Blog 7

For my seventh blog, I wish to discuss convergence within transmedia storytelling using synergy. According to Henry Jenkins, synergy is important to a given story through different media platforms to convey a complete story. On page 107 of his chapter Searching for the Origami Unicorn, he says “While the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic prospects sweet, and the audience primed, the media industries haven’t done a very good job of collaborating to produce compelling transmedia experiences.” This is very true to my favorite franchise: Resident Evil.

For a quick overview, Resident Evil is a story about a virus that was created by the Umbrella Corporation that created horrible monsters and ravenous zombies. Main characters were made to survive in situations where enemy numbers were high, ammunition was low, and the characters had to uncover the truth about the evil Umbrella Corporation. Although most of the video games and all of the movies have been touted as huge successes, there were many examples of how these two Medias as well as other Medias did not contribute to the overall storyline with much of the franchise becoming non-canon.

Starting with games themselves, there was not a great deal of corroboration for synergy within the games themselves, let alone each other. In this list of canon inconsistencies on the Resident Evil Wikipedia, there are discrepancies even within the games themselves. For example, in the first game there are two playable storylines based on which character was chosen. The stories themselves do not contribute to one another so both stories are considered non-canon. In the third game, the player makes decisions in the game that affect the story significantly, which renders it non-canon. Then there are spin-offs whose storylines do not agree with the main story of the main games.

If you think the games are bad, the movies and books are worse. The movies make no attempt to follow the storyline set in place by the original games; instead, they create their own storyline that is completely independent and use characters differently or creates entirely new characters. Same for the books, they are regarded as highly non-canon because they alter the storyline with events that are never mentioned in the main story and make connections between characters that resemble more fan fiction than actual franchise storytelling.

Although Resident Evil is one of my all time favorite stories, I would have to admit it is a poor transmedia convergence. I do believe it is still a great story and if there would have been better corroboration between the Medias to create a more complete story like in The Matrix; Resident Evil could have been an even better franchise with a lot stronger following.