The TVTropes Trope Finder is where you can come to ask questions like "Do we have this one?" and "What's the trope about...?" Trying to rediscover a long lost show or other medium but need a little help? Head to Media Finder and try your luck there. Want to propose a new trope? You should be over at You Know, That Thing Where.
If the characters realize and acknowledge that they're characters, that's still breaking the fourth wall.
Resident Evil Abridged uses such fourth wall breaks multiple times (noted in the summary by the last sentence of paragraph three).
Edited by MiinU
If by in-character you mean this is happening in a Show Within a Show, or the characters are putting on a theatre play or something like that, it would be an in-universe example of Breaking the Fourth Wall.
Edited by Twiddler
I think Medium Awareness is what you're looking for. A lot of other sources (and even some users on this wiki) don't distinguish between the two, but Breaking the Fourth Wall is supposed to be specifically about characters acknowledging the audience, while Medium Awareness is supposed to be about characters acknowledging some other aspect of the story that shouldn't really exist for them (i.e. they know they're in a story, they can hear the soundtrack, they know about the commercial breaks, etc).
If it's a Show Within a Show breaking the wall between it and the fictional "reality", then it's No Inner Fourth Wall.
^ we better have an "audience awareness" trope and leave BTFW as an exampleless supertrope.
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
That's kinda counter-intuitive, since acknowledging the audience is right there in the name of Breaking the Fourth Wall. The "fourth wall" is the imaginary wall between the characters and the audience. A hypothetical supertrope would be something like "Lampshading Fictionality".
It's a useful distinction, and I don't think we should change our trope names, but don't expect most commentators to pick up on it. It's a technical thing, on the same level as venom/poison.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
Do cases of breaking character while someone is supposed to be in-character (i.e., not in real life) fall under Breaking the Fourth Wall?
I wasn't sure since the former can happen without addressing the fourth wall, which seems to be a big part of the trope— they might be addressing another character, saying something along the lines of "You know we're just characters on a TV show, right?"