CHARACTER

Upper Paleolithic carvers in Europe made small figures of animals and people from mammoth ivory from about forty thousand years ago. The Vogelherd set includes a cave lion, a bison, a horse, a bear, a mammoth, and a lion-man - a body with a human face on a lion's. At La Madeleine in France a bison carved from antler is caught mid-grooming, turning its head to lick its own side.

Myths are not stories people tell once. They are stories with a fixed shape that get told to the same audience on a schedule.

Plato describes an older man in love with a boy who is compared, in the text, to a hunting animal that is deaf. The animal's ears are the point: the love is addressed to someone who cannot hear it, and the whole scene turns on that.

The sculptor who fell in love with his own work. The statue was never going to be able to leave, and the story treats that as part of the appeal rather than a tragedy to be corrected.

Walrus-ivory chess pieces from around 1150, buried on the Isle of Lewis and dug up in 1831, now divided between two museums and at least four incomplete sets. Two of them are probably replacements made in another workshop to replace pieces that had been lost.

The novel that turned its readers into a correspondent. Pamela Andrews writes home about her master's pursuit, and the reader takes the seat of the parents - receiving every letter, sending none. Published anonymously in November 1740, it became the first English best-seller and the first novel whose readers wrote back demanding more of it.

Diderot invented the wall in 1758 for the purpose of stopping the audience noticing. Every breach since - a wink, a clap, a lecture - is that convention failing on purpose, and it is the only time the far side admits you are there.

The painter stands in front of the figure he made and asks whether the man is really like it. He is. And it will never alter, which is the only thing about it anybody wanted.

A recurring cast of characters, in a fixed panel order, appearing every single day without exception for decades.

Episodes released in instalments, each ending unresolved, the audience expected to return for the next one.

In 1921 a flour company's advertising department needed one woman's name for the kitchen advice its all-female home-service staff was already writing. Betty Crocker was a signature and a persona, not a person: she answered letters, then took a radio voice in 1924, and gave millions a correspondent who signed herself "Cordially yours."

Street & Smith hired two men to sell a magazine on the radio. They invented a voice instead, and the listeners went asking newsdealers for the magazine that voice implied.

Broadcast drama on a fixed daily slot, written for an audience with nowhere else to be at that hour.

Fifty-four years of letters to a fictional detective, answered by an office that had chosen not to have a face.

End the episode before the answer. Give the viewer a fixed slot, a daily rhythm, and a question with no resolution, and they will come back tomorrow at the same time for years.

A dentist and a painter's sister were made into a national type on purpose, and one of them denied it for five years.

A gorilla who feels affection for the woman offered to him, premiered to a city that had just had King Tut, was cut by censors, and did not get the missing scenes back until thirty-seven years later.

A form built almost entirely by women, for women, and treated as unserious for fifty years. Daily episodes, fixed slots, cliffhangers, characters written in indefinitely and never resolved.

Orson Welles presented a novel as a news bulletin on 30 October 1938, and CBS identified it as a dramatic performance four times during the hour. An estimated nine to twelve million Americans heard it, and at least a million of them were scared into some sort of action. By the next morning the newspapers had a story about the listeners, which is the one that has been retold ever since.

A character who cannot die, printed in a newspaper, read by a generation of children on the same day.

The first-person film, the subjective shot, the character who exists to be looked through rather than at.

A children's comic club that awarded membership badges, and whose membership card was authorised by a character.

Two years of letters to a listener who could not answer, written by a thirteen-year-old who said out loud that she hoped the feeling was mutual.

The song where the singer pleads to be given the exact shape a man wants: a French phrase, a café in the dark. A whole musical built around wanting to be a specific imaginary person for somebody.

Made to answer a four-year-old's fear of the dark, by a man who made a cardboard cutout and hung it in a tree. Two men then claimed to have invented him.

A man nobody else can see kept drinking with him for years, and it worked because nobody in his life would say the sentence that ended it. It stops when two doctors who cannot see the rabbit go looking for him in it.

Peanuts began on 2 October 1950 with a strip whose first line - 'Good ol' CharlieBrown... How I hate him!' - announced the subject: affection that cannot be returned. A round-headed boy who loses everything, a dog who does not answer, a cartoon world that kept 350 million readers. Schulz maintained the loser's world on purpose.

A recurring family, played by the same cast, five nights a week, for years, in a house you could draw from memory.

Wayne C. Booth coined unreliable narrator in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961: a narrator who does not speak for the norms of the work, judged against an implied author the reader constructs. Sixty years of argument later the term still describes the situation plainly - you are inside a voice you cannot verify, and nobody will correct you.

The fictional thing rents space in someone's head and starts paying rent in meaning. You rehearse the encounters, you decorate them, you introduce them to friends like a roommate.

A fictional figure whose NAME is the product: the bond is with a person who was invented so that the relationship can never fail.

Fans gather, in costume, in a hotel ballroom, to be in the same room with people who feel the same way about a show.

Fan conventions as a permanent global circuit, with panels, dealers rooms, cosplay and a trade layer.

Across several decades of television studies the same pair of results kept surfacing: these bonds are extremely common among regular viewers, and the strength of the bond predicts enjoyment better than the quality of the programme does.

A television film made for a fictional holiday, aired once, about characters the audience believed they owned.

Academic work measuring grief responses to soap opera finales and finding the same markers as bereavement.

Stories resolve on a fixed date, the wait is publicised in advance, and the audience is given a date to be in the same place at the same time.

Twenty-eight million people watched a television finale and the largest audience for a broadcast in history.

An alien with a kitchen and a family, performed by a man who refused for four years to say how. Children cried when it ended, and the character was invited to birthday parties.

Fans insisting two characters should be together, and treating the show as withholding rather than as finished.

The show you have already seen, watched again, not for the plot. Familiarity as a nervous system intervention.

A child writes to a magazine telling them a fictional brand of baby food is real. The NEST never appears. The letter is never answered. The episode ends.

A scheduled block, a fixed slot, a face, a voice, a house, a family, and a writer who knows your name. Aimed deliberately at a person old enough to believe all of it, and running on a rhythm.

A costume is put on by a new actor and the audience transfers its entire attachment to whoever is now inside it. Running five days a week, in front of millions of children, with nobody pretending otherwise.

Killing a popular character for narrative effect, and the organised reaction that follows.

Blue's Clues premiered in 1996 and built its method out of a pause: the host looks into the camera, asks the child a question, waits through a silence written into the script, and then behaves as though an answer arrived. Children answered anyway, watched the same episodes repeatedly, and the period's research recorded their interaction and comprehension rising with every repeat.

Japanese animation and comics reach a large Western audience through dedicated channels, and a transnational fandom forms around them.

Two hours of a man telling you about his best friend. The friend does not exist, the man telling you does not know it, and you are being addressed by somebody who is also being lied to.

An actor's persona and a character's persona are widely treated as the same thing, and one retires while the other continues.

A character whose defining trait is looking at you, taken from the comics rather than invented for the film - and on a fifty-eight million dollar budget the address turned out to be the marketing.

Prestige television as a sustained parasocial bargain: writers, actors and marketing presenting themselves as authors of a world viewers inhabit.

A film that functioned as a funeral for eleven characters and was marketed as a collective event.

Six million people remain in a public argument about characters who no longer exist, for years, entirely in good faith.