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A fictional character is any person, personna, identity, or entity whose existence originates from a fictional work or performance. Such existence is presumed by those participating in the performance as audience, readers, or through other indirect means. more...

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In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods, an artificial intelligence or, occasionally, inanimate objects.

Characters are widely considered an essential element of fictional works, especially novels and plays. Nevertheless, some works have attempted to portray a story without the use of characters (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the most famous examples). Even in works that do not expressly convey the existence of characters, such as in poetry, they are presumed in the form of a narrator or an imagined listener.

In various forms of theatre, performance arts and cinema, fictional characters are portrayed by actors, dancers and singers. In animations and puppetry, different aspects of a given character are rendered separately using different modalities. In animation, for example, mannerisms and behavior are rendered by animators, while voices are rendered by voice actors. In machinima, voices are sometimes rendered using speech synthesis.

The process of creating and developing characters in a work of fiction is called characterization.

The opposite of a fictional character is a nonfictional character.

Names of characters

The names of fictional characters are often quite important. The conventions of naming have changed over time. In many Restoration comedies, for example, characters are given emblematic names that sound nothing like real life names: "Sir Fidget", "Mr. Pinchwife" and "Mrs. Squeamish" are some typical examples (all from The Country Wife by William Wycherley). Some 18th and 19th century texts, on the other hand, represent characters' names by the use of a single letter and a long dash (this convention is also used for other proper nouns, such as place names). This has the effect of suggesting that the author had a real person in mind but omitted the full name for propriety's sake. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo uses this technique. A similar technique was employed by Ian Fleming in his 20th Century James Bond novels, where the real name for M, if spoken in dialogue, was always written "Adm. Sir M***

Some ways of classifying characters

The following are some ways in which readers sometimes classify characters.

Round vs. flat

Round characters are those characters who are most complex and realistic; they represent a depth of personality which is imitative of life. They frequently possess both good and bad traits, and they may react unexpectedly or become entangled in their own interior conflicts.

Read more at Wikipedia.org