...“They left plenty of Easter eggs hinting at it in the first three Avengers movies, so it’s pretty obvious—the way to counter Thanos’ power now that he has all the infinity stones must be to simply realize he’s CGI and that it’s just a movie,” Avengers fan Raoul Bengston wrote in an online forum, detailing the potential implications of the villain being completely imaginary, including the possibility that the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe could itself be a wholly fabricated world devised decades ago by comic book writers....
Fictionalism is a general label for a kind of strategy in interpreting a kind of language or discourse; if you are fictionalist about something, you hold that, while purporting to refer to something, you are not actually referring to anything real. A common example is when we say, "The average family has 2.5 children," the phrase "the average family" looks like it is referring to something, but it's just a useful fiction. It's remarkably difficult to find a useful characterization of fictionalism that goes beyond this; practically any direction you step gets into controversial claims about some region of language. Even the average family example is not universally thought to get us into the realm of the fictional.
The Onion example gives a reason why this can be tricky to parse. Thanos is a fictional character. But it is not a fiction that Thanos is a fictional character with certain characteristics. One has to be a fictionalist about Thanos; but being a fictionalist about apparent facts about Thanos is not the same thing, and it's not as certain that this is desirable or even possible. You have to be very careful about what discourse it is to which you are applying the strategy.
And I wonder if the strategy even gets anyone anywhere. We have no generally accepted theory of fictions. And when we look at robust kinds of fictions, like legal fictions, the only actual difference between them and non-fictions seems to be that the fictions are constructed. So fictionalism, if it's really dealing with fiction, seems to reduce to the idea that something is constructed, and doesn't actually tell us anything about its status beyond that. Fictionalism about Thanos doesn't really seem to be anything more than the claim that Thanos, as Thanos, is artificial in some way. It doesn't even give us a particular way he is fictional, since it seems that there are lots of ways a thing can be fictional, depending on what we put into constructing it (description, role-playing, brand-making, or whatever).
And as I have noted previously, there seems to be no good argument for saying that fictions don't exist, or that you can't refer to them, or that they cannot be subjects of assertions, or anything of the kind. The only problem is equivocation if you (like 'Raoul Bengston') mix and match; breaking the fourth wall is something you only do as a joke or as a twist, not as a solution to a problem within the fictional narrative.
The best part of the joke is that 'Raoul Bengston' is almost certainly a fictional character; so if Bengston were right, the best way to respond to to him is to recognize that he's made-up and so not actually asserting anything. Fortunately for him and for all fictional characters and scenarios, he is wrong. And that's quite important more generally, because all hypothetical scenarios and all counterfactual reasoning involve some kind of fictional construction. Outside very limited contexts, we largely think in fictions of some kind.
