"The Walking Dead Family is a real thing, not just a hashtag": Experiencing Fan Tourism and Transmediality in Woodbury, Atlanta

Abstract

The 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SMCS) conference took place in Atlanta. Historically important for the Civil Rights movement, the city is home to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, but as an emerging hub for film and television production Atlanta is also home to various studios, location tours, and other sites for fan tourism. I attended SCMS 2016 because of the scholarship, but visiting Atlanta meant I was able to spend a day on Atlanta Movie Tours' 'Big Zombie' tours. The tours feature locations from The Walking Dead (AMC 2010-) in and around Atlanta, and are led by actors from the show. The tours thus provide fans access to behind-the-scenes stories and information, as well as exclusive access to locations, and opportunities to 're-enact' key scenes. In this paper, I document my experience of the tours as both fan and academic, focusing on the role that dissonance played. I began the tour from a purely fannish perspective, excited to see locations and hear stories, but during the tour I found it difficult to halt academic analysis of this particular form of transmedia tourism. The actors leading the tour spoke of the 'AMC family' while noting how they were instructed not to speak to primary cast members, and clips from the show played inside the tour bus before we disembarked to view them in their 'real' (rather than fictional) Atlanta context. I thus experienced a sense of dissonance from, rather than immersion in, the world of The Walking Dead, and suggest that this sense of liminality is currently underexplored in analyses of fan tourism. The idea of immersion is prominent in discussions of both transmedia properties and media-orientated tourism, where transmediality is assumed to bring the tourist deeper into the storyworld, rather than highlighting their divergence from it. I suggest in this article that immersion is over used in analyses of media tourism and the role that dissonance plays should be examined in greater detail. Contributor Note Bethan Jones is an independent scholar whose work examines the relationship between fans, objects of fandom, and producers. She has published extensively on digital media, gender, antifandom and toxicity and her work has appeared in the Journal of Transformative Works and Culture, Participations, and Sexualities, as well as edited collections for Palgrave and Routledge. She is a board member on the Fan Studies Network and has a co-edited collection on crowdfunding, published by Peter Lang in 2015.