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"Don't even break it." |
The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled theatre. In a theatre, the fourth wall is the one through which the audience sees the action of the play. The idea of the fourth wall was made famous by philosopher and critic Denis Diderot. It was used more in the 19th century. The fourth wall extended the idea of an imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience. If an actor speaks directly to the audience, does something to the audience, or even simply notices the audience, it is known as "breaking the fourth wall".[1]
In the series
The 4th wall seperates reality from fiction, acting as a barrier between the two planes of existence.
The 4th wall is important, as the existence of the IaLR Multiverse is linked to it. Without it, the IaLR Multiverse and everything in it will eventually cease to exist.
Dumb Universe
The 4th wall contains a pocket universe in where the concept of sanity appears to not exist. Known as the Dumb Universe, it is home to the Dumb Characters and many other wacky things.
The Gang has visited (or more accurately, was banished by the Licked Rom Gan to) this place once, in the final part of The Dream Dimension and throughout Glass Onion.
Final Destination's importance
The Final Destination is the only known gateway between the two seperate worlds, but even then, nobody from the IaLRverse (save for the Roleplayers, who sometimes enter as their avatars once in a while) has entered it for its intended purpose. Rather, fighters from the Smash Bros. Mansion and around the both the world, the universe and the multiverse use it as one of the many battlefields to fight against each other. Not to mention, nobody except the Smashers have ever heard of the Final Destination, and if someone else has heard of and/or talked about it, they're most likely referring to the Smash Bros. stage.
Breaking the 4th wall
In a nutshell: once the 4th wall breaks, all madness breaks loose.
Once someone triggers a Stage 2-6 4th wall break, the 4th wall literally shatters into pieces. Without a stable 4th wall, 4th wall energy, also known as Wutt energy, will leak out, leading to very weird effects, including but not limited to: characters swapping personalities, random events, things getting warped, stuff turning into other stuff, and the world glitching, items and characters occasionally appearing as wireframes for a split second (freaking some characters out often), and much more.
In addition to 4th wall energy, everything from the 4th wall's pocket universe also leaks into the world, leading to the appearance of Dumb Characters.
4th wall repair
Thankfully, the wall can automatically regenerate and glue itself back together in an instant (provided it is not a Stage 4-6 break). When the 4th wall begins the regeneration process, it drains all the already-leaked 4th wall energy from the multiverse back into the 4th wall, and reverses every effect that happened due to the 4th wall break. In addition, it sucks all the Dumb Characters and everything coming from its pocket universe back to the 4th wall itself. After that, it eventually repairs and regenerates all destroyed and missing chunks. Once that is done, all the 4th wall's pieces snap back into place, thus finally repairing the 4th wall and re-seperating sanity from insanity.
From Stage 4 to 6, the 4th wall can't automatically regenerate, thus leading to characters having to enter the 4th Wall Dimension to manually repair it. The same process happens after the wall is manually fixed, but the 4th wall is already glued back into one piece, and instead it makes a portal that only sucks in 4th wall eneegy and Dumb Characters.
Stages of a 4th wall break
There are 5 stages of a 4th wall break, with 1 secret break, getting worser as they go up. Secret breaks are rare, having a 1 in a thousand chance to happen.
(*) means that the stage is a secret stage.
- Stage 1 - The least dangerous, nothing weird and interesting happens. Staring at the camera and talking to the audience are examples of a Stage 1 break. The 4th wall can auto-repair in this stage.
- Stage 2 - Again, nothing weird and interesting happens, save for the rare occurance of a few Dumb Characters appearing. Referencing the fact that they're fictional, talking about other wikis, and others more are examples of Stage 2 breaks. The 4th wall, again, can auto-repair, but it'll take a bit longer.
- Stage 3 - The most well-known stage. Weird things happen, Dumb Characters appear, things turn into other things, etc, etc.. The 4th wall can auto-repair, but it'll take 2 hours. Manual repair is the quickest way to fix the 4th wall. There aren't any set examples.
- Stage 4 - More intense than Stage 3, this has the same events but more intense, but the 4th wall cannot auto-repair, and manual repairing will take 1 minute. Examples of this are explicitly referencing their fictionality, as in saying they are CGI, they are voiced by people, referencing the users alot, etc.
- Stage 5 - The second most lethal, this stage cannot be reachable unless you destroy the 4th wall with weaponry. This stage has a 75.5% chance of causing the Quadmageddon. The 4th wall cannot auto-repair in this stage, and repairing it manually will take 3-6 hours.
- Stage 6* - A stage 6 break is even worse then a stage 5. Many Dumb Characters appear, some things are wireframes and mini deletion rifts appear. Stage 6 cannot be reached, unless something possesses the 4th wall, breaking it. After the stage 6 break, Super Quadmageddon starts in 8 minutes. The manual repair takes 4-8 hours, but auto-repair won't happen. The stage 6 break is a secret break.
Quadmageddon
Were you looking for the episode, or event?
When the 4th wall gets extremely broken to a point of being irrecoverable, a series of catastrophes called Quadmageddon (or Wallpocalypse) happen. These disasters can break the very realm of time, space and reality. Worse, these catastrophes can rip the whole universe apart! There are 9 waves.
- 1st wave - What usually happens when the 4th wall severely breaks happen, but more extreme.
- Instead of some characters having Dumb counterparts, almost all of them has Dumb counterparts, marked by the appearance of Duplikat and Anap, Weegee, Askly, Ikki, Pootooo, Luni, Tode, Bondy, and much more.
- The occurance of things turning into other things and people glitching out are more common.
- 2nd wave - Things get extremely glitchy. Characters and stuff appear as wireframes for seconds. Backgrounds can sometimes appear as concept art or storyboards for seconds, too. Glitches mostly happen, and audio can sometimes get worse.
- Sometimes voidholes can appear, in where someone can fall for indefinite periods of time before getting back into the ground, like the Bottomless Pit in Gravity Falls. This is shown by Lucas suddenly falling into the floor.
- People start to swap minds in this wave.
- Some people may also appear in T-pose.
- 3rd wave - Time skips can happen. Also, random things from different time periods fall from the sky, a nod to Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
- 4th wave - Deletion rifts open, deleting them (i.e. sucking them) into a deep dull purplish void, simply called the Void.
- The Void is similar to the Void from Gumball, and Nullville from Phineas and Ferb, except everyone still has memory of the thing that was erased.
- Restoration rifts can also appear, sucking out objects from the Void.
- 5th wave - A giant time-space-glitch tornado, called the Quadnado, causes a lot of catastrophes, such as glitching stuff, deleting objects, turning things into other things, random things summoned, and also sucking anything near it into the time-space continuum (i.e. the place where Dr. Zomboss and Super-Fan Imp once ended up near the end of the Modern Day Part 2 trailer, also the place of the PvZ2 world map).
- 6th wave - The world starts to go insane, causing more havoc, and not to mention time rifts sucking in everything, and also some people and things sucked into random universes.
- 7th wave - The world gets partially corrupted, and viruses appear. Time makes no sense, and physics breaks itself, causing the characters and other stuff to float.
- The viruses are the same ones in the episode "The Lair of the Dark Star".
- 8th wave - The universe is almost corrupted, and there are only a few minutes to fix it until the 9th wave happens.
- During this wave, things suddenly turn white, and holes showing the thread start to grow, sucking in everything near it.
- 9th wave - The most lethal wave. The universe gets fully corrupted, and explodes, wiping out everything until only a white screen and the godly forces called the Roleplayers remain. Only the Roleplayers can restore everything back to normal, as in reverting the Quadmageddon.
Once everything is restored to normal by the Roleplayers, the gang will still have memory of what happened, but everyone else will not remember anything about Quadmageddon, for an odd reason. The Roleplayers will then continue to fix the 4th wall, to make it even more stabler than ever before.
Super Quadmageddon
A Super Quadmageddon (also known as a Teichocide, from the greek word teíchos meaning "wall" and the Latin suffix -cide meaning "act of killing") is much more powerful and has more waves than a normal Quadmageddon. It has more intensified effects.
- 1st wave - Dumb Characters appear. Lots of them.
- At least 3 Dumb Clones of each of the LR gang (both seasons, not including dead) appear.
- Dumb Characters that are not part of the 4th wall also appear at the same time, such as Idk, Littercup, Dabbercup, Blabbercup and Bupples.
- 2nd wave - Things start to get extremely, extremely glitchy.
- Along with many of the glitches in the original, things also stretch pretty insanely.
- 3rd wave - 4th wall monsters appear and try to destroy things.
- 4th wave - Qualighting starts to strike and deletion rifts appear.
- Some of the rifts move up and down or left to right.
- 5th wave - The Quadnado appears, but stronger, sucking in faster.
- 6th wave - Everything starts to change styles very rapidly.
- 7th wave - The universe starts to get really insane. A lot more deletion rifts appear, all of them moving. The Quadnado gets even stronger, sucking in very fast.
- 8th wave - The 4th wall Demon appears and fights the gang.
- 9th wave - Wallicanes start coming in, blowing things to the Quadnado.
- 10th wave - The universe starts to get corrupted. Viruses appear, but there are much more.
- 11th wave - The universe is almost fully corrupted, and there are only a few minutes left to fix it.
- 12th wave - The universe is fully corrupted, and explodes, wiping out everything until only a white screen and the godly forces called the Roleplayers remain. Only the Roleplayers can restore everything back to normal, as in reverting the Super Quadmageddon.
4th wall breaks
There have been some 4th wall breaks throughout the series.
One of the arguably biggest 4th wall breaks in the series was done by Star Dream, who logged onto SuperGaming101's account on the IaLR wiki, and did many things on the wiki, such as changing his profile picture, creating a blog, and doing an intentional vandal edit on the Papyrus page. On the wiki, he mostly talked with binary code. A similar case happened with The National Archery Association, where they told the gang through ROT13 to kill Lucas and give them the Phantasm to stop a mysterious threat. After refusal, they chose to fight the gang and take the bow by force. The two were an ARG.
Trivia
- Talking about the Fourth wall is technically breaking it.
- If you break the 4th wall during Quadmageddon, you worsen Quadmageddon.
- Almost every episode has the 4th wall broken once.
- Apparently, almost all 4th wall breaks are usually Stage 3 or 4. Rosewell even lampshades this in "Mass Attack".[2]
- During season two, Lemon Glass has been the character that has fixed the fourth wall the most of the time, rushing to fix it before anything weird happens.