“That’s all, folks!”
Imagine most fictional worlds as taking place in a single, simple room, one with four walls. The fourth wall is invisible, and it is this one that the audience views everything through. Breaking the fourth wall is when a character becomes aware that they are fictional, and acknowledges this in some way. They can do this through aside glances, mentioning that they aren’t real, or even speaking to the audience/creator. Sometimes, the creator gets involved in things, and that can get very interesting indeed, since the writer/artist is basically the fictional reality’s god.
Breaking the fourth wall is often used for meta-humour, such as when a character explains that ze did something because “it’s in the script”. When done well, these jokes can be both funny and clever, but some of them are so over-used by now that they can come across as a bit lazy at times. I guess that, when people first started doing it, the whole idea must have been really original and creative, and so while there were (and still are) writers and artists using it in clever and innovative ways, there were many other people who just copied them in the hopes of looking intelligent. The important thing to remember, though, is that merely being self-referential isn’t enough to create something that is funny or smart. That can end up just coming across as pretentious or a little childish. Anyway, breaking the fourth wall doesn’t always have to be done to be clever or anything like that. A lot of the time, it can just serve as a simple joke, perhaps a little predictable, but still funny.
Despite being a bit over-used in some ways, I still think that the idea still has a lot of potential to it, and there’s plenty of books, TV shows, comics, films and plays that use the idea in some very interesting ways. I also like it when people break the fourth wall in a less light-hearted way. This is less easy to pull off, because it really requires a lot of effort to come across as serious rather than silly, but when done right it can be incredibly effective. The whole idea of a fictional world having walls is pretty interesting, too. Does a fictional universe have boundaries? What shape is it? Is there only a void outside of where the scene is taking place? I think that the phrase was originally to do with theater, because most plays are acted out on a stage, which kind of resembles a room with a missing door. This can be seen with comic panels, picture frames and TV screens, too, though breaking the fourth wall becomes much more abstract when you consider literature, music or poetry. How do you define the shapes of their worlds? And what about a play where there is no stage, or where the audience can sit in the stage itself? There’s still so many different things to be explored when it comes to this.
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