Today, crypto technologies like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) enable a new model of character development and ownership that could not only unbundle creative media, but also lower the barrier to entry for online communities to bring new characters into the world.
The communities could distribute governance tokens to the holders of character NFTs, which in turn can be used to vote on key creative decisions. Such collaborative relationships between creator and community are already happening and will only increase as participants explore the possibilities, both creative (including governance) and financial.