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19 - Traversing the “Whoniverse”: Doctor Who’s Hyperdiegesis and Transmedia Discontinuity/ Diachrony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2021

By
Matt Hills
Edited by
Marta Boni
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Summary

Abstract

This chapter argues that the world building of long-running media franchises cannot be seen purely as a matter of textual attributes and instead partly emerges over time as a result of fans’ reading strategies. Taking Doctor Who (BBC TV, 1963—) as a case study, it is suggested here that fans and official producers have co-created the ‘Whoniverse’ across decades—not simply because small numbers of privileged fans have become producers/writers/showrunners, but also because fan interpretations have been diachronically recognized within the program's canon. Doctor Who has been marked by textual discontinuity, but fan audiences have playfully reconstructed its diegetic contradictions into coherent accounts of the Whoniverse. As such, fan practices have helped to generate and to conserve an integrated transmedial world.

Keywords: Doctor Who, fandom, hyperdiegesis, transmedia

In this chapter, I’ll return to a concept I introduced in Fan Cultures (Hills 2002, 137), considering how it can inform debates surrounding transmedia and world building. That concept is “hyperdiegesis”:

a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen […] within the text, but which […] appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension […] stimulating creative speculation and providing a trusted environment for affective play. (Hills 2002, 137—8)

I used this term to think about how cult texts offer up hyperdiegetic realms for their fans to learn about, become immersed in, and playfully transform, whether by playing trivia games, consuming episode guides, or writing fan fiction. I suggested that a combination of topophilic detail and coherence/ extensibility act as incitements to fan creativity and affect. However, as Elizabeth Evans has noted, “transmedia storytelling offers an expansion of […] Hills’ theory of […] hyperdiegesis” (Evans 2011, 28). This is because, increasingly, rather than narrative gaps being left for fans to speculate over, “the moments that are missing from the source text [can] become manifest […] as the narrative world stretches across […] platforms” (ibid, 29).

Type
Chapter
Information
World Building Transmedia Fans Industries , pp. 343 - 361
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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