana Gabaldon, Outlander (New York, NY: Bantam Dell, 1991), 413. 5. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 339. 6. Stephenie Meyer, New Moon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 219. 7. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York: Scholastic, 2009), 9.



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8. Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber (New York, NY: Bantam Dell, 1992), 705. 9. Battlestar Galactica, “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down,” episode no. 9, first broadcast March 4, 2005 by Sci-Fi. Written by Jeff Vlaming and directed by Edward James Olmos. Netflix. 10. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, directed by Peter Jackson (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2003), DVD. 11. Fellowship of the Ring, DVD. 12. 24, “2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.,” episode no. 50, first broadcast November 4, 2003 by FOX. Written by Joel Surnow and Michael Loceff and directed by Jon Cassar. Netflix. 13. Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Kershner (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1980), DVD. 14. Martin, Game of Thrones, 55. 15. Dexter, “Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” episode no. 4, first aired October 22, 2006 by Showtime. Written by Drew Z. Greenberg and directed by Robert Lieberman. Netflix. 16. Dexter, “Born Free,” episode no. 12, first broadcast December 17, 2006 by Showtime. Written by Daniel Cerone and Melissa Rosenberg and directed by Michael Cuesta. Netflix. 17. The Walking Dead, “Secrets,” episode no. 12, first broadcast November 20, 2011 by AMC. Written by Angela Kang and directed by David Boyd. Netflix. 18. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Angel,” episode no. 7, first broadcast April 14, 1997 by The WB, Written by David Greenwalt and directed by Scott Brazil. Amazon Instant Video. 19. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Innocence,” episode no. 26, first broadcast January 20, 1998 by The WB. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Joss Whedon. Amazon Instant Video. 20. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Becoming: Part II,” episode no. 34, first aired May 19, 1998 by The WB. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Joss Whedon. Amazon Instant Video. 21. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Graduation Day: Part II,” episode no. 56, first aired July 13, 1999 by The WB. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Joss Whedon. Amazon Instant Video. 22. Meyer, New Moon, 218. 23. Arrested Development, “The Righteous Brothers,” episode no. 40, first aired April 16, 2005 by FOX. Written by Mitchell Hurwitz and Jim Vallely and directed by Chuck Martin. Netflix. 24. Downton Abbey, “Season 2, Episode 8,” episode no. 15, first aired November 6, 2011 by PBS. Written by Julian Fellowes and directed by James Strong. PBS.org. 25. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2001), DVD. 26. Gabaldon, Outlander, 606.

Chapter 12

Ambiguous Morality

As vigilante serial killer Dexter Morgan tells us in his monologue, morality isn’t simple: “It was Harry who always had the answers. He knew who was good, bad, safe, or dangerous. I built my life on Harry’s code. I live by it. But Harry lied. . . . My concrete foundation is turning to shifting sand.”1 Even an “ethical code” can morph from a seemingly concrete foundation into shifting sand. The theme of ambiguous morality permeates much of the “quality” television programs airing today. From Dexter, to widowed suburban drug dealer Nancy Botwin, to advertising executive Don Draper with an assumed identity, to terrorism preventer and frequent torturer Jack Bauer, viewers are being asked to find redeeming qualities in morally questionable main characters. This theme has the most support from scholarly articles and from marathon interviewees, suggesting that ambiguous morality is at the forefront of our reading and viewing consciousness.2 We can see from Chapter 6, “Technocrat Villain,” and Chapter 7, “An Unlikely Hero,” that both good and bad must be present in our stories. This chapter, however, addresses examples of heroic and villainous traits wrapped up in the same person. Muddying the categories of good and evil is an important process as one matures into adulthood, as we see from this exchange between Buffy the vampire slayer and her mentor, Giles: Buffy: Nothing is ever simple anymore. I’m constantly trying to work it out. Who to love or hate. Who to trust. It’s just like the more I know the more confused I get. Giles: I believe that’s called growing up. Buffy: I’d like to stop then, OK? [Without pausing the conversation, she stabs a former-friend-turned-vampire who rises from his grave.] 163

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Giles: Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats. And uh, we always defeat them in a safe way. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after. Buffy: Liar.3

This exchange uses traditional Hollywood markers of good and evil (markers that the show often employs) to expose the complexity of human interaction. Just like Dexter, Buffy craves a clear path—an easy code to follow. But as she calls Giles a liar, we see that Buffy recognizes this impossibility. Marathoners’ appreciation for the media representations of nuanced morality suggest that they know what Buffy does: good and evil aren’t neat and tidy categories that we can easily recognize and react to. As marathoned texts present nuanced representations of good and evil, we can learn how to confront our own uncertainties to forge a moral path. After proposing a five-part test of morality and situating several characters on a moral continuum to illustrate the test’s application, I address two essential themes that encourage viewers to understand these complex figures: a sympathetic back story and acts of redemption. These themes do not excuse the ambiguously moral characters, but rather represent possible openings for viewer sympathy. Marathoner discourse and extant scholarly research suggest that characters of ambiguous morality promote the blurring of the real and fictive worlds. Quantitative research confirms that readers interpret morally ambiguous characters as more realistic than characters who are considered consistently immoral, the realism also leading to greater narrative transportation or story world immersion.4 Woven throughout this chapter’s analysis is marathoners’ observations of ambiguously morality and how that theme enriched their experience with the text. Many marathoners saw ambiguous morality as an element of humanity or a kernel of reality in these fictive texts. TEST OF MORALITY Characters of ambiguous morality occupy a continuum from more to less moral. Drawing from my readings of the commonly marathoned texts and the marathoner discourse, I created this list of questions, accounting for situations, narrative outcomes, and character constructions, to situate the characters on the continuum: 1. What circumstances does the character find herself or himself in that may call for a violent response? 2. Is there a way out that avoids violence?



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3. What is the impact of one’s violence or illegal actions on collective society? 4. What of the character’s history evokes reader sympathies? 5. Does the character express remorse? After providing examples of the less moral and the more moral ends of the continuum, I discuss characters who fall into a gray area. The violence seen in the Indiana Jones series likely gets a pass from viewers because it is safely ensconced in the action film genre and Jones is a likeable rogue (much like Han Solo). Jones, however, does not perform well in the test of morality. He fails both questions 1 and 3: the circumstances don’t always force him to violence, and building up museum collections is not of such a great benefit to society that it demands murder. As we see in the memorable scene from The Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Jones does not flee, but rather calmly shoots the “Cairo Swordsman,” he fails question 2: this violence was simply taking the easy way out rather than the moral way out. Jones is an archaeological pirate, stealing and killing to collect various artifacts because they “belong in a museum.” And in his world of archaeological piracy, it doesn’t matter if Han shoots first. Indiana Jones’ character perhaps would not be so popular in the contemporary media landscape. “Heroic,” action-based violence—of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon era—has taken a backseat to more nuanced and complex portrayals. One of the shared qualities between our ambiguously moral characters is that they hurt or even kill others, but these ultimate acts of violence do not mean that a character is completely amoral. Take, for example, Buffy Summers and Katniss Everdeen. Buffy primarily slays vampires and other violent creatures, but she is still one who ends life. As sometimes-ally vampire Spike informs her, “Death is your art. You make it with your hands day after day.”5 We see clear parallels between Buffy and Katniss who uses the final installment of The Hunger Games series to ruminate on her moral identity. Katniss reflects on a song her father sang called “The Hanging Tree”—a haunting ballad reminiscent of “Long Black Veil” and “Strange Fruit”—stating, “I used to think the murderer was the creepiest guy imaginable. Now, with a couple of trips to the Hunger Games under my belt, I decide not to judge him without knowing more details.”6 She gives readers a greater insight into her self-concept a hundred pages later, noting, “All those months of taking it for granted that Peeta thought I was wonderful are over. Finally, he can see me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly.”7 What Katniss says about being violent, manipulative, and deadly is true. But I excuse her for it (and consider her a hero) because she performs so well on questions 1, 3, and 5: Katniss finds herself in dangerous circumstances, pursues a collectivist mission, and often reflects on and regrets her violent

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actions. In sum, I disagree with the serial killer from Dexter’s first season who tells him, “You can’t be a killer and a hero. It doesn’t work that way.”8 Maybe Dexter is not a hero (indeed, I would argue that he is not), but some killers can be heroes when seen through a teleological lens. Katniss’s violence and manipulation are both a means of survival and a means of facilitating a revolution against authoritarian rule in Panem. Both her and Buffy’s violent actions ultimately save many more lives than they cost. Jack Bauer of 24 is another ambiguously moral character who often uses violence and deception with the goal of saving lives. In her dissertation about the rhetoric of torture, Amanda Davis Gatchet writes, “Jack Bauer is not depicted as a violent man; he is portrayed as a devoted husband (and eventual widow[er]), father, friend, and patriot. Because Bauer is a likable character placed in impossible situations, viewing audiences are encouraged to identify with him.”9 While employed by the fictitious U.S. government Counter Terrorism Unit in 24, Bauer exhibits loyalty to society and family, which humanize him and offer an excuse for his acts of torture and deception. At least in the show’s initial seasons, Bauer can be considered a key example of what marathoner Julian described as “a good guy doing bad things for good reasons.” If Indiana Jones and Katniss Everdeen are on opposing sides of the ambiguously moral spectrum, both Jack Bauer and Dexter Morgan belong somewhere in the middle. Dexter has a way out that avoids violence—reliance on the justice system through which he is employed as a police blood spatter analyst. However, as with our heroines and counter-terrorism agent discussed above, his outcomes may be seen as benefiting society. Dexter employs teleological ethics in the very first episode when announcing that, as a result of his killing of serial killers, “My own, small corner of the world will be a neater, happier place.”10 We can visualize this happier place in other episodes, such as “Born Free,” in which Dexter walks through an imagined receiving line of congratulations from both his law enforcement colleagues and the general public who tell him, “Way to take out the trash!” and “All right, Dexter! Protecting our children!” Dexter says, “Deep down, I’m pretty sure they’d appreciate a lot of my work,” and I suspect that some viewers would agree. The very first episode encourages audience sympathies as Dexter murders a man who abuses and kills children. Dexter attempts to draw lines between himself and this “monster” when he says, “Children, I could never do that, not like you. Never ever kids. I have standards.”11 The latter statement— I have standards—is the piece that rings false. Dexter has a code, but someone who frequently murders does not have firm moral standards when there are alternative means of “taking out the trash.” For some characters, initial steps on a path of violence or illegal action become a slippery slope. Breaking Bad’s Walter White and Weeds’ Nancy



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Botwin are prime examples of characters who may have initially evoked viewer sympathies but who gradually eroded those sympathies through the series. Walter initially began cooking and dealing methamphetamine to make money for his cancer treatments and to provide for his family upon his eventual death. The eighth episode, titled “737,” captures his goal ($737,000), which he has calculated to ensure his family’s financial security. Like Walt, Nancy also begins dealing drugs to provide for her family. Their initial circumstances offer a selfless excuse for these illegal actions, but personal gain becomes the focus as these antiheroes become deeply enmeshed in drug subcultures and harm their families as a result. These antiheroes also fail the latter two questions on the ambiguous morality test: they can easily avoid violence or illegal actions and their actions do not benefit society. Marathoner Wendy found herself reacting with anger when Walter was presented with a suitable employment alternative, but refused to give up the meth game. After watching him turn down a laboratory job (with health insurance to cover his cancer treatments), Wendy wrote in her marathoning journal, “It seemed to me that Walt likes the thrill of cooking meth and doesn’t want to lose that one thrill he has left in him. . . . Walt could have taken the job and not needed to cook meth for money.” Wendy’s interpretation of Walt’s motives foreshadow a poignant exchange between Walter and his wife, Skylar, in the series finale. Skylar begins, “If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family,” before Walt confesses, “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really, I was alive.”12 Nancy, too, has a few legitimate jobs throughout Weeds, but she always goes back to the quick and thrilling money of drug dealing. In the cases of Walt and Nancy, ego, thrills, and power ultimately supersede good intentions. SYMPATHETIC BACKSTORY It may not be a character’s existing circumstances but his or her past that encourages readers to understand and even sympathize with his or her amoral actions. Readers can understand how the character got to that place and may even see good intentions inside misguided plans. Josie appreciated nuance in the X-Men stories, seeing Magneto as more than a one-dimensional “bad guy.” She stated, “Magneto is pretty evil, but he’s got this history, and you kind of get where he’s coming from and why he’s doing these things.” When the long-form story arc traces the trajectory of an antihero, a piecemeal backstory can offer reader gratification. When reading 50 Shades of Grey, my main question was why Grey acts the way he does. Both Grey and Don Draper of Mad Men can have their amoral actions traced back to being born to prostitutes. In a series of flashbacks, viewers also see that Draper suffered

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abuse at the hands of his adoptive family. Writing about Mad Men in her marathoning journal, Greta stated, “I feel conflicted about Don’s character because he is morally ambiguous. As much as his actions frustrate me and violate so many of my values, I can’t help but feel that he is simply human.” Viewers need not identify with the morally ambiguous characters to recognize their humanity, including the horrible life circumstances that lead to bad choices. Being human means being flawed, and these flaws are more tolerable if they can be traced back to traumatic circumstances. Discussing the protagonist of her favorite television show, Dexter, Natalie states, “He explains in great detail over the course of the six seasons that have been aired, he explains why he feels alone, and I think that all of his reasons are very relatable.” This January 1, 2014 Tweet from @Dexter clarifies his sympathetic backstory, his feeling of isolation, and his commitment to vigilante justice: “The last time I was in a pool of my mother’s blood, I was too young to do anything about it. But I’m no longer a child.” The diegetic explanation for his homicidal urges is that Dexter witnessed the brutal murder of his mother as a child and sat in her blood for days before being found. This traumatic history offers viewers a way to excuse or at least understand Dexter’s psychopathic point of view. Sympathy for Dexter may be eroded if one compares him to other characters in the marathoned canon: Harry Potter, too, witnessed his mother’s murder and was arguably raised in worse circumstances than Dexter. Harry, however, took a different path, embracing deontological ethics in his quest to make the world a better place. REDEEMED TRAITORS Some characters start on an amoral path, but ultimately pay penance for their regrettable decisions. These characters have what I call a redemptive suturing, which allows readers to reflect back positively on the characters, despite their transgressions. These conflicted characters are driven by remorse and ultimately recommit to the moral cause. This recommitment often involves humility, deep sacrifices, and unaccomplished goals, but their enduring gift is that they willingly recommit to a collectivist cause. Other characters can forgive but can’t necessarily trust, or live in community with, the traitors. To use the language of The Walking Dead, these characters “can’t come back” or reenter the fold of humanity after their transgressions. In The Chronicles of Narnia chapter titled “Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time,” the White Witch informs Aslan, “every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to kill.”13 Analysis of popular stories suggests that authors have internalized the White Witch’s logic: the redeemed traitor



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role is largely fatalistic. The character’s journey in the narrative may be over, but his or her final act can live on. Merle Dixon of The Walking Dead is the quintessential redeemed traitor. His racism, sexism, and homophobia certainly cause discomfort in the group, but he later commits a more traitorous action, capturing former allies and delivering them to the sadistic “Governor.” We see the group struggle with how to deal with Merle after he leaves the Governor and attempts to rejoin the “good” side. They suggest locking him in a prison cell to maintain their own sense of safety, keeping him at a distance both figuratively and literally. Merle attempts to earn the group’s trust again by undertaking a solo mission to bargain with the Governor before the Governor attacks their prison stronghold. Merle explains, “This little trip—maybe it’ll keep that place standing. If I pull it off, maybe all is forgiven.”14 Perhaps realizing that he is beyond forgiveness in life, Merle attempts to bargain with the Governor, but his mission turns into a fatalistic one—to ambush the Governor. Merle may not have achieved his ultimate goal of assassinating the Governor, but his ambush gave his old friends a fighting chance by diminishing the strength of the Governor’s army. As with all redeemed traitors, Merle’s last act was his greatest. Boromir starts on the traitor pathway in The Fellowship of the Ring when he tries to forcibly take the ring from Frodo. However, Boromir’s transgression evokes reader sympathies by passing questions 1, 3, and 5. The ring takes his agency, with Frodo even telling Boromir “you are not yourself.”15 His purpose is also collectivist and admirable—he desires to defend his people from the onslaught of evil. Finally, Boromir expresses profound regret for his actions. In sum, Boromir has a regrettable moment of weakness, but selfishness and cruelty are not his enduring character traits. Cinematic devices vividly capture his transgression and repentance: Boromir’s voice takes on an omnipresent quality to signify that the ring has taken control of him and when he falls and “snaps out of it,” he shakes with tears and regret. Boromir’s humility leads to apologies and a valiant fight to save hobbits Merry and Pippin from Orc capture. When Boromir is dying, the film version of Fellowship of the Ring offers more forgiveness than the books with the following exchange between Boromir and Aragorn: Boromir: I tried to take the ring from [Frodo]. . . . Forgive me. I did not see. I have failed you all. Aragorn: No, Boromir. You fought bravely. . . . Boromir: I would have followed you, my brother. My Captain. My King. [Aragorn kisses his forehead.] Aragorn: Be at peace, son of Gondor.16

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Boromir’s last act of bravery, combined with this cinematic confession, apology, and humility ensure that he will rest in peace and that his legacy of bravery and heroism will be preserved. Severus Snape is one of the most well-known and perhaps the most wellloved redeemed traitors. Readers and viewers learn that instead of one final fatalistic action, Snape has performed many a sacrifice over a decade, serving as a double agent for the Order of the Phoenix to repent for feeding Voldemort information that led to the murder of James and Lily Potter. Marathoner Harper labeled Snape not ambiguously moral, but a hero: “[E]ven when you think that he might just be a straight up Death Eater and he’s killed Dumbledore, all of it was for a reason. . . . [H]e’s fighting for the good side, and he secretly was a hero.” She reflected on Snape’s morality compared to that of Dumbledore, one of our ambiguously moral puppeteers: “[Y]ou start the books and Snape is a generic bad guy and Dumbledore is like Santa Claus. And by the time you get to the end you learn that both of them have done all these good and bad things.” Sirius Black captures morality’s muddiness when he tells Harry in The Order of the Phoenix, “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on.”17 As we see with the redeemed traitor archetype, one can embrace the light after acting on the dark. EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY What the ambiguously moral theme in commonly marathoned texts offers to readers is a glimpse into raw humanity. Several marathoners overtly praised the complexity of their story’s characters, reveling in their messiness, humanness, and dimensionality. Josie remarked that “a story is much more rich if you have an evil character who is also a little human in some way because they have likability.” Damages marathoner Lena felt “satisfied in the characters,” calling them “complex.” In addition to complicated narratives, character complexity is another feature that both challenges readers and rewards them for commitment to a story as they witness character transformations unfolding. Lena’s enjoyment of the messiness of characters in Damages “makes me want to marathon other shows that feature anti-heroes and moral ambiguity. I am seeing The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Wire in my future.” After confronting questions of morality, Lena and other marathoners may take pleasure in continuing that line of questioning and comparing antiheroes. The trend of ambiguous morality in the contemporary media landscape and in the canon of commonly marathoned texts potentially offers a great reward to readers willing to muddy their conceptions of right and wrong and



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to reorganize the mental schema through which they sort various characters. In this process of confronting moral ambiguity, we may look past pointy hats and horns to see potential good. We may also look past a Santa Claus beard to see misguided decisions. The process of evaluating and reevaluating characters as they transform over the course of a narrative pushes us to question the placement of a line delimiting acceptable behavior, potentially evoking sympathy—or perhaps even mediated empathy—as we “feel with” these complex and complexly human characters.

NOTES 1. Dexter, “Father Knows Best,” episode no. 9, first broadcast November 26, 2006 by Showtime. Written by Melissa Rosenberg and directed by Adam Davidson. Netflix. 2. Two scholarly articles analyzing moral ambiguity in commonly marathoned texts are Beth Braun, “The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Ambiguity of Evil in Supernatural Representations,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 2. (2000); Michele Byers, “Dexter,” in The Essential Cult TV Reader, ed. David Lavery (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009), 92, 95. 3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Lie to Me,” episode no. 19, first broadcast November 3, 1997 by The WB. Directed by Joss Whedon. Written and directed by Joss Whedon. Amazon Instant Video. 4. K. Maja Krakowiak and Mary Beth Oliver, “When Good Characters Do Bad Things: Examining the Effect of Moral Ambiguity on Enjoyment,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 1 (2012): 131. 5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Fool for Love,” episode no. 86, first broadcast November 14, 2000 by The WB. Written by Douglas Petrie and directed by Nick Marck. Netflix. 6. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 126. 7. Collins, Mockingjay, 232. 8. Dexter, “Born Free,” episode no. 12, first broadcast December 17, 2006 by Showtime. Written by Daniel Cerone and Melissa Rosenberg and directed by Michael Cuesta. Netflix. 9. Amanda J. Davis, “Unveiling the Rhetoric of Torture: Abu Ghraib and American National Identity” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2008), 179–80. 10. Dexter, “Dexter,” episode no. 1, first broadcast October 1, 2006 by Showtime. Written by James Namos Jr. and directed by Michael Cuesta. Netflix. 11. Ibid. 12. Breaking Bad, “Felina,” episode no. 62, first broadcast September 29, 2013 by AMC. Written by Vince Gilligan and directed by Vince Gilligan. Netflix. 13. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Harper Collins, 1950), 155.

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14. The Walking Dead, “This Sorrowful Life,” episode no. 34, first broadcast March 24, 2013 by AMC. Written by Scott Gimple and directed by Gregory Nicotero. Netflix. 15. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2001), DVD. 16. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, DVD. 17. Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yates (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 2007), DVD.

Chapter 13

Postmodern Immersion and Interactivity

One quote refers to taking down a Galactic Empire in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, the other to taking down a historical landmark in How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM): Luke Skywalker/Ted Moseby: “I won’t fail you. I’m not afraid.” Yoda/Barney Stinson: “You will be. You . . . will be.”1

This set of mirrored dialogue represents intertextuality, which Gray defines as “instances wherein a film or program refers to and builds some of its meaning off of another film or program.”2 The dialogue is simple, with its use of everyday language and normative syntax, but the intertextual relationship provides many additional layers of meanings. It becomes an exchange involving two disparate story worlds, two meaningful contexts, and two sets of deep character histories. Media scholars commonly apply intertextuality in a way that is consistent with Gray’s use, but Julia Kristeva’s explication of intertextuality theory positions it not as a connection between two mediated artifacts, but rather as connections among systems of signs. She states that analysis of intertextuality reveals the cultural and historical fabric of these utterance patterns.3 Although Gray focuses on films and television programs in his definition of intertextuality, the concept has a rich history in literature, with Marie-Laure Ryan likening this literary device to a digital “hypertext,” the embedded code thus forging a link between the two texts.4 Ryan’s analogy carries important meaning, and more closely aligns with Kristeva’s definition, suggesting that the use of intertextuality in traditional media texts makes these texts part of a “World Wide Web” of signification. There are no links to physically click on 173

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in (print) books, film, and television, but readers must mentally click through and access the referential text if they are to play with the full range of available meanings. When accessing these mediated texts digitally, readers can also easily engage in interflow, with various screens open during the reading experience.5 Our minds and the internet are mutually influencing spaces where culture is negotiated and constituted. Intertextuality violates traditional textual borders, allowing the text to reach outside itself, as does self-reflexivity—the other literary device covered in this chapter. Self-reflexivity is a way for texts to comment on their own constructed worlds and give readers a behind the scenes look, thus opening their textual borders to let readers and viewers into the story world. Brooker observed “teasing nods in dialogue that treated the viewer as confidante” in Lost’s third season, which “subtly softened the boundary between the fiction and its viewers, flattering fans with another little in-joke.”6 I see selfreflexivity as a mutually confirming high five between text and reader. This narrative device promotes diegetic trust, presupposing a mental connection between reader and author (the woman/man behind the textual curtain). The reader’s recognition of self-reflexivity is an acknowledgement that author and reader understand each other through the narrative journey. In commonly marathoned texts, self-reflexivity often takes the form of acknowledging writing weaknesses, actor biographies, character habits, or common media tropes. A simple example of the latter form can be seen when HIMYM’s Ted Moseby discusses his “meet cute” with a love interest.7 Ted’s use of a cinematic term—the “meet cute”—is an acknowledgment of the series’ meta-narrative (which is highlighted in the series title How I Met Your Mother). The answer to the series question—how does Ted meet the kids’ mother?—has to be (and was) a meet cute. Whereas intertextuality blurs the borders between texts, ineluctably linking separate story worlds, self-reflexivity redraws the textual border in a secondary way: by blurring the boundary between writer and reader. Self-reflexivity lets us witness storytelling mechanisms and inner workings. That communion with the authors—a shared perspective—allows us to become part of the text. These two storytelling devices—intertextuality and self-reflexivity—are part of postmodern aesthetics, a system of thought in which meanings are “unstable, decentered, multiple, fluid, [and] emergent.”8 As intertextuality blurs the boundary between text/text and self-reflexivity blurs the line between author/reader and, secondarily, reader/text, meanings are less controllable or containable. Collectively, these two postmodern devices bring the narrative’s constructed nature to the readers’ level of awareness, encouraging readers to acknowledge, assess, and accept their role in the charade. Writing about cult television texts, a label applicable to many series referenced in this chapter, Sara Gwenllian-Jones notes that this genre makes “exuberant use



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of intertextual, intratextual, and self-reflexive references,” which promote “intense imaginative viewer engagements that may be immersive or interactive or both.”9 I see interactivity as an outgrowth of immersion: only after plunging into the story world and learning its nuance can we assume a more active role in the charade. Put differently, immersion is a license for interactivity. Like a telescoping game narrative, more privileges are unlocked as you further plumb the story’s depth. The ability and invitation to interact are two such privileges. These two storytelling devices offer added value to readers and texts. Although they were written and released decades apart, both the Star Wars franchise and HIMYM television show enhance each other’s value by stitching their texts together and thereby integrating them more tightly into the fabric of popular culture. Gwenllian-Jones argues that both intertextuality and self-reflexivity allow a text to extend its fiction beyond the original “text to a variety of other discourses and media incarnations.”10 By blurring their textual and authorial boundaries, these texts can have a life beyond their own. HIMYM readers can find added amusement or understanding by knowing the Star Wars stories and watching HIMYM. In addition to this chapter’s opening dialogue, HIMYM references the original Star Wars trilogy in many additional scenes. Indeed, Star Wars is a story that is essential to key moments in the characters’ telling of their own story. For example, liking the Star Wars movies is a “test of compatibility” between protagonist Ted and a future fiancée. Star Wars can also be seen as a “text of compatibility” for readers: like one story and you should like the other. When employing intertextuality and self-reflexivity, authors invite the audience into a shared knowledge circle: Only those “in the know” will understand and enjoy references and jokes. One can almost picture storytellers who commonly use strategies of intertexutality and self-reflexivity (like Joss Whedon and HIMYM’s Carter Bays and Craig Thomas) writing with multiple computer windows or screens open to various texts and fan sites. And viewers can gain enjoyment by following a similar path of understanding—fact-checking texts, reading websites, or looking at various fan sites to either confirm or get the joke. Better yet, viewers may have enough faith in their knowledge of popular culture that they are the ones confirming the jokes on the internet. For marathoners, these forensic fan practices often take place after engaging in marathoning’s insulated flow. They are a means to cope with one’s mind replaying notable moments in the marathoning journey. This chapter is my final piece in the development of the code of morality found in commonly marathoned texts because it comes back full circle to the reader: as they take part in warranting the story, willingly suspending disbelief and engaging in diegesis mining, readers are integrated into the text and better able to learn from the stories’ equipment for living. Texts, authors, and

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readers cannot stand alone: it is rather their engagement with one another that makes meaning—and makes the marathoning experience meaningful. INTERTEXTUALITY Harry Potter is such a well-known text that it was used as joke fodder in at least four different television shows. Its references were mostly quick one-liners that offered a wink to the extensive Harry Potter fan community. Fantasy story worlds collide in season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Buffy’s little sister, Dawn, snottily retorts “Mom, I’m not going to Hogwarts” after her mom suggests that Buffy take Dawn back-to-school shopping.11 Other characters use Harry Potter references as insults, such as G.O.B. of Arrested Development who calls his brother Michael “the boy who lived under the stairs” (upon seeing Michael driving the family’s stair car), and Ted Moseby who calls Robin’s dad a “stone cold Slytherin.”12 Intertextuality can also be self-deprecating with Robin referring to her engagement ring as a Potter-esque “cloak of invisibility” that keeps attractive men from noticing her.13 These short exchanges do not ask for viewers to be well-versed in Potter lore. Even those who haven’t read the books or seen the films likely recognize that Hogwarts, “the boy who lived under the stairs” (Harry), or “Slytherin” are part of the wizarding world. And even if viewers do not get the quick references, their enjoyment of Buffy, HIMYM, or Arrested Development will not be much diminished. The Harry Potter and Weeds intertextuality was more extensive, supporting minutes of dialogue and providing richer meaning. When misanthrope Celia Hodes leaves her husband Dean and daughter Isabelle in Weeds’s second season, Isabelle cautions Dad not to get used to Mom’s absence. Isabelle explains, “Mom is Voldemort. Don’t you know that? You may have reduced her to vapor now but she is out there gathering her strength. And she will be back.”14 This dialogue and its Harry Potter analogy is more than a mere reference: it draws from specific details in the Harry Potter story world— Voldemort’s initial “defeat” and eventual return to power—to enhance viewers’ understanding of the Weeds diegesis. It reinforces one story world’s logic by basing it on a preestablished diegesis. Isabelle’s analogy clearly has an impact on Dean whose eyes widen after the proclamation “she will be back.” Through this exchange, viewers who are still getting to know Celia are told that she is powerful and dangerous. In a reversal of Lily Potter’s love saving Harry, it is daughter Isabelle’s lack of love for Celia that works to keep Dad safe from Mom’s eventual return. Weeds boasts another well-developed example of intertextuality with its closing scene from season one. In an episode aptly titled The Godmother,



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pot-dealing widow Nancy Botwin gathers together a team to launch a growand-sell operation.15 Other than the title of the Weeds episode, viewers aren’t given obvious signals about the intertextuality. The camera follows Nancy’s gaze around the table as she points out her lackeys—those in charge of distribution, finance, sales, and legal matters. When The Godfather and “The Godmother’s” closing scenes are viewed one after the other (which is quite easy to do in the age of YouTube), the similarities are striking. Nancy is the Don. And in place of Michael’s wife Kay as the judge of morality, we have Nancy’s son Shane. Shane looks through their open patio doors at the group Nancy has assembled, watching one man handing his mom a pot plant, and the other men standing up in reverence of Nancy and this plant of possibilities. Just as one member of Michael’s “family” shuts the door on Kay, thus symbolically telling her to turn a blind eye to what she has seen, Nancy’s housekeeper, Lupita, closes the door on Shane. Undoubtedly, Weeds pays homage to The Godfather by studying and mimicking its camera rhetoric, character constructions, and action. More importantly, however, for Weeds viewers, the intertexuality says things both about and to them. The connection constructs an ideal audience, telling viewers that Weeds expects them to be well-versed in classic cinema. They are a high-art-appreciating audience, thus commutatively elevating Weeds to the status of high art. Drawing from their knowledge of The Godfather, viewers can also treat the intertextuality as clues to Weeds’ unfolding narrative. The intertextuality suggests that Nancy has entered a dangerous path to loneliness and regret, and that Shane will eventually “open the door.” Not just intertextuality, but also storytelling convention tells us that the grow operation will test Nancy’s morality, ruin her family, and unleash violence on the community. Also integrating The Godfather thoroughly into one of its plots, HIMYM takes us back to where Don Corleone started it all in “Romeward Bound,” using Marshall’s costume, black and white film, background music, and the “orange” theme to tie sitcom to dramatic film.16 The density of the symbolism—accordion music, costuming, subtitles—commands viewers to recognize that they are watching a parody of The Godfather. But this intertextuality offers different levels of meaning depending on the viewers’ knowledge base. In addition to merely recognizing The Godfather’s influence on the scene, viewers may draw from their knowledge of the film to understand the import of the decision facing HIMYM characters Marshall and Lily. This scene signals a turning point in the story: Will they stay with their friends and maintain humble lives in New York or take a risk and move to Rome? If I hadn’t watched with my husband who knows The Godfather trilogy better than me, I would not have understood the symbolism of the orange Marshall picks up in “Little Italy.” Because of a piece of fruit, we knew that Marshall’s

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dream of Rome would be dead. And if you do not know what the orange theme is, check out the many websites dedicated to explaining its symbolism and cataloguing its examples. The Godfather is a must-watch for cinephiles, but Star Wars is a mustwatch for anyone wishing to understand American culture. (Just ask my threeyear-old who dressed as Yoda for Purim.) Star Wars’s pervasiveness perhaps explains the frequency of its references in various texts. The Toy Story series draws from Star Wars references in several places, including toy-torturer Sid representing the Empire when demanding of Sheriff Woody, “Where’s the rebel base? Talk!” before burning him with a magnifying glass.17 Kids likely don’t get the reference, but these moments are a small treat for the parents who watch the Toy Story movies with them. HIMYM can speak directly to those who grew up watching Star Wars, and its intertextuality is unparalleled, with dozens of Star Wars references, including Barney’s “Ewok Line” theory to determine a person’s age, gags featuring Barney’s Stormtrooper outfit, and small bits of dialogue that are catalogued quite thoroughly with screen shots and subtitles on the “Ginger Jedi’s” tumblr page, “HIMYMandStarWars.” The tumblr page stands as an excellent example of fan scholarship, creativity, and archiving. In addition to enhancing the enjoyment of HIMYM viewers who also love Star Wars, the intertextuality provides important framing to some of the series’s key mysteries. One key revelation comes when Marshall and Ted reminisce about their triennial Star Wars marathons in the episode “Trilogy Time”:18 at the end of the episode, viewers are taken into the future to see that Ted will get married and have a baby girl. What we do not learn at this time is whether his wife allows him to name the baby Leia, an intention he professed in season six. This one answer to the show’s overarching mystery is revealed, but many more remain. Even those who have not seen Star Wars likely know that Luke and Leia are the main characters in the films. But those smaller details (like The Godfather’s oranges) are even more rewarding for readers to discover, for these discoveries represent a bigger badge of fandom: You knew enough to notice. Take, for example, my most exciting finding from Fellowship of the Ring. When I read the scene in which the Black Riders attack Fatty Bolger at Crickhollow (a scene and character not included in the film), I got stuck on this passage: “The Brandybucks were blowing the Horn-call of Buckland that had not been sounded for a hundred years, not since the white wolves came in the Fell Winter.”19 I showed this passage to my husband and one of my students, none of whom saw its significance. What they failed to notice was a clear connection to A Game of Thrones: the white wolves (direwolves) and Fell Winter (Winterfell). I searched the internet and found no link between the two stories. Maybe this passage was in George R. R. Martin’s unconscious



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mind or maybe he knowingly drew inspiration from it. Either way, it’s a bond between two captivating story worlds—a bond that I was delighted to uncover. Just as we see with my nerdy delight, intertextuality can lead to enhanced enjoyment—not just according to me, but according to the accounts of marathoners, scholars, and superheroes. Comparing herself to her dad who “doesn’t watch very much television,” marathoner Kayla observed, “I’ll start cracking up because they’ve made this hilarious reference to something, and he won’t understand.” She found her knowledge of various story worlds to really “enrich the watching experience or even the reading experience.” Writing about Seinfeld in Everything Bad is Good for You, Johnson argues that “The show gets funnier the more you study it—precisely because the jokes point outside the immediate context of the episode, and because the creators refuse to supply flashing arrows to translate the gags for the uninitiated.”20 This divide Johnson describes—between the initiated and the uninitiated—captures the difference between Kayla and her dad, explaining why her amusement surpassed his. Johnson’s divide also captures the alienation Captain America feels from the other Avengers. Frozen for decades and newly revived, he has missed a massive amount of popular culture. His face lights up, however, and he looks for validation from the other heroes when he understands Nick Fury’s reference to the “flying monkeys” from the depression-era film, The Wizard of Oz. SELF-REFLEXIVITY In addition to HIMYM with its “meet cute” described in this chapter’s introduction, other commonly marathoned texts demonstrate an awareness of media convention through their character dialogue. When chemistry teacherturned-meth-cooker Walter White arranges his first “drug meet” at a junk yard, experienced dealer Jesse mocks Walt’s choice of location, saying, “This is like a non-criminal’s idea of a drug meet: ‘Oh I saw this in a movie.’” Jesse suggests they meet instead at Taco Cabesa or the mall.21 This piece of dialogue assures viewers that Breaking Bad presents us with a more credible reality, a true window into the meth-dealing subculture, which is in contrast to Hollywood images of drug dealing. Despite the many shocking moments in the narrative, Jesse seems to be suggesting that this subculture is more “normal” than the uninitiated think. The Dowager Countess of Grantham also cautions Downton Abbey viewers against buying into a media reality when she tells her granddaughter Sybil not to marry the family chauffeur, opining, “Now Sybil dear, this sort of thing is all very well in novels, but in reality, it can prove very uncomfortable.”22

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With this piece of dialogue, Downton Abbey mocks literary convention while using the same strategy in its own television narrative. This dialogue is just one piece of support for another trend in self-reflexivity—waiting until readers (and fans) are diegetically established to risk these jokes. Because self-reflexivity acknowledges the text’s constructed nature, readers need to be comfortably immersed in the narrative to be able to warrant these jokes and still maintain a suspended disbelief. Narrative self-reflexivity presents a unique opportunity to briefly pause the simulation and adopt a world-oforigin perspective before continuing the game play. Just as avid viewers “know” the Dowager Countess and expect these types of one-liners in her advice to the family, we can often delight in characters demonstrating how well they know their fictive peers. In this self-reflexive thread, we see characters mocked for their well-known habits and appearances. In Sherlock’s second season, John Watson gratifies viewers by insulting the Sherlock Holmes persona we have come to know, of “being all mysterious with your—cheekbones. And turning your coat collar up so you look cool.”23 The Avengers’ Tony Stark is also the comic foil as he sprinkles these types of comments throughout his interactions with his fellow superheroes. His sarcastic praise of Bruce Banner exemplifies this type of self-reflexive exchange: “I am a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”24 Stark calls Thor “Point Break,” perhaps inspiring the towheaded god to engage in his own self-reflexivity as Thor tells the other Avengers “You people are so petty—and tiny.”25 Inherent in these pieces of dialogue are acknowledgments of the ridiculous character constructions. An enormous green rage monster is not grounded in reality. Neither is a huge, hammer-wielding god. But viewers will likely play along with the ruse, just as Tony Stark eventually did with the Avengers Initiative. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is my favorite movie of the series because of its self-reflexivity. Winks to the fans—the initiated—begin when Harry walks into the Great Hall after an altercation with Draco Malfoy. Ginny Weasley observes that Harry is “covered in blood again,” before asking Hermione, “Why is it he’s always covered in blood?”26 Life isn’t easy when you’re Harry Potter (or any wizard for that matter) while Voldemort is returning to power. Hogwarts’s school-year-opening ceremonies capture the gravity of the situation but also make light of the unreality. Ron fills Harry in on what he missed while Draco stomped on his face: “The Sorting Hat urged us all to be brave and strong in these troubled times. Easy for it to say, mate. It’s a hat, isn’t it?” When Ginny points out Harry’s persistent state of danger and Ron questions the value and validity of one of the series’ major characters, the dialogue is drawing attention to the series’s constructed nature, to the absurdity of a talking, advice-giving hat. This self-reflexivity is almost like



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the writers saying to viewers, “We know you know this isn’t real, but thank you for coming on the journey with us.” That thanks can only be issued well into the journey, in this case, the fifth of eight films. Instead of thanking dedicated viewers with self-reflexivity, straightshooters Daryl from The Walking Dead and Zoe from Firefly mock other characters’ skeptical attitudes as a way of shaming readers into suspending disbelief. After teenager Jimmy laughs at Daryl’s confession that he once saw a Chupacabra, Daryl silences his critic with the following exchange: Daryl: What are you braying at, jackass? Jimmy: So you believe in a bloodsucking dog? Daryl: You believe in dead people walking around?27

In the world where dead are reanimated, one should not discount the possibility of the existence of Chupacabras. A similar exchange can be seen in Firefly when shipmates suggest that one of their fellow travelers is clairvoyant. When her husband Wash states with incredulity, “That sounds like something out of science fiction,” Zoe calmly, patronizingly reminds him, “You live in a space ship, dear.”28 What these exchanges say to readers is that our minds need to be open as we immerse ourselves in these fictive worlds, lest our shortsightedness blind us to real possibilities. Buffy takes a different approach to remind viewers of the link between fantasy and reality, modeling the skepticism herself when encountering the “real” Dracula in season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When the fictitious slayer meets the vampire whose well-known mythology is rooted in crumbs of historical reality, she asks him, “This isn’t just some fanboy thing?”29 Arguably, Dracula is “more real” than Buffy (because of his pseudo-historical basis), but she questions his existence as mere play. And play is exactly what shows like Buffy invite readers to do. We suspend disbelief, seriously engage with the narrative, and slowly allow the stories to become part of our lived existence. Seen through this lens, being a “fanboy” is as legitimate a role as being Dracula.

EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING SUMMARY The collective force of these postmodern elements of intertextuality and selfreflexivity blurs the line between reader and text, thus welcoming readers into the story. We give our time, energy, and minds to understand the characters, customs, scenes, and inside jokes from a story world. In return, the series will sometimes break the fourth wall in a way that is textual rather than

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camera-based: characters aren’t speaking directly to us, but the authors and characters acknowledge our presence and invite interactivity. Texts promote interactivity through self-reflexivity that encourages us to question generic themes, character constructions, and plot devices. This self-reflexivity ultimately rewards us for suspending our disbelief, just as the other characters must do. Intertextuality welcomes not just readers and fans into the story: it welcomes other marathoned texts in as well (and, by extension, readers’ experiences with those texts). We are thus able to draw from our additional media and popular culture knowledge to craft a broader metaverse of understanding. Marathoner Byron used a spatial metaphor to describe how the intertextuality and self-reflexivity in Kevin Smith movies made him feel: “It builds a community around these movies that doesn’t really exist in reality but it’s kind of like a new reality, but it’s very real. . . . It feels like someplace you can go.” The feeling of physically being in a story, an alternate reality of sorts, makes the story’s messages even more meaningful. This chapter is the closing of my argument that marathoning is a form of media engagement that encourages readers to place themselves in the stories and negotiate the nuances of morality. Because of the ludic nature of the marathon experiences, the narratives (and the values contained therein) can function as a form of learning through play. Readers are not necessarily adopting the attitudes displayed in their stories—which is an important point to make considering that Dexter was the most marathoned television show in my study. Rather, these stories represent case studies that help us confront difficult questions about how to function in society. Heroes are presented with not one big decision, but with a series of decisions as they make their way through a complex world. And readers don’t see only pure heroes: they see technology-abusing villains, beneficent puppeteers, ambiguously moral characters, and redeemed traitors. The complexity of these stories, combined with these postmodern textual devices, enables readers to play with and within the story, thereby honing their morality along the journey. These are not choose-your-own-adventure stories, but rather they are choose-themeaning-of-your-own-adventure stories. NOTES 1. Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Kershner (Century City area of Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1980), DVD; How I Met Your Mother, “Landmarks,” episode no. 135, first broadcast May 9, 2011 by CBS. Written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas and directed by Pamela Fryman. Netflix. 2. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 117.



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3. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36–37. 4. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 7. 5. Will Brooker, “Television Out of Time: Watching Cult Shows on Download,” in Reading Lost: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show, ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009), 52. 6. Brooker, “Television Out of Time,” 68. 7. How I Met Your Mother, “P.S. I Love You,” episode no. 175, first broadcast February 4, 2013 by CBS. Written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas and directed by Pamela Fryman. Netflix. 8. Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, 5. 9. Sara Gwenllian-Jones, “Virtual Reality and Cult Television,” in Cult Television, eds. Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta Pearson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 85. 10. Ibid. 11. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Real Me,” episode no. 81, first broadcast October 3, 2000 by The WB. Written by David Furry and directed by David Grossman. Netflix. 12. Arrested Development, “In God We Trust,” episode no. 7, first broadcast December 14, 2003 by FOX. Written by Abraham Higginbotham and directed by Joe Russo. Netflix; How I Met Your Mother, “Band or DJ,” episode no. 173, first broadcast January 14, 2013 by CBS. Written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas and directed by Pamela Fryman. Netflix. 13. How I Met Your Mother, “Ring Up,” episode no. 174, first broadcast January 21, 2013 by CBS. Written by Jennifer Hendricks and directed by Pam Fryman. Netflix. 14. Weeds, “Pittsburgh,” episode no. 22, first broadcast October 30, 2006 by Showtime. Written by Jenji Kohan and directed by Craig Zist. Netflix. 15. Weeds, “The Godmother,” episode no. 10, first broadcast October 12, 2005 by Showtime. Written by Jenji Kohan and directed by Lev Spiro. Netflix. 16. How I Met Your Mother, “Romeward Bound,” episode no. 181, first broadcast April 15, 2013 by CBS. Written by Chuck Tatham and directed by Pam Fryman. Netflix. 17. Toy Story 1, directed by John Lasseter (Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Pictures, 1995), DVD. 18. How I Met Your Mother, “Trilogy Time,” episode no. 156, first broadcast April 9, 2012 by CBS. Written by Kourtney Kang and directed by Pam Fryman. Netflix. 19. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 193. 20. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 87. 21. Breaking Bad, “A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal,” episode no. 7, first aired March 9, 2008 by AMC. Written by Peter Gould and directed by Tim Hunter. Netflix.

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22. Downton Abbey, episode no. 28, first aired February 10, 2013 by PBS. Written by Julian Fellowes and directed by David Evans. Written by Julian Fellowes. PBS online. 23. Sherlock, “The Hounds of Baskerville,” episode no. 5, first broadcast May 13, 2012 by BBC. Written by Mark Gatiss and directed by Paul McGuigan. Netflix. 24. The Avengers, directed by Joss Whedon (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2012), DVD. 25. Ibid. 26. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, directed by David Yates (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Picture, 2009), DVD. 27. The Walking Dead, “Chupacabra,” episode no. 11, first broadcast November 13, 2011 by AMC. Written by David Johnson and directed by Guy Ferland. Netflix. 28. Firefly, “Objects in Space,” episode no. 14, first broadcast December 13, 2002 by FOX. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Joss Whedon. Netflix. 29. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Buffy vs. Dracula,” episode no. 80, first broadcast September 26, 2000, by The WB. Written by Marti Noxon and directed by David Solomon. Amazon Instant Video.

Conclusion

The Media Marathoning Paradigm

After I told a family member (whose media time is dedicated mostly to physical books and DVR’d baseball games) how much I was enjoying Orange is the New Black (OITNB), she asked, “What time is it on?” The question gave me pause. Not only is OITNB available only through Netflix streaming or DVD purchase, I hadn’t thought about a television schedule in some time. I also hadn’t thought about how to rent or purchase a DVD in a while, so I asked my friends how they were watching films. Streaming, downloads, and library rentals dominated the answers. When it comes to books, I still frequent my local library, dutifully reserving books that have caught my interest and paying my $1 hold fee to make sure the book is waiting for me. But when a stomach bug recently immobilized me, a Divergent series download got me through. Advances in content delivery technologies have clearly enabled rapidly evolving relationships between reader and text. Media marathoning is one notable pattern in these evolving reader/text interactions. As digital technologies facilitate easier, user-centered access to media texts, narratives increase in complexity, and more readers seek engaged, holistic experiences in story worlds, marathoning looks to be the new normal in media engagement. Rather than tuning into whatever is on television, viewers are choosing to see one story through—or see as much of the story as is currently available. Rather than picking up a stand-alone book, readers find themselves drawn into series, which they thoroughly mine before picking up a different diegesis. Rather than a collection of DVDs stocked in one’s entertainment center, it is box sets that are populating the shelves—or streaming and downloading capabilities are emptying those shelves. Rather than just spending money on a ticket to attend a franchise film premiere, many people spend time watching the previous films in a series, the pre-premiere time investment thus serving as a “ticket” to a richer media 185

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experience. The increasing emphasis on in-depth stories and immersive story engagement enabled by user-empowering content delivery technologies collectively comprises the “media marathoning paradigm.” And this paradigm has notable implications for traditional media boundaries and delineations. This book’s two-part structure offers an enhanced understanding of the evolving relationship between reader and text by examining both marathoners’ discourse about their experiences and the symbolic terrain of their chosen stories. Using qualitative methods to understand the how, why, and what of marathoning is a bottom-up approach that exposes key features of this phenomenon. Popular press articles from 2011 to 2013 largely focus on a media industry perspective of binge-watching, ignoring what individual users are doing and failing to dig into the content of marathonable stories. This book is a testament to the value of knowing what is happening on an individual and textual level so as to thoughtfully comment on marathoning’s cultural impact. Although there is some truth to the extreme examples of “binge-watching” circulating throughout the popular press (and seen on Portlandia), analysis of marathoning’s cultural impact reveals many unnoticed rewards. A TiVo binge-watching survey also reveals that attitudes toward marathoning are improving: Whereas 53 percent of participants in a spring 2013 survey said that binge-watching had negative connotations, only one-third of spring 2014 participants said the same thing.1 In the first half of the book, I painted a picture of media marathoning as a commonly conscientious media consumption strategy, inviting character empathy and emotional involvement, cognitive engagement and critical thinking, and all of this while promoting and maintaining real social bonds. In the second half of the book, I characterized the moral exploration these story worlds offer. Marathoned texts often harbor simulations that encourage readers to engage with challenging ethical questions and to fine-tune their moral compasses through pleasurable ludic play. I now offer a more detailed summary of media marathoning’s perils and promise. MEDIA MARATHONERS It is true that some marathoners put important life events on hold, missing out on sleep, losing work productivity, and temporarily ignoring friends or family to continue with a series. However, many marathoners consulted in this study scheduled their marathons thoughtfully, building their immersive media engagement into breaks from school, work, or programming schedules (e.g., when new television episodes go on hiatus during the winter holidays and summer). These media-rich floating holidays represent an escape from mundane routines and media habits. And marathoners often used these media-rich



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holidays to strengthen relationships with friends and family by marathoning texts together or by acting on media recommendations from their trust circle. While the immersive marathoning experience may have resulted in temporary isolation (if one watched or read alone), the ultimate result of the marathon was that it strengthened social bonds through the opportunity to communicate with others in person or through computer-mediated means about a shared story world. It is true that some marathoners reported diminished connections to characters because they had consumed the series so quickly. These “tourist” marathoners were destination hopping through the story world, primarily reading to “see what happened” rather than focusing on to whom it happened or how it happened. However, the majority of marathoners felt as if they were more closely bonded to characters, activating the characters as pseudo-avatars through the process of going on an intense journey together. The “resident” marathoners experienced real emotions that mirrored their characters’ emotions. Many also drew affective connections between their own life experiences and the characters’ experiences, using the story to transport themselves to a different time in their life. Although some of the marathoning experiences were not emotionally pleasurable, many marathoners were so engaged in the media simulation that they mourned the end of their beloved characters and the game play experience when the story concluded. It is true that some study participants were able to marathon because their texts were simple and did not ask much of them, but the majority of marathoners had their interest captivated by dense, complicated story worlds. These vast story worlds offered readers many points of engagement and readers often accepted those invitations, consulting fellow fans, the internet, and traditional media sources to learn about story histories, story extensions, creative processes, actors, and new related works. The practice of marathoning is a way to easily keep this spider-webbing expanse of information straight in one’s mind, the strong diegetic memories paving the way for further accumulation of information and context. The sum of these behavioral, affective, and cognitive patterns suggests that the marathoning experience is holistic, engaging, emotional, and thought provoking. MARATHON MORALITY These story worlds are made dense not just through their extensive casts of characters or fictive geographies, but also through their depth of moral thought and conversation. The ludic play space of media marathoning invites reader involvement in the narrative. As stakeholders in this narrative, we consider what paths to take along the extensive, winding journey. The moral path is

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rarely obvious and our perspectives about seemingly moral or amoral characters may change. To be sure, we have some explicitly evil and explicitly good characters, but we can learn a lot from asking what characters have in common that makes them “evil” and what other characters have in common that makes them “good.” Moreover, we have ambiguously moral characters, such as our puppeteers and redeemed traitors who undercut the possibility of locating any foundation of firm moral ground. We can draw our own boundaries of acceptable conduct, of moral decision making, by seeing the consequences of character transgressions—and by questioning other characters’ and our own reactions to the transgressions. In the ludic space of media marathoning, confronting these challenging questions is engaging and pleasurable—even when the story outcome may not initially give us pleasure. When engaged in the ludic simulation, we vividly experience the characters’ decisions and can learn from them to avoid cultivating our own histories of regret. Commonly marathoned stories present readers with many possibilities, but a few certainties can be distilled from the repeated patterns. First, humans will face challenging situations. The untenable position abounds in marathoned stories and in real lives. We aren’t always presented with discretely “good” or “bad” pathways to take in response to difficult choices: we must forge our own path of potential risk and reward. The best way to make these tough decisions is to draw from the cardinal virtues of love, mercy, humility, sacrifice, and independence of thought seen in marathoned texts. We see these virtues in the actions of our heroes and their allies; we see the virtues violated by the villains we condemn; we see the virtues ultimately adopted by the puppeteers and traitors who earn our forgiveness; we see the virtues form the backbone of a successful strategy for good to overcome evil. In an increasingly secular world, marathoning is an act of the new faithful. These stories evince the same prominent components of religious texts—presenting their own Gods, devils, parables, commandments, and values to help readers navigate their lives morally. NEW ROLES IN THIS NEW NORMAL Although I do not expect the more leisurely consumption of television, film, and book series to disappear, I anticipate that media marathoning will take up an increasing proportion of individuals’ media time. In addition to marking altered reader/text relationships, the media marathoning paradigm captures the shifting roles of media creators, distributors, fans, and other producer/ consumers. With these shifts come exciting new opportunities for empowerment, for experimentation, for involvement. Although this list is not exhaustive, I outline some of those shifts, and their related opportunities, below.



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Authors are increasingly creating expansive, fictive worlds rather than stand-alone texts. The Walking Dead, for example, has an ever-changing, expansive cast of characters, a live talk-show that takes place right after original episodes air (The Talking Dead), viewer polls, online games, a sixpart series of webisodes, and a spin-off series that was announced in early 2014. Marathoning a vast diegesis represents the opportunity to chart our own course through the story world. Media consumers now have the power to watch or read what they want, when they want, where they want, how they want, and how much they want. Some media producers and distributors are responding to this need for holistic, immersive experiences as we see from the all-at-once releases of new television series and the all-at-once production of new film series. No matter what media executives do, no matter what control they ultimately cede to the people, our own ability to change the shape of the media journey through media marathoning already harbors much power. The story doled out by a programmer, publisher, or distributor is more under their control. Through the ludic play that collapses real and fictive, the self-charted media marathoning experience feels like my own journey. These characters are my people. These vicissitudes are mine to share with the pseudo-avatars. Through communication with other journeyers, we gain new perspectives on the stories. Through this communication, the texts can morph into our stories, our characters—at once personal and collective, but not centrally controlled. The engaged practices of many media marathoners mimic what other media scholars and I do to study our chosen texts. We read them. We reread them. We analyze what others have written. We create our own textual readings, derived from the original story and all of its paratexts we have consulted. We study these stories and dissect them, expressing our ideas to various audiences. Marathoners are doing this through their in-person and computer-mediated conversations, through both formal and informal channels. Marathoning should thus be seen as a gateway to creating what Johnson calls evolving works of public scholarship.2 Digitization of popular media makes it both easily accessible and easy to scrutinize or study. The digital environment also harbors collaborative space for collective intelligence that collates and analyzes public scholarship on popular media, ideally leading to refined ideas. Media critics have said that we are in a new golden age of television.3 I say that we are in a new golden age of media engagement. This book attempts to capture the amalgamation of forces at play in the media marathoning paradigm by drawing from many of the agents involved. My argument is predicated primarily on the voices of marathoners describing their experiences, and the voices of authors that are displayed through character dialogue. At various points in the book, however, I have also quoted authors themselves, network executives, and content distributors to capture

190 Conclusion

their relationships with stories and readers. Furthermore, I draw from media studies scholarship and fan sites created by knowledgeable, creative, and public media scholars. I also intend my book to be a work of public scholarship, accessible to readers of many interests and backgrounds. The companion blog to this book, mediamarathoning.com, represents another space for me to work through ideas about media marathoning, respond to those writing about similar trends in the popular press, and facilitate conversations with media marathoners, popular culture fans, and communication scholars. The media marathoning paradigm shift is still fresh, and I hope this book is the start of a much longer conversation. NOTES 1. Dina Gachman, “Breaking Bad, House of Cards Most Binge-Watched Shows,” Forbes, June 25, 2014, accessed July 2, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/dinagachman/2014/06/25/breaking-bad-house-of-cards-most-binge-watched-shows/?utm_ campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social 2. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 169. 3. David Carr, “Barely Keeping up in TV’s New Golden Age,” The New York Times, March 9, 2014, accessed July 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/ business/media/fenced-in-by-televisions-excess-of-excellence.html?_r=0

Appendix

Schedule of Questions for Marathoner Interviewees

OVERVIEW 1. What shows, films, or books did you list on your questionnaire? 2. How did you access the shows, films, or books? 3. At what pace did you complete the reading or viewing? Was there a pattern to your reading or viewing in terms of reading or watching on certain days, at certain times? 4. Did you change your daily/weekly schedule during the marathon? 5. Describe your reading or viewing conditions and behaviors. Where were you? Were you doing anything else at the time? Who were you reading or watching with? CONNECTION TO THE TEXT 6. What drew you to each story? a. What do you like about each story? Why did it/they capture your attention? Did you enjoy the experience? b. What universal themes did you find in each story? Why might each one appeal to a variety of people? c. How did you feel emotionally during the reading or viewing experience? How did the story engage you emotionally? How did you feel at the end of the experience?

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192 Appendix

ADDITIONAL COMMUNICATION ABOUT THE STORY 7. Do you discuss your marathoning experiences with friends or family? If so, what kinds of conversations does it spark? MARATHONING VS. TRADITIONAL READING OR VIEWING 8. Did this experience of marathoning differ in other ways from a traditional reading or viewing experience? If so, how did the experiences differ? Follow up on understanding the story, characters, etc. 9. What would motivate you to do another marathon? How would you choose the story? 10. Many captivating stories will show up in multiple places along the media landscape. For example, a video game may be created based on a book, a magazine may report on an important film, or message boards may be created for viewers to discuss a show. Have you sought out any other media related to the stories you marathoned? Follow up with multimedia examples to jog participants’ memories if they can’t think of any. 11. What final thoughts do you have on the marathoning experience?

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Index

24 (television show), xiv, 25, 94, 96; Bauer, Jack 156, 157, 163, 166 50 Shades of Grey (book series), xiv, 91, 95, 167

Batman, 104 Battlestar Galactica, xiv, 21, 26, 30, 32, 59, 74, 94, 97, 102, 114, 139, 155 Bauer, Jack. See 24 binge-watching, x, 186 Blockbuster (media rental business), xvi, xvii Bluth, George Michael. See Arrested Development Bluth, Michael. See Arrested Development box sets, xvii–xviii, xx, xxvi, xxxvii–xxxviii, 69 Breaking Bad, x, xiii, xx, 22, 29, 34, 68, 94, 179; ratings of, xxx–xxxi; White, Walter, 166–67, 179 Browncoats. See Firefly Buffy the Vampire Slayer, xiii, xiv, 49, 94, 106; friendships seen in, 143, 145, 149; intertextuality seen in, 176, 181; Summers, Buffy, 103, 112, 115, 129, 158, 163–65

affect: defined, 39; negative, 56; relationship between cognitive impact and, 5, 64 Agent Smith. See The Matrix (film series) alternate reality, 3, 182 American Movie Classics (AMC), xxxiv, 68 antiheroes, 167, 170 Aragorn. See Lord of the Rings (book series) Arrested Development, xiv, xxv, 74, 94; Bluth, George Michael, 117, 153, 158–59; Bluth, Michael, 116–17, 153, 176; on DVD, xxx, xxxi; Netflix fourth season release of, xxvii, xxxvi, 4–5 auteurism, 82 The Avengers, xiv, xx, 95, 137–38, 179–80; See also Whedon, Joss

Campbell, Joseph, 103, 113–14, 129 character death, reader reactions to, 39, 47–48, 50, 81 Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 3, 22, 75–76, 103, 159, 168; Pevensie, Lucy, 2–3, 36

Back to the Future (film series), xiv, 57, 81, 88 Baggins, Frodo. See Lord of the Rings (book series) 203

204 Index

chronology shifting, xxix–xxxi, xxxviii, 16–19, 31, 71; cross-media, 18 collectivism, 97, 107, 113, 117, 128, 134–35, 137, 139, 146, 156, 165; redeemed traitors and, 168–69 complex television, xxxiii, 20, 66 convergence, xvii, xix–xx, xxii, xxx–xxxi, xxxv–xxxvii, 1 Cullen, Edward. See Twilight (book series) cultural capital, xviii, 23, 31, 77–78 Darth Vader. See Star Wars (film series) Death Stars. See Star Wars (film series) deontological ethics, 96, 123, 129, 139; hero and, 114, 119 Dexter, xiv, xxv, 15, 21, 42–43, 50, 67, 94, 124–25; “The code of Harry” in, 124–25, 156, 163; Morgan, Dexter, 124–25, 157, 163, 166, 168 diegesis mining, 75–83 diegetic memories, xi, 19–20, 36, 45, 73–75, 78, 83 diegetic trust, 47, 50, 56, 59, 66–67, 78, 82, 159, 174 Divergent (book series), 50, 185 Downton Abbey, xiii, 33, 77, 94, 159; Dowager Countess of Grantham, 123, 127, 179–80 Draper, Don. See Mad Men Dr. Who, 34 Dumbledore, Albus. See Harry Potter (book series) DVD, xvi–xviii, xxii, xxix, xxx–xxxi, 15, 18 DVR, xvi, xxix, 16, 29, 185 endlessly deferred narrative, 66–67, 79, 83, 126 entrance flow, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxx–xxxi, 21, 70, 82 e-reader, xv, xxvii–xxviii; Kindle, xxiv, xxvii–xxviii; Nook, xxvii Everdeen, Katniss. See The Hunger Games (book series)

fandom auteur, xxxviii fans: Jenkins, Henry writings on, xvi, 22, 89; media influence of, xxxvi–xxxviii; media purchases of, xviii; membership in community of, xxi, 8–10, 17, 77; online communication of, xviii, xxi, 11, 31, 34, 80; pathologizing, 17, 23; pilgrimages of, 35; rewards of being, 10, 20, 23, 83, 174–76, 182; rituals of, 33 Fillion, Nathan, 82 Firefly, xiii, xiv, xxxvii–xxviii, 66, 82, 94, 181; Alliance, 106–7, 149; Browncoats, xxxvi; Reavers, 66, 106; Reynolds, Malcolm, 92, 145; Serenity, xxxvi, 94, 149 flow (television), xxii; See also entrance flow and insulated flow forensic fandom, 50, 75, 78–80, 83, 89, 175 A Game of Thrones (book), 104, 153, 157, 178; See also A Song of Ice and Fire Game of Thrones (television series), xxxii, 8, 20, 39, 41, 80, 89; HBO and illegal downloads of, xxvi game play. See ludic media experience Gamgee, Samwise. See Lord of the Rings (book series) Gandalf. See Lord of the Rings (book series) Glee, xiv, xxix, 27, 43, 94, 135 The Godfather (film series), xiv, 32, 95, 123, 177–78 Gossip Girl, xiv, 19, 29, 48, 94, 103, 105; van der Woodsen, Serena, 116–17, 135 Granger, Hermione. See Harry Potter (book series) grassroots intermediaries, xxiii, xxvi Grimes, Rick. See The Walking Dead

Index

Harry Potter (book series), xiv, xxxvi, 19, 24, 26, 50, 55, 72, 81, 95, 176; Death Eaters, 105, 134–36, 139, 170; Dumbledore, Albus, 97, 104, 107–8, 113–14, 124–25, 127–28, 146, 170; fan pilgrimages and, 35; Granger, Hermione, 9, 49, 53, 138, 124, 144–45, 180; Horcrux, 124, 136, 144, 145; house-elves, 138–39, 148; Mirror of Erised, 107, 113; Potter, Harry, 95, 112, 115–18, 127–28, 146, 149, 159, 168; Pottermore (website), 82; Snape, Severus, 125, 170; Voldemort, 104, 108, 116, 134, 148–49, 176; See also Harry Potter (film series) Harry Potter (film series), xiv, xx–xxi, xxxi, 19–20, 54, 95, 180; See also Harry Potter (book series) Heidegger, Martin, 102–3, 105, 107 hero, 93, 94, 95, 96–97, 103, 106–8, 111–19, 123–30, 133, 143–46, 150, 156–59, 163, 188 The Hobbit (film series), xxxii, 80, 148 Home Box Office (HBO), xxvi, xxxi How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), xiv, xix, 19, 94, 173–78; Moseby, Ted, 66, 173–74, 176; Stinson, Barney, xix, 123, 127, 173 The Hunger Games (book series), xiii, xiv, xxiv, xxvii, xxxiii, xxxvi, 18–19, 33, 46, 48, 50–51, 71–72, 78, 95, 104–5, 116, 154; Abernathy, Haymitch, 125–26; Everdeen, Katniss, 54, 66, 89, 102, 104–5, 113, 115, 118, 121n33, 126, 128–29, 147, 155, 165–66; Hawthorne, Gale, 102, 118, 155; Mellark, Peeta, 46, 102, 104–5, 118, 121n33, 126, 147, 155, 165 hype, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxvii, 17–21 hyperdiegesis, 75–76 immortality delusion, 118–19 Inception, 4, 8

205

Indiana Jones (film series), xiii, xiv, 15, 95, 165–66 individualism, 97, 102, 113, 128, 137 insulated flow, xxii, xxiv–xxvii, xxx, 7, 10, 22, 64, 70, 78, 175 interactivity, 64, 74, 75, 175, 182 interflow, xxiv, 174 intertextuality, xx, 173–79, 181–82 James Bond (film series), xiv, 21, 95, 104 Kant’s categorical imperative. See deontological ethics Lewis, C. S. See Chronicles of Narnia long-form story arc, 67, 69, 83, 167 Lord of the Rings (book series), xiv, xxxv, 95, 101; Aragorn, 123–24, 155–56, 159, 169; Arwen, 155–56, 159; Baggins, Frodo, 111–12, 134, 144, 159, 169; Boromir, 107, 169–70; Elrond, 107, 112, 153, 155–56; Faramir, 124, 134–35; Gamgee, Sam/Samwise, 102, 113, 143–44, 147; Gandalf, 107, 112–13, 123–25, 134, 148, 160; The One Ring, 103, 107–8, 147, 153; Sarumon, 102, 105, 116, 125, 134; Sauron, 103, 107, 111, 134; Treebeard, 102, 104; See also Lord of the Rings (film series) Lord of the Rings (film series), xiv, xix, xx, xxi, xxxv, 51, 54, 63, 95; See also The Hobbit film series; Lord of the Rings (book series) Lost, xiv, 31, 46, 58–59, 64, 67, 74, 79, 94, 146, 174 loyals, 41–42, 75; See also fans ludic media experience, 3–11, 22–23, 25, 31, 42, 48, 54, 76, 81, 88, 182, 188–89; game play and the, 3–5, 11, 40, 42–45, 78–79, 180, 187; game play invitation and the, 64–69; simulation and the, 4–5, 39–40, 63, 65, 73, 79, 84, 180

206 Index

Mad Men, xiv, xxx, xxxv, 25–26, 29, 69, 94, 170; Draper, Don, 48, 163, 167–68 Martin, George R. R. See A Song of Ice and Fire The Matrix (film series), 76–77, 95; Agent Smith, 106, 111, 115, 118; Morpheus, 115, 125–26; Neo, 106, 111, 115, 118; The Oracle, 111, 124, 130 media event, 16, 20, 36 media-filled floating holiday, 16, 18, 27, 35, 51 medium bias, xviii, xxxv, 56, 58 Mellark, Peeta. See The Hunger Games (book series) metaphysic of morals, 96 Middle-Earth News, xviii morality delusion, 119 Morgan, Dexter. See Dexter Moseby, Ted. See How I Met Your Mother narractivity, 75, 79–80, 83 narrative fidelity, 8, 78 narrative transportation, xxiii, 3, 6–7, 19, 25, 49–50, 65, 82, 92, 118, 164 Neo. See The Matrix (film series) Netflix, xxv–xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xxxvi, 15, 22, 29, 31, 185; post-play feature of, xxv, xxvi, 22 Nielsen Company, xxx, xxxvii–xxxviii nostalgia, 53–55 novice identification, 55 TheOneRing.Net, xxi Orange is the New Black, xxviii, 185 Outlander (book series), xiv, 95, 153–55, 160 overflow, 4, 77 parasocial mourning, 50–52 paratexts, xxxi–xxxii, 90, 189 pastoral ideologies, 102, 106–7, 109

Perks, Hazel, viii, xxxix, 178 Pevensie, Lucy. See Chronicles of Narnia piracy, xxvi “playing God,” 102, 107 Potter, Harry. See Harry Potter (book series) predictability/novelty dialectic, 16–17, 51, 78 pseudo-avatars, 40–44, 47, 49, 59, 65, 67, 88, 91, 187, 189 puppeteer, 94, 97, 113–14, 123–30, 140, 144, 182 quality television, xxx, 163, xxxiv, xxxv; golden age of, 189; high art description of, xviii, xxxiii–xxxv, 147 redeemed traitors, 168–70; redemptive suturing, 168 re-marathon, xvii, 9, 16, 36, 42, 47, 52, 54, 58, 72 resident (of mediated story), 8, 72–83, 187 schedule shifting, 22–27 self-reflexivity, 159, 174–76, 179–82 Serenity. See Firefly shelfie, xviii, xix, xlin19 Sherlock (BBC television series), xxiv, xxvi, 9–10, 34, 180 simulation. See ludic media experience Skywalker, Luke. See Star Wars (film series) sleep, loss of while marathoning, 7, 24–25, 28 Snape, Severus. See Harry Potter (book series) A Song of Ice and Fire, xiv, xxxvi, 10, 45, 83, 95; Martin, George R. R. 79, 178; westeros.org, 79 Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis, ix, 77, 83

Index

Stark, Eddard. See A Song of Ice and Fire; Game of Thrones (book); Game of Thrones (television series) Star Wars (films), xiii, xiv, xix, xxi, xxxviii, 9, 15, 30, 33, 35, 54, 70, 74, 81, 95, 135, 153, 158, 173, 175, 178; Darth Vader, 102, 108, 118, 125, 146, 149, 156; Death Stars, 103, 108, 115, 135, 139; Emperor Palpatine, 104, 138, 148; Ewoks, 138–39, 178; Jedi, 102, 156; Kenobi, Obi-Wan, 102–3, 113, 124–26; Skywalker, Luke, 103, 113–15, 118, 124–26, 146, 148, 156–57, 173; Stormtroopers, 105, 178; Yoda, 116, 156–57, 173 Stinson, Barney. See How I Met Your Mother stockpiling, xxix, 70; See also chronology shifting Summers, Buffy. See Buffy the Vampire Slayer Swan, Bella. See Twilight (book series) teleological ethics, 96–97, 126, 129, 140, 146, 157, 166 temporality: collapsed, 8, 15, 31, 44, 46, 71–72, 83, 88; reader control of story, 7, 16, 28, 44; reader reduced control of, 7, 23 test of morality, 164–65 textual excess, 4, 75–77, 81 time shifting, xxix, 16, 28, 31 tourist (of mediated story), 8, 63, 70–74, 187 Toy Story (film series), xiv, 52, 95, 135, 147, 156, 178 Trailer Park Boys (television and film series), 10, 26 transmedia storytelling, xxxii, 75–78

207

True Blood, xiv, 19–20, 55 Twilight (book series), xiv, xxviii, xxxii, xxxiii, 9, 18, 24, 26–27, 44, 46, 51, 58, 72, 90, 95; Cullen, Edward, 114, 136, 154–55, 158; love triangle in, 153–55; Swan, Bella, 112, 115–16, 136, 155, 158 Twitter, xviii, xxxvii, 43, 168 Vampire Diaries, 153–54 van der Woodsen, Serena. See Gossip Girl VCR, xv–xvi, xxix Velveteen Rabbit metaphor, 1, 147 villain, 93, 94, 95, 101–9, 111, 114, 133, 143, 148–50, 163 Voldemort. See Harry Potter (book series) The Walking Dead, xiv, xxxiv, 20–21, 32–33, 36, 64, 68–69, 94, 97, 126, 135–36, 145, 157, 168–69, 181, 189; The Governor, 104, 140, 169; Grimes, Rick, 55, 126–27, 135, 140, 158 wardrobe metaphor 1–12, 45, 48, 51, 54, 76–77, 81, 83, 89 Web 2.0, 43 Weeds, xiv, 94, 176–77; Botwin, Nancy, 167 Whedon, Joss, xxxviii, 82 White, Walter. See Breaking Bad White Witch, 103, 168; See also Chronicles of Narnia Whovians. See Dr. Who world of origin, 3, 7, 8, 12n2 world building, xxxii, 4; See also transmedia storytelling Yoda. See Star Wars (film series)

About the Author

Lisa Glebatis Perks (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Communication and Media at Nazareth College. Her research interests include audience reception processes and rhetorical analysis of media representations. Her work has been published in Communication, Culture and Critique, Communication Quarterly, Communication Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and The Journal of Popular Culture.

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