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Where's Mary Sue When You Need Her?: Difference between revisions
→The Problem: the Ontological Status of Fictional Characters
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A fictional character is by definition non-existent: there is no winged horse Pegasus, there never was a Philip "Pip" Pirrip, or at least not one whose life experiences are identical to those of Pip in ''Great Expectations'', and a search for a Daria Morgendorffer identical to the one portrayed on the series ''Daria'' among the quick and the dead will be in vain.
At the same time, people have no qualms about saying these figures "exist in the mind," without any explanation of the terms "exist" and "mind,"
These are just consequences of a general problem with any name ''N'' whose referent has an unclear ontological status. The American philosopher and logician W.V.O. Quine summarized the problem thus:
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It's obvious why this would be troubling to a philosopher, but why would it trouble producers and consumers of fiction? Some would say it shouldn't; others would say it doesn't; and I claim both are wrong. The ''solution'' to this problem in fiction is so well-established that people fail to realize that it is a solution, and to this very problem: the solution is to stipulate that there are multiple real universes, and these universes are populated by fictional characters and alternate versions of them. MacGillicutty (the character, not the author) takes this solution as true until Daria disabuses him of it in the penultimate chapter of "Where's Mary Sue?"
===The Solution: Fictional Characters as Unactualized Possibilities in a Single Real World===
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