Teorias de fãs no engajamento transmídia em Dark (Netflix) : rotas de significação em rede

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand how Netflix’s and showrunner Baran bo Odar’s promotion strategies for the third season of the TV series Dark, in June 2020, boosted transmedia engagement, based on theories and fan conversations on Reddit. We started by observing the company’s posts related to the release of the third season of the TV series Dark and also posts by the production's showrunner, Baran bo Odar, on Instagram. For this case study, the proposed path covers the development of television product distribution technologies as a media ecological system. It emphasizes the trajectory of Netflix and the evolution of its business model from streaming distributor to audiovisual producer. The history of serialized narratives produced for television, audience engagement, the formation of fans and fandoms and the production of new meanings about their objects of devotion are of interest to this work, especially the circulation activities of this information, related to different contexts. Thus, the conversations of fans of the Dark series on the online social networking platform Reddit are the empirical object for the analysis of routes of meaning in networks of conversations formed by fans. To this end, the conversations of the series’ engaged audience on Reddit were collected using the Communalytic tool, in the r/dark discussion forum from April 28 to August 24, 2020, and the conversations collected between June 16 and July 7, 2020, were analyzed using the NVivo tool. The data was filtered using the word theory and then analyzed using the concepts of engagement by Dahlgren and Hill (2020), transmedia engagement by Evans (2020), and circulation by Braga (2006). Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2009; 2014; Bryant, 2017; Rodríguez, 2022) was used as a methodology. The analysis showed how the conversations of Dark’s engaged audience on Reddit consolidate a solid and supportive community, committed to developing fan theories and sharing knowledge about the series. The conclusion is that fan conversation forums, created organically and unmoderated by production companies or broadcasters, are channels with the potential to generate expansions of the narrative universe and transmedia extensions of the original plot. The members of the r/dark subreddit bring various personal references to the debates, broadening the reach of the series, demonstrating that transmedia engagement is behavior that goes beyond audience numbers or online social network metrics.