Introducing the Mediaverse

The introductory chapter dives into how the mediaverse came to be - as a development of my ‘musings’ considering my personal television fandoms, which then grew into its own to develop theoretical concepts with contextual underpinnings. When delving deeper into those fandoms that I was an active or passive member of, one of the first noticeable commonalities was their success in mainstream media. This could mean several things—commercial success, critical success, auteurial popularity etc. What followed was a contextualisation of these texts as fan spaces for interaction, negotiation and revision that eventually developed into an inductive study through which the discourse surrounding fan-text-producer interaction could be problematised and its complex nature better understood to map the changing landscape of television culture. Considering my fan identity, I was particularly concerned with those fandoms whose dynamics in the sense of textual references, interpersonal fan interactions and negotiations with textual producers were clear to me. It is in the process of these examinations that a model was developed to parse, complexify and present as a template the interconnectedness of television texts and their stakeholders.