(10-19-2016, 08:12 PM)Verad Wrote: Keep me posted. I'm interested, but some of how you're describing portrayal makes it sound like a culturally received idea - something everyone "knows" as you say - rather than something inherent in the text. That kind of theory isn't my exact field so I'd like to know more before I go jumping to conclusions.
A further distillation of Portrayal can be more than just "how it is presented." It can also be considered to be the actual "thing" that is handed to you; an example is whether the thing given to you is a movie, sculpture, etcetera. Some also consider it to be "the work as a whole," which would fall roughly into line with what I gave you (presentation). I personally am not a fan of the "overall" line of thinking, because it leaves us without terminology we may use to discuss individual pieces of something as complex as a movie or a videogame.
None of these terms are solidly defined, because artists like to argue and nothing in art is empirical. The more common terms I've seen for these are "content," "style," and "form," so a search for those may give you more information, though most of that refers to Visual Arts instead of actual entertainment media.