DarknessofHeavenandDreams
That would indeed be canon and non-canon characters.
None are real; never were and never will be.
Yup, just like I said: I think he meant cannon and non-cannon characters. Although it's possible he was referring to self-inserts ("real" because they have a counterpart in real life) and cannon and non-cannon characters who do not have counterparts in real life. Bleh. This is why you should say what you mean, and not something else.
Anyways, on the ontology of characters: me quoting Umberto Eco is a thing that keeps happening.
Quote:
Incomplete Possible Worlds and Complete Characters
By definition, fictional texts clearly speak of non-existent persons and event (and precisely for this reason, they call for the suspension of our disbelief). Therefore, from the point of view of a truth-conditional semantics, a fictional assertion always states something that is contrary to fact.
Nevertheless, we do not take fictional assertions as lies. First of all, when reading a piece of fiction, we enter into a tacit agreement with its author, who
pretends that what he or she has written is true and asks us to
pretend to take it seriously. In so doing, every novelist designs a possible world, and all our judgements of truth and falsehood relate to that possible world. Thus, it is fictionally true that Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street and fictionally false that he lived on the banks of the Spoon River.
That, of course, is just the beginning. It goes on for quite a bit. There are diagrams. It's very grounded, and yet very death-of-the-author-y. It has nothing to do with whether characters will get up and walk about on the street, and everything to do with why we react to them the way that we do ("Weeping for Anna Karenina" ).
So, taking all
that into account, what might it mean for (still fictional) characters to be divided into real and non-real? Would a "real" character be one that is believable? one that's story has been written, rather than merely imagined?