The story of LuvKitteh01x3 is not a true story. However, there are many elements to it that do hold truth. When creating LuvKitteh01x3, I thought of my own experiences. I thought of experiences my friends had had growing up online. I collected anonymous recounts. I studied real artists who speak about these things. In my opinion, there was no better way to tell LuvKitteh’s story (and in doing so, my own story and the stories of countless others) than with transmedia.

 

I have always been fascinated by transmedia properties, even when I was too young to know what transmedia is. Franchises like Pokémon and My Little Pony spanned merchandise, video games, animated content, and more, and I was hooked. Some part of my autistic brain enjoys latching onto transmedia due to the expansive amount of content to consume, memorise and immerse myself in. In that regard, it’s no wonder why creating a transmedia experience was such a natural idea for me.

 

When researching Transmedia, I found Henry Jenkins, the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. His blog, Pop Junctions, was extremely useful to me when I was trying to gain a better understanding of transmedia. In his 2007 post Transmedia Storytelling 101, Jenkins stated that “Transmedia storytelling is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence.” I have to agree; I find new interpretations, new twists on properties we already know, to be incredibly important and innovative in a time where we, the general public, have so much media thrust into our faces at all times. Transmedia storytelling expands our horizons, “expands what can be known about a [...] world while dispersing that information”, causes us to delve deeper both as consumers searching for answers and as creatives growing more and more experimental with transmedia as an art form, hiding easter eggs and hints across a web of different storytelling formats.

 

That search for answers is what I wanted to implement into LuvKitteh’s story. Ultimately, she is doomed by our narrative, but as she grows older and separates her personal life from her online experience, the audience will be left guessing. When the project releases, if LuvKitteh were a real person, she would be 21 years old. What sort of job does she have? Who is she surrounded by? Does she have a partner now? These are things I want the audience to wonder. I want them, with the transmedia narrative that I provide, to create their own version of LuvKitteh’s future. I want this character to become an idea, a concept in the consumer’s mind of a girl who was broken as a child and who may or may not have picked up the pieces. Perhaps one hypothetical outcome may comfort a reader more than another hypothetical, maybe the way the reader projects onto LuvKitteh hits closer to home than anything I could write myself. I want my audience to have their own unique perception of this work. I want their own experiences to be brought into the equation, because nothing hits harder than seeing parts of your own story.

 

I created the LuvKitteh experience through drawings, written text, an interactive website, and animation. I wanted it to feel real, tangible, as if you were clicking through a real person’s life, as if you were falling down an internet rabbit-hole, and I felt that I would capture that best with a wide use of transmedia mediums. As human beings, we do not just bring one thing to the world. In order to make the artist behind LuvKitteh feel as human as possible, I felt it most impactful and appropriate to harness everything I was able to. Our human experiences, documented online, are inherently transmedia - text, images, videos, artwork, snippets of our lives. Therefore, transmedia techniques must be used to replicate them.

 

I hope that everyone who grew up online can consume LuvKitteh’s story and see part of themselves. I hope that her story rings as true for them as it does to me. And I hope, if they haven’t already, embracing LuvKitteh could help them embrace their own past selves.