This page is pretty redundant. We already have a page for the fourth wall itself, and the whole point of that is that characters tend to observe it. Why have a page for characters that observe something meant to be observed?
Hide / Show RepliesThat's right, both this article and Noticing the Fourth Wall get the metaphor wrong (though in that one it's only in the title).
In a theater set, there are three walls that represent a room indoors. Therefore the "fourth wall" is the other one that isn't there, separating the characters from the audience. Breaking it means getting out of the stage, to interact with the audience.
To put it in television terms, the fourth wall isn't the TV screen or the camera, but the very absence of a camera (or rather, the air standing in the place where the camera should be). So most characters DO notice and observe the fourth wall, it's those who don't that break it.
It's not redundant to say that, besides of something being done, some character does it more than others. The very fact that it's (presumably) pretty easy to identify which characters qualify for the trope (and it's not just the same ones who have ever broken the fourth wall) is indicative of that.
And I disagree characters usually "notice" something that's just an absence to them if they don't react to it in any way. It's like saying I'm noticing and observing — and, especially, was even before thinking about this — the absence of pink unicorns in my room. Not sure whether that affects the actual argument as far as Noticing the Fourth Wall goes, though at least "observer" is vague enough that this trope name probably works under some interpretation.
Edited by 86.50.74.185
It seems like a lot of these examples are just works with No Fourth Wall, not works where only one particular character breaks it.