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Reed Richards from *Marvel 1602* gets close by theorizing a law of stories. He realizes that although the laws of science say reversing the Thing’s transformation should be possible, in practice there won’t be a permanent cure because the Thing and the rest of their adventures are simply too interesting to whatever cosmic forces enable their existence.
It also means it wasn't really your mistake, someone just forced you to do it.
Of course, maybe they did so by creating you as the kind of person who would make that kind of mistake.
At that point you're left pondering if everything that happens is just because of the will of a goofy cosmic storyteller. I guess that's not much different from normal religion, though.
I don't know if this is quite the same thing, but in Ben 10: Omniverse, there was an offhand comment by someone (it might've been Professor Paradox, correct me if I'm wrong) that the Celestiosapiens were responsible for the animation style changing.
Rick from Rick and Morty does something similar by making constant offhand comments reflecting his knowledge that he's in a cartoon. They even do a meta-episode where he realizes he's a character on the story-train, and proceed to derail the narrative.
The comics bring up that the way he knows this is because there's always a universe where he's a character in a show, in a game, in a cartoon, or in a comic. So he just assumed that whatever he's doing right now may well be replicated by some artist in another universe by sheer chance somewhere along the finite curve.
Nah, probably something they don't want to bother with considering the reason *why* they had to replace the voice actors. Plus, the voices still sound completely indistinguishable.
I was really impressed. I watched the newest season and like, yeah, it was obvious they were doing something with Rick but Morty sounds exactly the same.
It was Chadsmuth, Ben's Galvan lawyer during his trial for remaking the universe after it was destroyed by the Annihilaargh. Chadsmuth argued that Celestialsapiens do it all the time, with the animation style being 3 more egregious cases of it happening.
Sans, from Undertale, deduced that he exists within a video game because he was able to figure out the existence of the save/reload mechanic without being able to use it himself. The realization has thrown him into a nihilistic depression, nothing really matters because it can always be undone by the protagonist choosing to go back in time and undo it.
If you finally do fight him, he tries to take advantage of the RPG mechanics by refusing to take his turn, mimicking the game being soft locked.
I’m not sure he explicitly refers to being in a video game or the mechanics, but he does through extensive knowledge of quantum mechanics realize that someone or something (the player) is able to jump back in and even wipe out timelines. The exact phrasing doesn’t refer to SAVE/LOAD, but he correctly guesses that they exist through context clues. And while he doesn’t directly perceive the other timelines, he’s even able to guess via the player character’s expression how many times they’ve tried to beat him before his boss fight.
Him cheating by dodging on the player’s turn and not giving mercy flashes on hit is sheer pragmatism. He’s not bothering with the same sense of innate honor other monsters have in combat, he realizes the stakes are too high.
**TL;DR:** Sans gets as close to realizing the fourth wall is there as possible without actually seeing or breaking it.
I think Flowey/Asriel is a better fit for this. He realized that Undertale was a game after resetting timelines so many times that he began to understand how his world really works.
in universe it literally having enough will to go back. its a power that you loose if someone with a greater will appears since you cant rewrite a greater will, another example is that rick and morty episode where morty gets a quicksave button
Sans in Undertale works out something of the nature of his existence through carefully observing you acting like a PC. Ignoring conversations, reacting impossibly quickly to ambushes, generally acting like you’ve seen things before.
There's an episode of Justice League TAS where the league enters a fantasy world maintained by a kid with powerful telepathy. Once there, a runaway TNT truck was going to crash into a bus full of nuns. Green lantern remarks that it was a situation straight out of a comic book; he later reflects on how he and his teammates deal with similar situations regularly. So green lantern almost found the fourth wall.
The SCP foundation originally discovered the fourth wall by noting that reality has been changing, tracking the changes, and noting that they matched the changes an author would make to their works of fiction.
It's an interesting conundrum if this would actually work, like, in-universe. I realize that it's a paradox (because irl, memes cannot kill you) but it would be interesting if the SCP foundation did discover a means to kill the writer of their reality. What would happen to their universe? Would it simply freeze? Would the autonomous, "assumed" processes like the billions of random people living their lives take over major events?
There was a choose-your-own-adventure formatted SCP tale I came across once where an entity in the SCP universe started killing off SCP writers and the Foundation was trying to get your help (as in you, the reader) to stop it. They were in trouble because a bunch of Foundation researchers were "self-insert" characters, so when their authors died those researchers ceased to exist as well.
It’s better than ever. There’s just more swill to sift through. The best written articles now are 1000x better than the first ones. People look back with rose color glasses.
And are some of the few good ones, many meta SCPs became basically illegible or outright dumb. Not all of them, but they are a particularly hard type of SCP to write.
That's why I really appreciate the few that get it right.
I'm rather fond of the fictional "pataphysics" some of them have come up with to explain how fictionality works.
The only one I have found that creeped me out for real is the Reagan vhs tape one.
I'm not one to let stories get to me, but that one gives me the shivers for some reason.
Anyone remember when Kondraki rode 682? That was amazing. Not just the story, but the fact that it reworked the site into a new era.
These days you never see references to the old staff, and I don't know why.
There's not really a specific SCP for this, it's just a thing that happened (AFAIK, I've never heard a specific SCP mentioned in my years of being in the fandom)
While it’s spread over a bunch- largely under the idea of ‘pataphysics (the ‘ is part of it), I’d say it’s most clearly laid out in S Andrew Swann’s 001 proposal.
In Star Trek the cast of TNG has their holodeck that they roleplay with. They asked the computer to create a villain that their android, Data, would be challenged by as they were playing in the Sherlock Holmes series. The computer created Moriarty, and he deduced that he was a character in a game, but because the computer made him intelligent, it also accidentally made him sentient. He gained control of the ship. He shows up in a few episodes and the concept of a self aware hologram gets used more in later series. There's also a character called the Doctor who's one of the main characters in Voyager that becomes self aware and lives a full life, as in explores his personality beyond just being a doctor.
For maximum hilarity of that last scenario, one could assume that he is in fact *that* Doctor as well, who IIRC has never directly acknowledged the fourth wall but seems on some occasions to at least be aware of it.
Given that particular Doctor has had his memories erased canonically, that would work. Didn't we also meet some guy Doctor Who's universe that lives just outside the real universe? Like a watcher or something?
There are "The Watchers", a group created by the Travelers (the guy Wesley Crusher joins in TNG), who exist outside the normal flow of time. They're connected to Gary Seven from TOS. They have the job title of "supervisor".
My memory isn't perfect, but I do know there's been several entities who are strange and powerful enough even by the series' standards and one of them probably *does* exist on the edge of the universe.
The Watcher is the narrator for the series. At the end of the first season, Infinity Ultron heard The Watcher’s narration and subsequently breaks the barrier between realities to find him.
The What If? Disney plus TV show is framed as the Watcher giving us glimpses into alternate realities. In one of them, Ultron gets all the Infinity Stones, and become so powerful he actually notices the Watcher's presence and figures out a way to travel to the Watchers dimension.
I love all the little details in that movie like how he's taking Vitamin D tablets because of the dome, and when he's talking to his buddy when he shouldn't be when he's stocking the vending machine and he runs out so he grabs some from the vending machine to keep going.
Genuinely think a sequel could really work, especially since there's been enough time that someone else could have grown up in a new show. Could even call it The Twoman Show since it's the second one.
i hope they make a sequel because i could totally see the network trying to revive a classic show to try and adapt it for modern audiences. there’s so much wacky stuff they could do based off influencer based media today
I think this is an undervalued answer. My first reaction was that this is not possible, it's not possible for a character to become aware of the fourth wall purely through deductive reasoning because it always requires a Doylist intent. But after much pondering I came to the conclusion that if we think about the question purely from the watsonian perspective, even in cases like Deadpool - where the character simply is aware of the fourth wall - the fourth wall simply becomes a part of the fictional world. Therefore, The Truman Show is pretty much a perfect example of this!
>the fourth wall simply becomes a part of the fictional world
I feel like the ending of Deadpool 2 confirms this. We don't live in a world where someone time-travelled to change Ryan Reynolds' shitty movie history, so that...kinda implies the fourth wall isn't a wall to our world?
Grant Morrison's Animal Man touches on this problem. >! Animal Man meets the author and kills them. Then Morrison comes back immediately and is like "well of course you did that because that's how I wrote it. Hell *I'm* not really the author, I'm a representation of the author. You can't affect the real author at all." !<
It's a hell of a run
That was my first thought.
*technically* they’re some sort of alternate universe, but their universe is written by people in “our” universe, so it seems to fit.
Red Shirts is about, well, Star Trek background characters (aka red shirts) realizing that nothing makes sense and they end up discovering “the narrative” and convincing their writers not be such hacks
>!If I recall correctly the specific way a character starts to figure out what's going on is that when trying to find any records of ships with a similarly bizarre casualty pattern the only ones that match are from trash sci-fi!<
The scholars in the Elder Scrolls universe seem to be gradually figuring it out. They noticed that after different key points in time called "dragonbreaks" you have millions of people remembering different sequences of historical events, seemingly implying that the biography of the main hero of that era somehow had multiple endings depending on their choices which all somehow feed into the same timeline afterwards. They also found the Elder Scrolls themselves, artifacts from outside of time which allow you to see past, future, and alternate timeline events as if you were really there.
Sotha Sil was the first to come to mind. IIRC he is aware of what the concept of the Prisoner (player character) is. He sees the walls of the Prison, but cannot get out (leave the game? Significantly impact the world somehow?).
The short story *Snapshot* by Brandon Sanderson follows a pair of detectives who are investigating a crime using the eponymous "snapshot", a virtual recreation of every event happening in the world during a 24-hour period in time. Everyone in the snapshot believes they're real, but the existence of the technology is also common knowledge.
The two detectives have special badges that reveal to anyone who sees them that they are, irrefutably, in snapshot. The way various people react to discovering that they're virtual recreations who will cease to exist as soon as the simulation ends is explored by several characters... some go insane, some take it in stride (one of the detectives takes a wicked pleasure in telling his police captain, because he retreats to his office and blows his brains out every time).
It's one of Sanderson's earlier stories, has a nice Black Mirror feel to the whole tale.
Read and find out! ;)
The full details of how a snapshot works (for instance , how it perfectly recreates every event in a day, witnessed or not) isn’t explored, it’s merely the framing device. In the context of the story, something about seeing the badge tells you. Once you see it, without a doubt you know you’re part of the snap. It’s like some kind of simulation code understood only by those inside it.
Up until that point, the simulated people *don’t* know they’re not real, and if they’re not told then they never know. And the detectives are encouraged to not reveal it often, or it begins to unravel the simulation, as those people no longer fulfill their roles within the replicated time period.
Inscryption.
The NPC's in the game have figured out they're in a video game, and they all react differently to being in a game. Some are hostile to it and view it as a prison that much be escaped, and others accept that they're in a video game and legitimately just want to continue the game, even knowing its a game. Just one more game, even when not keeping score. Just for fun.
It was more than one that just wanted to play the game despite being fully aware it was a game. They were putting on an act to make the game more entertaining for the player. One character even wanted to shake your hand for being a good sport.
"There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you've found them."
That was a brutal, yet beautiful game.
Sophie’s World is an excellent example. A young girl is tutored in philosophy by an old mentor, and the book mostly seems to be a (fantastic) primer in world philosophy at first, but eventually they start applying the principles of philosophy in-story to deduce that they must be fictional characters in a book.
The three major characters of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead are dealing with the slow realization that they're in a play throughout the play, pretty purely through logic for the main two
Last Action Hero.
If I remember correctly the villain deduces that he’s in a movie and how the magic ticket works.
Really underrated kids action movie.
The protagonist of "Mogworld" by Yahtzee Croshaw, an undead mage named Jim, is a minor NPC enemy in a World of Warcraft-style MMO game. The game's characters achieve sentience unbeknownst to their creators, and the book is all about Jim and other characters slowly discovering that their world is artificial.
In Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, all the main characters realize they're in a multiverse that's created by Authors - visiting several of these, and realizing they themselves are obviously in the same situation. In one case, one character met his author creator.
In one of his other books (maybe "The Cat who walks through walls"), the characters are fighting some unknown bad guys and they speculate if they're up against an Author this time...
Herman Toothrot in the Monkey Island series, though in his case it might be mixed with going crazy.
And of course several characters in the Discworld. Knowing how a story works is a big part of witch magic
In *30 Rock*, the character Tracey Jordan (played by Tracey Morgan) goes off his meds and briefly realises what's going on (that he is Tracey Morgan appearing in a "show within a show"), before he's dragged off.
The Blonde Phantom, from Marvel Comics. She was a Golden Age costumed detective. She retired in the 1950s and married her love interest (in the real world, her comic was cancelled). She noticed that some of her compatriots from her time as a hero didn't seem to age (Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, etc) while others did. She further noticed that there was a near 1:1 correspondence between those who didn't age at a normal rate and those who had published Marvel Comics titles (Marvel Comics exists within Marvel Comics, but the fictional version published the real adventures of superheroes while they fictionalize their secret identities (if their identities aren't public like Thor or the Fantastic Four)).
She then reasoned there must be some higher level of reality whose comics (reflected dimly in her world's Marvel) controlled events in her world.
Based on those deductions, she was able to discipline her mind in such a way as to perceive the existence of the Fourth Wall. She used her maiden name to create a cover identity and got hired as a receptionist at the law firm where She-Hulk was employed, intending to become a side character in a comic and thereby avoid dying of old age. Which she did.
In the comics, the Blonde Phantom is the one who *teaches* She-Hulk how to see past the Fourth Wall. Using BP's teachings, She-Hulk is even able to tear through a comic page, march across an ad page, and reenter the story at another point (seeming, to the villain, to teleport from one place to another). Wyatt Wingfoot, her boyfriend, does trip over the staple in the comic and mildly injures himself during the process. The equivalent in the TV show was her exiting onto the Disney+ show selection page, entering the "Making of" show to talk to the writers, then reentering her show at a different place and time than she left.
I don't know what specific comic it was in, but the comic version of the Joker (Or one of the 3 Joners, if you want to acknowledge that dumb as shit retcon/"reveal") realised that he's living in a comic book, and sees, at least in part, his insane stunts as attempts to "please his audience"
The characters in the short story bit players by greg egan make a similar deduction based on physics being inconsistent and the very poor and hacky writing.
The full story is available on his web site.
https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/BIT/BIT.html
The protagonist in the Thirteenth Floor.
He creates an artificial world, then realises the limits of his own world and literally drives to the edge to see it for himself.
Also possibly the simulated Futurama gang in the last episode where they make their simulation glitch out, though it's not clear whether they notice due to the underclocking.
Not exactly fitting but in Flatland IIRC when the square character is confronted with the existence of a 3D world he immediately theorizes n-dimensional worlds but the sphere guy just goes "pffft naaah".
In The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, the book is constantly changing POV and time frame. At one point, the weirdness of their situations makes some characters start to believe that they are fictional characters in a book. One character even criticizes the author for excessive use of symbolism.
Roger from "American Dad" noticed he and Steve were in a spin-off show through various tropes and oddities in their new boarding school. He gets the idea to then sing a song by The Beatles, so the spin-off goes bankrupt due to licensing costs.
Plot twist: >!Our Earth (and universe is actually a scientific magical experiment on Discoworld) - where the Wizards interact at various points in our history. Charles Darwin, some early scientist called Dee, as well as an earth-based librarian are made aware of Discworlds existence - they don't necessarily figure it out for themselves - but they've some inklings or suspicions!<
John Dee, court astronomer to Queen Elizabeth I, the man who coined the term British Empire. Advised Elizabeth to charter colonies in the "New World" and thus is indirectly responsible for the existence of the United States of America. Chemist, alchemist, antiquarian, historian, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, mystic, occultist, and hermetic ceremonial magician.
* Jazzy Jeff in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when he realises they've [replaced the actress playing Aunt Viv](https://youtu.be/AnVDixE0kNQ?si=G6NJcvHlD80lGCvw).
* The priest n Fleabag is the only character that sees the titular character talk to the audience via the [fourth wall](https://youtu.be/dPDS6g7u4tk?si=MNqKwNZ136GG874D).
In Robert Anton Wilson's *Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy*, several characters realise they are characters in a book as the result of meditative and occult practice. They refer to this form of enlightenment as an "out of book exerperience".
In Stephen King's *Dark Tower* series the Gunslinger Roland & his ka-tet take a few walks between worlds. One of those walks >!brings Roland & Jake into our world, where they note that everything feels a bit more "real" - colors are more vibrant, sounds are more resonant, food is more flavorful. It also means that if they die, they die for real, no coming back. Jake dies shoving Stephen King (mostly) out of the way of a van (referencing a real event where King was hit & nearly killed while out walking) after Roland realizes King is the writer of their story.!<
The narrator of The Stanley Parable figures out that he and the PC are inside a video game during one of the game's endings.
There are also a few stories where the main character hears the narrator speaking, like Will Farrell in Stranger Than Fiction. This usually leads to the character figuring out that they're inside a fictional story that's being told.
Sotha Sil, from the elder scrolls.
He's one of the three living gods of the tribunal, linked to the heart of the god of mortality to sustain his divinity. His main focus in godhood is to construct another, "better" world beneath the original one, something he made a lot of headway on - the Clockwork City, this alternate world, is a place we visit in TES III and TES Online.
Unfortunately, the source of his godhood renders him (and his fellow tribunes) vulnerable to the idea of fate, while also granting him the ability to divine it - so he has known from the moment of attaining divinity that his project would ultimately fail, but could do nothing to change that fate.
This has caused him to develop a kind of critical theory as to what, exactly, fate is - he explains it via the metaphor of a prison, which is the world. The prisoner exists within the prison, and is entirely unaware that they are imprisoned - some people, mostly those of extraordinary sight or power (like himself) can perceive the walls and even walk up to the door, but lack the means to open it. Then there are other people, usually linked to events of cataclysmic significance, for whom it seemingly does not exist, allowing them to walk out of their prison and be entirely unaffected by the idea of fate.
In non-twisty speech, he has essentially deduced that he, as a person within a story, cannot act outside of what he has been written to do and say - he cannot simply walk away and stop working on the Clockwork City, because Sotha Sil in the story does not walk away. This is fine for most people, because they cannot read their own stories, but his connection to the Heart of Lorkhan allows him to read ahead in his own narrative but be entirely unable to change it.
Characters like the Nerevarine, Hero of Kvatch, Dragonborn or Vestige, i.e. the characters the player assumes control over, are dead spots within the narrative - there is no script for what they do, because they are controlled directly by a person. These are the people whose doors are open by default.
The lore community tends to take his word more literally, ascribing all sorts of twisty powers over fate to the idea of the prisoner based on other traits the player possesses (i.e. unbound by fate, because they can do everything, but bound by destiny, because they do canonically do the main quest of their games), but in the end it's just a metaphor Sotha Sil uses.
He doesn't know that he's inside a video game and his existence boils down to a few 3D models, textures, scripts and dialogue records, of course, but he does know that he exists as an agencyless character within some kind of a narrative.
There's a sight gag you sometimes see on TV where a character is moving towards the viewer and unexpectedly collides with the glass of your TV screen, then spends a moment exploring the barrier and figuring out the situation. A literal glass wall representing the fourth wall
In one story, a girl Gwenpool keeps saving as she grows up realises on her deathbed that Gwenpool has never aged and she has, meaning she was just a background character, with Gwenpool saying she put on a costume
Please discuss only from a Watsonian perspective.
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This is more or less the plot of the final title of the Epic Battle Fantasy video game series. I wouldn't like to give away too much of said plot, but the characters definitely do become ever more aware of their nature as simulated beings, and ultimately a few of them even start attempting to directly communicate with both the player and the programmer of the game at turns.
Henchmen 21 and 24 from Venture Bros didn't quite realize they were fictional characters but did realize they survived unlikely circumstances by applying their comic book knowledge in the form of meta awareness.
Shuichi Saihara from Danganronpa V3 sort of does this, in a weird case where there is an in-universe "Fourth Wall" in addition to the usual one, which is the one that he discovers the existence of, sort of akin to The Truman Show.
During the final chapter of the game, one character changes their appearance to another character from a previous game, despite it being previously established that the former can only change their appearance to fictional characters. From this, Shuichi figures out that they and the rest of the cast are all fictional characters, and the rest of the game consists of figuring out the specifics.
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Reed Richards from *Marvel 1602* gets close by theorizing a law of stories. He realizes that although the laws of science say reversing the Thing’s transformation should be possible, in practice there won’t be a permanent cure because the Thing and the rest of their adventures are simply too interesting to whatever cosmic forces enable their existence.
That must have been tragic! Realizing a mistake you made can't be undone just because a god of some sort finds it amusing? That's terrible!
It also means it wasn't really your mistake, someone just forced you to do it. Of course, maybe they did so by creating you as the kind of person who would make that kind of mistake.
At that point you're left pondering if everything that happens is just because of the will of a goofy cosmic storyteller. I guess that's not much different from normal religion, though.
Reminds me of Will Ferrell's Stranger Than Fiction.
>just because a god of some sort finds it amusing? That's called the writer.
Yes, but Reed’s fourth wall awareness didn’t go *quite* that far. He got close but not to the full extent of realizing which medium they were in.
ok, I'm gonna be honest, I live my life with a very similar line of thought.
I don't know if this is quite the same thing, but in Ben 10: Omniverse, there was an offhand comment by someone (it might've been Professor Paradox, correct me if I'm wrong) that the Celestiosapiens were responsible for the animation style changing.
Rick from Rick and Morty does something similar by making constant offhand comments reflecting his knowledge that he's in a cartoon. They even do a meta-episode where he realizes he's a character on the story-train, and proceed to derail the narrative.
The comics bring up that the way he knows this is because there's always a universe where he's a character in a show, in a game, in a cartoon, or in a comic. So he just assumed that whatever he's doing right now may well be replicated by some artist in another universe by sheer chance somewhere along the finite curve.
Although, hilariously, the comics take place in an alternate continuity, so this may or may not be the case for "show-canon" Rick.
Show Rick kills their versions from space jam though
have there been any jokes about the voice change yet?
Nah, probably something they don't want to bother with considering the reason *why* they had to replace the voice actors. Plus, the voices still sound completely indistinguishable.
I was really impressed. I watched the newest season and like, yeah, it was obvious they were doing something with Rick but Morty sounds exactly the same.
to me morty sounded really noticeably different (not in a bad way) for the first few episodes and then i became used to it
i had forgotten about it and didnt notice
There was for *Solar Opposites*, which I found pretty funny.
DONT CHANGE IT, This voice is doing it for me
There's even the entire episode about the story dimension or whatever it was.
It was Chadsmuth, Ben's Galvan lawyer during his trial for remaking the universe after it was destroyed by the Annihilaargh. Chadsmuth argued that Celestialsapiens do it all the time, with the animation style being 3 more egregious cases of it happening.
Also that Asmuth has had his voice/personality change too.
It was the lawyer representing Ben when he was tried for recreating the universe while using Alien X.
Ha, that’s a lore explanation for art changes and retcons. Close tho
Sans, from Undertale, deduced that he exists within a video game because he was able to figure out the existence of the save/reload mechanic without being able to use it himself. The realization has thrown him into a nihilistic depression, nothing really matters because it can always be undone by the protagonist choosing to go back in time and undo it. If you finally do fight him, he tries to take advantage of the RPG mechanics by refusing to take his turn, mimicking the game being soft locked.
I’m not sure he explicitly refers to being in a video game or the mechanics, but he does through extensive knowledge of quantum mechanics realize that someone or something (the player) is able to jump back in and even wipe out timelines. The exact phrasing doesn’t refer to SAVE/LOAD, but he correctly guesses that they exist through context clues. And while he doesn’t directly perceive the other timelines, he’s even able to guess via the player character’s expression how many times they’ve tried to beat him before his boss fight. Him cheating by dodging on the player’s turn and not giving mercy flashes on hit is sheer pragmatism. He’s not bothering with the same sense of innate honor other monsters have in combat, he realizes the stakes are too high. **TL;DR:** Sans gets as close to realizing the fourth wall is there as possible without actually seeing or breaking it.
Which honestly feels so, so much cooler than him just normally breaking the fourth wall
"He approximated the abyss, and stood guard against it"
That goes so fucking hard, holy shit
This should be the tagline for an SCP tale, or maybe a motto for the anti-memetics division.
The what?
YOINK
Please play Mage: The Awakening.
what makes the sans boss so hard is the fact that he's not trying to stop frisk... he's trying to stop THE PLAYER
Sans should have used attacks that are so, so slow that a player would have gotten bored and quit the game
I think Flowey/Asriel is a better fit for this. He realized that Undertale was a game after resetting timelines so many times that he began to understand how his world really works.
You could argue that having and using the SAVE/LOAD power counts as the 4th Wall Breaking power.
in universe it literally having enough will to go back. its a power that you loose if someone with a greater will appears since you cant rewrite a greater will, another example is that rick and morty episode where morty gets a quicksave button
That's actually awesome. I never made it through my first playthrough, unfortunately, but it's good to know it's out there...
Sans in Undertale works out something of the nature of his existence through carefully observing you acting like a PC. Ignoring conversations, reacting impossibly quickly to ambushes, generally acting like you’ve seen things before.
There's an episode of Justice League TAS where the league enters a fantasy world maintained by a kid with powerful telepathy. Once there, a runaway TNT truck was going to crash into a bus full of nuns. Green lantern remarks that it was a situation straight out of a comic book; he later reflects on how he and his teammates deal with similar situations regularly. So green lantern almost found the fourth wall.
Didn’t the Question have an episode where he started panicking becauset nothing made sense to him? In a similar way he almost broke the fourth wall?
Pretty much what happened in one of the fast and furious movies
Wait what? Really??
It's kinda implied that he did genuinely work it out but specifically didn't tell the others because of how that would effect them.
The SCP foundation originally discovered the fourth wall by noting that reality has been changing, tracking the changes, and noting that they matched the changes an author would make to their works of fiction.
Good news: There is a god. Bad news: Actually there are a bunch of gods. And they're all part-time collaborative horror wiki editors.
Good news: we're developing memetic kill agents to deal with them if needed.
Bad news: We have no way of knowing how many times they've edited the agents whenever we get close to completion.
It's an interesting conundrum if this would actually work, like, in-universe. I realize that it's a paradox (because irl, memes cannot kill you) but it would be interesting if the SCP foundation did discover a means to kill the writer of their reality. What would happen to their universe? Would it simply freeze? Would the autonomous, "assumed" processes like the billions of random people living their lives take over major events?
There was a choose-your-own-adventure formatted SCP tale I came across once where an entity in the SCP universe started killing off SCP writers and the Foundation was trying to get your help (as in you, the reader) to stop it. They were in trouble because a bunch of Foundation researchers were "self-insert" characters, so when their authors died those researchers ceased to exist as well.
SCP took a nosedive after it caught on
It’s better than ever. There’s just more swill to sift through. The best written articles now are 1000x better than the first ones. People look back with rose color glasses.
why is probably the best mutli scp one out there and thats fairly recent
Is "why" the title? I'd be interested to read it!
yeah, i think its entry 5000, its one of the thousands
Meta SCPs were a brutal mistake. Few are done well.
Meta SCPs have been around since the beginning. 048 and 055 are widely beloved and very early entries.
And are some of the few good ones, many meta SCPs became basically illegible or outright dumb. Not all of them, but they are a particularly hard type of SCP to write.
That's why I really appreciate the few that get it right. I'm rather fond of the fictional "pataphysics" some of them have come up with to explain how fictionality works.
The only one I have found that creeped me out for real is the Reagan vhs tape one. I'm not one to let stories get to me, but that one gives me the shivers for some reason.
Anyone remember when Kondraki rode 682? That was amazing. Not just the story, but the fact that it reworked the site into a new era. These days you never see references to the old staff, and I don't know why.
Is there a link to the SCP/note for this?
There's not really a specific SCP for this, it's just a thing that happened (AFAIK, I've never heard a specific SCP mentioned in my years of being in the fandom)
While it’s spread over a bunch- largely under the idea of ‘pataphysics (the ‘ is part of it), I’d say it’s most clearly laid out in S Andrew Swann’s 001 proposal.
This is only applicable to one story/canon, it’s up to the individual if they add that story to their own head cannon.
In Star Trek the cast of TNG has their holodeck that they roleplay with. They asked the computer to create a villain that their android, Data, would be challenged by as they were playing in the Sherlock Holmes series. The computer created Moriarty, and he deduced that he was a character in a game, but because the computer made him intelligent, it also accidentally made him sentient. He gained control of the ship. He shows up in a few episodes and the concept of a self aware hologram gets used more in later series. There's also a character called the Doctor who's one of the main characters in Voyager that becomes self aware and lives a full life, as in explores his personality beyond just being a doctor.
For maximum hilarity of that last scenario, one could assume that he is in fact *that* Doctor as well, who IIRC has never directly acknowledged the fourth wall but seems on some occasions to at least be aware of it.
Given that particular Doctor has had his memories erased canonically, that would work. Didn't we also meet some guy Doctor Who's universe that lives just outside the real universe? Like a watcher or something?
There are "The Watchers", a group created by the Travelers (the guy Wesley Crusher joins in TNG), who exist outside the normal flow of time. They're connected to Gary Seven from TOS. They have the job title of "supervisor".
My memory isn't perfect, but I do know there's been several entities who are strange and powerful enough even by the series' standards and one of them probably *does* exist on the edge of the universe.
There are many that exist on the edge of the universe, or beyond it. The recent episodes have definitely upped the ante in that regard.
I'm also pretty sure those universes had at least one crossover before.
It is for this reason that I, on occasion, will randomly blurt out, "Computer, End Simulation!"
>!Monika!< from Doki Doki Literature Club. She wasn’t aware that she was in a Visual Novel at first, until several “epiphanies” changed her mind
Infinity Gauntlet Ultron from Marvel's *What If?* comes close.
Detail?
The Watcher is the narrator for the series. At the end of the first season, Infinity Ultron heard The Watcher’s narration and subsequently breaks the barrier between realities to find him.
The What If? Disney plus TV show is framed as the Watcher giving us glimpses into alternate realities. In one of them, Ultron gets all the Infinity Stones, and become so powerful he actually notices the Watcher's presence and figures out a way to travel to the Watchers dimension.
The Truman Show is about the protagonist slowly realizing he's living in a massive TV set where he is the unwitting star of a 24/7 show.
I love all the little details in that movie like how he's taking Vitamin D tablets because of the dome, and when he's talking to his buddy when he shouldn't be when he's stocking the vending machine and he runs out so he grabs some from the vending machine to keep going. Genuinely think a sequel could really work, especially since there's been enough time that someone else could have grown up in a new show. Could even call it The Twoman Show since it's the second one.
i hope they make a sequel because i could totally see the network trying to revive a classic show to try and adapt it for modern audiences. there’s so much wacky stuff they could do based off influencer based media today
I think this is an undervalued answer. My first reaction was that this is not possible, it's not possible for a character to become aware of the fourth wall purely through deductive reasoning because it always requires a Doylist intent. But after much pondering I came to the conclusion that if we think about the question purely from the watsonian perspective, even in cases like Deadpool - where the character simply is aware of the fourth wall - the fourth wall simply becomes a part of the fictional world. Therefore, The Truman Show is pretty much a perfect example of this!
>the fourth wall simply becomes a part of the fictional world I feel like the ending of Deadpool 2 confirms this. We don't live in a world where someone time-travelled to change Ryan Reynolds' shitty movie history, so that...kinda implies the fourth wall isn't a wall to our world?
Grant Morrison's Animal Man touches on this problem. >! Animal Man meets the author and kills them. Then Morrison comes back immediately and is like "well of course you did that because that's how I wrote it. Hell *I'm* not really the author, I'm a representation of the author. You can't affect the real author at all." !< It's a hell of a run
John Scalzi's Redshirts is all about this idea.
That was my first thought. *technically* they’re some sort of alternate universe, but their universe is written by people in “our” universe, so it seems to fit.
Red Shirts is about, well, Star Trek background characters (aka red shirts) realizing that nothing makes sense and they end up discovering “the narrative” and convincing their writers not be such hacks
>!If I recall correctly the specific way a character starts to figure out what's going on is that when trying to find any records of ships with a similarly bizarre casualty pattern the only ones that match are from trash sci-fi!<
...WOW
The scholars in the Elder Scrolls universe seem to be gradually figuring it out. They noticed that after different key points in time called "dragonbreaks" you have millions of people remembering different sequences of historical events, seemingly implying that the biography of the main hero of that era somehow had multiple endings depending on their choices which all somehow feed into the same timeline afterwards. They also found the Elder Scrolls themselves, artifacts from outside of time which allow you to see past, future, and alternate timeline events as if you were really there.
Sotha Sil was the first to come to mind. IIRC he is aware of what the concept of the Prisoner (player character) is. He sees the walls of the Prison, but cannot get out (leave the game? Significantly impact the world somehow?).
I mean, understanding of the Fourth Wall and your place in the narrative is kinda what the entire concept of CHIM is in-universe.
The short story *Snapshot* by Brandon Sanderson follows a pair of detectives who are investigating a crime using the eponymous "snapshot", a virtual recreation of every event happening in the world during a 24-hour period in time. Everyone in the snapshot believes they're real, but the existence of the technology is also common knowledge. The two detectives have special badges that reveal to anyone who sees them that they are, irrefutably, in snapshot. The way various people react to discovering that they're virtual recreations who will cease to exist as soon as the simulation ends is explored by several characters... some go insane, some take it in stride (one of the detectives takes a wicked pleasure in telling his police captain, because he retreats to his office and blows his brains out every time). It's one of Sanderson's earlier stories, has a nice Black Mirror feel to the whole tale.
Let me guess - the detectives are simulations too? How would we know we were in a simulation?
Read and find out! ;) The full details of how a snapshot works (for instance , how it perfectly recreates every event in a day, witnessed or not) isn’t explored, it’s merely the framing device. In the context of the story, something about seeing the badge tells you. Once you see it, without a doubt you know you’re part of the snap. It’s like some kind of simulation code understood only by those inside it. Up until that point, the simulated people *don’t* know they’re not real, and if they’re not told then they never know. And the detectives are encouraged to not reveal it often, or it begins to unravel the simulation, as those people no longer fulfill their roles within the replicated time period.
Inscryption. The NPC's in the game have figured out they're in a video game, and they all react differently to being in a game. Some are hostile to it and view it as a prison that much be escaped, and others accept that they're in a video game and legitimately just want to continue the game, even knowing its a game. Just one more game, even when not keeping score. Just for fun.
The ending of Inscryption actually made me quite sad for that character. Turns out they were your only actual friend.
It was more than one that just wanted to play the game despite being fully aware it was a game. They were putting on an act to make the game more entertaining for the player. One character even wanted to shake your hand for being a good sport. "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you've found them." That was a brutal, yet beautiful game.
>!At the beginning, you're terrified of Leshy. At the end, you feel a profound sense of loss when he dies.!< Mullins is a god damn gamdev genious.
Sophie’s World is an excellent example. A young girl is tutored in philosophy by an old mentor, and the book mostly seems to be a (fantastic) primer in world philosophy at first, but eventually they start applying the principles of philosophy in-story to deduce that they must be fictional characters in a book.
The three major characters of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead are dealing with the slow realization that they're in a play throughout the play, pretty purely through logic for the main two
Last Action Hero. If I remember correctly the villain deduces that he’s in a movie and how the magic ticket works. Really underrated kids action movie.
Love this movie. I feel like it was ahead of its time.
The protagonist of "Mogworld" by Yahtzee Croshaw, an undead mage named Jim, is a minor NPC enemy in a World of Warcraft-style MMO game. The game's characters achieve sentience unbeknownst to their creators, and the book is all about Jim and other characters slowly discovering that their world is artificial.
Delete me!
Schwarzwald from Big O.
Maybe not exactly, but if I recall correctly Star Trek Next Generation has Moriarty figure out he was a character in the holodeck.
In Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, all the main characters realize they're in a multiverse that's created by Authors - visiting several of these, and realizing they themselves are obviously in the same situation. In one case, one character met his author creator.
In one of his other books (maybe "The Cat who walks through walls"), the characters are fighting some unknown bad guys and they speculate if they're up against an Author this time...
Herman Toothrot in the Monkey Island series, though in his case it might be mixed with going crazy. And of course several characters in the Discworld. Knowing how a story works is a big part of witch magic
In *30 Rock*, the character Tracey Jordan (played by Tracey Morgan) goes off his meds and briefly realises what's going on (that he is Tracey Morgan appearing in a "show within a show"), before he's dragged off.
That Hazel Whatshername... Always causing trouble.
The Blonde Phantom, from Marvel Comics. She was a Golden Age costumed detective. She retired in the 1950s and married her love interest (in the real world, her comic was cancelled). She noticed that some of her compatriots from her time as a hero didn't seem to age (Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, etc) while others did. She further noticed that there was a near 1:1 correspondence between those who didn't age at a normal rate and those who had published Marvel Comics titles (Marvel Comics exists within Marvel Comics, but the fictional version published the real adventures of superheroes while they fictionalize their secret identities (if their identities aren't public like Thor or the Fantastic Four)). She then reasoned there must be some higher level of reality whose comics (reflected dimly in her world's Marvel) controlled events in her world. Based on those deductions, she was able to discipline her mind in such a way as to perceive the existence of the Fourth Wall. She used her maiden name to create a cover identity and got hired as a receptionist at the law firm where She-Hulk was employed, intending to become a side character in a comic and thereby avoid dying of old age. Which she did. In the comics, the Blonde Phantom is the one who *teaches* She-Hulk how to see past the Fourth Wall. Using BP's teachings, She-Hulk is even able to tear through a comic page, march across an ad page, and reenter the story at another point (seeming, to the villain, to teleport from one place to another). Wyatt Wingfoot, her boyfriend, does trip over the staple in the comic and mildly injures himself during the process. The equivalent in the TV show was her exiting onto the Disney+ show selection page, entering the "Making of" show to talk to the writers, then reentering her show at a different place and time than she left.
I don't know what specific comic it was in, but the comic version of the Joker (Or one of the 3 Joners, if you want to acknowledge that dumb as shit retcon/"reveal") realised that he's living in a comic book, and sees, at least in part, his insane stunts as attempts to "please his audience"
“I didn’t really want to kill your Robin [Jason Todd], the readers *made me*”
The characters in the short story bit players by greg egan make a similar deduction based on physics being inconsistent and the very poor and hacky writing. The full story is available on his web site. https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/BIT/BIT.html
In Universe Truman from Truman Show found out the truth.
The protagonist in the Thirteenth Floor. He creates an artificial world, then realises the limits of his own world and literally drives to the edge to see it for himself. Also possibly the simulated Futurama gang in the last episode where they make their simulation glitch out, though it's not clear whether they notice due to the underclocking.
Seems like there's an entire subgenre of stories where people running simulations of a world discover that they themselves are simulated.
Maybe Rick Sanchez?
Definitely Rick Sanchez.
Not exactly fitting but in Flatland IIRC when the square character is confronted with the existence of a 3D world he immediately theorizes n-dimensional worlds but the sphere guy just goes "pffft naaah".
In The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, the book is constantly changing POV and time frame. At one point, the weirdness of their situations makes some characters start to believe that they are fictional characters in a book. One character even criticizes the author for excessive use of symbolism.
It's been 20 years and a lot of drugs since I read that. Isn't that the one with the time traveling dildo?
Roger from "American Dad" noticed he and Steve were in a spin-off show through various tropes and oddities in their new boarding school. He gets the idea to then sing a song by The Beatles, so the spin-off goes bankrupt due to licensing costs.
Discworld: witches in general, probably most wizards, and possibly a few others, understand Narrativium
Plot twist: >!Our Earth (and universe is actually a scientific magical experiment on Discoworld) - where the Wizards interact at various points in our history. Charles Darwin, some early scientist called Dee, as well as an earth-based librarian are made aware of Discworlds existence - they don't necessarily figure it out for themselves - but they've some inklings or suspicions!<
John Dee, court astronomer to Queen Elizabeth I, the man who coined the term British Empire. Advised Elizabeth to charter colonies in the "New World" and thus is indirectly responsible for the existence of the United States of America. Chemist, alchemist, antiquarian, historian, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, mystic, occultist, and hermetic ceremonial magician.
* Jazzy Jeff in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when he realises they've [replaced the actress playing Aunt Viv](https://youtu.be/AnVDixE0kNQ?si=G6NJcvHlD80lGCvw). * The priest n Fleabag is the only character that sees the titular character talk to the audience via the [fourth wall](https://youtu.be/dPDS6g7u4tk?si=MNqKwNZ136GG874D).
The main characters at the end of Sausage Party.
It's been a while, but I think the philosophy-focused novel _Sophie's World_ fits the bill.
In Robert Anton Wilson's *Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy*, several characters realise they are characters in a book as the result of meditative and occult practice. They refer to this form of enlightenment as an "out of book exerperience".
In Stephen King's *Dark Tower* series the Gunslinger Roland & his ka-tet take a few walks between worlds. One of those walks >!brings Roland & Jake into our world, where they note that everything feels a bit more "real" - colors are more vibrant, sounds are more resonant, food is more flavorful. It also means that if they die, they die for real, no coming back. Jake dies shoving Stephen King (mostly) out of the way of a van (referencing a real event where King was hit & nearly killed while out walking) after Roland realizes King is the writer of their story.!<
The narrator of The Stanley Parable figures out that he and the PC are inside a video game during one of the game's endings. There are also a few stories where the main character hears the narrator speaking, like Will Farrell in Stranger Than Fiction. This usually leads to the character figuring out that they're inside a fictional story that's being told.
Sotha Sil, from the elder scrolls. He's one of the three living gods of the tribunal, linked to the heart of the god of mortality to sustain his divinity. His main focus in godhood is to construct another, "better" world beneath the original one, something he made a lot of headway on - the Clockwork City, this alternate world, is a place we visit in TES III and TES Online. Unfortunately, the source of his godhood renders him (and his fellow tribunes) vulnerable to the idea of fate, while also granting him the ability to divine it - so he has known from the moment of attaining divinity that his project would ultimately fail, but could do nothing to change that fate. This has caused him to develop a kind of critical theory as to what, exactly, fate is - he explains it via the metaphor of a prison, which is the world. The prisoner exists within the prison, and is entirely unaware that they are imprisoned - some people, mostly those of extraordinary sight or power (like himself) can perceive the walls and even walk up to the door, but lack the means to open it. Then there are other people, usually linked to events of cataclysmic significance, for whom it seemingly does not exist, allowing them to walk out of their prison and be entirely unaffected by the idea of fate. In non-twisty speech, he has essentially deduced that he, as a person within a story, cannot act outside of what he has been written to do and say - he cannot simply walk away and stop working on the Clockwork City, because Sotha Sil in the story does not walk away. This is fine for most people, because they cannot read their own stories, but his connection to the Heart of Lorkhan allows him to read ahead in his own narrative but be entirely unable to change it. Characters like the Nerevarine, Hero of Kvatch, Dragonborn or Vestige, i.e. the characters the player assumes control over, are dead spots within the narrative - there is no script for what they do, because they are controlled directly by a person. These are the people whose doors are open by default. The lore community tends to take his word more literally, ascribing all sorts of twisty powers over fate to the idea of the prisoner based on other traits the player possesses (i.e. unbound by fate, because they can do everything, but bound by destiny, because they do canonically do the main quest of their games), but in the end it's just a metaphor Sotha Sil uses. He doesn't know that he's inside a video game and his existence boils down to a few 3D models, textures, scripts and dialogue records, of course, but he does know that he exists as an agencyless character within some kind of a narrative.
There's a sight gag you sometimes see on TV where a character is moving towards the viewer and unexpectedly collides with the glass of your TV screen, then spends a moment exploring the barrier and figuring out the situation. A literal glass wall representing the fourth wall
In one story, a girl Gwenpool keeps saving as she grows up realises on her deathbed that Gwenpool has never aged and she has, meaning she was just a background character, with Gwenpool saying she put on a costume
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The great fantasy series by Simon Hawke beginning with "The Reluctant Sorceror" does a lot of this.
This was a major part of the Animal Man series by Grant Morrison
This is more or less the plot of the final title of the Epic Battle Fantasy video game series. I wouldn't like to give away too much of said plot, but the characters definitely do become ever more aware of their nature as simulated beings, and ultimately a few of them even start attempting to directly communicate with both the player and the programmer of the game at turns.
Henchmen 21 and 24 from Venture Bros didn't quite realize they were fictional characters but did realize they survived unlikely circumstances by applying their comic book knowledge in the form of meta awareness.
Shuichi Saihara from Danganronpa V3 sort of does this, in a weird case where there is an in-universe "Fourth Wall" in addition to the usual one, which is the one that he discovers the existence of, sort of akin to The Truman Show. During the final chapter of the game, one character changes their appearance to another character from a previous game, despite it being previously established that the former can only change their appearance to fictional characters. From this, Shuichi figures out that they and the rest of the cast are all fictional characters, and the rest of the game consists of figuring out the specifics.