Breaking the Fourth Wall

Breaking the Fourth Wall

Raven Winslow was driving down the freeway in a small Honda, one of those delightfully small and sleek examples of Japanese engineering that only the Japanese have enough sense to drive. She had seen a lot of unpleasant-looking billboards on her little drive, and quite a few unpleasant-looking cars. Most of them were SUVs of some sort, which Raven found more than a little depressing. It was as if the drivers were saying "Gas prices have been rather high lately, but I don't care, because I obviously have $100 a week to burn fueling up this behemoth anyway." Oh look, there goes another Hummer, she thought. Ugly, boxlike monstrosities, she observed. All the finesse of an armored tank.

Another car went by. This one was a Lexus. Raven's mother didn't care much for Lexuses--she called them Toyotas with delusions of grandeur--but then, Raven's mother probably didn't care for giving her children normal-sounding names, or we wouldn't be following a "Raven" in the first place. She had actually named her daughter after a character in an old comic book. The Teen Titans, I think. Raven's mother had been a bit of a mystic, in her own lower-intelligence-level sort of way, and had apparently thought her daughter would have psychic abilities or something like the Raven in the comic book. Raven's mother was often disappointed with her daughter, and indeed with much of the world for not working out according to her bizarre logic. Oh well, Raven observed, it was better than the Joneses down the lane who had named their daughter Dasani, and their son Sidney Sheldon. It didn't even sound right--Dasani Jones, Sidney Sheldon Jones. It just didn't flow right.

Another car passed her. This one was a Mustang, which, unlike other sports cars, has a big, hulking, unmistakeably masculine presence. Raven wondered just how insecure and self-conscious the driver must be to own an impressive-looking sports car like that. She decided, since she couldn't see him through the tinted windows, that he must be a balding middle-aged man with an ugly face, and perhaps a deformed hand, just to make things interesting.

As she continued on her way to the "Japanese culture convention," which was actually an anime convention that tried to make itself look more normal with an intelligent-sounding name, Raven Winslow suddenly, inexplicably, did something extraordinary, something no one else on the freeway would ever dare to do at all.

Raven Winslow broke the fourth wall.

This is not to say that there were walls by the freeway and she drove through them, or that her speakers were blaring so loud that they shattered the glass walls of a nearby skyscraper (she was, in fact, listening to Orgy's version of "Blue Monday," which at that exact moment was singing the words, "Tell me now how do I feel?" but that's not exactly relevant to this story). No, Raven broke the fourth wall in the way characters in bad television shows or comic strips do. She suddenly realized she had no idea at all how she felt, about the convention, about driving down the freeway, or even about Orgy's music, because the author hadn't written it yet. She wasn't even sure what she was wearing because her appearance hadn't been described. She could be a gangly blonde teenager dressed to look like an oddly-dressed Japanese cartoon character, she could be a college student wearing black, with purple hair. She could be white or black or Asian. Why, she could be anything at all!

And so Raven decided to use her newfound powers to remake herself. She reached into the passenger side seat, where there was in fact a copy of this very story, an element which will no doubt keep the reader up at night about an infinite chain of a story about Raven picking up a story about Raven picking up...but let us continue. She picked it up and wrote in that she was driving in a blue Honda Insight--and it was, despite the fact that the Insight was such a short-lived model of car that the manufacturers didn't even have time to give it colors other than a futuristic gray. After all, she was in a fictional story, and in fiction, anything goes. She carefully pulled over to the side of the road, and in the process suddenly realized she knew how to drive stick shift, even though she had no memory of ever learning how. She then wrote in that she was wearing a bright yellow shirt and a pair of flare-leg jeans, over a pair of reddish-brown combat boots. She continued to describe her grass-green eyes, her bright red hair, when she realized she hadn't decided on a hairstyle yet. She decided it would be fun to see what hairstyle the reader picked out for her, and hoped it would look good in auburn. She was quite happy to find that it did. Her shirt bore the legend "I Don't Play Well With Others." A very nice touch on the part of the author, Raven thought.

She wasn't sure what sort of adventure she would cause herself to have on the way to the convention, or what would happen when she got there, but she had a feeling her story-editing powers would make things quite fun, as long as she didn't lose her copy of this story to write in. Raven smiled. It was going to be an interesting day.