“The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” by Hank Green and Bernie Su (2013)
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YouTube / The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – via Iframely Fandom by Design by Judeth Oden Choi The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was a popular web series based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, the series aired on YouTube from April 9, 2012 through March 28, 2013. During the year that LBD ran, it aired one hundred episodes on its primary YouTube channel, plus an additional fifty episodes across four character spin-off YouTube channels. Most importantly, LBD’s “interactive team” operated thirty-five social media accounts across numerous social media platforms, including Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and LookBook. Spanning multiple media forms, LBD is part of a field referred to as transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins defines transmedia storytelling as “the art of world making” (Jenkins 2006). The consumers must navigate their own paths, “chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2006). A transmedia storyworld refers, according to Peter von Stackelberg, “to the shared universe within which the settings, characters, objects, events, and actions of one or more narratives exist.” Winning the 2013 Creative Arts Emmy for Original Interactive Programming and accumulating over forty million views, LBD is one of the most successful independent transmedia projects to date. What makes LBD’s critical and popular success unique is that it was almost entirely web-based (there was a book) and was not part of a larger marketing campaign or fundraising effort. Other successful transmedia projects like Why So Serious?, promoting the film The Dark Knight, or Canal + Spain’s Game of Thrones season 4 companion MMORPG, web series and social media campaign, are designed to enrich the consumer experience, thus compelling more consumers to turn on their televisions, go to the theatre or purchase products. In 2010, Tim Kring, funded by Nokia and supported by the NGO WeGiveBooks.org, developed Conspiracy for Good. An augmented reality game, the campaign was immersive and expansive in scope, ultimately building and stocking five libraries in rural Zambia and funding fifty scholarships for schoolgirls. LBD, on the other hand, was not primarily designed to drive consumer behavior ‘in real world,’ but was built to engender online fandom of the media itself. In fact, although the central and titular character is Lizzie Bennet, the most important character in the narrative and commercial structuring of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries may be ‘The Fan.’ On the Nerdist Writer’s Panel podcast, Bernie Su explains why he believes The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was a unique format: “Sure it’s a web series, but it’s not like a third person web series, it’s a first person web series. And it’s not TV; it’s not movies chopped up into two, three-minute videos. It’s its own thing.” It was theatre, an event that unfolded in real time before an audience on a stage that was the internet itself. It carefully considered the distance between audience and performer, between fiction and life. The primary medium the creators chose for their adaptation, the first person vlog, evoked YouTube celebrity and fan culture. Well-timed Twitter announcements, character reveals, and plot points, matched up with real-world conventions, sponsorship offers and spin-off opportunities, increasing the vlog’s exposure and boosting fan engagement. A careful relationship was maintained between the audience and the performers by encouraging fans to create their own fan art, fan fiction, blogs, discussions and communities, but maintaining character blogs, namely Twitter, as devices to further the story, re-establish the parameters of the storyworld, and persistently re-cast the audience as fans, denying them any greater sense of agency. To Become a YouTube Celebrity, First You Need Fans LBD’s fandom was nurtured by the very medium through which the story was told: the video blog or “vlog.” The typical vlog is composed of one person looking directly into a camera—even the factory-installed camera on one’s computer will do—usually in the privacy of his/her own room. I can’t think of any other media that so clearly conjures Ranciere’s question, “Why not think, in this case too, that it is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance that constitutes the distance itself?” By attempting to close the distance with first person vlogs, and invitations for interactivity, it actually accentuates the gulf between the youtube stars and the fandom. The conceit of LBD was that Lizzie Bennet, based on Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, is a twenty-four year-old mass communications graduate student from small-town California who keeps a video diary presumably about her mother’s desperate attempts to marry off Lizzie and her two sisters. Most of the story was told from Lizzie Bennet’s perspective; however, several characters made guest appearances, stumbled into, or “interrupted” her vlogging. Because Lizzie was a YouTube vlogger, and LBD was itself a YouTube vlog, the character’s success as a rising YouTube star and the success of the LBD were intertwined; one would not make sense without the other. It was no coincidence that once LBD gained sponsorship and financing for the remainder of the series, they also began gearing up for Episode 60, the first on-camera appearance by William Darcy. Episode 60 accumulated over 100,000 views in the first twenty four hours (Shields), and became an event remembered in blogging history as #darcyday. After all, the web series, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, was about a woman making a web series called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Lizzie Bennet and her co-stars’ rising popularity became a plot device that forwarded the action and set the stage for the major story modernizations, namely Mr. Collins’ proposal, Lydia Bennet’s scandal, and Lizzie and Darcy and Jane and Bing’s eventual unions. In the early episodes of LBD, Lizzie feels free to speak her mind about everyone she meets. She does not consider the possibility that any of her friends, family or acquaintances might watch the videos. As the series went on, and LBD became increasingly popular, Lizzie became more aware of her vlog’s reach. It is because LBD was so popular, that the characters themselves watched the video diaries, a device that fueled the resolution of plot conflicts and united our couples. In Episode 60, soon after William Darcy first sits down with Lizzie, Darcy confesses his love for her. After Lizzie refuses Darcy’s advances, Darcy says, “I was unaware of your feelings towards me.” Lizzie replies, “You were unaware? Then why don’t you watch my videos?” Lizzie is telling Darcy that he has to become her audience, one of her fans, to truly know her and win her love. To be the audience of LBD is to at once become part of Lizzie’s inner circle, to be her confidante, her follower and her fan. Reigning in the Seahorses Fan interaction was built into every aspect of the LBD experience. Creator Bernie Su described the show as the “true definition of the web” (Farber). During a Google+ Hangout, LBD fans happened to share an image of a seahorse with William Darcy’s head, thus the LBD fan community named itself “The LBD Seahorses,” or simply “The Seahorses.” “The Seahorses” started their own Tumblr pages, Lizzie Bennet Diaries subreddit, Twitter account and YouTube channel. LBD actors, writers and producers made occasional appearances in The Seahorses’ videos, comments and chats, remaining directly connected to the fans. Lizzie also occasionally made—seemingly random—references to seahorses in her videos, reminding her fans of their insider status. LBD fans also generated over eight hundred works of fan fiction on websites such as fanfiction.net. Each LBD character had their own Twitter account, which they updated every few days during the show, with posts about major story events and the mundane. Jay Bushman, the transmedia director, calls the short, contained Twitter conversations “playlets” (Nerdist). Typically these conversations were written between characters, but fans also inserted themselves in the conversation, sometimes eliciting real-time responses from the characters:
Producer Alexandra Edwards describes these conversations, “It works a lot like improv, actually: a character might start the scene, so to speak, with a certain Twitter update. Then fans will respond, and how the conversation goes really depends on the interaction” (Prior). Depending on which character(s) the fan followed, when and how often s/he read Twitter, each audience member gathered different pieces of the story that formed his or her own experience. While it may appear that consumers’ (note the word “consumers”) had endless opportunities to interact with LBD, the role of the audience was narrowly defined. The only roles in the world of YouTube are the vloggers and the fans. Therefore, it follows that the audience must behave as fans in order to interact in the storyworld. On the occasions when audience members strayed from their role as fan, or tried to push the conversation in a new direction, away from the narrative, the characters were quick to redirect them to their role as consumer. One of the most obvious instances of recasting the audience in the role of the fan occurs during Lydia’s scandal. The conversation began on January 26, five days before the news of Lydia’s sex tape broke via the vlog.
Lydia’s Twitter followers knew Pride and Prejudice, so they knew that George was not truly in love with Lydia and must be trying to manipulate her. The followers asserted themselves into Lydia and George’s conversation, trying to stop them as a loyal friend might.
When Rachel Bloom wrote to George “we want you out of her life,” she was presumably speaking on behalf of Lydia’s fans. However, when Lydia replied to her directly, Ms. Bloom seized the opportunity to address Lydia, not as a fan, but as a dear friend, someone who cares for Lydia “way to [sic] much.” Lydia tried to reframe the conversation by addressing all of her fans: “you guys don’t freaking get it.” Thus denying Ms. Bloom any special position in the narrative by lumping Ms. Bloom with the rest of her fans.
A second follower, Barbara Mora Mendez, tried to correct Ms. Bloom’s overreach and restore the status of Lydia’s fandom by reminding Lydia that “we love you as your loyal viewers.” But for Lydia it was too late to restore this conversation. It had done the job of furthering the story by establishing Lydia’s “us vs. the world” mentality, strengthening her tie to George, and isolating her from her loving fans. In an August 2013 article in Wired magazine, Rob Hinchcliffe writes that “when we think about transmedia and multiplatform, we should also be talking about transexperience and multicontributor.” The web, says Hichcliffe, “does not want to simply be another channel, another delivery system. It wants to be a toolbox, a sandbox, a toybox all rolled into one.” LBD fell short of that promise. It did not provide its audience with endless ways to play in its storyworld. It is prescriptive, even didactic, in its insistence that the fans stay in their seats. By making fandom the only way the audience could participate in the storyworld, it milked adoration but strangely also evoked genuine love from the audience. Did LBD work despite the limited agency of the audience? Or did it work because it asked nothing more from its audience than to be consumers? In 2013 transmedia storytelling had its moment, and as theatre practitioners we were excited by the potential of “transexperience,” “multicontributor” media. Since then it has only thrived as a marketing tool–is that where it belongs? Transmedia may be built of commercial platforms for commercial purposes, but what if the machine can be re-appropriated? What if we can as Eagleton describes Piscator’s ‘theatre machine,’ “harness this revolutionary cultural machine to revolutionary political ends, to lay bare, estrange, objectivate, demystify, dismantle, transform the relations between stages and audiences, dispel the aura of bourgeois theatrical magic with a breath of cultural materialism”? Does harnessing these technologies make the culture that we produce slave to the technology (“instrumental” as Eagleton described)? Or does culture emerge from the tools (and maybe in response to the limitations) that surround us? I am convinced that ‘new media theatre’ will take advantage of all of the social, creative and collaborative potential of the internet (and digital technologies), and I am exploring what agency and performance, collaboration and conflict look like in online worlds.
Cited: Bushman, Jay, Margaret Dunlap, Rachel Kiley, Kate Rorick, and Bernie Su. “Nerdist Writer’s Panel: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.” Interview by Ben Blacker. Audio blog post. Nerdist Writer’s Panel. Nerdist Industries, 9 July 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013. Eagleton, Terry. “Cultural Technology and the Avant Garde.” Farber, Betsy. “Case Study: How “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” creator has changed the face of storytelling.” iMediaConnection Blog. iMedia Communications, Inc., 17 Sept. 2013. Web. 1 Nov. 2013. Green, Hank and Bernie Su. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Pemberly Digital. Web. 20. August 2013. Hinchcliffe, Rob. “Transmedia storytelling: what’s the alternative to alternate reality games?.” Wired UK. Condé Nast Digital, 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 1 Nov. 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print. Prior, Karen Swallow. “The New, Old Way to Tell Stories: With Input From the Audience.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 18 Oct. 2013. Ranciere, J. (2007). The Emancipated Spectator. Artforum, 271–341. Shields, Mike. “The Biggest Web Series Opportunity for Brands Wasn’t at the NewFronts: Encore to Austen-inspired Lizzie Bennet Diaries Set for This Summer.” AdWeek. Guggenheim Digital Media, 20 May 2013. Web. 15 Nov. 2013.
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