Literary Agent Hypothesis: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"The legend you are about to hear is true. Only the needle should be changed to protect the record."''|'''[[Stan Freberg
This is the hypothesis:
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''The work is [[Inspired By]] real events. The person listed as the author is really just the literary agent for the character who wrote it. For some undisclosed reason, all involved want the truth of the story to be kept a secret.''
This is a thought experiment that occurs in many
Following from this the theory normally takes one of two routes:
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* '''[[Ripped from the Headlines|Loose Retelling]]''': For whatever reason the creator has taken someone else's story and retold it in a way that won't come back to them and won't be recognised as real. This point of view is a middle-ground between supposing what we see on-screen is absolutely real and admitting that it is just fiction. It may be claimed that several stories have been mashed together and certain people have been merged into single characters.
The former is generally seen as plainly nuts for any fictional work, even the ones that really are true stories; the latter makes interesting scholarly discourse impossible.
While this line of thought has advantages for speculation and is somewhat less silly than supposing that what we are watching is real, it walks a fine line: beyond excusing production mistakes, this hypothesis is occasionally extended to allow for [[Fanon Discontinuity]], supposing that the parts we don't like are the bits that are outright fabrication, and therefore allowing us to discard them. Within fantasy gaming circles, this is also the distinction between "Lore" and "Canon": "lore" assumes certain facts are mostly historic interpretations and
This notion has probably always existed in some fashion, but as an explicitly stated thought experiment, it originated with and is still most closely associated with ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' fandom. Some [[Speculative Fiction]] series take this a step further, lifting a page from quantum mechanics and postulating that all works of fiction are reflections of various [[Alternate Universe
This trope is not to be confused with [[Direct Line to the Author]], which is where it is official canon that a fictional story is true, instead of just [[Fanon]]. Also not to be confused with [[Recursive Canon]], though it sometimes overlaps it. The distinction between these tropes is as follows:
Tropes related to this include [[Writer
{{examples|Examples of the Literary Agent Hypothesis in action include:}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[
* ''[[School Rumble]]'' often reads like a "[[Big Fish]]" version of the author's life. The manga that Harima works on are probably just jokes at the expense of stories the author has written, the unrealistic points of the normal story could simply be exaggerations His boss was intimidating, so he was 20 feet tall... The same could be applied to other characters who were very tall or even changed size, such as Tennouji.
* More than one ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia]]'' Fanfic speculates that Himaruya ''might'' be doing this.
* To a degree at least two levels removed, the ''[[
* The [[OEL Manga]] [[Dracula Everlasting]] has the original work by Stoker as being a case of this.
* [[
== [[Fan Fiction]] ==
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* [[Cult Classic]] ''Jake Speed'' is built around the notion that pulp novel heros like [[Mack Bolan]], [[Doc Savage]], [[The Destroyer|Remo Williams]], and the eponymous Jake Speed are all real; it's the ''authors'' that are fictional. (They use the proceeds from the novels to fund their adventures.) The hero even has a ghostwriter for a sidekick.
* The DVD commentary of ''Walk Hard'' is done in this vein, with famous rock and roll stars talking about their experiences with Dewey Cox.
* [[Peter Jackson]] invoked this for the production team of ''[[The Lord of the Rings (
* The [[DVD Commentary]] for ''[[The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension]]'' takes this stand about the film, with screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch taking on the role of one of Buckaroo's men and pointing out where the movie differs from "the way it actually happened". Similarly, the film's novelization describes itself as a novelization of actual events (and the latest volume in a long series of similar books about Buckaroo).
== Literature ==
* Eoin Colfer makes use of this trope with ''[[
* In ''[[
** In an interview with the author, a fan asked whether H.P Lovecraft was onto something in the same way. The answer - yes. [[Oh Crap]].
* ''The Number of the Beast'' revolves around this idea, and Heinlein coined the term "World-As-Myth" to describe it. It is a kind of [[wikipedia:Metafiction|metafiction]] known as "transfictionality".
* Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]''. Dedicated fans use the conceit that Conan Doyle was merely Dr. Watson's literary agent, from whence comes the name of this trope. So basic to the Sherlockian fandom that you can go to a meeting of Sherlockians and never hear Conan Doyle referred to by any other name than "The Literary Agent".
** But note that Dr. Watson himself claims this to be the
* Likewise it's been suggested several times that [[Nero Wolfe]] was a real person and Archie Goodwin was making cash on the side by selling their case records to Rex Stout (and the reason why [[Always Murder|Wolfe only seems to solve murders]] is because they sell better than plain old theft or corruption). This is especially appropriate since Wolfe was allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes and has been accused of being related to him in some way (either his actual son by Irene Adler or as his nephew by his brother Mycroft, who Wolfe greatly resembles).
* George MacDonald Fraser's ''[[Flashman]]'' series blurs a number of lines. The title character is lifted from a Victorian novel (along with at least two supporting characters), and occasional supporting characters are lifted from other works of fiction (notably Colonel Sebastian Jack Moran and [[Sherlock Holmes]] himself), but most characters are from actual recorded history (minor characters are often invented by Fraser). Despite Flashman's life story being preposterous, the conceit worked well enough that (according to a 1969 article in [[Time (magazine)
* While the books themselves do not invoke [[Direct Line to the Author]], Garth Nix [http://www.scholastic.com/titles/seventhtower/qa.htm has said] regarding ''[[The Seventh Tower]]'', "Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it."
* ''[[The Great Gatsby]]'' features what would seem to be a mistake when the narrator talks about "the events of two years ago" when he's meant to be relating the story of only one year ago. However, some hypothesize that the extra year was deliberately written in to give the impression that the character spent that time writing and publishing the book.
* ''The Time Ships'', a sequel to ''The Time Machine'' by [[Stephen Baxter]], implies that the Time Traveller told his story to H. G. Wells who then created a fictionalised version. Wells himself wrote the story from the first person and numerous other works have run with the idea that ''[[The Time Machine]]'' is [[
** Interestingly enough, ''The Time Ships'' is ''itself'' an example of this trope, with Baxter claiming to have only slightly polished a manuscript allegedly by the Time Traveller himself. The anecdotes by the author at both the beginning and the end of the novel also hint at what ultimately became of him...
* Steve Hockensmith's mystery/Western ''Holmes on the Range'' (about a cowboy who is inspired to take up detective work after reading several Sherlock Holmes stories) doesn't just play this card but starts off being [[Direct Line to the Author]] as well! The story itself uses the original literary agent
* In his novels ''Tarzan Alive'' and ''Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life,'' [[Philip Jose Farmer|Philip José Farmer's]] claims that Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lester Dent were just the biographers of [[Tarzan]] and [[Doc Savage]]. He claims that their books were highly fictionalized and sensationalized and presents somewhat more mundane, but still sensational versions of the stories that correct various factual inaccuracies and continuity errors. For example, he explains that whenever Tarzan encountered a lion, a plains dwelling animal, in the jungle, it was actually a leopard and Burroughs exaggerated because lions were bigger and more dangerous looking. He also tries to explain away both characters' great strength and intelligence by claiming their [[wikipedia:Wold Newton family|ancestors were irradiated by a meteor]], and that other relatives of Tarzan and Savage whose ancestors were exposed to that radiation include [[Pride and Prejudice|Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy]], [[Sherlock Holmes]], [[Fu Manchu]], and [[Bulldog Drummond]]. Philip José Farmer is in a class of his own.
** There's a lovely moment in ''Tarzan Alive'' when Tarzan tells Farmer the actual story behind one particular book, adding that the secondary hero's love interest was [[Downer Ending|killed by a hit-and-run in New York City some six months after the book ends]]. Farmer comments that he likes Burroughs' version better (the lovers stay in a [[Lost World|medieval city]] in Africa), and Tarzan smiles and says, "He knew what he was doing."
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** In the Barsoom novels, Burroughs went so far as to claim that John Carter was his beloved uncle.
* ''The Pushcart War'' has left at least one reader who read the book as a kid and didn't realize it was fiction because by that time the dates in her copy were fifteen or twenty years in the past.
* The [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] novel ''[[Luke Skywalker and
* T.H. White's ''[[The Once and Future King]]'' doesn't exactly include this; however, since he was basing his story much upon Sir Thomas Malory's ''[[Le Morte
* Tim Lucas' ''[[Dracula]]'' novel, ''The Book of Renfield'', explains that Stoker just cleaned up the original journals and such.
* ''The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica'' series by James A. Owen ''runs'' on this trope. {{spoiler|The three protagonists are revealed at the end of the book to be J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and their friend Charles Dodgson. Their adventures bring them close to things like magic wardrobes and elven cities which they claim to use as inspiration. H.G. Wells acts as their mentor, having admitted that ''The Time Machine'' is an autobiography and he had a child with Weena. The second book introduces James Barrie, who personally knew Peter Pan. The most recent book has an undead [[Edgar Allan Poe]] admit that The Cask of Amontillado is not a short story, but an instruction manual he wrote for how to deal with his enemies.}}
* J.R.R. Tolkien implied this with ''[[
* ''[[Harry Potter (
* The ''Khaavren Romances'' are supposedly [[Historical Fiction]] written within the ''[[Dragaera]]'' universe and then "translated" by Steven Brust. One of the novels even includes an "interview" between Burst and the "real" author, Paarfi, where Paarfi lambastes Brust for the liberties he's taken with the novels.
* ''[[Series of Unfortunate Events]]'': The letters to his agent at the ends of the books suggest that he is telling the true story of the orphans.
* [[Michael Moorcock]] is quite fond of this one. The ''Oswald Bastable'' and ''Colonel Pyat'' series are prime examples.
* [[Gene Wolfe]]'s ''[[Soldier of the Mist]]'' and sequels are supposedly translations of 2,500-year-old scrolls. Even more audaciously, his ''[[Book of the New Sun]]'' series is supposedly translated from a far-future language "that has not yet achieved existence". Wolfe's Afterwords to these books are masterpieces of mock scholarship.
* In the foreword to ''[[The Jungle Book (
** While we're on the subject, Pamela Jekel claims that her Kipling pastiche ''The Third Jungle Book'' is actually a lost Kipling manuscript.
* ''[[The Saga of Darren Shan]]'' posits the story as Darren's diary. At the end of the series, {{spoiler|when Darren returns as a Little Person he goes back in time and scares the younger him away from seeing Steve reveal that Mr. Crepsley is a vampire, allowing for them to avoid becoming involved in the war and letting others take their place in this timeline. He then gives Mr. Tall the diary and asks him to change the names and publish it as a fictional book so the world will know what really happened.}}
* Alan Dean Foster's novel ''Quozl'', has one of the characters meet the titular aliens, while a teenager. Her brother later finds himself watching a Quozl cartoon, and confronts her. She admits having stolen the ideas, but notes that it paves the way for the Quozl to come to be a part of earth. It works.
* [[
* Played with in [[Philip K. Dick]]'s short story "Waterspider". The protagonists decide to fix a technological problem of their era by time-travelling into the past, the golden age of precognatives, and consulting with the precog whose paper "Night Flight" foresaw their very predicament: [[Poul Anderson]]. The reader eventually realizes that the "precog society meeting" is actually a [[Science Fiction]]
* In ''[[Who Cut the Cheese?]]'' by Stilton Jarlsberg, Biff in the frame story is selling copies of ''Who Cut the Cheese?'' out of his car.
* The ''[[Amelia Peabody]]'' books by Elizabeth Peters are explicitly framed as being extracted from the journals Amelia kept during her many adventures and prepared for publication by Peters as editor. Amusingly, it's also clear that Amelia intended for them to be published, and there is considerable "evidence" that she went back over them and "cleaned them up" after the fact, mostly to make herself look better.
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* The only plausible explanation for the [[Celebrity Paradox]] in the [[Recursive Canon]] is that ''[[Drake and Josh]]'' is a tv show in [[The Verse]] of ''[[
* The [[Distant Finale]] of ''[[
* An [[What Could Have Been|early draft]] of the ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' episode "Little Green Men"
* "The Haunting of Deck Twelve" from ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' played with this by showing us upfront that Neelix was the one telling the story, and then lampshading it by having the Borg children call him out on one of its technical inaccuracies, to which Neelix basically responds "Who's telling this story?" After that, whenever any of the characters in the flashback scenes says something technically inaccurate, we understand that they didn't really say that; what we're hearing is just the way Neelix (who doesn't understand the Voyager's mechanics very well) remembers it.
* This is occasionally used in ''[[Xena: Warrior Princess]]'' and ''[[Hercules: The Legendary Journeys]]'' with scenes in several episodes set in the present day. Apparently Kevin Sorbo ''really is'' Hercules.
== Music ==
* [http://www.xocmusic.com/ XOC], who covers videogame music, invented [https://web.archive.org/web/20130507084925/http://www.xocmusic.com/vgtmtg/ Videogame: The Movie: The Game], including a full background involving a really bad movie, as an excuse to write chiptunes for such levels as [[Slippy-Slidey Ice World|"Crystal Frozen Cold Chilly Ice World"]] and [[First Town|"Hometownton USA"]]. Which he then covered.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' is narrated throughout the whole thing by many of its characters, describing how they felt and acted during that particular time you are playing. The entire backstory is meta-narrated by Alazlam Durai, a descendant of Olan Durai (a character you get to encounter) whenever none of the other characters are in play because {{spoiler|he retells the entire story from start to finish in his book}}.
* Though it's not official, one popular theory for puzzling out ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'' series' snagged-up timeline is that it ''is'' a legend, with details being changed with each retelling of the story of Ganondorf trying to take over Hyrule, becoming the monster Ganon, [[Save the Princess|kidnapping Zelda]], and being stopped by a certain green-clad [[Heroic Mime]]. Therefore, they say, there really is no single
** This also explains why details such as the appearance of monsters and the general layout of Hyrule are not remotely consistent between subsequent games.
* The Silicon Knights remake of ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'', ''The Twin Snakes'', had no connection to the original studio other than Hideo Kojima's supervision and the dialogue scenes, which were made from scratch by Konami. The entirety of the original title was rebuilt from the ground up including these new scenes, and while it was the same game in heart, it was basically made with a new brand of cloth. As such, the whole story underwent a bit of a genre shift, as the original game was a very deadpan action-suspense-drama account of a mission which takes place over a short period of time and was not apparent to anyone outside of the know. The remake, on the other hand, graciously exaggerates the narrative, featuring scenes in which bullets are sliced (with a vibrating blade, nonetheless), the protagonist superleaps about 15 feet across a gap and onto a raised area, and a bunch of missiles explode in some cataclysmically unrealistic way. As a lot of fans of the series played both games within a half-decade timeframe, the differences were all too notable, and many have taken to break the two down, former and latter, into "how it happened" and "how it was told."
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** Several scenes throughout the series note that soldiers are increasingly being trained to fight in Virtual Reality without any real battlefield experience. MGS2's [[Mind Screw]] finale explicitly associates the non-canon game ''Metal Gear: Ghost Babel'' with this practice, implying that it exists within the MGS world as a VR scenario.
*** This is also another explanation for ''The Twin Snakes;'' it's not a movie adaptation of ''In the Darkness of Shadow Moses,'' it's the VR training of the Shadow Moses incident Raiden mentions having gone through during his training before ''Sons of Liberty.''
* ''[[Splinter Cell]]'': An "interview" on the first game's disk and [
* ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'' plays with this trope a bit, at times feeling like a real story that
* ''[[Touhou]]'' fandom often postulate the idea (jokingly or not) that ZUN acquires all the necessary information to make the games and [[All There in the Manual|supplementary material]] from [http://danbooru.donmai.us/post/show/267420/ conversations with his drinking buddy], [[Reality Warper|Yukari]]. Any contradictions are therefore Yukari being deliberately misleading or ZUN forgetting a detail.
** The various official ''[[Touhou]]'' fanbooks are in-universe documents, complete with bias, apocryphal information and outright speculation. ''[http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Bohemian_Archive_in_Japanese_Red Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red]'' was written by [[Intrepid Reporter|Aya]] for her newspaper, ''[http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Perfect_Memento_in_Strict_Sense Perfect Memento in Strict Sense]'' is the latest edition of the Gensoukyou Chronicle as written by [[Photographic Memory|Hieda no Akyu]], and the ''[http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/The_Grimoire_of_Marisa The Grimoire of Marisa]'' is a spellcard encyclopedia [[Exactly What It Says
*** Perfect Memento is a particularly good example of this, as in the Monologue, Akyu outright admits that not only is the [[Documentary of Lies|entire work a gross exaggeration]], but the Youkai ''actively asked her'' to make them sound scarier: ''"I got a great number of requests from youkai, such as, 'make me sound stronger', or 'what do you think of this power?'"''.
* This trope is used as a fan explanation for {{spoiler|the MASON System's apparent time-traveling abilities}} in ''Apollo Justice: [[Ace Attorney]]''.
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* Based on the opening and ending videos, it's implied that entirety of ''[[Mechwarrior]] 4: Mercenaries'' is a story or series of stories told by an older Spectre some time after the Word of Blake Jihad.
* [[Dragon Age II]] is told by Varric to Cassandra when she comes to him looking for the Champion sometime after the events of the game. How much of an [[Unreliable Narrator]] he is has yet to be determined, although he does admit to blatantly making things up, such as the beginning of the game and {{spoiler|the first telling of their raid on Bartrand's house.}} Cassandra calls him out on it.
== Visual Novels ==
* ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro
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** Humorously enough, there is ''some'' truth to this. The Foglios work/worked as professors at the real-life TPU (Teikyo Post University, later renamed Teikyo University).
* ''[[Sailor Sun]]'' is a webcomic ostensibly about the "real lives" of the actors and actresses who portray web comic and fan fiction characters. [[Recursive Canon]] abounds, since the actors all seem to be playing themselves.
* [
== Web Original ==
* The "[[Slender Man]]" photographs and most subsequent adaptations of the story, including several mockumentaries and "video diary"-style projects, treat the Slender Man as a very real figure: at least, as real as an [[Urban Legend]] cryptid such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster could be. The Slender Man has become so ingrained in popular culture that you could be forgiven for thinking that the myth had been incubating for decades, as opposed to being the creation of a forum member and a product of a contest to manufacture "paranormal" photographs by editing normal ones. One of the common elements is characters thinking the whole Slender Man thing is just a myth, and the stuff they find online is fake, until it actually happens to them.
* ''[[
* Supposedly, author [[User:Max Sinister]] compiled the [[
== Western Animation ==
* This was parodied in ''[[Darkwing Duck]]'', where a TV writer in the "real" world had gotten a helmet that tuned into [[Alternate Universe
* Some technically-minded fans attempt to reconcile the exaggerated action of the ''[[Star Wars: Clone Wars]]'' miniseries with the films and [[Expanded Universe]] by explaining that the cartoons are in-universe propaganda created by [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Paxi_Sylo a minor character] from the miniseries. According to the official Databank, this may actually be the case.
* An episode of ''[[The Real Ghostbusters]]'' animated series showed the Ghostbusters consulting on a feature film based on their real adventures and starring actors named Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis. At the end, we saw the cartoon characters watching live-action clips from the movie itself, with Peter Venkman complaining that this Murray guy looked nothing like him.
* There was an episode of ''[[Justice League]]'' where the League travels to a different world featuring some villians and superheroes that resemble those of [[Green Lantern]]'s favorite childhood series. After some initial confusion, [[Martian Manhunter]] posits the authors wrote under "some sort of psychic link to this world" unknowingly. After finding the graves of his heroes and hidden wreckage from a war, he finds that the reason the series was canceled was because [[Crapsack World|the bad guys won]] and most of the rest of the world is {{spoiler|all just an illusion created by the villain.}}
* ''[[Futurama]]'' deconstructs the idea in "Yo Leela Leela"
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