May the Fan Be with You! Languaging Identities and Representation between “Pan-fanaticism” and “Aug-melted” Reality

«Expanded transmediality» (Stein and Busse 2012) is a bi-directional process where top-down media franchises exploit bottom-up participation, while grassroots involvement progressively influences the creation of television texts. In such a context, that could be defined as «pan-fanaticism» (Moschini 2015), the sphere of values belonging to fan communities has become pervasive since, not only these groups interact with TV series’ creators, but also many screenwriters and directors tend to define themselves «fans» of the stories they wish to tell. Through the critical multimodal discourse analysis (van Leeuwen 2014) of a selected corpus of examples, the paper aims at investigating the linguistic and semiotic realization of transmedial «pan-fanaticism»: it is a kind of representation that sets the stage for the emergence of an “aug-melted reality”, that is the mediated discursive space where global flows of «fantasyscapes» (Napier 2007) and reality converge and where collective and individual identities are negotiated in transcultural, transnational and transmedial «imagined communities» (Anderson 2006 [1983]).