Co-Opting Game of Thrones with Digital Paratext Narratives: Interactivity, authorship, and affordances in the storytelling environment of the internet

In my article-based dissertation, I examine the narrative practices of participatory online audiences in relation to HBO’s popular TV-series Game of Thrones. I approach this subject from the perspective of a narrative formations I call digital paratext narratives. These are distributed narratives around and about static core texts, like novels of TV-series, that occur in digital environments. Digital paratext narratives impose interactivity upon their core texts, subjecting them to a wavering of narrative authority. In addition to examining Game of Thrones itself, I also analyse audience-authored online discourse about the series in the articles of this study.

The starting point of my dissertation is that the widespread mass-adoption of digital technologies has caused the internet to become the predominant storytelling environment of contemporary culture. I propose a dual perspective of narrative affordances of digital environments and affordances of digital narratives to help make sense of the complex entanglement of contemporary narrative forms and practices with digital environments. My dissertation zooms in on the ways in which the relationship between the authors and audiences of narratives is reconfigured in this new storytelling environment.

To that end, I put together a theoretical framework composed of elements from paratext theory, classical narratology, the model of Interactive Digital Narratives, communicative models of rhetorical narrative theory, and affordance theory. The end- result of this synthesis is aligned with—and contributes to—what Paul Dawson has called discursive narratology. With the help of this theoretical framework, I examine the ways participatory audiences co-construct, contest, and co-opt the narrative of Game of Thrones by the means of strategic deployment of digital paratext narratives. These theoretical efforts amount to configuring a model designed to describe how narratives function, and how they can be used, in the new media environment defined by digital technologies. The model can further shed light on how the emergence of new narrative practices associated with the proliferation of digital technologies has impacted contemporary culture. The theory of metamodernism, introduced by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van Den Akker in 2010, functions as my point of departure for theorizing contemporary culture in relation to previous cultural dominants like postmodernism. My key intervention in metamodernist theory lies in foregrounding digitalisation and internet culture within this theoretical discourse.

The data used in this study consists of Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series on which Game of Thrones is based) and a selection of online paratexts about these works. It includes paratexts created by HBO, 20 articles published online by various newspapers and blogs, as well as a collection of social media content produced by audience members (4 Reddit posts) and influencers (6 YouTube videos). In this study, I analyse the data as illustrative examples that support the theoretical discussion.

My thesis consists of four peer-reviewed publications and a theoretically oriented summarising part. The peer-reviewed publications together contribute to answering four primary research questions: 1) What are digital paratext narratives? 2) What kinds of author–reader communication do they facilitate? 3) How are they shaped by the affordances of the internet? and finally 4) How are digital paratext narratives used in public discourse?