4th Wall Break in novels

[vaurwyn]

Where lol, i can’t find it on your profile

A Beholder's Path | Royal Road

Hello, it’s me, Aether. As a beholder, curiosity is the driving force of my existence, which is why when I found a new world close to mine, I just had to tear a passage through spacetime to explore it. The rest of the demon world may or may not have used this passage to invade, but I am sure...

www.royalroad.com

I'm quite proud of it, but it only has 12 chapters and is on hiatus until I finish my other novel, so I don't know if I would recommend reading it.

 

[Southdog]

Do people really think 4th wall breaks started with video games?
That in thousands of years humans have been telling stories, people had characters blatantly recognice that they are in a story only in the last couple of decades?

The sequel to Don Quixote stars the author hunting down a copyright troll so he can square away his rights to sell the novel. It was written in the 17th century.

Shakespeare's soliloquies are literally the character sitting the audience down and spilling their guts out. It was written before America was even a country.

Both were used for drama and satire, but they weren't very comedic in tone. It's just as the name says, you don't break something unless you absolutely need to.

 

[Deleted member 57675]

So I was wondering, if 4th wall break is possible in the game, is it also possible to do it in mangas and novels? And if it is, how do they do it?

Yes.

 

[Fox-Trot-9]

Ouran High School Host Club, both manga and anime version, has forth wall breaks. Nisio Issin's Monogatari light novel series and its anime adaptation has forth wall breaks. Hell, the Haruhi Suzumiya anime has Kyon, a fourth wall-breaking character with a narrator track in the anime. Breaking the 4th wall is so common in anime and manga, you kind of forget that it's there b/c it's so ubiquitous. As for video games, 4th wall-breaks are there in the bad ending game screens ("Game Over") and in the directions on how to do things with your controller; it's so ubiquitous, it's almost invisible if you're not looking too closely. And if you translate that into written format, you get LitRPG / isekai adventure stories for male audiences and reincarnation / villainess otome game stories for female audiences.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

I hate infinity.

People love to throw it around I stories not understanding the implication. Lets say there are an infinite number of universes. That means, right now you are being watched from an infinite number of universes when your life is considered a sitcom.

In a comic, that means any 4th wall break is logical because you always have an audience.

Everylife everywhere is up on some sort of cosmic live stream service getting an infinite number of up and down votes and the comment section has most likely devolved into discussions about Hitler.

Because they always do.

 

[lambenttyto]

So I was wondering, if 4th wall break is possible in the game, is it also possible to do it in mangas and novels? And if it is, how do they do it?

Breaking the fourth wall is about the narrator. The narrator is not the character unless it's first person narrative. The narrator can absolutely break the fourth wall quite easily, and can even slip from third person into first person. It's more common with omniscient narrators. I'm experimenting a lot with a more visible narrator in my own writing. After over a million words with narrators that are as unobtrusive as possible, practically invisible, I'm now more interested in this change of style.