Transmedia Storytelling in a Fragmented Age
Abstract
Narrative gravity is a system-level diagnostic heuristic for explaining why some transmedia storyworlds remain coherent under platform fragmentation while others lose interpretive stability. The problem is not simply how stories circulate or whether a world possesses a stable core. It is what coherence looks like after circulation, when audiences increasingly encounter a world as isolated fragments and sequence cannot reliably do the work of orientation on first contact. This chapter shifts the focus from expansion to what I call the partial-entry problem: the moment coherence must be sustained even when first contact is incomplete. I propose narrative gravity as a heuristic to locate where the work of coherence is actually being carried, whether in texts, paratexts, or community infrastructures. The framework operates across three analytically distinct but systemically linked dimensions: thematic constancy, structural necessity, and ethical resonance. These dimensions work at different analytical scales, narratological, formal, and sociological respectively, but they converge on a shared object: the maintenance infrastructure that keeps a storyworld legible over time. A historical analogue, the Great Siege of Malta, grounds the argument against presentism. The chapter then extends the analysis to feed-based environments and generative AI contexts, introducing Proof of Humanity as a way to track responsibility and trust when provenance becomes unstable.
