flannan said:UnpopularAnime said:When an anime character is created, is part of the creator's consciousness put into that character, and the character thinks everything he is experiencing is real?
If yes, then how does it work?
Is the character only conscious of the frames that are currently being created?
Is the character conscious whenever the anime is watched?
Or does the character get a mind of its own, after the anime is finished he lives his own life, which the creator is oblivious to.
Or something else?
One can think of anime characters as simulated people. The "computer" that is simulating them is the author's mind. As long as the author is thinking about them, they are, to a certain extent, alive. The resulting anime is a presentation/documentary of their life.
Note that some writing styles are probably not in line with this concept, but some are.
Now that we have this concept, we can have answers:
Yes, the character thinks everything he is experiencing is real, unless the author wants otherwise. He may or may not be aware of any shortcuts the writer takes, for example a lot of characters seem aware of the difference between important people and the masses. But if they are aware, they rationalize it as the way their world works.
The character may perceive time differently from us, being capable of setting up a joke while other parts of the joke should not yet be visible to him/her. The classic example is harem protagonists walking in on girls changing - MC gets the impulse to go wherever he tries to go because the girls would be changing there, even though he is not consciously aware of that, because he has a property of "accidental pervert".
The character is only conscious when the original work is planned, or when a work is re-arranged during adaptation. You're watching only a record of the characters' existence, no better than a documentary.
The creator might simulate the character's life even after the work is done. For example, while we never knew what happened to Negi Springfield after the ending of Negima (and how did his love life worked out), the author has worked it out, and included elements of that in his next work, UQ-Holder.
Unless the creator does it, the character's simulation stops, and he/she is frozen in time, to eventually erode and be forgotten.
Depending on your point of view, the same character featuring in doujins, fans' imaginations and other places might be the same character, or merely a copy that is not the same as the original. In either case, he/she will have a lot of copying errors beyond any inflicted intentionally.
UnpopularAnime said:Not that kind of consciousness, a better word would be "quallia". It's the thing that seperates us from the robots, we can actually experience things, while a robot, even if it can imitate a human, is just running off of code.
Note that not everyone believes in qualia, and that there is any principal barrier between humans and sufficiently advanced robots.