All Kinds of Storytelling

I don’t know if any of y’all are following BuffySummers, AgentFinn, willow_r, TaraMaclay, Xander, SpikePratt on Twitter, but if you’re not, the person or persons behind the handles are doing a wonderful job of retelling the whole arc of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in conversation, and essentially in real time. It’s probably something that will only appeal to fans of the show who are already basically familiar with the events that are unfolding in prose. But it is a good illustration of Twitter’s potential for storytelling. This example is episodic, the pace can be a little jerky sometimes. But as a way of re-exploring characters I feel familiar with already, it’s working quite well. It’s becoming more common for shows and movies to create character Twitter accounts. Glee, for example, has a whole bunch of them set up, but they aren’t particularly good: lots of repeated jokes, extreme sporadic entries, no real interaction with the events of the plot or deeper development of the characters beyond their tics. I think feeds like these will work best if they’re treated like webisodes, a way of offering more, quality original content that expands a universe, and can be produced at no cost other than the time of the person who is tasked with updating them. But that means taking them seriously. Just because a product doesn’t require major production costs doesn’t mean it should look and read cheap.