Estrutura narrativa Easter Egg com crianças e adolescentes na Retrospectiva Animada de Felipe Castanhari

Abstract

Improving the use of screens, as well as media education processes, has been a growing concern worldwide, which is reflected in legislation and documents produced in Latin America and the European Union. Conversely, in Brazil, there is a large volume of actions aimed at prohibiting the use of digital media and little investment in communicating complex news content to children and adolescents. This research counters the "adultcentric" perspective (Tomaz, 2019) and the understanding of youth as "media zombies" (Deuze, 2013), problematizing, on the one hand, the scarcity of hegemonic journalistic approaches and, on the other, the lack of recognition of narratives that flourish in digital contexts, driven by the interacting users themselves. It starts from the hypothesis that the apparent disinterest of youth in politics is a reflection of a historical silencing that ignores the existence of a prosumer audience eager for information, provided the content dialogues with participatory culture in an attractive and editable way. It is also presumed that the vacuum left by mainstream media has been filled by new information architectures. The main objective is to analyze how the use of Easter eggs—the practice of hiding references in a work—in the dissemination of news acts as a vector for political engagement, transmedia literacy, and citizenship. To investigate how the appropriation of digital entertainment formats consolidates new informational languages, the empirical object chosen is the Retrospectiva Animada (Animated Retrospective) from Canal Nostalgia, led by youtuber Felipe Castanhari. The corpus encompasses 10 years of episodes, 50 react videos—audiovisual productions of users' reactions to the respective editions—and 12,000 comments published on the channel's official productions. Methodologically, the investigation is outlined by the Audiovisual Materiality Analysis (AMA), proposed by Coutinho (2016), in which the object is observed holistically through the lens of theoretical-analytical axes. Three assessment prisms were selected: 1) Technique and aesthetics, focusing on the music video language and the environment of proximity; 2) Myth and power, identifying the centrality of a dramaturgy in conducting the discourse; and 3) Prosumer reinação and memory, analyzing civic mobilization through collective decoding. The results reveal that Easter eggs were amplified within the transmedia ecology, leaving their merely referential and metonymic function as an interactive figure of speech to be commercially appropriated as a retention strategy tool. It is observed that this resource exceeded its initial action and consolidated itself as a narrative structure by bringing news, political engagement, and agency to its core. The interacting user is summoned as a "viewer-investigator" (Jost, 2023), activating memory and reinação (understood as creative and insurgent mobilization) through cognitive reward. However, it was found that the excess of hyperconnections without the anchoring of clear information generates overload, noise, and paralysis. Furthermore, it was noted that the same narrative structure can be co-opted by disinformation ecosystems, acting as its base mechanism. Faced with this scenario of high cognitive demand and the risk of dissonance, a Freirean educational praxis is proposed, the Hyperconnected Dialogic Pedagogy, which adopts the Easter Egg Narrative Structure as a "generative theme" (Freire, 1970) in order to transform the algorithmic and investigative curiosity of children and adolescents into civic and relational competence.