m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

In Part I, I covered the fictional, meta-choicemaps shown in Bandersnatch. Here in Part II, I’ll cover some of the more significant actual maps of the show as played (and frequently mapped) by the viewers. I’m also planning a Part III for the less significant, but still interesting, maps out there.

One of the earliest choice maps of Bandersnatch the TV show was posted to reddit by u/scrixie on the same day (December 28th, 2018) that Netflix broadcast the show. It gave a good, quick summary in the White Bear style of the meta-maps seen in the show, and became one of the go-to maps in reporting about the show. A far less popular summary map was posted to reddit in early January by u/truthcrab. Structurally, it uses meandering paths illustrated with screencaps, but in content it is quite similar to the more famous map:

One novelty brought on by the process of summarizing the multiple paths through these nodes is the annotations—the orange circles in the first map and the faded choice in the second—intended to indicate that the choices are not always available, or other qualities that change depending on previous choices.

Most of the choice maps out there are more exhaustive but (or therefore) structurally less interesting. The most famous is another early map by u/alpine- on Reddit (sometimes falsy attributed to The Verge, although they credited it properly themselves), which lies firmly in the flowchart style. A boxier but more washed-out flowchart from IGN also garnered a bit of attention for its completeness:

Along with the standards, Petrana Radulovic at Polygon dug up (and Popsugar later regurgitated) some rarer early choice maps, including an allegedly low-spoilage, unusually curvy flowchart from Reddit user u/madarasi012, and a White-Bear style map from Reddit user u/kicos018 which takes the exhaustive route, but adds an interesting application of background color to a main divergence point:

But by far the most interesting (and hard to find) choicemaps out there are the ones made and used by the producers themselves. They first started with a White Bear-style flowchart, then tried using Twine:

Later they wrote their own software, Branch Manager:

There are a few more glimpses of the software in a couple of making of videos on YouTube.

Update

Besides Part III, there is also A Cosmic Epilogue.