In this project, I examine how novel character representations emerge in global narrative systems. Characters, after all, are among the most diverse today as they have ever been, and their representation is essential to understanding the underlying implications of narrative systems on global scales. In the past decade alone, they have been represented by beams of light, rivers, statues that only move when they aren’t being observed, talking ants, paper airplanes, sea sponges, talking toasters, and nuns who sing and dance in unison. Users (readers, viewers, consumers) of narrative experiences now have access – because of two centuries of unimaginable growth in communication technologies – to narratives from, by, and about people whose actions, belief systems, and own identities force us all to reflect, question, and imagine. We’d all hope this brave new world, which was not long ago a brave new horizon, has done more good than harm to our ways of life. Yes, we have access to more information than we ever have before. People still try to control what we can and can’t see, and those subversive narrative consumers among us still sometimes ask the question: what aren’t I seeing? Yet we continue to move forward, each year understanding a little bit more of the stories behind the experiences of others, reflecting more deeply, and taking actions to adapt to a world of so many voices and interfaces. Our world has so many stories that one would be forgiven for opting to not consume the same story twice. Such is the great charade, or the great tragedy, of our networked world: while we can access more stories from more places, we are liable to think that once we’ve heard a story, we’ve heard it as it was really intended. In her The Dangers of a Single Story, novelist Chimamanda Adichie reflects deeply on the ways that prejudice and fear can be stoked by the fires of misinformation, which today travel more quickly than they ever have. One would be forgiven for thinking that the way a story is packaged reflects the story itself—where it came from, or whom it came from, and through whose many hands the story has been modified ever since.

But through complexity comes simplicity. The complication of the narrative ecosystem has created, surprisingly, some of the most simplistic narrative forms to emerge on a global scale in centuries, yet whose exact technical mechanisms are some of the most complex in our history. Who wants to travel to experience a story when we can experience it right here, wherever we happen to be? Who wants to pay more money for an experience that requires more physical and emotional commitment on our part? Shouldn’t we be paying more to do less?

Botanical Beasts

Monsters, or Beasts, are chimeric in nature; they possess the combined features of several animals. Many of the greatest and most despicable monsters (historically) appear to possess uniquely human characteristics, physiological or otherwise. Monsters designed for modern audiences possess characteristics of humans, animals, and plants. The clearest example of this comes to us from the 1978 Dungeons & Dragons: the Demogorgon.

The beast—inspired by the Pagan demon of the same name—became among the first fantasy beasts born into the 21st Century. The Demogorgon was depicted as bipedal with two baboon heads, tentacles for arms, a scaled torso, and birds’ feet. Standing like a man (or like Beowulf’s Grendel) yet behaving like an intelligent beast, it would later become the most iconic of 21st century’s depictions of man-made monsters, made so with the 2017 release of Netflix’s Stranger Things, a streaming web series about a group of D&D-playing kids who have accidentally stumbled upon a gateway to the “Upside-Down,” which for our purposes we can liken to D&D’s “Veil of Shadows,” of which the historical Demogorgon is the prince. What’s most interesting about our fascination with the Demogorgon today is not its overnight celebrity, but its botanical design features—making it as much plant as animal.

Flash forward to 2017, the year that the rest of the world came to meet the Demogorgon. This time around, however, the beast was noticeably different than in its previous iterations. For one thing, it was as much plant as it was animal; for another, one of its most essential features was removed—its two sets of eyes. Like many other modern monsters, the Demogorgon appears to “see” using a sort of sixth sense, at the same time seemingly wired into a hive mind of other Demogorgons, like ants or bees in a hive.

However, the Demogorgon is not the only botanical beast drawn from mythic, fantastic, or fictional narratives. Immediately, we see that characters of this sort are not only common, but popular with vastly different demographics and age groups.

The Demogorgon's original manifestation. Wizards of the Coast. Dungeons & Dragons.

Mechanical Monsters

With the age of artificial intelligence comes robotic heroes who couldn’t have existed prior to the industrial revolution. As we gain a deeper understanding of psychology, physiology, we also begin to use character development as an opportunity to practice what we’ve learned. When we depict androids or artificially intelligent machines in modern narratives, we often encounter characters who lack eyes, ears, hands, or other such sensory features—accounting for machines’ extrasensory nature. A particularly problematic example is that of "Nier: Automata," a transnarrative (manga, video games, films, etc.) focusing on highly sexualized humanoid android characters who, you’ve guessed it, have no eyes. Another issue worth raising here is that gender, in robotic characters, serves no obvious purpose beyond the strictly narrative. But perhaps this "genderizing" has gained a new purpose, one that requires us to view the situation from the perspective of the gendered robotic character--to assert for him a true, humanistic individuation. Thereby, and by masking the individual intelligence within a social system, the robotic character becomes as any other human character, but with the extended intelligence and capabilities of an optimized, mechanical system.

What Does a Hero Look Like: Then & Now

In early 2019, while I was just getting into the meat of this thesis, the Internet erupted over a picture of Steven Pruitt. If you aren’t familiar with that name, you’re not alone: Pruitt is responsible for editing nearly 3 million articles on Wikipedia and for writing at least 35,000 more. For context, if you had visited Wikipedia and perused any article this year, there's about a 33% chance that Pruitt had a hand in writing or editing it.

In a society that uses knowledge as both a weapon and a resource, the value of information cannot be overstated. Pruitt's true gift, I believe, was that of narrative access and agency. Those places on Earth without Wikipedia access have far greater issues than those that an encyclopedia may be able to solve. But for those with even the most remote access to the Internet of Things will have lived in a more democratized world as a result.

This brings us back to our original observation. What is it about Pruitt's appearance--rather than his service--got Internet users so activated? At the time of his first public interview, it appeared that half of the Internet wanted Pruitt to be lambasted because, in their opinions, he looks kinda funny. The other half--were we to dilute "the Internet" into a social schism only several hundred thousand miles wide--found Pruitt to be a hero. In a world that privileges access to information, Wikipedia stands as a powerhouse of social justice. Pruitt, a humble writer whose work has absolutely changed the landscape of virtual narrative access for so many people around the world, is exactly the kind of hero we’ve been waiting for. His strength is not measured by the hammers that he can wield, but by the knowledge that he can share.

The Danger of a Single Story

John Duncan’s 1912 depiction of the Fomorians, a race of one-legged, one-armed subhuman giants from Celtic mythology (shown in the above historical depiction as two-legged). In Celtic lore, the Fomorians were believed to be the original settlers of Great Britain. They were also believed to be the first of five cultures that the Celts had to defeat before eventual unification. In thinking of The Danger of a Single Story, I wonder if maybe the Celts – or who would eventually become the Celts that is why the Follorians have one arm and one leg. Maybe that is why monsters are so monstrous. We must villanize the other whom we feel we must eradicate