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Sliding Scale Of Fourth Wall Hardness
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):

Completely Solid Fourth Wall

Visible Fourth Wall

  • 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.

Playing With the Fourth Wall

  • 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.)

Nonexistent Fourth Wall

  • 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.

Beyond No Fourth Wall

  • 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.


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