#this isn't to say that SW approaches the genuine religious texts of myth or biblical stories

[daisyachain]

I hate talking about the nature of franchises because they’re such a frustrating and contradictory invention of 20thC mass media. Fundamentally, franchise fiction exists as a moneymaking device where a single property is successful enough that anything with the same brand name will break even at worst. It’s a risk mitigation method by producers/studios/publishers/rightsholders in a world where making mass artwork depends on precarious funding. You may have a great idea for great art but if doesn’t have mass appeal/have some way to make profit, execution is going to be limited.

Public arts funding closes some of the gap but is limited in the opposite direction, where it is awarding based on subjective ‘merit’ and tends to focus more on High, Important Art. Fair enough, if it’s publicly funded you may as well give it to work that will be win awards and be taught in classes.

Looking back on storytelling traditions, though, there’s a running theme of canon. English-language works constantly reference Greco-Roman stories/The Classics. Folklore worldwide consists of the same few stories, told and retold and reinterpreted and re-explored. From the primal soup of ‘why did Jercophanes die in that freak thunderstorm?’ occurring across the Greek islands you get Zeus, god of thunder. A million stories later told by people who had unfaithful husbands/bad dads/etc. later, you develop the archetype of Zeus, all-powerful philanderer. Then the Iliad, made by entertainers from a dozen half-remembered historical events, talks about its events in the context of which gods support who. The preexisting miasma of religious tales is used to explain and inform a popular story. The Iliad is then referenced endlessly in every story published since, Dante names Hector as one of the virtuous pagans, we still call our weaknesses ‘Achilles’ Heel’

All that is to say that stories are by nature intertextual and early storytelling traditions rely on mixing/melding/extrapolating existing stories. That continues today, every story in some way references a dozen others. English-language fantasy either references Tolkien or deliberately avoids him. Shakespeare is constantly rehashed. Classical and Biblical allusions are widespread even with the Anglosphere moving away from religious Christianity. But, the nature of copyright means there’s a limited amount of engagement with contemporary classics. You can reference, but the extent of exploration is limited because it’s not a collaborative project, it’s an academic response.

For the most part the approach of writers is rightfully distant from previous work. You can’t just stable a few pages from completely unrelated folios together, add a few sentences and sell it on. This isn’t saying that a mid-18thC knockoff heavily edited version of Hamlet where Ophelia lives and Claudius is actually Hamlet’s real father is good, only that the borderless blending of stories seems more natural than strict delineation.

Meaning, the modern day phenomenon closest to the development of folklore are franchises. The argument has been made a lot that fanfic is actually this manifestation, but it’s not. Fanfic is typically character-driven, plot-lite, designed to release some tension in the story for the satisfaction of the reader. It’s rarely about expanding the world or writing a new, complementary story. Franchise fiction, though, has the license and mandate to create new stories in the same universe as the old. Star Trek comics, Star Wars novels, spin-offs, etc. retell and expand on the stories that define English-speaking pop culture in a mutually reinforcing way. And because they are not just allowed but encouraged to use our modern myths as a starting point, you can get hugely complex, wacky, interconnected webs of story that each feed into the other in a way that’s financially difficult with indie media. This isn’t to say that you can’t do it with indie media, only that the clashing and interplay of multiple authors telling the same story is most direct within that umbrella.

So, franchises are simultaneously editorial-controlled cash cows designed to suck every ounce of independent storytelling out of the market, and the only place where modern myths can be directly incorporated into the same shifting amorphous blob that characterizes (at least Anglo) story tradition