I didn’t feel the need to appear before now, because I knew I’d face big shouty demands like this as soon as I broke the fourth wall. I think I might have to retcon everyone and go back to nice peaceful anonymity…
In fiction,
Webcomics in particular, the
Fourth Wall is sometimes
nonexistent; sometimes it is so solid that you can
lean on it. This is a sliding scale of how solid the
Fourth Wall is.
From most solid/hardest, to least solid/softest (Note that promos and the like
do not count for this scale):
- Soliloquies, Asides, and the like, as long as the audience is not directly acknowledged. The characters behave as if they were characters in a story, but they don't know who might be watching. (You talk to the audience in a soliloquy, yes, but only because the conventions of the theater say that doing so means that you're actually just thinking out loud at the audience.)
- Leaning On The Fourth Wall
- Aside Glance
Semipermeable Fourth Wall
- A Narrator (but not a Viewpoint Character) who speaks directly to the audience, but whom the characters do not know about; but only if the narrator's announcements amount to more than "Meanwhile", "see Issue #7", or other scene setting.
- Fourth Wall Mail Slot: where, outside of the plot, the characters respond, in character, to reader mail or reader content — if it is the only break in the fourth wall.
- Fourth Wall Observer: One character has full Medium Awareness, and the others write it off has him being insane.
- In a video game, the characters are aware of the context of the game just enough to explain a concept of the game to the player, but do so within the context of the story. Common in Justified Tutorials.
- Painting The Fourth Wall refers to metafictional devices where the author calls attention to the limits of the medium. See trope page for details. (There are many subtropes; see that page.)
- Medium Awareness: the characters may directly acknowledge the mechanics of their medium and/or that this is just a show, but these acknowledgments don't actually effect the plot and/or the characters never acknowledge their fictionality.
- Full No Fourth Wall: The characters acknowledge their fictionality directly.
- Mind Screws sometimes goes beyond No Fourth Wall, to imply such things as the viewer being a fictional character, so this entry is for them.
No examples; there are
plenty of subtropes for them.
- Well, maybe a brief comparison of Bob And George and One Over Zero, to explain how the scale works:
- The characters of Bob And George know they're in a Web Comic, but it only sometimes directly impacts the plot, and the characters' actual existence is never in question.
- In One Over Zero, Medium Awareness is the main plot, and the characters themselves acknowledge and debate their possible fictionality/nonexistance.
