ABSTRACT
Instead of presenting a summary or a definite set of conclusions, these final pages offer some perspectives on further lines of inquiry as well as some reflections concerning a potential Transmedia Character Studies. Transmedia characters are once again addressed as a specific structure of affordances for interpretation, circulation, and reappropriation, composed of their complex hybrid ontology, their epistemological incompleteness, an internal network governed by canonicity and continuity negotiation, as well as by blurred (but far from arbitrary) boundaries to other characters. Second, this final section offers a reflection on the applied methodology to triangulate characters as elusive communicative constructs or deliberately constructed “virtual actants” oscillating between media texts, media forms, and media discourses. It argues that studying transmedia characters implies reframing mediality – impressions of transparent immediacy vs. opaque hypermediacy – in social, political, and ideological terms as the constant negotiation of what is considered “normal” and “natural” (and thus a transparent representation) vs. “political” (and thus a mere media construct) in any given media text.
