Metafiction - TV Tropes

"Good God, this is beyond fourth wall jokes. This is like if the fourth wall had a mouse hole, and the mouse hole had four walls, and they had a termite hole, and the termite hole had four walls. That's the fourth wall we'll be looking through. You know... the twelfth wall."

• Bakuman。: It's a manga about making manga. It just doesn't go for the fourth wall, but everything else is there.
• Medaka Box:
  • Akune is a direct reference to a traditional manga hero, and how the male part of the audience tends to turn that character into a pointless destroyer in fanfiction, whereas the female part turns the same concept into a bishonen on a white stallion, but then having that character mature beyond them, learn from their viewpoints, and move onwards. It is explicitly stated, but still a bit of a Genius Bonus.
  • Kumagawa is a fan of Shonen Jump, the same magazine Medaka Box is serialized in, and has a habit of Lampshade Hanging and imagining how everyone's lives are somewhat predestined.
  • Ajimu drags the story kicking and screaming into metafiction because she sees Medaka's life like a manga with Medaka as the protagonist and herself as the seemingly unstoppable villain. In order to try to beat her she even shifts the genre of the story so that the story has more use of Zenkichi as protagonist in order to defeat her.

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: The entire film is an example more literally than most examples as a lot of the drama of the film that Miles faces is built around the actual concept of continuity and the journey of story-telling as a whole being represented by the variations of the multiverse he encounters along his way and where the biggest source of conflict between himself, Miguel, and the Spot all stem from in one way or another.

• Deadpool & Wolverine: Given Deadpool's infamous reputation for breaking the fourth wall, the film is very upfront about some of its story being an allegory for real life events concerning Fox and Disney. Deadpool's recruitment by the TVA and invitation to join the Sacred Timeline before his timeline is wiped from existence is a thinly veiled nudge-and-wink to the fact that Disney has bought out Fox's film division and will be rebooting the X-Men films, but Deadpool is "special", which is why he's been given a chance to escape this fate. Additionally, the notion of universes slowly falling apart after the death of their “anchor being” (who, in Deadpool’s universe, was apparently Wolverine) seems to be a nod to the X-Men movies struggling to progress without the franchise’s flagship character, and Deadpool encounters several characters from dead and cancelled movies who desire a satisfying ending to their arcs.
• Inland Empire: A movie about making a movie, where at some point the actress becomes her character and enters the world of her movie, and at varying points also the world of a different movie, a radio show, and a TV show. Frequently breaks the fourth wall and creates great confusion about what is and isn't real.
• Scream: They're slasher movies that are about slasher movies, in which the characters, heroes and villains alike, have all grown up watching them on home video, and know all the tricks, tropes, and clichés.

• Cloud Atlas: Consists of six different stories, each set in a different time period with radically different style and genre. Each story exists as a story within the next book, usually dismissed as fiction - yet there are recurring details and motifs that suggest that all narratives are part of the same coherent story and universe.
• If on a winter's night a traveler: Each chapter is an excerpt from a previous book, and you, the reader, are on a quest to find the rest of the book and figure out how they all fit together.
• Nursery Crime: A detective story set in a world where nursery story characters are real, the laws of fiction affect reality, and people discuss which plot devices to use in their day to day lives. The blurring of fiction and reality and the way fictional characters are stuck in modes of operation and inevitabilities determined by their original story are plot points.
• Pale Fire: The book is nominally literary commentary by the academic Charles Kinbote on Jonathan Shade's poem "Pale Fire", but as the book goes on the commentary has increasingly nothing to do with the text (or obvious readings of the text) of the poem and more and more about Kinbote and his deranged obsession with Shade. Disagreements about about what is and isn't real within the world of the story.
• Academy of Mr. Kleks: The fairy tale denizens know perfectly well they're made up - The Little Match Girl and her creator, casually hanging around the story explain to Adaś he needn't feel sad for her, because she's not real. There is a fairy tale enchanted princess whose story hasn't been finished and she worries about that. The fairy tales visit and help each other freely, and that includes Mr. Kleks who sends his students for visits and, at one point, invites all the fairy tales to tell them the story of Lunarians.
• Thursday Next: Set in a world where literature is Serious Business, the books are about a policewoman who can travel in and out of books, via a Great Library where fictional characters live, to ensure plots go the way they should. Also hangs a lampshade about just about everything.

• The Stanley Parable: The game is a deconstruction of how players will intentionally attempt to subvert given directions in order to find any possible hidden endings or Easter Eggs.
• The conceit of UFO 50 is that it's a ROM dump of a game collection by some obscure company from the '80s; everything past the intro takes this in-universe perspective. By solving a series of puzzles hidden within the games, you can gradually unlock the hidden Miasma Tower, a game about the development of UFO 50 and what working at the company was like at the time.

• Koihime†Musou:
  • According to Chousen, the world of Koihime Musou exists because someone wrote the story of Koihime Musou by looking at the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and wondering what it would be like if Sousou and her generals were all lovers and Sonken and Shuuyu were actually enemies. The bit about the gender-flipping goes unstated, but the implication is there.
  • Indeed, this happens for every story anyone's ever thought up. Entire universes spring into existence from the True History (real life) whenever someone creates a story—and stories based on that stories create more alternative histories that branch out from the first alternative history.
• Save the Date (Paper Dino): Many of the game's mechanics revolve around you essentially cheating the game. Jumping around save states and playing the game many times over are essential to making progress.
• Umineko: When They Cry: The story is essentially about how mystery stories are created, and the VN operates on several levels of "meta" realities. For starters, there's the board (aka, the events of each episode), then there's the "Meta World" that Beatrice, the Witches, and Meta-Battler exist on, and then even past that there's the top level reality that Ange lives in.

• qxlkbh: The comic regularly comments on itself in a fourth-wall-breaking manner, and the authors are themselves prominent characters.
• Surviving Romance: The webcomic explores the free will of the characters within an established story and how that changes when the circumstances that surround them change. With the reveal that the protagonist "Chaerin" is actually the author of the original romance novel "I’ll Love You Every Day" and the villain of the webcomic is the original protagonist gaining sentience, the webcomic also interrogates the relationship between the author, the author's intentions and the characters in the story.

• The Japanese Creepypasta "Cow Head" has been described as a meta-ghost story since it is about a ghost story so frightening it kills anyone who reads it. No details about the story are given, although it presumably involves a cow head.