Tag: medium awareness

Medium awareness is the situational and generally temporary awareness characters in works of fiction have and display of the very fact that they are characters in works of fiction. For example, they may comment about the background music, quip about the script or narration, complain about the roles given to them by the writer or their lack of screen time, see the subtitles that appear on screen, inform the audience about the arrival of the commercial break, and even use medium effects as tools. The most common form of medium awareness is known as breaking the fourth wall, in which characters speak directly to the audience, either to it as a whole or to specific members of it. The "fourth wall" is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage of a proscenium theatre through which the audience sees the play; it is a metaphor for the boundary between what happens inside the work, to the characters, and outside it, to the audience.