And then there's all the callbacks to those. Here's a few lines of Keats I read recently:

...but to that second circle of sad Hell

Where in the gust, the whirl-wind, and the flaw

Of hail-stones, lovers need not tell

Their sorrows; pale were the lips I saw

Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

For those keeping score at home, that's Keats alluding to Dante alluding to a famous and semi-legendary Italian love affair. And the Bible, of course. Earlier in the same poem, Keats throws in a lot of references to Greek myth too.

I know very little anime, actually. I could be missing something, I haven't read Joyce, but all the best novels I'm familiar with - whether it's something like the Great Gatsby or Dune - don't seem to do this.

Are we talking about the same thing? I am not talking about meaningful allusions and indirect references, or borrowing from myth and exotic cultures, or re-tellings of the same story for a different effect. I am talking about this kind of blunt, literal, fourth-wall-breaking namedropping of things that have no business being in your story.

Let me give examples of what I do and do not find problematic. For instance, HPMoR's references to Tolkien are fine. They make sense. What is really being mentioned are the works of Tolkien, we're not asked to believe that Legolas was part of magical Britain's history. Of course the works of Tolkien would exist in HPMoR's reality, and Muggleborn children could cause Dumbledore to be familiar with them. I loved that bit where Dumbledore speaks about all the copies of LotR he'd been gifted, and part of the reason I loved it was how much sense it made in retrospect.

On the other hand, we have Mornelithe Falconsbane - a fantasy character - mentioned next to Hitler as an important historical figure. This is a pointless, throwaway insert in its purest form, an author being 'clever'. It exists only for the sake of itself, it adds nothing to the story - take it out and nothing is missing, it's never mentioned again nor did it affect anything. All it does is break the fourth wall.

Seems to me that it's a lose-lose thing to do. To those who aren't familiar with the Valdemar books, it means nothing, so it's useless. To those who are, it's immersion-breaking. Even in the depths of my happy death spiral back when I first discovered HPMoR and blazed through it in near-pure joy, I found that stuff jarring.

Your last name alludes to another excellent example … so much so that I had to check that you didn't just create it for the sake of this comment!

Joyce does it non stop in Ulyesses. Most of the works of Vladimir Nabokov do it very heavily. As does Pynchon.

Your argument would be more convincing if you had managed to actual provide some good literature, as opposed to pompous garbage, as examples.