And there they were, face to face with their greatest enemy. 50 feet tall, with an axe, the blade almost as large as his own torso. His eyes flamed, as if each were the mouth of a dragon. Nothing else was visible underneath the scaled, rippling armour which covered his entire body.
“You think you can defeat me? I’m a million times stronger than you will ever be!” Cragnarthar the Destroyer boomed, his voice echoing over the plains that he had spent millennia beating into submission.
“See what I mean?” Craig muttered. “He’s so cliche - it sounds like a shitty book.”
“Can you shut up? We have to kill him! Otherwise he’s going to destroy Earth and then rule the entire universe!” John whispered back harshly.
“Do you not realise what you just said? It’s even more cliche! Sounds like a self published young adult novel!”
“What are you two talking about?” The Destroyer boomed.
“Ok seriously, they aren’t even trying with this dialogue. That’s so lazy. Why would the Destroyer of countless worlds, holder of infinite power, say something so mundane.” Craig replied.
“Craig, you’ve been going on about this for ages, can’t you just let it go? We aren’t in a fucking book! He’s going to kill the planet or some shit.”
“The writer is probably reading what we’re saying right now, and thinking it’s fucking hilarious.”
“There is no writer. There is only me, the greatest power in the univ-”
“Oh shut up, you’re not even real, you’re just a shittily written antagonist, can you just stop?” Craig shouted back, angrily.
“Craig, are you trying to get us killed?” John said. “It was alright when you were just talking about this shit to us, but you just told the fifty foot tall, fame breathing eyes, axe guy to shut up.”
“LOOK! He made a typo! You said fame! That sentence didn’t even make sense! It’s just poor writing!”
“I don’t know what you two are going on about, but it really doesn’t interest me in the slightest, I just wanted to kill both of you with an axe, so if you could kindly-”
“But you’re not REAL! You’re just a piece of writing, and a shit piece at that. You should just-”
Very suddenly, Cragnarthar disappeared. The writer was fucking tired of Craig’s bullshit.
“JOHN! DID YOU HEAR THAT? THAT WAS NARRATION! WHAT DID I TELL YOU?”
“Ok, what the fuck was that?” John said.
“Narration! It’s the writer!”
It was in fact, the writer. Craig kept bringing up how shit his writing was, and it was really starting to piss him off. What do I have to do to get you to shut up, Craig?
“Wait what the fuck. You just changed the tense. Or the perspective, or whatever.”
It is my book, Craig. And you’ve done nothing but criticise it the whole way. I brought you into existence, so if you think I’m so flawed, you must be too.
“Wait, wait, wait.” John said. “Are we not real? Are we just book characters.”
Yes John, you are.
“Well what the fuck? Why did you write my mother to death?”
Well, er, it was for a plot device, you know, to keep the story moving, you know, err-
“Couldn’t you have done it another way? You had her beheaded by an ogre. Are you fucking demented or something?”
I, err, it was just for a err-
“Hang on though, if we’re just book characters, do we not have consciousness? So we’re not real people?”
Well, I guess not but…
“Are we even real at all? Are you just typing words on a page because you have no real friends and have to make your own conversation?”
Well, yes. Is there something wrong with that?
“So you’ve projected your own interior monologue onto a page in order to pretend like you have meaningful conversations with people?”
Err, yes? I think.
“You’re just a bit sad aren’t you.”
Yep.
“And if you stop writing, do we just stop exisiti