ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter turns the perspective of the preceding inquiry around, discussing first the many instances in which actual people appear as fictionalized protagonists in various types of media texts. Building on the more fine-grained conceptual distinction between fictionality (a claim of media texts) and fictiveness (an assumed attribute of represented entities), the chapter approaches the general ontology of such fictionalizations through an extensive discussion of the principle of minimal departure, before providing a detailed typology of potential relations between actual world “originals” and their fictive counterparts. Particular attention is given to cases in which the fictiveness of characters can be gradual rather than absolute and where the fictionality of representations is ambiguous, up to the point where some audiences may be entirely mistaken about the status of fictitious celebrities like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat. The chapter then focuses on the concept of inventability that describes conventions and negotiations of shared knowledge governing the borderlands between fact and fiction. This allows for a critical assessment of the esthetic and political potentials of media forms to engage with actual people and events. The chapter traces six fundamentally different strategies to create characters modeled after (and mostly even named) Donald Trump. Finally, the chapter addresses to what extent there can be a truly non-fictional character theory or, in other words, whether media texts that are non-fictional to all accounts construct their “protagonists” as represented characters in mostly the same way as fictional ones. The fact-fiction distinction, it is argued, consequently depends on how various mediated representations of a character relate not only to the empirical world but also to each other, rather than on inherent features of any one character representation.
