Nova Southeastern University NSUWorks All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations HCAS Student Theses and Dissertations 5-11-2020 "Unbowed, unbent, unbroken": Ontological Insecurity in "Game of Thrones" and Other Fantastic Transmedial Storyworlds Nicole I. Chavannes Nova Southeastern University Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_etd_all Part of the Other Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Other Rhetoric and Composition Commons Share Feedback About This Item NSUWorks Citation Nicole I. Chavannes. 2020. "Unbowed, unbent, unbroken": Ontological Insecurity in "Game of Thrones" and Other Fantastic Transmedial Storyworlds. Master's thesis. Nova Southeastern University. Retrieved from NSUWorks, . (49) https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_etd_all/49. This Thesis is brought to you by the HCAS Student Theses and Dissertations at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Thesis of Nicole I. Chavannes Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Nova Southeastern University Halmos College of Arts and Sciences May 2020 Approved: Thesis Committee Thesis Advisor: Dr. Juliette Kitchens Thesis Reader: Dr. Janine Morris Program Reviewer: Dr. Juliette Kitchens This thesis is available at NSUWorks: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_etd_all/49 “UNBOWED, UNBENT, UNBROKEN”: ONTOLOGICAL INSECURITY IN GAME OF THRONES AND OTHER FANTASTIC TRANSMEDIAL STORYWORLDS A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Nicole Chavannes Halmos College of Arts and Sciences Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts Nova Southeastern University May 2021 © 2021 by Nicole Chavannes All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am so very grateful for the time I have had in NSU’s Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program and Writing and Communication Center. It has been a privilege to learn from the faculty in DCMA and to grow alongside my peers, academically, professionally, and personally, with so much support from the department. First and foremost, I must thank my incredible review committee, Dr. Juliette Kitchens and Dr. Janine Morris. Thank you both for your endless patience, mentorship and support (and for being my sounding board for all things Game of Thrones for the better part of two years). Thank you for helping me mold this project into a (manageable) cohesive text through wedding planning, a pandemic, Zoom fatigue, grief, and so much more. You have both made my time in this program so special, and I could not have done it without you. To my friends in CRDM, thank you for making me feel seen and understood, for making me laugh when I wanted to cry, and for withholding judgment when I inevitably did cry. Our movie nights, game nights, and holiday events kept me sane. A special shoutout to Veronica Diaz for always offering a second pair of eyes and many encouraging words. Thank you to my family and friends for always understanding my time restraints and putting up with my last-minute cancellations. To my parents—thank you for always supporting my academic ambitions and encouraging me to continue doing what I enjoy most: learning. I must also recognize my husband Mickey’s efforts to get me to finish this thesis for the past year. Thank you, Mickey, for keeping my work area stocked with the essentials: electrolytes, coffee, snacks, and cats. Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the four-legged creatures who have helped me along my journey. Tiger, the family cat: thank you for always jumping on my iii keyboard as I was writing and purring loudly in my face. It didn’t encourage much productivity, but it made me smile (and sneeze). Frodo (my anxious domestic long-hair) and Minnie (my rambunctious Scottish Fold), thank you both for offering me emotional support through the challenging year that was 2020 (and for jumping on my keyboard much like Tiger). In return, I promise to give you lots of cat treats and belly rubs. Again, thank you to everyone who has in any way supported me through my grad school journey and the thesis-writing process. Most importantly, thank you for listening to me rant and rave about Game of Thrones to an obscene degree for the past three years; I will try to take a break from it for the foreseeable future. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Review of Literature ..................................................................................................................... 8 “Power resides where men believe it resides”: Authorial Intent, Author/Audience Relationships, and New Media ................................................................................................... 9 “Hold the door”: Transmedia Storytelling ................................................................................ 13 “My watch is ended”: Television and Transmedia Studies ...................................................... 23 “Winter is coming”: Moving Forward ...................................................................................... 27 Limitations ................................................................................................................................... 30 Analysis ........................................................................................................................................ 31 “For the Throne”: Modes of Viewing and Ontological Security .............................................. 31 “Any man who must say ‘I am the King’ is no true King”: “Author” Commentary, Canon, and Ontological Security ................................................................................................................. 37 “Valar Morghulis”: Character Deaths, Recasting, and Ontological Security ........................... 47 “Chaos is a ladder”: Interim Fandom and Ontological Security ............................................... 55 “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention”: Unsatisfactory Endings and Ontological Insecurity .......................................................................................... 60 “Breaking the wheel”: Conclusion ............................................................................................ 67 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 71 v 1 Introduction The summer of 2019 saw one of the most significant televisual happenings of the decade: the premiere of the eighth and final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones (GoT). The premiere episode of the season alone had 17.4 million views across all of HBO’s viewing platforms, and 55 million pirated views in the 24 hours following its airing (Gartenberg). Unsurprisingly, the series finale outdid all the series’ previous viewership records, with 19.3 million views (Pallotta). As such, the show has left its mark on the U.S.’s televisual landscape, although many fans considered its final season a more negative mark than they had hoped. This collective fan disappointment is evidenced by a fan-made petition titled “Remake Game of Thrones season 8 with competent writers,” which drew over 1.8 million signatures and, at the time of writing, is still collecting them (D.). As a fan of the series, I watched the show diligently, changing my work schedule so I could watch each episode premiere Sunday evenings, refusing to watch with friends for fear that they would speak too much and ruin the experience of first watching an episode, and conscientiously avoiding spoilers on the rare occasion that I hadn’t watched an episode by the following Monday morning. It was, in fact, the only show I watched in real time during its run, as my preferred viewing method for most programs was typically binge-watching in bed. To test this theory, I went so far as to catch up on several seasons of each of the CW’s Arrowverse one summer, watching every season available of Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl in chronological order with the intention of watching each of their upcoming seasons in real time, only to give up shortly after the premiere of each show’s new season. As such, GoT was the only show of its era that held my attention enough to watch weekly, and few series have since inspired the same devotion. 2 The GoT finale had quite the fanfare surrounding it; indeed, the entire final season was heavily built up to in the two years preceding its premiere and following the previous season. Countless fan-generated theories circled the internet prior to the final season, with fans speculating what might occur based on previous seasons and George R. R. Martin’s novels (on which the show is based). The series, however, had long since surpassed the narrative in Martin’s published novels by the time season eight rolled around. As such, fan theories were based on Martin’s previously published works, which were not yet narratively caught up with the show but had significantly more characters and storylines. Fans were thus able to discuss the seemingly endless possible turns the final season might take, waiting in anticipation as the clock set by show creators D.B. Weiss and David