the.com/metafiction

means A story that openly acknowledges it's a made-up narrative, often by drawing attention to its own devices, author, or fictional status.

from A 20th-century academic coinage built from the Greek prefix 'meta-' (beyond, about, self-referential) plus 'fiction' — the same 'meta' that gives us metadata and metalanguage. The term surfaced in literary criticism around the 1970s to describe novels that step outside their own story to comment on storytelling itself, though the trick of fiction winking at its own artifice is far older than the word for it.