Narrative Hallucination

A term used to describe the phenomenon in which a community, most typically the fandom, collectively hallucinate a narrative that involves the characters of any media due to a lack of proper story, narrative, and characterization present within the original source material.
For example, a Narrative Hallucination may demonstrate itself as asserting a trope of characterization as the de facto of the original's actual truths, typically resulting in the harassment and attacking of others of those who do not back these thoughts.
Most notably, Narrative Hallucinations most commonly result in defining characters into tropes and cliches with intent to write towards that trope as opposed to the trope or cliche being a byproduct of the writing. (i.e: within fanfiction spaces, characters are typically flanderized and dumbed down into specific roles and tropes.)
This phenomenon is most prevalent within online specific spaces and with media (fictional and non-fictional) that have become a pop sensation and fall under the aforementioned prerequisites. (i.e: refer to "Animal Hospital Anomaly," "Dandy's World," et cetera; though it (phenomenon) does not limit itself to the medium of games.)

"Lad, whaddya mean you hate this character? Character A?"
"Because they hurt Character B constantly!"
"... what? Where was that in the source material?"
"Huh?"
"... did you just have a narrative hallucination? Are you basing your perception of this character purely on fan-material?"

Narrative Hallucination by yiNineSols August 3, 2026