Abstract
‘Kayfabe’ is a term widely used in wrestling to describe the maintenance and fan acceptance of the fictional and scripted elements of sports entertainment wrestling, wherein the events and interactions are treated as ‘real’. In doing so, the audience becomes a key player in the world of the text as the audience interaction becomes a catalyst for further in-world events. In this article, I argue this concept has applications in other interactive story modes and propose an analytical framework for categorising different actions through a kayfabe lens. Using examples from a form of interactive text, online transmedia stories, I show how employing kayfabe to distinguish types of comments can lead to a more nuanced discussion of interactive texts. By exploring how audience members currently respond to these texts, I demonstrate that kayfabe is valuable concept for exploring interactive stories in different contexts beyond wrestling.
Keywords
Introduction
Sports entertainment wrestling, such as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), is known for its fictional nature, but is nonetheless a compelling example of fan interaction, engagement, and collaboration. Fans of professional wrestling are often discussed as though they do not understand that what they are watching is scripted but, by contrast, wrestling fans actively ‘buy into the fantasy and therefore make it authentic’ (Martin, 2016: p. 244). The very nature of sports entertainment wrestling asks fans to see that something is fictional and look beyond that to enjoy it. Shannon Bow O’Brien suggests that, for wrestlers, ‘success or failure hinges upon their ability to sell their performance to the audience. Achievement hinges upon eliciting emotion from the viewers. Cheering and booing are the same as long as they are sincere and voracious’ (2020, p. viii). Fans typically know what they are watching is scripted and part of the fun is in engaging with the storylines and characters in spite of (and because of) this.
To describe this particular phenomenon, there is a term used extensively in the world of professional sports entertainment wrestling; ‘kayfabe’. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard defines kayfabe as ‘the artificial reality surrounding professional wrestling, whereby wrestlers appear larger than life and different from their real personas, and the matches can be predetermined and fictional yet feel completely real to wrestling fans’ (2019, p. 31). Additionally, kayfabe can be seen as ‘a convergence of reality and fiction that produces a simulation of reality, or a hyperreality, in which reality becomes indistinguishable from the simulation’ (Reinhard, 2019: p. 31). While kayfabe may have originally been a professional concept intended to preserve the staged nature of the wrestling, the evolution of kayfabe in a modern context towards ‘neokayfabe’ (where kayfabe is more openly discussed, acknowledged, broken, reinforced, and more (Zimmer, 2023)) actively encourages audiences to lean into the fictionality of the narrative built in professional wrestling. The text then benefits from the interactivity afforded to fans who become co-creators in the fictional world.
In this paper, I argue that the concept of kayfabe has applications far beyond its current place in wrestling, particularly in the context of immersive and interactive settings. Fans engaging with fictional content as though it is real can be seen in many capacities and this is particularly prevalent in interactive storytelling spaces. As such, I propose a kayfabe framework to help explore these interactions. This development is necessary to better categorise and address the diverse ways that users engage with interactive texts as existing taxonomies prove problematic in certain circumstances. I will firstly outline how kayfabe is discussed in scholarship by outlining its use in both wrestling spaces and beyond. I will then outline the proposed framework before demonstrating the validity of the framework by undertaking a pilot study of an online transmedia text to explore how this framework applies in interactive spaces.
Kayfabe in wrestling and beyond
Kayfabe is not a new concept to scholarly work. Much has been written about it to date, but the vast majority of this focuses on the concept in relation to wrestling (which is to be expected). In this section, I outline the concept, its origin, and key academic discussions around the topic to date in order to highlight the concept’s current applications and theoretical connections.
The term ‘kayfabe’ has many proposed etymological roots. In an article for The Wall Street Journal, linguist and lexicographer, Ben Zimmer (2023) outlined the potential origins of the word, and in doing so highlights the increasing visibility the term has gained, noting that the term ‘has long been known to pro wrestling enthusiasts, but it has only recently gone mainstream to apply to political theater and other playacting’ (n.p.). Zimmer highlights that ‘kayfabe’ does not have a clear origin, with many theories on how and why the term is used to describe the phenomenon. These theories include kayfabe possibly originating from a Pig Latin version of fake (i.e. ‘akefay’), old carnival language, or coming from the French phrase ‘qui vive’ (Zimmer, 2023). Scholarly research tends to land on the carnival roots, with many scholars referencing the origins of the wrestling format and its link to travelling circuses (Jeffries, 2019: p. 1; Jones, 2019: p. 278; Litherland, 2014: p. 531). While the background of the term is debated, its definition is widely agreed to be the convergence of reality and artificiality in professional wrestling spaces.
In discussing kayfabe and wrestling, Lisa Jones (2019) outlines that what many non-fans refer to as ‘fake’ is more readily described as ‘scripted’. The outcomes of matches are pre-determined and the overarching storylines are crafted by ‘creatives’ (Jones, 2019: p. 277). That said, the performers are still required to perform moves that are physically demanding, occasionally painful, and legitimately dangerous if things go wrong (see Chow and Laine, 2014 for a more detailed discussion of physical performance and audience affirmation in wrestling). In modern wrestling, kayfabe is more nuanced than ever, in part because of the growing recognition of kayfabe, and equally because the sport’s growth in the online sphere makes it more difficult to distinguish between performance and non-performance.
The tension between the reality, fiction, and performance of wrestling has theoretical underpinnings in both Kendall Walton’s discussion of fiction, mimesis, and ‘make-believe’ and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. Walton’s discussion of fiction and make-believe is particularly useful for understanding how kayfabe functions as being concretely fictional, but nonetheless evoking a sense of ‘realness’. Walton’s work offers a philosophical approach to understanding how audience members engage with fiction and understand it as being both unreal (in that it is not based in reality) and real (in that it can nonetheless elicit genuine physiological responses) at the same time. Walton (1978) uses the example of a viewer watching a horror movie who is at once both fearful of the monster, but also aware that the monster cannot genuinely harm them. The viewer in this example is in a state of what Walton terms ‘quasi-fear’ (1978, p. 6), and highlights the ways in which fiction can be both ‘real’ and fictitious to audience members simultaneously.
Jones (2019) and Gilbert (2022) each reference Walton in their work on wrestling and kayfabe. Jones articulates that Walton’s approach to make-believe helps us understand why and how audiences embrace concretely fictional texts. Gilbert further points to Walton’s acknowledgement that it is difficult to know if someone genuinely believes or accepts ‘make-believe’, and suggests that ‘when it comes to kayfabe, genuine belief becomes secondary to the actions of the moment’ (Gilbert, 2022: p. 78) meaning that an audience member’s response and actions (such as cheering or booing) are more important than whether they genuinely believe something happened.
Gilbert goes on to consider kayfabe in the context of Baudrillard’s hyperreality theory. He posits ‘Kayfabe is a paradoxical reality. It is a manifestation of Baudrillard’s hyperreality theory, where fiction and reality consolidate to the point where there is no clear distinction between the two’ (Gilbert, 2022: pp. 73-74). Freund explains Baudrillard’s hyperreality as ‘a state of being where the line between the “real” and the “simulated” becomes blurred to the point of being indistinguishable’ (Freund, 2024: p. 859). In the context of wrestling, the convergence of artifice and reality through kayfabe show a form of hyperreality in practice. When the audience responds to the scripted elements of wrestling as though they are real, it further heightens the perceived reality of the fictional elements. Brian Jansen (2018) also explores Baudrillard’s theory in the context of wrestling and notes that where kayfabe in the WWE builds storylines upon storylines, this could be seen as a move towards hyperreality rather than second-order simulation. Jansen says this is particularly the case in the ‘Reality Era 1 ’, where the line between fact and fiction in kayfabe was increasingly blurred (2018, p. 643).
The duality of fiction and non-fiction raises the question of how kayfabe as a concept differs from audiences simply knowing something is fictional, such as how they might interact with a typical feature film or narrative-based television show. The answer here lies heavily with the notion that the text is interactive. This interactivity requires audiences to partake in the text beyond just observing. The cheers and boos of wrestling fans become part of the text rather than a mere reaction to it. Jones states that wrestling is different even from theatre (which we might consider to be similar because the audience watches a live performance much like live wrestling audiences) because, in wrestling, the audience’s response is part of the text (2019, p. 283). Jones goes on to explain that in theatre, the observer is typically behind the fourth wall, while in wrestling the audience plays ‘the role of spectators both within, and without, the fiction’ (2019, p. 283). Semeijn describes the fourth wall as ‘the ontological barrier or separation between the fictional and the actual world’ and notes that in comparison to traditional theatre or film, identifying ‘where the fourth wall is to be physically located in other kinds of media (e.g. novels, pretend play/LARPing or videogames) can become complicated’ (2024, p. 649). With regard to the fictional walls of wrestling texts, Jones points to pro-wrestling critic Tim Kail’s claim that wrestling is ‘no-wall-theater’ (Kail, 2017). Kail suggests ‘Pro-wrestling has no walls to begin with. It is […] a category of performance art that strives to mimic reality so thoroughly that it removes all appearance of artifice’ (2017 in Jones, 2019: p. 283). The concept of ‘no-wall-theatre’ speaks to the idea that wrestling invites the audience into the fictional space rather than creating a fictional world that is merely to be observed, and further reinforces the concept of wrestling as an example of hyperreality. Some forms of immersive theatre similarly offer audience members an opportunity to contribute to and participate in the storyworld, though as Gezgin and Imamoğlu (2024, p. 252) highlight; there is still more to be explored regarding audience behaviour in relation to immersive theatre. Here, kayfabe offers a new lens through which to explore audience engagement with interactive texts across contexts and disciplines.
In contrast to most immersive theatre, kayfabe in wrestling extends beyond the traditional walls of a text as wrestlers are expected to maintain their fictional persona outside the ring as well. Prior to widespread use of the internet, kayfabe was an industry term related to the maintenance of characters and meant performers should never allude to the idea that the events in wrestling were scripted either inside or outside the ring (Norman, 2019: p. 83), but in a modern context, kayfabe extends into online spaces, causing complications in defining where a ‘character’ or story begins and ends. The increased access to performers via social media as well as the increasingly transmedia-tised product that is the WWE means kayfabe is more complex than ever. Zimmer (2023) quotes Abraham Josephine Riesman as introducing the term ‘neokayfabe’ which Zimmer defines as ‘[blurring] the line between fact and fiction, as wrestlers’ story lines jump from the ring to real life and back again’. The emergence of neokayfabe points to a shift in the understanding of how performers and characters are positioned and perceived by audiences particularly in the modern context. Neokayfabe aligns with the earlier discussion of the WWE’s ‘Reality Era’ and the implications in terms of a shift towards hyperreality.
To distinguish between actions that are in character and out of character, Benjamin Litherland (2014) uses the terms ‘kayfabe’ and ‘non-kayfabe’ in his discussion of wrestling feuds on the platform Twitter (now ‘X’). Litherland highlights that wrestlers flip between tweeting (‘posting’ on X) in character and out of character, and in doing so, the audience must negotiate and differentiate between kayfabe and non-kayfabe (2014, p. 533). This differentiation is made increasingly difficult when performers share their name with their wrestling persona – such as John Cena who wrestles under his real name – and have a celebrity profile that extends beyond their wrestling persona. For wrestlers who perform under a character name, it is easier to switch between kayfabe and non-kayfabe because there is a much clearer distinction between the person and the character as the two likely have separate accounts. Dru Jeffries (2019) asserts that the line between kayfabe and non-kayfabe has become increasingly blurred, and in some instances, this is deliberately the case. Jeffries outlines: [Some events] should not be understood as a true, spontaneous, unscripted event (a shoot, in the parlance of the industry), nor as an entirely fictional event (a work), but rather as a blend of the two (a worked shoot). Worked shoots are meant to give viewers the impression that performers are going off-script and transgressing kayfabe—even while they do so with WWE’s express permission. (Jeffries, 2019: p. 6)
In a modern setting, reality is made to look like fiction, and fiction is made to look like reality. The minutia involved in differentiating between what is kayfabe, what is not, and what is supposed to look like one or the other presents audiences with a particularly complex story world. That said, kayfabe suggests that it does not matter if something is or is not ‘real’ because either way it contributes to audience engagement. O’Brien supports this approach, and states: Wrestling is unique because the performers exist with a duality of person. […] The character has to move forward a storyline for an audience while the person simply lives a life. Under the rules of kayfabe, this difference does not exist. Person and character are interchangeable with no clear division. The audience often intuitively understands the difference, but many of them accept the utter reality of the world presented to them. (O’Brien, 2020, p. ix)
While audiences are typically able to identify what actions are kayfabe and which are non-kayfabe, the increasingly blurred lines make this task more difficult to do successfully. Here I refer back to Gilbert’s (2022) claim that whether an audience member believes kayfabe is beside the point – their actions and reactions in the moment are instead paramount.
The role of the audience is an important component to kayfabe. Certainly, kayfabe is industry term that is in many ways defined by what the actors do, but the audience is also responsible for the maintenance of kayfabe. Their reaction to events contributes to the way that storylines develop and play out. As such, understanding that audiences can then have kayfabe or non-kayfabe response to events is important for recognising the interplay at hand. This duplicity of responses from fans forms the theoretical underpinning of fan engagement with immersive and interactive storytelling and is visible in other interactive storytelling modes. In kayfabe, the audience and the performers functionally co-author the text (albeit to different extents). Christian Norman, for example, contends that in the context of wrestling, the ‘WWE now addresses fans as both consumers and as participants in the production of wrestling texts’ (2019, p. 89). Further to this, Eliseo Sciarretta states the ‘WWE’s audience can almost be considered as an additional character, since it can influence the course of events through its behaviour, and indeed it is the most difficult to manage, because it is the only one that bookers 2 can not [sic] fully control’ (2019, p. 560). Audience actions are therefore paramount to consider in the negotiation of the storyworld.
With this in mind, it is also prudent to contextualise kayfabe alongside other concepts which consider what is inside and outside the text. For example, there is an argument that actions that are considered kayfabe or non-kayfabe may be more appropriately described as diegetic and non-diegetic, textual and extratextual, or indeed metatextual or metafiction. However, exploring actions through each of these lenses has different implications to kayfabe. Diegesis, for example, is defined as ‘the spatio-temporal world’ depicted in a text, and components that are within that world are diegetic, while anything outside it is extradiegetic (or nondiegetic) (Chandler and Munday, 2020). The oft-cited example of diegetic and non-diegetic sound is a useful comparison here. A character playing a piano would produce diegetic sound, however, the soundtrack to the movie which characters cannot hear would be considered non-diegetic sound. In certain story environments, diegesis is not so neatly applied. For example, all comments posted on an interactive YouTube series exist in the same ‘spatio-temporal world’ depicted in the text. A comment that upholds the illusion that the text is real is in the same diegetic frame as comments which point to its fictionality. This means that diegesis is not necessarily an accurate or useful way to distinguish between these comments. To consider one comment diegetic implies that the other is diegetic as well, which then alters the way these actions can be examined in relation to their impact on the storyworld.
Equally, considering audience interactions as ‘extratextual’ (meaning outside the text) suggests that these actions are not an intrinsic part of the text which is problematic when considering the ways that these interactive texts are shaped by audience responses. Kayfabe therefore more accurately describes the way in which actions on the part of both producers and audience members contribute to the text. Similarly, metafiction or metatextuality pose as concepts which could be applicable in the place of kayfabe. While kayfabe texts may engage in elements of metafiction or metatextuality through their self-referential nature, these concepts do not necessarily function as analytical frameworks through which to examine the role of the audience and the co-creation involved in some interactive texts.
Kayfabe builds on the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ – a term used by ‘scholars and laity alike to describe how readers, listeners, viewers, and players seemingly disregard reality to enter into and become engaged with the circumstances and the inhabitants of fictional worlds’ (Ji and Raney, 2016: pp. 125–126). This concept is inherent in kayfabe, and kayfabe helps make links between the suspension of disbelief and the layered hyperreality created as a result of interactivity. As an analytical framework, kayfabe can describe actions in relation to fiction, contribution, and perception rather than in direct relation to the ‘canon’ text or its characters. It is a slightly different approach that has different uses and outcomes in terms of exploration. In the context of immersion, kayfabe offers a more useful distinction between different actions and their impact of the storyworld than other existing frameworks.
In this article, I seek to highlight the ways that the concept can be used outside of wrestling though I am certainly not the first to do so. Beyond wrestling, kayfabe has more recently been used to describe the US President Donald Trump’s political rhetoric and his public political persona (Moon, 2022; O’Brien, 2020; Zimmer, 2023) as well as his online political presence (Surowiec and Miles, 2020). It has also been used to discuss the phenomenon of virtual influencers. Taylor C. Black (2020) touches on the concept of kayfabe while conceptualising how an Instagram account for a human-looking computer-generated character (a virtual influencer), “Miquela” (@lilmiquela), navigates authenticity and mimesis in an online setting. Black draws on an article from Chris Sims at The Verge who argues that kayfabe is a useful concept in discussing the world of virtual influencers (Sims, 2018). Intriguingly, Black also points to the web series Lonelygirl15 as an example of how authenticity can be performed and nods to the complex relationship between reality and fiction in that space. Lonelygirl15 is an example of the type of immersive and interactive storytelling I explore in the following sections of this article. Black’s article in many ways relates to the arguments I am seeking to make in this article, though with a different focus in the virtual influencer space. I posit that these concepts can be explored in more depth and detail, particularly in considering how the audience contributes to kayfabe in interactive spaces.
Outside of the above, kayfabe is relatively under-utilised as a concept beyond wrestling. I argue that it is a phenomenon that can be seen in many interactive fan spaces and helps us unpack the ways that fans contribute to the artificial story world. Thus, in the following sections, I will introduce a framework which categorises different actions based on their maintenance of kayfabe and show how kayfabe can be applied in other interactive fan spaces to explain the ways in which audiences lean into artifice, and in turn, ultimately facilitate more immersive storytelling.
Kayfabe as a framework for exploring interactive texts
To this point I have outlined the key factors and applications of kayfabe both in terms of the construction of the text, the role of performers, and the role of audience members primarily in relation to wrestling. Kayfabe has the capacity to be applicable in many interactive storytelling spaces as a framework through which different types of audience interactions can be explored, differentiated, and dissected. Interactive texts such as online transmedia stories and immersive environments such as live-action role-playing (LARP) experiences or immersive theatre, virtual influencers, and certain types of video games are examples of other spaces where a kayfabe framework can be applied to explore the different actions of both producers and consumers of the text. A kayfabe framework offers a way to distinguish between the ways that different interactions contribute to or detract from a semblance of reality in fictional texts in a way that is distinct from discussing whether they are canonical or extratextual.
The analytical framework I propose for applying kayfabe in contexts beyond wrestling builds from Litherland’s (2014) distinction between kayfabe and non-kayfabe when discussing wrestlers’ online social media presence. Litherland’s approach is a largely effective way to breakdown wrestlers’ social media posts as being either in character or out of character, but it is limited in how effectively it applies to all producer and audience actions. In particular, this approach is limited because certain interactions (such as comments on social media) may simultaneously engage with both kayfabe and non-kayfabe to differing degrees. This duality makes the existing dichotomy awkward when applying it as an analytical tool in certain scenarios. For example, a single comment on social media which both praises John Cena the character’s actions and John Cena the performer’s acting cannot neatly be defined as kayfabe or non-kayfabe when categorising the comment as a whole, which disrupts the analytical process. As such, further development of Litherland’s categories is required. I therefore introduce two additional categories to more effectively label actions on the part of both the producers of the text and the actions of the audience. In more accurately categorising different actions, there is increased capacity to more fully examine their impacts.
Given the (sometimes) indistinguishable nature of reality and fiction, the most prudent way to categorise actions using textual analysis is based on their contribution – rather than their intent – as one’s intention can only be known by speaking to them directly. Thus, the framework below categorises actions based on their impact rather than their intent. The definitions for each category are somewhat simplified as I intend for this framework to be applicable to a range of texts rather than one format, but nonetheless the central definition of the kayfabe concept remains intact.
The framework incorporates four categories for segmenting the actions of both producers and audience members. These categories are ‘kayfabe’ which refers to actions that contribute to a sense that the text is real, ‘non-kayfabe’ which incorporates actions that overtly reference the fictionality of the text, ‘ambi-kayfabe’ where actions treat the text as both real and fictional at the same time, and ‘quasi-kayfabe’ which encompasses actions that either do not distinctly refer to the text as either real or fictional. While, at first, the categories of kayfabe and non-kayfabe seem mutually exclusive in nomenclature, and thus ‘ambi-kayfabe’ as a category appears logically flawed, this framework categorises actions holistically rather than partially. Therefore, as some actions may both maintain and break kayfabe simultaneously, the crossover category in ambi-kayfabe captures these actions. This approach allows for more tailored discussion of these actions. Figure 1 below offers a visual representation of the different categories of kayfabe in the form of a Venn diagram. A visual representation of the kayfabe framework.
Proposed kayfabe framework, featuring examples of actions in online transmedia stories.
Online transmedia stories as interactive environments for kayfabe
Online transmedia stories are one example of the kind of storytelling space that would benefit from the use of a kayfabe framework. In this section, I will introduce case studies of online transmedia texts which are noted for their interactive storytelling components then move to applying the framework to examples from these texts as part of an experimental pilot study.
Transmedia stories are notably defined by Henry Jenkins as stories which take place over multiple platforms or media formats, with each component making a distinct contribution to the story (Jenkins, 2008: p. 334). Web series, such as Pemberley Digital’s The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012-2013), KindaTV’s Carmilla (2014-2016), and The Candle Waster’s Nothing Much To Do (2014) are all examples of online transmedia stories which sought to create interactive stories through the use of various social media platforms for storytelling. Each of these texts primarily tell the story via YouTube videos produced to look like vlogs – a category referred to as ‘mimic vlogs’ (Adams, 2022) – but also utilised social media accounts such as Twitter (X), Instagram, and Tumblr to further develop the characters. These web series were particularly popular in the mid-2010s, with each of the series listed above boasting a view count in the millions and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries earning critical acclaim by way of winning the Emmy for ‘Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media’ in 2013 (Camden and Oestreich, 2018: p. 32). The aforementioned Lonelygirl15 series, discussed by Black (2020), is a key example of social media storytelling which replicated the authentic aesthetic of the vlog and caused widespread debate about whether or not the series was fictitious (Burgess and Green, 2018: pp. 42–44). While the production of this kind of series on YouTube has decreased, there are similar formats now appearing on TikTok and Instagram Reels that use formats native to those platforms – a fact which reinforces the relevance of continued research in this space.
Transmedia stories told in online spaces actively invite audience interaction by developing and presenting the fictional characters as though they are real. This format then allows producers of online transmedia texts to create character accounts on social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter (X), Tumblr, Instagram, and more. In doing so, the producers create a story environment where audiences feel a sense of attachment to the characters because the audience is afforded the opportunity to interact with these characters. A character’s Twitter (X) account, for example, becomes a space for interaction, and also contributes to the ‘liveliness’ of the characters as a result of their presence in authentic online spaces – the characters appear on timelines alongside users’ friends, celebrities, and more – which adds to the sense of realism for the story (Tepper, 2014: p. 56-57; Seymour et al., 2015: p. 102). These fictional texts, when engaged with as though they are real, create a sense of hyperreality such as that seen in wrestling because the characters can respond to audience comments which adds to the verisimilitude of the text.
The interactivity of these online transmedia texts is one of the hallmarks of the format and it has been discussed at length in other scholarly work (Adams and Barbour, 2022; Camden and Oestreich, 2018; Jandl, 2015; Kumar, 2021; Seymour et al., 2015; Zeiser, 2015). Seymour et al. (2015), for example, explore interactivity in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and highlight the impacts of an interactive story on how producers must construct and navigate their texts. That said, audience interactions take many formats and many of the members of the audience who watch these series do not engage with the texts in a truly ‘interactive’ way in that not all comments contribute to the story in the same way. As such, a kayfabe framework provides a lens through which to unpack and differentiate the various ways in which audiences comment on and engage with these texts. I argue kayfabe offers an approach to exploring the immersive elements of interactive texts and the impact of co-authorship. In the following section I apply the kayfabe framework to comments from an online transmedia text to exemplify how this framework helps distinguish between different types of interactions, thus highlighting the capacity to apply kayfabe beyond wrestling.
Applying kayfabe to online transmedia stories
In the context of online transmedia stories, interaction takes place across many different social media platforms given the characters and audience are present across various sites. For the purposes of the following examples, I have focused on the comments on several videos from the web series Nothing Much to Do – a 2010s, modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing created by The Candle Wasters. Nothing Much To Do has a smaller (but still sizeable) audience in comparison to some of the other online transmedia stories discussed in this article. Episodes throughout the series have a mean average of around 50,000 views per video and approximately 70 comments (as of September 2024). As an experimental pilot study designed to assess the validity and applicability of the kayfabe framework, I completed a qualitative content analysis of the comments on five videos from various points in the series to see how different comments could be categorised utilising a kayfabe framework, and the types of interactions that occurred within each of these categories. The videos were purposively selected to gather a selection of videos which occurred at different stages of the 76-episode series and ensured that videos were included from different channels within the series such as videos from Beatrice, Benedick, and ‘The Watch Project’ (Ursula’s channel which also hosts videos from Verges and Dogberry). While the pilot study is limited in scope, it offers a tangible insight into the types of interactions that are actually happening in the comments sections of these videos. A broader study of the comments across multiple web series and across multiple platforms is beyond the scope of this paper but would be a fruitful analysis in the future.
Results of pilot study comment categorisation.
When examining comments that can be considered kayfabe, there are many types of comments that contribute to the sense that the text is real. From a production point of view, the transmedia status of the texts allows for other characters within the text to contribute to a sense of liveliness. Take the comments on Episode 12 ‘A Special Announcement!’ posted to Beatrice’s account as an example. The character Benedick comments 30 times on the video asking a litany of inane questions and he alone makes up the majority of comments. These comments are concretely kayfabe. They contribute to the fictional story world while maintaining the illusion that these characters are real people.
In-character comments also offer an insight into one of the other types of comments: interactive comments. These comments directly interact with the fictional characters in the series and might be in response to the characters in the video or in response to other comments on the video (such as Benedick’s comments in the aforementioned example). This interaction is also an example of kayfabe. Audience members here perform a similar role to the audience at wrestling events. By responding to the video and characters as though they are real, the audience contributes to the sense that the events in the video are real.
Figure 2 (below) is an example of an audience member responding in kayfabe to one of Benedick’s comments on Episode 12. A kayfabe comment where fictional character Benedick comments on Beatrice’s video, and an audience member responds.
Here the audience member is poking fun at Benedick and responding as though he is a real person in the context of the comments. By engaging with the fictional comments in this manner, the audience member lends credence to the idea that Benedick is a real person, thus reinforcing the ‘reality’ of the fictional world. Similar to this, some audience members address the characters directly in the same way that they might address a real vlogger which often means referring to them by name. Figure 3 (below) shows an example of an audience member referring to a character directly. A kayfabe comment where an audience member directly addresses fictional Beatrice.
Some audience interaction may prompt responses from the characters themselves, which further adds to kayfabe. These interactions often act as an opportunity for character traits to be developed or reinforced to the audience (an argument which Jandl (2015, pp. 189–190) makes regarding the question and answer videos in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries). Figure 4 (below) shows Beatrice responding to a comment on episode 26 ‘All Round Great Guy’ that suggests she ‘friendzoned’ Pedro. In this example, Beatrice’s comment allows her character to be more wholly developed by responding to the audience’s comments. A kayfabe comment, where fictional character Beatrice responds to an audience member.
These particular story elements, while often miniscule in the scope of the narrative and plot, would not exist without an audience member providing the material for the fictional character to respond to. The above example of Figure 4 exemplifies the notion of ‘no-wall-theatre’ wherein the story world extends beyond the traditional boundaries of the text (Jones, 2019; Kail, 2017). Audience interaction and contributions that maintain kayfabe allow the creators of the text to respond and build a more immersive story as a result thus demonstrating hyperreality in practice. The concept of co-authorship also applies here with the audience contributing to the online texts rather than simply responding to it, reinforcing that these comments should not be considered extratextual.
Some comments may alternatively break kayfabe rather than maintain it. These non-kayfabe comments take several forms and break kayfabe to differing extents. Given Nothing Much To Do is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, there are several comments across the series that make reference to the source material or the overall plot. Other non-kayfabe comments are more explicit in that they will actively refer to the series as a work of fiction. Examples of this include comments that refer to the actors by their real names or by referencing the acting choices more broadly. Figures 5 and 6 are each examples of concretely non-kayfabe comments. A non-kayfabe comment, where a user explicitly mentions the acting in the scene. A non-kayfabe comment, where the audience member points to the text’s status as an adaptation.
These comments break kayfabe by overtly acknowledging the fictional status of the works and while they have the capacity to inform how other viewers perceive the text, their impact is different to comments which reinforce the ‘reality’ of the text.
Comments that do not definitively maintain or break kayfabe fit in the ‘quasi-kayfabe’ portion of the proposed framework. Figure 7 (below) is one example of a comment that responds to the video broadly, and therefore neither contributes to nor breaks kayfabe. A quasi-kayfabe comment which does not necessarily break or maintain kayfabe.
Ambi-kayfabe comments, conversely, simultaneously reinforce the reality of a text and reference its fictionality. The following example (Figure 8, below) both addresses one of the characters by name directly (a kayfabe action) and addresses the producers of the text while referencing the original source material (a non-kayfabe action). By labelling this comment as ambi-kayfabe, we are able to consider the multiple ways it may contribute to the text. An ambi-kayfabe comment which both treats the text as though it is real and breaks kayfabe by addressing the producers and source material.
What stands out amongst this small pilot study is the capacity for some comments to read more than one way depending on how you read it. Additionally, some comments might change category depending on whether they are in response to a kayfabe or non-kayfabe comment. The duality of some comments is important to explore, in part because it highlights how difficult it is to both study these kinds of texts and definitively comment on an audience member’s understanding of the text through textual analysis alone. Equally, this duality shows how kayfabe contributes to the complexity of how other audience members may need to be extra cautious in order to identify if a text is ‘real’ or fictional. Kayfabe audience responses have the capacity to act as confirmation that the video is in fact ‘real’. For audience members who are not ‘in the know’, these comments maintaining kayfabe act as confirmation. In many ways, kayfabe becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Audience members treat the text as though it is real, which makes the fictionality of the text seem more real, in turn making it easier for the audience to engage with the text as though it is real.
It is worth acknowledging that many people who watch these series will not comment on the videos, thus I am working with particularly active audience members in these sections. It is also important to consider the role of the platform and the fact that audience interaction with a text has the capacity to be ongoing after the text has concluded. For example, in the pilot study of comments on some videos in Nothing Much To Do there were comments from many different points in time with some coming years after the release of the series. The comments section can act as an archive, chronicling the various ways that others have engaged with a text over time. Kayfabe can be maintained or broken in these comments as well. Kayfabe practices with online texts thus evolve over time particularly once the series is complete, as there is less incentive to engage in kayfabe when ‘live’ transmedia texts reach their conclusion (Adams and Barbour, 2022). While viewership may ebb and flow over the years, the comments on YouTube videos and characters’ social media accounts are preserved (albeit not perfectly, see Ruppel (2009) and Camden and Oestreich’s (2018) discussions of archiving cross-sited narratives). This preservation of fan interaction means that more recent viewers engage with the layers of previous viewers’ perspectives, which is a different experience compared to audience members who engage while the content is actively being released. A potentially interesting study would be to consider the ways in which newer viewers of older series interact with the videos and how their comments engage with kayfabe.
There is little to suggest that audience members who engage with the characters in these web series genuinely believe the characters are real, though the audience engagement occasionally extends beyond simply commenting on videos or replying to tweets. For example, some fans of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries went a step beyond surface level interaction with the text during the initial live release of the series. In the web series, Wickham and Lydia’s engagement in Pride and Prejudice is given a modern twist in the form of a sex tape that Wickham threatens to release online. The series executed this by creating a website counting down to its release which posed as an important point in the plot of the series, as Darcy’s redemption in part relies on his effort to remove the site. Some members of the audience went beyond simply discussing the countdown and actively tried to take down the site themselves (Jandl, 2015: p. 82). The audience’s attempt to intervene with the plot ultimately required producers to step in and ask fans not to tamper with the website given its importance to the plot (Seymour et al., 2015: pp. 103–104). In this example, we can see how the audience participation in kayfabe posed problems for the producers and interfered with the potential success of the story because the interactivity afforded to the audience provided an opportunity to interrupt the execution of the narrative. In the same vein as Sciarretta’s (2019) claim that the audience is the WWE’s character that cannot be controlled, this example from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries shows the power of the audience in interactive texts. An invested, engaged, and in-kayfabe audience makes maintaining control of the text more difficult. Jandl notes that the producers of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries were ‘occasionally required to sacrifice authenticity for the sake of the story’ and suggests that this does not seem to have had an impact on the audience, who were ‘willing to suspend their disbelief to a certain extent in favour of the narrative’ (2015, p. 183). There is therefore a tension between creating a series that appears authentic while simultaneously managing audience members’ reactions to the series (either in kayfabe or outside it). This tension then raises questions about the implications of engaging with kayfabe in the context of the ethics surrounding producer and fan power dynamics as well as story design.
Conclusion
In this article, I argue that the concept of kayfabe has applications beyond wrestling in that it can offer a lens through which to discuss interactive story environments more broadly. I propose an analytical framework which extends existing taxonomies and which can be applied to many interactive spaces. I then apply the framework to examples from online transmedia stories to exemplify how this works in practice. Online transmedia stories demonstrate many of the characteristics of kayfabe because they create a fictional world which audiences members embrace and perpetuate. By embracing the fictionality of the story, audience members of these online texts are equivalent to wrestling fans. For fans of each of these works, treating the texts as though they are real is part of the fun and is an integral aspect to fandom in these spaces.
Simply considering these texts to be ‘interactive’ flattens the vast variety of ways that people engage with these types of texts. Not all audience members who watch online transmedia stories will comment on a video hoping that a character will respond. Some will actively want to commend the actors on how well they delivered a particular line or complain that the producers omitted a character. These comments still contribute to how other audience members engage with the text, but they are not necessarily ‘interactive’ in the same sense that other comments are. Kayfabe offers us a lens through which to differentiate between these comments and unpack how they affect the text.
While the framework has primarily focused on the application of the concept to comments on YouTube videos (given those are the core texts of many of the online transmedia stories discussed), the same framework can be used to breakdown how people engage with other interactive and immersive storytelling environments. Consider the growing popularity of immersive theme parks, immersive theatre, live-action role-play games or experiences (both online and offline), and escape rooms. These are all examples of situations where leaning into the artifice of the interactive story space makes for a more compelling and interesting audience experience, and the actions in these spaces can all similarly be broken down into kayfabe, non-kayfabe, ambi-kayfabe, and quasi-kayfabe actions. Different platforms also have unique affordances and therefore implications. Livestreaming games (especially role-playing games) on Twitch, for example, offers an opportunity for audience interactivity in real time through live chats. Future research could consider the ways that this occurs and how performers and audience members both interact and contribute to the balance of artifice and reality in these spaces.
This paper utilises an experimental pilot test to assess the validity of the framework and the examples included in the discussion, while limited in scope, successfully highlight how kayfabe can be applied to online transmedia stories. In discussing only one platform, I am inherently restricting the capacity to explore all the ways that audiences perform both kayfabe and non-kayfabe actions while engaging with online transmedia stories. To engage with the full range of opportunities would be beyond the scope of this paper, but would nonetheless provide a more all-encompassing review of how kayfabe operates in these spaces. Future work might consider a more in-depth analysis of a single text, texts with different ‘core texts’ (i.e. online stories told primarily via TikTok for example), or perhaps a broader range of texts entirely. Further, sub-categories within the proposed categories would allow for even more detailed exploration of kayfabe and its application in different formats.
Kayfabe gives us the language to explore how audiences engage with interactive texts with significantly more nuance, and this framework offers a way to categorise different actions through a kayfabe lens. Not all audience members will interact in the same way and certainly not all audience members will treat the text as though it is real. However, kayfabe provides us a lens through which to look at these interactions and differentiate between the many forms of engagement. It allows us to separate a fan who explicitly responds to a character from those who broadly discuss the text. Kayfabe is currently underutilised in the sense that it is applied in only limited settings (namely wrestling). I argue the concept provides us with language and theoretical foundations to investigate similar texts where fiction and artifice converge, and the proposed analytical framework provides a starting point for utilising the concept in other settings.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.