Transmedia, Film, and Religion

The tendency among scholars is to see worldbuilding as a noncontroversial act of the human imagination. However, worldbuilding is not neutral. This chapter considers the phenomenon of worldbuilding writ large as it intersects with film and transmedia. Mainstream worldbuilding often draws on Christian beliefs, and too often depends on a white, corporately centralized, consumer-driven reality that is presumed harmless because it is perceived as separate from everyday life. We should not presume ideological neutrality in worldbuilding. Instead, when we look at a transmediated world and its affiliated films, we should ask: Why was this world created, and why is it being perpetuated? Who benefits, who doesn’t, and why is this story being told? Worldbuilding could be a practice of anti-racist imagination if we imagine a world beyond the one already here, if we were to become more critically aware of the unacknowledged presuppositions that fuel so much of the media we consume today. Indeed, there are artists already producing imaginative visions of a better future, as this chapter shows.