June 25-26 saw the coming together of a host of researchers working on the cutting-edge of various aspects of characters for a super-intensive long-form workshop organized by Jaqueline Berndt at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University, the Characters: Rights and Roles, International Workshop. And we were fortunate enough to be there to witness the inspiring intensity of the talks and discussions, and to also contribute with our own experience from the JVMG project.
This event was one of those special occasions that are more like a true master-class on the state of the art of the topic woven together by all the participants through the constant discussions and cross-referencing of themes and questions, where the sum of the workshop became indeed more than just its individual parts, which in themselves were packed with so much detail – with an hour allotted for ample delivery and deliberation for each presenter – that this report can in no way do justice to them.
The opening keynote “What is a character? Copyright’s (muddled) answer” by Simone Schroff was the probably most anticipated presentation of the workshop, and rightly so, as it delivered a high tempo no punches pulled critical examination of a range of copyright regimes and interpretations regarding characters and the effects thereof on the creative industries. Some of the key takeaways from the presentation (which also encompassed a mini crash-course on copyright law) included the following. Copyright law usually explicitly lists the kinds of works that can benefit from protection. Characters, however, are not listed as a work type in themselves, instead each country has its own test (or in the case of US law multiple tests that differ across jurisdictions) for deciding whether they enjoy copyright protection or not. An often recurring requirement in these tests is that characters be distinctive and consistent over time, which pushes industry actors and thereby creators as well to veer away from change and development in characters as that could undermine the potential to protect the character via copyright, which is still the preferred tool for the protection of intellectual property (as opposed to, for example, trademarks or design law). The highly current problem of artificial intelligence and copyright was also briefly discussed. Here the fact that there is no author in the traditional sense, and thus no expression and no originality in the sense that copyright law understands these terms currently results in that there can be no copyright protection for the time being either. The way these things are understood and regulated, however, might change in the future. EU case law is in the making, and the US copyright office has already registered some assisted works but not purely generated ones. This last point is another aspect of the question, that further complicates this field: it is often unclear when and how much AI was actually used during the creative process.
Next up Lukas R.A. Wilde took over at the helm, and did not drop a single beat in maintaining the tempo and excitement set by Simone Schroff. His presentation “Characters, kyara, figures, actants: Terms and concepts across disciplines” examined the central foundational question of where are characters actually located, on the level of a represented world or in some sense “beyond” that? The first of these positions could be seen as the narratological approach, summed up by the statement that characters are “first and foremmost elements of the constructed narrative world” (Eder, Jannidis & Schneider 2010: 9), while the second position corresponds to a cultural studies approach, where characters are “popular heroes” (Bennett 2017) or “cultural icons” (Brooker 2013). To discuss the many different theoretical frameworks that grapple with this duality and to offer a potential solution for reconciling them Lukas R.A. Wilde introduced the notion of transmedia characters as networks of partially distinguished character versions (see his monograph Transmedia Character Studies together with Tobias Kunz for all the exciting details). Ultimately concluding his talk on the note that irrespective of terminological preferences it is important to make the distinctions clear between locating the characters on the level of the storyworld or the transfictional substrata. Furthermore, certain media forms, genres, narrative traditions and so on prefer one side of this distinction over the other, thus neither one of these two can be considered more fundamental than the other.
In the third presentation of the day, “The many faces of Ronja and Pippi: Children’s book illustrations, fan art, adaptation” Olga Kopylova introduced the results of her seemingly whimsical yet ultimately far-reaching exploration of the impact of children’s books illustrators on the form that characters can end up taking in the popular imagination. Choosing as her case studies Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump and Ronja rövardotter she explained how popular illustrated books may generate complex and extensive inter- and transtextual networks – especially in relation to character depictions – through both translated editions and different illustrated editions in a single language. Examining a wide range of Pippi Långstrump editions in various languages, she identified at least five Pippi interpretations that seem to color the sense of the title character in a specific direction: neutral Pippi, sweet child Pippi, lovely girl (older) Pippi, gremlin (with devil like ponytails) Pippi, and even troll Pippi in one artist’s interpretation. These could be interpreted either as representations of particular character aspects, or as completely different character versions. Therefore, the character is destabilized over the many different editions not only on the textual level (particularly in the case of translations) but also on the visual level. Furthermore, certain illustrators can have a defining impact on the way characters and their storyworlds live in the popular imagination. For example, the impact of Ingrid Vang Nyman can been seen in the way the white spots (never mentioned in the text) she added to the horse have become a permanent fixture and most likely canon interpretation of the horse’s appearence. Olga Kopylova’s preliminary conclusions in this research project at the time of the presentation were the following: kyara drawings in illustrated fiction operate under similar principles to that of transmedia characters; illustrators can develop parallel visual canons for characters; the influence between text and image flows both ways (illustrations are bound by the text but can also have a lasting effect on the metatext); illustrators contribute to the formation of the “visual canon”; visualizations travel internationally; and efforts from above to canonize a single visual interpretation are problematic and might prove ineffective.
Continuing the strand of rich empirical research served with fine grained critical interpretation Dario Lolli took us behind the scenes to the world of anime licensing trade shows in his presentation ‘Believing in Characters: Anime Licensing as “Truth Function”‘, in which he problematized the distinction between production and consumption from a completely new angle. The “believing in characters” discourse continues to pathologize fans – who seem to believe in characters too deeply – or portray them as childlike and overly emotional. At the same time, however, professional anime licensing is based just as much on a practical belief in characters and not just a juridicial function of managing the various bundles of rights pertaining to their use in, for example, broadcasting or merchandising. And while copyright establishes characters as entities kept together by rights, they nevertheless function as celebrities that seemingly exert an influence on the very media professionals that are working with them. Indeed, licensing experts don’t just mechanistically shape the taste of consumers – argues Dario Lolli –, but rather have to understand them in fine detail and have to act as knowledgeable and privileged spokes persons for the changing tastes and attitudes of consumers, and thereby, ultimately, both licensors and licencees need to believe in characters just like fans do. This argument was richly illustrated with many details from his fieldwork at licensing and media trade shows, where the different temporalities of media consumption over time and across the globe are synchronized with each other; and where the professionals visiting these events are addressed as consumers – in which characters at the stands/booths play a key role, establishing an affective response that precedes any business negotiations – even though they are buying licensing properties.
From the trade show floors Joleen Blom brought us straight back to the very fabric of stories and the question of character’s transtextual identities in her presentation “The case of Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling (2023)” discussing some of the major points from her open access book Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling, (which you should go and download now). In the book she offers concrete studies of characters in transmedia ecologies, critiques the idea of narrative continuity between transmedia works, and relocates the focus from player character/avatars to non-player characters. She also introduces the term dynamic game character, these are characters in narrative based games whose development and narrative outcome is influenced by the player’s decisions. Her discussion in the presentation focused on chapter four of the book “Strategies to control a character’s transtextual identities”, examining three traditional forms of control in detail, namely: authorship, ownership and canonization. Many interesting points were raised regarding the first two as well, however, for the sake of brevity I will jump straight to the paradoxes that Joleen Blom outlined regarding canonization. Multiple canons tend to emerge over time, but creative industries tend to favour content loyal to their narratives, ignoring and marginalizing transformative expressions. Even so, canonization proves to be a difficult tool of control, as canons have to be constantly updated and fixed. The tension between competing versions of a character and the way canonization is employed to try and corral these and ultimately single out a preferred version was illustrated on two case studies, one from Mass Effect and the other from Dragon Age: Origins. Both these case studies highlighted how dynamic game characters cannot stay dynamic when they are moved to another media other than games, with comics content created in both cases forcing a particular interpretation (and thus play-through choices) on the respective narratives and concerned characters.
In the final presentation of the day, “Modern Mascot General: The Daoist Deity Black Tiger as Transmedia IP” Nick Stember introduced the first leg of an ongoing project at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen aimed at connecting contemporary media forms with various East Asian artifacts in the museum’s collection and thereby tying even more dimensions of the question of characters and rights to the overall discussion. The Copenhagen Scroll is a depiction of the Thunder Ancestor (the Daoist god of thunder) from the late sixteenth century, and is a prize possession of the national museum. The first phase of the project centers around creating a comic book about the Thunder Ancestor and the Copenhagen Scroll. Not only is this comic book reinterpretation and extension of the Copenhagen Scroll an interesting example of the branching and ever multiplying nature of characters (as discussed in Lukas R.A. Wilde’s, Olga Kopylova’s and Joleen Blom’s presentations), it is also a unique example in the way institutional actors – in this case the National Museum of Denmark – can also play a part in this process beyond individual creators or businesses, as well as in the way it is a historical/mythical figure that is being taken up as a character. And it is this last point that Nick Stember elaborated on in more detail in his presentation, drawing attention to the way that in China and Taiwan one can find celebrity spokes characters, non-celebrity spokes characters and public domain characters. Beyond the example of Daoist deities such as the Thunder Ancestor being taken up in works like the recent movie Creation of the Gods, he brought up and discussed in much detail the example of the Black Tiger General, a figure mostly found in Taiwan and associated with the god of wealth (based on the Ming novel that the aforementioned movie is also based on). As such the figure is often used for promoting the god of wealth or in associations that play on this connection, for example an Easycard keyring with Master Black Tiger. The fact that the Black Tiger General (or Master Black Tiger) represents a public domain character in Taiwan is well illustrated by the fact that beyond its use by corporations like Easycard, it has also been incorporated in a temple’s promotion, and has been turned into a cartoon and Line sticker packs by a freelance illustrator as well.
Day two started with a seamless continuation of where day one had left off with the role of museums and the theme of public domain characters being carried on in Susana Tosca‘s presentation “Fictional Characters and the Cultural Commons in Museum Communication“. Susana Tosca also touched on the New East-Asian Museum Tales project – that Nick Stember had used as the jumping off point for his presentation –, but more importantly introduced a fresh theoretical framework combining the notion of cultural commons (formulated by Walter Santagata and colleagues) with her own work together with Elizabeth Evans on transmedial characters (looking at characters as networks of traits in a transmedial space, and problematizing the notion of a historical center) in order to discuss a special exhibition at the National Museum of Denmark, The Raid. This exhibition centered on viking culture and the figure of Bjørn Ironside – historically an amalgamation of many heroes –, also taken up in the highly successful Vikings television series (2013-2020). Both the Vikings series and the museum is tapping into the cultural commons, but the Vikings series has had such a strong impact on the cultural commons that it seems to both help (by building interest) and hamper (by so strongly influencing visitor expectations) the museum in mobilizing the same sources. This example provides a strong illustration of one of the central ideas of the cultural commons problem, namely that the reproduction of the cultural resources can lead to an erosion or an undermining of the internal coherence of said resources as well as to uncontrolled change. Thus, Susana Tosca left us with the closing question of can we craft characters that are both informative and resonant, ensuring at the same time that cultural traditions are preserved in a responsible manner?
Staying on the theme of GLAM institutions and issues but turning back more towards legal concerns, next up, Dalma Kálovics addressed the problem of “Access issues and archiving of comics in the digital age“. Although we tend to think of digital content as being more readily available and easier to preserve than material objects, the ephemeral and at risk nature of digital content is starting to become more and more obvious. There are already a large number of pre-70s print publications that were never properly archived and as such have completely disappeared, creating holes in the history of manga that can never be directly explored by researchers. Without being fully aware of this we are witnessing the formation of similar holes in contemporary manga history as a result of the way digital publication and dissemination platforms work and the lack of systematic archiving aimed at preserving digitally released works. Three main problems were discussed by Dalma Kálovics that lead to this happening, namely the effect of licenses expiring and platforms disappearing (both impacting the availability of works that were never truly owned by their readers) as well as region locked (or geoblocked) manga. First, examples of the impact of license expiration include the effect of manga artists changing publishers resulting in their older works no longer being available. Sometimes only newer (e.g. colorized) versions remain available, which can hamper comparative research. Second, an example of a platform going out of business resulting in large portions of the work published there becoming unavailable (since most licenses were never picked up by other platforms or publishers) is that of JMANGA, where readers only had subscription or pay per volume access to read titles online, but not to download the works they purchased access to. Third, while geographical distance can be an issue for obtaining print publications as well (for example shipping fees can be high), but for digital copies geoblocking can make works completely unavailable. Dalma Kálovics also offered a detailed survey of the current state of archiving regarding digitial manga and webtoons. In Japan the National Diet Library now collects some digital manga, but only publications with proper ISBN numbers are collected, so, for example, webtoons and works released by chapters will not make the cut. Indeed, there are already at least 20 years of digital publications that were never collected, potentially leading to new holes in the history of manga as seen from the future, warns Dalma Kálovics. In Korea a webtoon archive is being developed, however, currently only metadata is available on the works (similar to the MADB).
Then, Zoltan Kacsuk provided a library and data science perspective on characters in his presentation, “Working with anime and manga characters from a digital humanities perspective: Lessons learned from the Japanese Visual Media Graph project and beyond” (see the slides below for details).
In the penultimate presentation of the workshop, “Defining film authorship in the 1970 complete reform of the Japanese copyright law: Exploratory notes on the debates of the 4th Subcommittee of Examination of the Copyright System (1966–1970)” Mathieu Mallard took us right back to the very beginning of the workshop, with a minute examination of the way the change in copyright law for movies in Japan was debated and decided. One of the central tensions in the debate between 1966-70 revolved around the nature of movies as being the creative product of usually not one author but rather a collaborative effort of multiple parties. Nevertheless, in order to enable efficient business operations the copyright had to be placed in the hands of a single party, chosen to be the producer. In a preliminary version of the new copyright law’s text the director was still positioned as the representative actor (on behalf of the creators of the movie, i.e. the “authors”) whose responsibility it is to arrange for the publication rights to be transferred to the producer. In later subsequent versions of the draft this was modified to reflect a stronger claim on the part of producers for holding the copyright of the work (and thus the rights to exploit its publication) from the start of the film making process, stating that by entering into the film making process the creators have implicitly expressed their will for the movie to be published by the producers. These discussions and shifts in the formulation of the law’s text help us better understand the way business interests were held to be more important than asserting creator’s rights in relation to film making in Japan at the time.
The closing keynote by Sheuo Hui Gan, “Instant Attraction: On Animated Characters in Today’s Saturated Media Environment” bought together a number of fresh ideas and case studies to highlight the way character designs have changed in our new media environment and have in turn impacted the way amateur users and semi-professional creators present themselves in video content online – providing a very vivid and fitting ending to this two-day rights and characters focused extravaganza. Characters have become the central focus of attention in today’s narratives and media products even more so than before. The speed at which we consume these works has led to creators using established conventions and tropes in character design to signal character personality traits, which in turn leads to the way “visual appeals may be traceable to other characters and possibly even their stories” engendering the emergence of a “character archaeology” in which these relationships can be traced back through layers of iteration and borrowing – similar to Azuma Hiroki’s description of database consumption. This trend carries with it the threat of characters becoming less and less unique and less anchored to their individual source works. At the same time there are still ample examples of the way unique characters can be assembled in part by playing with the existing conventions and tropes, and thereby expressing even major plot points and driving forces through the character designs as demonstrated on the case studies of Delicious in Dungeon (Dungeon Meshi) and Spy x Family. A third case study of Genshin Impact drew further attention to the way that “modern character design tends to centralize meaning on the characters, making them the focal point of the visual storytelling process” to the point that the internal story of the characters’ development can become externalized, “allowing us to understand the characters through their visual appearance,” and thereby even enabling a non-linear engagement with the story and characters. Finally, Sheuo Hui Gan, turned towards the phenomenon of amateur and semi-professional content creators turning themselves into characters through the use of visual effects and animation. Building on Murray Smith’s work, Engaging Characters, she emphasized the complex and layered relationship between the audience and the creators’ characters ranging from identification through empathy to absorption. Interestingly the homogenizing effect found in character designs due to the fast paced nature of our contemporary media environment is further accentuated in this space by the often limited range of mass-produced filters and visual effects available to amateur content creators.
The workshop was a massive success. I am quite confident in stating that everyone left the event both exhausted and elated, with lots and lots of inspirational ideas taken home to be further developed and connected. We would like to sincerely thank Jaqueline Berndt for not only organizing this event, but also playing a key role in facilitating the discussions and orchestrating the symphony of ideas that were explored during the two days. Furthermore, a huge thank you goes out to all the presenters for their enthusiasm and engagement. And last but not least a big thank you to all the students, who participated with us in this two-day intellectual adventure. We look forward to seeing everyone again soon at various events and venues and to continuing our discussions and joint work in the future.
