The transmedia narrative expansion of princess archetype in the board game Rebel Princess

Abstract

The card game Rebel Princess, understood as a transmedia expansion of the archetype of the princess and her actantial function in traditional fairy tales, is a paradigmatic example that can be framed within comparative studies on intermediality. For this reason, this paper hypothesises on the consideration of the language of modern narrative board games as a new artistic medium capable of establishing inter- and transmedial relationships that further expand the scope of the concept of reader intertext and affect the design of effective proposals for literary education. For this purpose, we start from a methodological design with a qualitative approach, whose instrument is built from the model of literary text analysis by Lluch and Sanz Tejeda (2021) and the transformational model of intermedial analysis by Pardo (2018). After its application, the results show the viability of the study of certain narrative games as artistic means of transmedia expansion different from those considered so far, with their own particularities of the need for active and interactive participation of the receiver in the multimodal narrative for its progress and completion. Indeed, it is evident that proposals such as Rebel Princess have the capacity to participate in decentralised constellations made up of narratives from different media, such as the literary or filmic, due to the inter- and transmedial contacts with a macro-universe of hypotextual references.