Reality - Fiction Interaction

## Summary

Our real world can logically never truly intersect with fictional worlds. The fact that people have created a fiction in our view just means that they have created, for example, words and pictures. The authors have not created any new realities, they have not created intelligent and spiritual beings. They have just created stories within books, comics, games, TV, movies, or animation. We compare the fictional worlds from their points of view. And to them our world does not exist in any sense.

Author avatars and significant 4th wall breaking instances should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, as not all of them are equal in merit and significance. Likewise, a few general rules of thumb should be adhered to:

Firstly, no matter what the author's intentions are, fiction and reality can never fully interact. The real world, and real people can be simulated within fiction, but they will still be fictional representations and characters. As such, no fictional character can be responsible for the creation of "The real world".

Secondly, Author Avatars are not inherently bad, as some fictions use them in meaningful and relevant manners. There are several games in which the player is a part of the story proper, as well as numerous stories in which the author is made present, either through an avatar or fictionalized portrayal. We have to see if the author avatar is relevant, or if it is just a wink towards the audience.

Thirdly, Author Avatars do not equate tier 0 boundlessness, and characters beating/killing their authors are not quantifiable nor meaningful feats. For instance, while The Lord of Nightmares beat her writer with a shovel, said "writer" was still a fictional character, and in no way, shape or form can LoN affect real people, or actually defeat her real world writer. Similarly, no one should look at real life humans as a "tier 0 species", simply because we can write stories.

* 1Introduction
* 2Reality-fiction difference
* 3Breaking the 4th wall and introducing a "real world"
	+ 3.1Author Avatar

## Introduction

A recurring trope of metafiction is the interaction of fictional characters with their author or the real world.

However, fiction being what it is, it is equivalently incompatible with our reality, and therefore can only simulate it, which brings us to multiple cases of the relationship between this pseudo reality and fiction:

## Reality-fiction difference

In the case of higher dimensional beings , the lower world(s) may seem similar to fiction to them: the lower reality has no influence on the one above, and this can usually alter the reality of the world below in one way or another.

It is also worth noting that this can vary in terms of scale: in the case of Umineko no naku koro ni, the witches see the human world as a mere chessboard, but Featherine, which exists in a level of higher existence, also sees the world of witches as a chessboard.

However, this does not apply if the two worlds are mutually fictional : World A is a work of fiction in world B, but world B is a work of fiction in world A as well. This is a mise en abyme .

## Breaking the 4th wall and introducing a "real world"

In today's post-modernist era, a common element of metafiction is the breaking of the 4th wall (a character is aware of their fictional nature), which can sometimes extend to introducing our "real world" **into** The fiction.

However, no matter what an author's intentions, fact and fiction cannot interact with each other. The real world and its inhabitants can be represented in fiction, but will always be fictional characters, based on real elements. The idea that a character is responsible for creating the "real world" is also excluded, as this would only extend to the depiction shown in the work in question.

### **Author Avatar**

The avatar of the author is a fictional representation of the author as a character, it can also apply to the reader or the player in the case of the video game.

Although some avatars of the author may be just gags or very poorly written characters (which is the case with a majority of "self-insert" in fanfiction); some works make them characters just as important and interesting as the rest ( Homestuck , The annals of the Discworld ) or make them a main protagonist in the case of the player/reader ( Doki Doki Litterature Club , Earthbound ).

Being an avatar of the author doesn't make a character all-powerful, and being able to defeat or kill one doesn't add anything more than usual scaling. It is ultimately only a fictional character, and trying to put a character above other fictions for the simple reason of being an avatar of the author or being superior to one of them constitutes a fallacious argument as well as a very poor understanding of metafiction.

Tori-bot, the avatar of Akira Toriyama, for example, was often beaten by the inhabitants of the Penguin Village; however this does not constitute an impressive fact and in no way makes them comparable or superior to real humans.