My characters are acting like they're in a book, sort of

I will never get over how meta my novel is.

It's probably because two major characters are deeply influenced by books and fiction. One of them claims he essentially learned to speak from books (and observed that someone else in the story speaks like he's from a book), and he chose his own name for no reason other than that it literally sounded like the sort of name someone from a book would have. Another is...I was going to say "manipulating" but it's not so much that as "directing"? her situation so that it resembles something that might happen in fiction.

I'm sure there is some sort of message or theme here. (So far what I'm getting is "don't try to live your life like it's a book or you will end up sad because these people ended up said", though they would have ended up sad even if they hadn't consciously acted as though they were in fiction.) At any rate, it's amusing me.