Have we as a society grown so irrational and psychotic that we have to be reminded that there is a boundary between the reality outside our heads and the fantasies within? Are we in danger of drifting into a stupefied slumber where the figments of our dreams can claim the rights that we have previously reserved for concrete entities?The characters of fiction, written down as literature, drawn as manga or anime, expressed in the multitude of means technology has granted to us, lack independent agency. By hijacking our mind's ability to empathize and reason about other minds they create the cognitive illusion that they exist.However we must remember that without sentience, without true moral agency, these mental phantasms whose pseudo-existence is purely within the mind of their hosts can make no ethical claims to the concrete world outside. I can imagine the vilest of crimes within my head without harming a single creature of ethical consequence. I can commit fictional atrocities whose magnitude and horror eclipse the worst tyrant's genocide but still act and be in every way a moral, ethical contributor to society.This fact should be obvious to every sane adult, indeed learning to distinguish between the imaginary and the real is one of the prerequisites for being an adult. I should not need to devote three paragraphs of text to hammering this point but unfortunately I feel I must. People have been charged, prosecuted and punished for this style of thought crime.If such actions were mistakes of a more censorious past one could look back with the knowledge of lessons learned. However not only are real people being prosecuted for crimes against fake people in the present, laws are being passed to make it easier to prosecute this in the future.