#eccenticeditor

In Authorized Resistance, Is Fan Production Frakked?, Suzanne Scott takes a skeptical look at certain Transmedia extensions that seek to collaborate with their fans while also maintaining textual authority. She clarifies that this is different than the prohibitionist approach that corporate entities will take towards non-authorized fan Transmedia creations. Instead, Scott discusses how “download it yourself” content from series creators can place fan production under “temporal and creative threat,”(211). This is because this new media seeks to reaffirm the original creator’s textual authority and prevent fans from getting the opportunity to create their own media that would interfere with the text’s official canon.  

In this example, we’ll look at TK-436: A StormTrooper Story and see how it functions under this transmedia collaboration model that Scott discusses.  

http://www.starwars.com/video/fan-film-awards-2016-tk-436-a-stormtrooper-story

TK-436: A StormTrooper Story is a fan-made Star Wars short film that was selected by the Star Wars Fan Film Awards of 2016. The film follows the story of a Stormtrooper named Adam who is forced to confront his pace when he finds that his former lover is fighting on the side of the Rebel Alliance. The fan film has a very high production value and utilized impressive special effects. It doesn’t add much to the main cannon of the Star Wars Skywalker Saga, but it provides an interesting look into the stories of stormtroopers which isn’t really explored by the main star wars Transmedia extensions.  

To analyze the relationship of the corporate side of star wars with this fan production, it’s important to look at the nature of the contest itself. According to Wikipedia, the contest had originally not allowed in-universe fan-fiction stories to be told until 2007. This was only because all the movies had been released, and one could assume based on the reading that this was to make sure the official text was not competing with any other. The contest also restricts which copyrighted material that the films could use, limited them to a collection of approved images, music, and sound effects.  

Through examining this rules, it can be found that this context seeks to hold a collaborationist relationship with the fans while also wielding some textual authority. They want the fans to be able to produce content to share with other fans, but they place rules and regulations upon the fan productions to fit within the guidelines of the Star Wars brand. Those are exactly the restrictions the TK-436: A StormTrooper Story is falling under, and although it is a fan creation it falls under the power of the Star Wars corporate entity.  

Work Cited 

Scott, Suzanne. “Authorized Resistance: Is Fan Production Frakked”, Cylons in America Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, Continuum New York and London, 2008, pp. 210–222.