The Sopranos has a bunch of these, some of them which look even trickier - there are references to the Godfather films and to Goodfellas, and Bruce Springsteen is explicitly part of the Sopranos' world.
I think describing them as 'one directional' misses why they're interesting - it's true (to my knowledge) that Bruce Springsteen doesn't mention the Sopranos in his music, but I don't think that shows there's nothing puzzling going on when Bruce Springsteen is referenced in the Sopranos.
the Gilmore Girls and Sopranos each trying to be a base level reality in which the other one is a mere work of fiction is a different thing than the Sopranos being a work of fiction that also features real people and places. The latter, prima facie, doesn’t seem paradoxical/puzzling to me
I agree they're different (perhaps the other ones I mentioned are a bit more similar, but still different). But if you don't find them puzzling, I'm not sure I'll be able to change that.
This can only be solved by the fact Tony Soprano and the Gilmores are really famous in some way and both are viewed as trashy reality tv in both instances.
Did anybody already mention Brian Tantina? He is in both shows. As Mustang Sally on "The Sopranos" and as Bootsy in "Gilmore Girls". He is simultaneously fictional and real in the scenario.
I think one has to be careful when adopting a strategy of adopting ad hoc restrictions on when you can infer otherwise obvious implicit truths about a fiction, since the baseline assumption is that you can generally make fairly sensible extrapolations from what is seen…
…and the cases where you can’t are due to innovative narrative structure or unreliable narrators or mysteries or rug pulls etc. if you generally revoke inferential license you will have trouble forming a coherent understanding of the story.
I think Kit Fine mentions somewhere that we want our metaphysics of fiction to be able to take this kind of case into account but when I was making one I regretfully opted leave that to a future acolyte with a better grasp of non-well-founded set theory
Not to worry, I wrote a fan-fic spinoff of your metaphysics of fiction in which you explained that you'd found a surprisingly elegant resolution to this problem
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