To begin with, the obvious answer is, “Yes,” given that there are science fiction novels that describe civilizations with trillions of inhabitants.
But dial it back to named characters who actually do something, individually, in a story, movie, TV show, play, opera, etc.
(e.g., it isn’t enough to say, “Doug, Sam, and Joe were also in Harry’s crew,” if that’s all we ever know of them. They have to have some specified action. “Doug grabbed the phone and ordered pizza.” Good enough; Doug’s on the list.)
How the hell many fictional characters, of this level of realization, have there been in the entirety of fiction? As a “Fermi-Question” can we even come within one overall order of magnitude?
(This could have gone in General Questions, but it seems more relevant here.)
Well, I just did a little research (which may be cheating). As a ballpark figure, there’s about half a million new books published every year. Approximately a hundred thousand are works of fiction. Granted, a lot of these are self-published and might only be read by a few dozen people but the characters within still count. Let’s be generous and say there’s an average of twenty characters per book. That gives us approximately two million characters a year from written works of fiction.
You probably can’t project that figure back to far because there was a lot less self-published fiction prior to the internet. And an even further drop-off prior to the era of modern printing. So I’m going to say two hundred million characters is probably a realistic estimate for the total number of characters in all written fiction.
And written fiction is probably the biggest source for fictional characters. Movies are only about a hundred years old and are much fewer in number than books. Television is even more so. Plays and operas may have been around a long time but they’re not all that common. So let’s just call it a round hundred million characters for all of fiction outside of books.
So my estimate is around three hundred million. The total number of real people who have ever lived is in the neighbourhood of a hundred billion. So real people outnumber fictional people by a ratio of around 300:1.
…and each of them has created, in their heads, their own version of their parents, siblings, and significant others—and make no mistake, that’s exactly what we do!—then fictional characters definitely outnumber real people.
Of course if you add the requirement that the fictional creations must have been written down, much less shared, then we’re probably back to ‘real people outnumber fictional characters.’ But don’t try to tell me that the Boss (or Mother or Uncle) you have in your head actually is that person…
No doubt what people believe about other people (especially about their motivations and feelings, not so much about their actions) is not all true, but that is a very different matter from their being fictional creations, in the sense that characters in novels, movies etc. are fictional.
I think I need clarification on the publication standards, I suppose you could call them. As a kid, I had multiple imaginary friends, named stuffed animals, imaginary superheroes, and so on. And while I might have been more imaginative than average, I’d have to suppose that the average number of such characters is greater than one per person. And I’ve certainly told stories about them to others. But I never actually wrote any of those stories down, and I certainly never got any of them accepted for publication. Does that count? What if I wrote down stories about them, but nobody else ever read them? Or only my immediate family? What if I got a blog and put the stories there? Does it depend on how many people read my blog?
I couldn’t begin to improve on Little Nemo’s analysis and thinking so I just want to add a thought to the thread’s main point.
If we consider the Old West to have ranged in time over 50-60 years in the 19th Century, and covered the territory west of the Mississippi, one might make the case that all the people contained in books, movies, TV episodes and other works of fiction – especially the Bad Guys – might approach in number the “real people” of that time and place.
Every time I would watch an episode of the old shows like Gunsmoke (which was localized to Dodge City and environs), I would always wonder how many of those characters could have actually been there at the time.
Do you want to count fictionalized representations of real people? Like Napoleon in War and Peace, Pocahontas or Anastasia in the various Disney movies, or any number of those people from the Old West, like Billy the Kid or Jesse James? Do you want to count Julius Caesar as he appears in Shakespeare as a different character from the Julius Caesar in HBO’s Rome, as the same one, or not as fictional at all?
Well, I was being a bit facetious. But the idea that we see others as fictional versions of who they “really” are–as ‘characters,’ in a sense–is certainly not original to me; one of John Scalzi’s 2011 columns references the notion in a routine way, as if it’s unworthy of special comment:
Yeah, I think it would be easier to just say that as kids, many/most of us had invisible friends, stories we played out with toys, and so on, resulting in at least a couple of characters per person.