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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48688
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Another example that I'm fond of is acknowledging a work of fiction as a work of fiction within your own universe. This is frequent in the humor of "The Orville" where characters not owned by the series owners will frequently get discussed, and one of the regulars, a literal minded alien from a culture that loves literature will frequently discuss fictional characters as if they were real. While not overtly stated, he does think that somewhere in Earth's history Kermit the Frog and Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer were real people and accepted as great leaders of their peoples (and for some reason, Rudolph's dad was considering infantcide for the red nose... though it's more of a problem of his own culture that he was projecting). Another member of his species thinks that Dolly Parton was a powerful poet of Earth's historical Feminist Movement (The joke turns meta in that what's wrong with the assumption isn't that the character is wrong... she's arguably right but the audience isn't likely to think of Parton in that light).

Personally, I once used this in a Star Trek fan-fic which opened with the Captain, who was out of uniform (in a get up with black pants, a white shirt, and a black open vest) when he got called to the bridge, is already in a fowl mood and we learn it's because the Ferengi who sold him the holonovel he was currently playing through lied that it was the rare version where his character got to shoot first (while not saying anything, it's clear he was playing Han Solo on the Holodeck recreation of Star Wars. His love of the franchise had been made known in the past) and in another RP campaign I ran, I had a shuttle pilot training sim on the holodeck set to be blatently the Trench Run from A New Hope... of course, this being Trek, the Holodeck malfunctions and now they have to do the Trench Run or die... and the one character who wasn't involved was desperately trying to give them an edge by throwing in a number of scifi references... the shot that finally gets Vader off the characters tails was fired by Kirk's Enterpise, Captained by Kirk (who was given lines by our best bad Shatner impersonator... it's a table of nerds playing Star Trek role play, you have your pick of Shatner impersonations) who decided that this was so far off the rails that his first officer was the always logical Commander Chewbacca (and we had an impersonator for that too).

Some sub-genres are so prolific that they almost require some shout out. Vampire fiction will almost always have the clueless soon-to-be-victim pulls out a thing that is supposed to ward off vampires only for the vampire to roll his eyes and point out that that trick only works in [insert a snarky description of another popular vampire series that included that rule] and this real life. One memorable one was the Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic which introduced a masked villain named Twilight around the same time the book series was first published. While coincidence, it did allow Buffy to quip that the villain's name sounded like a lamer version of her vampire romance... which turned out to foreshadow the identity of the villain (specifically, the vampire in her own vampire romance).

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