Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-121.45.54.78-20130925110520/@comment-6032121-20200602005348

That's fascinating work — but I feel as though it's still missing a few cases.

Chiefly, I'm concerned with prose here. In prose, you often get stories which, instead of a third-person narrator, are presented as in-universe autobiographical accounts, sometimes with a bit of a frame story in the third person around it. At what point do we go from mentions to appearances — e.g. from "the Doctor spends a significant amount of this story telling his companion an old legend about Rassilon", which goes in References, to "this story is an appearance of Rassilon"? Clearly there's a line — I think no one would argue with the idea that Sherringford Holmes or whoever "appears" in All-Consuming Fire. But where should it be drawn?

Similarly, within a single novel, what about what goes on between chapter breaks? If Chapter 10 of PROSE: Bernice Summerfield and the Imaginary Example ends with Benny telling Jason "hang on, I'll pop over and ask Professor Candy what he thinks about this" and her heading for Luna University, and Chapter 11 skips ahead to Benny returning from Luna, telling Jason in moderate detail (let's say a paragraph or two of expositionny dialogue) how her talk with Professor Candy went…

…well, in this scenario, doesn't Candy appear in Bernice Summerfield and the Imaginary Example? …Really? He's never "on screen", as it were, but if you write a plot synopsis of the book, you'll just say "Benny then goes to see Candy, who tells her X, Y and Z", glossing over the levels of narration at play.