When characters in an ongoing story suddenly find themselves in a new fiction that views their entire history as a work of fiction, you're watching a Real World Episode. The intended effect is to make the audience believe that the characters have broken through the Fourth Wall and entered your reality. Stories with these plots are popular because of Deconstruction and Lampshade Hanging jokes, as well as Take That Me humour. Sometimes it's a form of raising the stakes, as at least two worlds may now be in trouble.
This trope is related to, but distinct from, Refugee From TV Land. In Refugee from TV Land, a character is pulled out of a Show Within a Show, whereas a Real World Episode concerns characters the viewers have been following for some time prior to this, and no indication had yet been given that they were in fact fictional (other than the fact that they, y'know, exist in a TV series, movie, book, comic, or video game). Quietly implies that All Fiction Is Real Somewhere and can be paired with a "Reading Is Cool" Aesop.
Compare Mage in Manhattan (where a powerful villain from another world, but not always another fiction, comes to assault the world of the audience), Up the Real Rabbit Hole (where the "topmost" universe is recognized as the "real" one), and Tomato Surprise (where we learn the protagonists are not what we expected them to be). Contrast Trapped in TV Land (basically the inverse of this). Definitely not to be confused with an episode of The Real World.
Examples:
- Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): The 2003 anime ends with Ed and Hohenheim travelling through the Gate of Truth. On the other side is our world. They discover that World War One and World War II were at least partially the result of all the alchemy that was going on in their world.
- Sonic X begins by having Sonic, Eggman, and a whole menagerie of characters from their world being pulled into the explosion of Eggman's base, ending up in a different universe. It turns out that the city Sonic and most of his friends landed in was Station Square from the Sonic Adventure series, and later episodes had the two worlds merge in order to adapt both Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2).
- The premise of Fables is that the Public Domain Characters from folklore and fairy tales have decided to emigrate from their stories and into ours.
- The DCU:
- Prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths, Earth Prime was designated our world, with no superpowers or anything. Characters occasionally ended up here when travelling through the Multiverse. Earth Prime got its own version of Superboy shortly before being destroyed in the Crisis.
- Later, Earth Prime was recreated, and Superboy wound up being dumped there after he punched himself. He seemingly lost his powers and did nothing there other than reading the very issues you were reading, trolling DC message boards and making his parents cook for him.
- Animal Man: At the conclusion of a long Mind Screw Story Arc, Buddy Baker left his world and has a long metaphysical conversation with Grant Morrison in person.
- Doctor Who:
- The Doctor Who comic in Doctor Who Magazine had a story entitled "TV Action!", where the Eighth Doctor and Izzy travelled to our reality. Tom Baker, who had played the Fourth Doctor, defeats that month's alien by merely talking to him and rambling endlessly.
- A Doctor Who (IDW) storyline, written in honor of the 50th anniversary, has the Eleventh Doctor travels to an alternate dimension where Doctor Who is a fictional long running TV show, most recently played by Matt Smith. During the course of the adventure, he gets second place in a cosplay contest, meets fans he's inspired throughout the years, saves the always budget-less BBC money by letting them film his latest adventure, and confirms that while Elisabeth Sladen may have tragically passed away, her beloved character Sarah Jane Smith is still very much alive chasing adventures offscreen. Also, he's the one who suggests that Peter Capaldi play the next Doctor.
- During Marvel Zombies 5, Machine Man and Howard the Duck go into a universe that isn't designated to collect information on zombies. While there, the scene cuts to a copy of their own book.
- Vampirella: The first Dynamite run ends with Vampirella being sent to a universe by her mother Lilith where she is only a comicbook character.
