Jobs

Most concepts of jobs are kind of nonsense in this metafictional plane of existence. Money is still used and people refer to jobs, but they'd probably be just as fine if they didn't do anything at all and kept buying or trading things anyway. Still, background chaarcters continue to shuffle away at their tasks, and many characters prefer to keep working if only to pass the time. This includes mundane jobs, but there's also a few specialities and skills that are unique to the metafictional plane.

Analysts

Being a fictional character is most obviously different from being real because you have a God: the writer. While not everyone actually worships them as such, and there's plenty of complication from the existence of the audience, you were created consciously by a person with a set of ideas about what you should be. Usually, to make some kind of thematic or artistic point. It's not surprising then that most ficiontal characters view their world similarly to a medieval Christian; a series of metaphors to be dissected and understood as much as a physical thing. And like how medieval people had bestiaries to illustrate these connections in the natural world, characters step up to work as analysts.

Analysts are roughly equivalent to therapists in terms of social function. They help other characters analyze their works so they can better understand how their worlds are composed, and where they fit into it. Often analysts have a very religious perspective on their job; they're helping characters connect to the "divine" and "heavenly intent." Others, dedicated to an atheistic modernism, approach the practice much more like a regular frank doctor. They're as likely to talk about good news and bad news and how they've diagnosed you as an unreliable narrator. Of course, there also plenty of analysts between those two extremes, so that clients can search for whatever style serves them the best.

Forecasters

It's hard to be a serial. Unlike a character from a completed project, like a novel, you're still in bits and pieces and don't know what'll happen next in your story. And unlike in real life, where the results of an important test can be found crushingly soon after completion, serials often have cliffhanges, where characters can be left hanging for weeks or months. Obviously, they want some sense of what's probably going to happen to them in the future.

Enter the forecaster. These characters dedicate themselves to predicting how serial stories will end while they're stuck between season finales and waiting for the next chapter to be released. To the best of the best, no piece of foreshadowing is beneath their gaze. Forecasters and Analysts are both prone to celebrity bias, with Sherlock Holmes getting a shocking number of applicants on the daily, but even characters with an audience the size of a friend group can provide well thought out prognostications.

Such services are especially appealing to characters from cancelled shows or stories, who will likely never experience the rest of their lives. Having a few experts weigh in with predictions or reconstructions of what likely would have happened can be a balm for that stinging feeling of loss and provide a sense of closure. But even characters who aren't facing this tragic fate (yet) get joy from these detectives, either as a silly birthday gift or a more serious form of divination. To the end of entertainment, some forecasters even specialize in intentionally absurd or improbable predictions as a kind of comedy routine.

Back to the main page