Similarities and differences/reality and fiction aside, these ladies remind me of the full spectrum of a woman’s intrinsic strength as well as the fact that most women are and should be allowed to be as complex as anyone else, and I’m grateful for that.Īnd like with the men on December’s list, I will continue to carry these influential female characters with me wherever I go, and I am thankful for the ability to do that. They offer knowledge, wisdom, resilience, spirit and the ability to rise above what meets the eye through sheer talent, power and will.Īt the risk of sounding like an egotist, I see myself in many of them, especially those who share and embody my own feminist beliefs, but I also see in them many qualities I don’t have but admire and aspire to acquire (couldn’t resist-those rhymes were ripe). They offer pop culture fans so much more than sugar, spice and everything nice. These results show that novel, unfamiliar hybrid genres have the potential to confuse recipients and thus temporarily provide a way for“fiction” to enter “life.I raved about 50 fictional men back in December 2017 and have finally finished the sister list for my Top 50 Favorite Fictional Female Characters! Yaaay! By comparison, cues that permit the unambiguous identification of the film as fiction (impossible content elements, disclaimer as part of the credits) are only rarely given as reasons. To substantiate their perceptions of or their doubts concerning the film's ontic status, both recipients that consider it to be fiction and recipients who are uncertain frequently refer to information gathered from other media. While most discussants correctly identify it as fiction, almost 40 percent are at least temporarily uncertain as to the product type. A second analysis explores the perspectives from which this reality status is discussed and whether the recipients regard the film as fiction or as nonfiction. A first analysis shows that among those e-mails written within six months after the release of the film, 38 percent refer to questions concerning its reality status. To study the reception, a random sample of e-mails from Internet newsgroup discussions of the film is subjected to content analysis.
This model is then applied to a media product transcending the traditional boundaries between“fact” and “fiction,” the pseudodocumentary horror film The Blair Witch Project and its reception. Under all three perspectives, a media product will usually contain cues that orient the recipient toward ontic status, plausibility of content, and so forth. This article is concerned with how recipients evaluate the reality status of media products, how they distinguish and how they interrelate elements of“fact” and “fiction.” On the basis of an overview of recent theories of fictionality, an approach comprising three independent perspectives for evaluating the reality status of media products is proposed:a pragmatic perspective concerning the product type (“fact,”“fiction,” and “hybrids”), a semantic perspective concerning product content (degrees of plausibility), and a perspective of mode referring to the (perceived) realism of the product (formal features and their effects on degree of involvement).