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1. A Postmodern Audience’s Need for Multi-Stranded Narratives
A critical analysis, with a focus on Game of Thrones
“Multi-strand describes a narrative category that contains more than one casual chain of
events and by implication, multiple protagonists and antagonists. The various lines of
action proceed in parallel direction, which then intersect and crisscross.”—Halvatis (2011)
Multi-stranded narratives have gained a large presence in modern media, gaining
prevalence across all platforms and areas of media. They have many names; Silvey (2009)
names them as “network narratives”, they are called “ensembles” or “thread structures” by
Murphy (2007) and Booker (2007) calls them “hyperlink narratives”. For the purpose of
this essay, they will be referred to as ‘multi-stranded narratives’; as a phrase it is best
because it notes the multiplicity of narratives within a text but doesn’t necessarily connote
a connection between the strands, which is true for Game Of Thrones (2011-) where some
narrative strands run independently and others are intertwined, which is a key narrative
element of postmodern texts.
Postmodernism is a key concept to explore when acknowledging multi-stranded
narratives. Hutcheon (2003) calls postmodern texts “historiographic metafiction, where
texts detail history with a parodic edge”. Similarly, Hassan (1985) says that postmodernism
“does not suggest that ideas or institutions of the past cease to shape the present. Rather,
traditions develop”. Keep et al (virgindia.edu, 2014) note that postmodernism sees a
“dissolution of distinctions” where media “combines several traditional styles into one
structure… and meaning is found in combinations of already created patterns”, noting
how boundaries are blurred and samples from many areas, cultures and techniques are
combined, which was first theorised by Strinati (2014) in his ideas of “cultural populism”
and the “multiplicity of cultures”. For the purposes of this essay, postmodernism will be
defined as an artistic and cultural movement in which history is identified but deliberately
discarded in favour of a blurring of distinct lines, and where media texts are created with
an assemblage of various techniques, styles and narratives to give diversity and modernity
to a piece, seen in Game Of Thrones’ (2011-) combination of cinematographic styles across
episodes and it’s alternate historical timeline.
Another notable theory regarding the key focus is post-structuralism. At a base level, as
Gabriel (mtholyoke.edu, 2014) notes, post-structualism implies that “discourse shapes
reality” and that anything the audiences knows to be true is shaped by what they have
been told or what they have learnt. Derrida (1998) encourages post-structuralists to
deconstruct structures that seem to be certain, such as well-established binary oppositions
which he describes as “violent hierarchies”. This can be exemplified in television shows
such as Lost(2004–10) and Game Of Thrones (2011-), where issues that arise don’t
necessarily have a clear good or bad resolution, and can instead be approached through a
number of avenues. This belief that views and opinions shape reality lead to a loss of

2. history, where the truth of what happened is lost in the re-construction through discourse.
Strinati (2004) details how history becomes merely a construction of three things, “form,
concept and signification”. White (2009) notes that “many modern historians hold that
narrative discourse…is the very stuff of a mythical view of reality” and that, “when used
to represent real events, endows them with an illusory coherence”. This is how post-
structuralism will be defined in this essay; a movement where reality is shaped simply by
voice or opinion, which in turn suggests that everything the audience thinks they know
are only constructions made for them, implying that history itself may be a construction,
as all they know of it is what is told to them. This further aligns post-structuralism with
post-modernism and the idea that a postmodern audience values style over substance. This
manipulated history is typical of the fantasy genre, where an in-narrative backstory is
required to define the magical world, exemplified in Lord Of The Rings (2001–
2003) and Supernatural (2005-) where in-narrative events that occurred before the text are
created by the producers and establish a world for the audience. In reference to Game Of
Thrones (2001-), this theory shows itself as the narrative has an extensive folklore that is
manipulated at the will of the producers as a shortcut to teaching the audience the
extended narrative. It becomes important too in films such as Maleficent (2014), which
utilises a fairy story that all audiences are familiar with, Sleeping Beauty, but adapts it and
changes it to suit its narrative in order to connect better with the audience, who are more
comfortable with a narrative they are familiar with rather than being forced to learn an
entirely new narrative. The important aspect is that no matter the origin of the folklore or
backstory, it is entirely at mercy of the producers, and is not set in stone.
Hassler-Forest (euronet.nl, 2014) notes that “classical film structure was grown from short
stories” and as such it was “inevitable” that films structured of multiple narratives would
soon become commonplace. He puts this down to an audiences growing need for more
complex texts and how early this began to occur; he alludes to “Griffith’s crosscutting in
the climax of Interolerance (1917)”, a film made in 1917, and Greg Toland’s unification of
multiple, individual narratives in one single shot in his 1946 film The Best Years Of Our
Lives. It’s clear then that multi-stranded narratives are not a new invention, but they have
seen resurgence across the turn of the millennium, starting with Pulp Fiction (1994) and
continuing with films such as Snatch(2000) and Love Actually (2003). They are three films
that cover a wide selection of genres and they lead the wave of mass adoption of the
narrative technique, which filtered down into the platform of television and fuelled hit
shows such as Lost (2004–10), Downton Abbey (2010-) and Game Of Thrones(2011-). But
why is this so? What has caused producers want to use multiple narrative strands in their
texts increasingly often?
A key element of postmodernism is media saturation (Strinati, 2004). Large strides in
technology across the past decades has made technology far more accessible to the masses
but also allowed for easier and wider delivery of media content at all times. Online
streaming “rose 388% yearly across 2013–14” (Osborne, zdnet.com, 2014), which shows
that audiences are enamoured by the benefits of online streaming as a content delivery and

3. the instant gratification it offers. Media is now a portable experience, accessible at any
time, contained in mobile phones and tablets with internet connectivity across the
country. Independent online services such as Netflix and LoveFilm and services provided
by the already major TV channels such as BBCs iPlayer, Channel 4s 4oD and HBOs
HBOGo, where audiences can watch the entirety of Game Of Thrones (2011-), now allow
audiences to choose what they want to watch and not be bound by broadcast schedules.
The internet also levels across countries, creating a flat earth where anyone can access any
media at any time. Netflix in particular is also starting to create original programming,
meaning you can only watch shows such as Bojack Horseman (2014) and Orange Is The
New Black (2013) through their service. This enables to audience to make wider choices
about what they watch but also disables audiences, limiting their ability to consume
certain media through multiple platforms and services. This enables active audiences to
select what they view; Levy & Windahl (1985) note that “media use is motivated by needs
and goals that are defined by audience members themselves” and so this ability to choose
what to watch gives audiences even more control over the gratifications they receive from
their media consumption. However, this freedom means that audiences are now
oversaturated by media; they’re consuming it all the time, subconsciously through
advertising and actively through the consumption of media texts, be it TV shows or films
but also YouTube videos, magazines and newspapers. This instant gratification has a
contagion effect; Davidow (theatlantic.com, 2012) explains the neuroscience of
consumption of a media text, in that it “can excite the neurons in the ventral tegmental
area of the midbrain, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain’s
pleasure centres. This in turn causes the experience to be perceived as pleasurable. As a
result, some people can become obsessed with these pleasure-seeking experiences”. This
leads to a domino effect, where the consumption of media results in the consumption of
more media. This constant need for stimulus means that audiences easily become overly
used to commonplace techniques and therefore fail to be engaged with or fulfilled by
media texts. Lyotard (1979) noted that this growth “leads necessarily to a fracturing of
over-arching cultural narratives” or grand meta narratives and, as such, multi-stranded
narratives would become very popular and very profitable productions because
postmodern audiences could actually be satisfied by a number of narratives within the
singular text. Parshall (2012) notes that audiences “immersion in film and television has
trained [them] to fill in gaps”. The Boat That Rocked (2009) is a slightly different example
of a multi-stranded narrative film, because it’s strands are multiple self-contained
narratives that rather than character-following strands. Those multiple narratives do not
lead directly on from one to the other; audiences have to fill in the gaps between for
themselves, and assume developments in character emotion and composition. The
audience’s mass consumption of media has not only led them to crave more complex
multi-stranded narratives but, as The Boat That Rocked (2009) shows it has also taught
them to be able to consume them. Despite seeing texts on a superficial level, postmodern
audiences become more able and complex as they consume more media and, as Parshall
(2012) puts it, they become more able “to give underdeveloped characters the benefit of
the doubt” and just assume things about the plot that the text may not have time to show
them. This allows the audience “to enjoy the mass momentum of multiple mini-dramas”.

4. Furthermore, the rapid growth and adoption of technology has allowed social media to
enter the multi-stranded narrative fray. New, web-exclusive shows such
as MyMusic (2013) give each of the eleven characters an in-narrative Twitter account.
This allows for a third dimension of narrative storytelling but also for the characters to
interact with the audience and allow the audience to immerse themselves in the narrative,
as well as tapping into the audiences social needs and capitalising on this need to drive
their engagement and viewing. This would not be possible without a multi-stranded
narrative; otherwise the characters would all be tweeting about the same thing at once,
nullifying the interest in the topic. It would also limit the amount of characters you could
have with Twitter accounts, as single-narrative texts limit the character development in
terms of multiple characters.
Post-structuralism has a large prevalence in Game Of Thrones (2011-) and works well as a
commentary on the growing popularity of multi-stranded narratives. It falls well in line
with the views of a postmodern audience; they discourage clear binary oppositions, akin to
postmodernism, as Derrida (1998) dismissed them as “violent hierarchies”. It plays on the
postmodern idea of hyper-reality (Baudrillard, 1994), where what we believe is reality is in
fact only constructed for us and it notes that history is lost and obscured, as
postmodernism does, through discourse. The obscurification of history is well
demonstrated in Star Wars (1977-), where the history of the in-narrative universe is
manipulated not only by the tinted eyes of each story strand but also by the multi-
platform nature of the franchise at large; every movie, video game, TV series and comic
that exists within the Star Wars universe seeks to reinvent and alter the story in some way.
This only serves to obfuscate the truth of the history of Star Wars, making it a very post-
structuralist text, as each and every history of it we’re given is one that is told to us, and it
is constantly manipulated and changed. Wrather (overthinkingit.com, 18/11/14) notes
post-structuralism in specific reference to Game Of Thrones(2011-) when he says that
“there isn’t a single, canonical version of events” due to the series’ multi-stranded
narrative. “Historical authority is revealed as a discourse…merely subject to the
vicissitudes of experience and interpretation” because the audience can discover things
only as the characters who make up each strand discover them but can also only know and
understand these things as the characters know and understand them. The events are only
presented through the eyes of each character and so the truth of history is lost and instead
a new reality is created for the audience by the producers, as theorised by Pollock (1996)
when he suggests that, at a very basic level of “the social construction of
reality…individuals know reality as that which the media both show and tell them”. He
highlights that audiences can only know what they are shown. This links multi-stranded
narratives with hyper-realities; the retelling of the narrative is a constructed reality in
itself in that by choosing to show particular story strands over other story strands the
producers create a hyper-reality that is substantially different from what actually
happened in the narrative, as far as the audiences knows. The loss of history through the
story strands helps to contribute to a hyper-reality of a constructed truth. Steiner (2012)
continues to analyse post-structuralism in Game Of Thrones by noting the dissolution of

5. the binary oppositions. He calls the narrative “an intricate tale…that tells of both the good
and the dark sides of the human being”. This aligns well with Wrather
(overthinkingit.com, 18/11/14) who says “nobody is all good or bad” because their
appearances are skewed by the “dictates of self-interest” of the characters whose strands
are being followed. Through each strand of the show we’ll see a character differently,
because that character is skewed by the current story strand, which is usually tied to a
specific character and therefore their opinions and views blur the clarity of that strand.
This dissolves the binary oppositions in the show because, with a multi-stranded narrative,
we are given the good and the bad of every character. So post-structuralism, and its links
with postmodernism, are extremely prevalent within Game Of Thrones (2011-). Multi-
stranded narratives are the basis for these links and this explains why postmodern
audiences show an increased reception to them.
The emergence of multi-stranded narratives is not limited to the film and television
platforms, however. They have permeated video game culture, with games such as The
Walking Dead: 400 Days (2013) giving the player control of a series of different characters
whose individual narrative strands intertwine and influence each other. Comic books too
now feature multiple protagonists; there is a notable series of Avengers comics that follow
a different superhero in each edition but across the same in-narrative day. This multi-
platform expansion mirrors the postmodern audiences growing capability for wider
consumption across devices and platforms.
In conclusion, it would appear that a postmodern audience have every reason to desire
multi-stranded narratives; they defy what their media-saturated consumptions habits have
come to know, they align with postmodern trends of obscuring history, transcending time
and space, blurring binary boundaries and creating hyper-reality and they encourage a
post-structuralist approach to narrative. Multi-stranded narratives allow avenues for
engagement that postmodern audiences previously lacked and, as such, they respond
remarkably positively to them.
Reference List;
· A Poetics of Postmodernism; History, Theory, Fiction—Linda Hutcheon (2003)
· Altman and After: Multiple Narratives in Film—Peter F. Parshall (2012)
· An Introduction To Studying Popular Culture—Dominic Strinati (2014)
· An Introduction To Theories Of Popular Culture—Dominic Strinati (2004)

6. · Constructed Authorship, Quality TV and the Case of Game Of Thrones—Tobias Steiner
(2012)
· Defining Postmodernism—Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin and Robin
Parmar, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0242.html (accessed on 9/11/14)
· Don’t Believe Your Eyes: Game Of Thrones, Narration and Adaptation—Matthew
Wrather, http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/04/27/game-of-thrones-narration-
adaptation/, (accessed on 18/11/14)
· Exploiting The Neuroscience Of Internet Addiction—Bill Davidow
(2012) http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/exploiting-the-neuroscience-
of-internet-addiction/259820/ (accessed on 21/11/14)
· Me And You And Memento and Fargo—J.J Murphy (2007)
· Media Construction of Reality and Social Construction of a Pop Culture—Stephen
Pollock (1996)
· Multiform & Multistrand; Narrative Structures In Hollywood Cinema—Stavros Halvatis
(2011)
· Multiple Narrative Structures In Contemporary Cinema—Dan Hassler-
Forest, http://www.euronet.nl/users/mcbeijer/dan/mns/ (accessed on 8/11/14)
· Not Just Ensemble Films: Six Degrees, Webs, Multiplexity and the Rise of Network
Narratives—Vivian Silvey (2009),
· Of Grammatology—Jacques Derrida (1998)
· Online media, TV streaming rises 388 percent yearly: report—Charlie
Osborne, http://www.zdnet.com/online-media-tv-streaming-rises-388-percent-yearly-
report-7000034899/ (accessed on 21/11/14)
· Postmodern Hollywood—MK Booker (2007)
· Post-structuralism—Satya
Gabriel, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/post_structuralism.htm(accessed on
9/11/14)

7. · The Concept Of Audience Activity—Mark Levy & Sven Windahl (1985)
· The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation—Hayden
White (2009)
· The Culture Of Postmodernism—Ihab Hassan (1985)
· The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge—Jean François Lyotard (1979)