i have a question about fiction throughout human history, i don’t know if it belongs in this subreddit or not, feel free to repost it where you think it belongs….
give me an estimate of the number of fictional characters humans created in stories,novels,manga comics, movies, tv shows and in epic poems and legends and every other kind of storytelling there is, i said an estimate, i’m not asking from a presise number and also…
do you think it’s more than 8 billions or less ( that being the human population )
by SaidNadir2021
3 Comments
Even an estimate has to be educated.
If we take the estimate that ~130,000,000 books have been published since the printing press came to Europe, and assume that evey book is fiction (they aren’t of course, but we can assume that many because of the number of books which have been either self-published or distributed privately), and if we assume that each book has maybe 20 speaking roles (some will have less, some will have far more), then that’s ~2,600,000,000 characters *just since the introduction of the printing press* half a millennium ago.
What about epics, mythology, and so on?
Well, the Bible and the Mahabharata have almost 3,000 people named in each. Not speaking roles, no, but 3,000 names. 1,000 in the Iliad. And so on. Now take into account that probably only 1% of the oral traditions *if that* have been preserved from the last, say, five thousand years. What about earlier? Humans might have been telling stories for ten thousand years, a hundred thousand, maybe even a million.
At this stage there isn’t even a point in trying to work it out.
The number of fictional people in stories is probably far more than 8,000,000,000.
I love this question. Have we imagined more people than there were real ones? Check out the different answers in this [Straight Dope forum](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-more-fictional-characters-than-real-people/695648/4). The answers vary wildly.
What a wonderful question!