Fictional discourse is, primarily, discourse used to produce literary fictions; there is also the “metafictional” discourse used to talk about fictions, to report their contents or other features. On a traditional view classically articulated by Searle, primary fictional discourse doesn’t have a specific semantics; sentences there just have the semantics they would in their standard uses. Fiction-makers convey their fictions by pretending to use them in their standard ways without doing so, and without what they do giving them a specific, dedicated representational point with a semantics of its own. This view is less popular nowadays than it used to be. A question the now more popular alternative view raises is, what is the contribution of intuitively empty names to such a dedicated semantics? Many supporters of the traditional mere pretense view, including Searle, argued that, in the metafictional uses to which they granted a semantics, apparently empty names are not in fact empty, but refer to some more or less exotic entity. Some of those who grant a dedicated semantics to primary fictional discourse, like Salmon and others, extend this realist view to it. The paper aims to uphold considerations already given by irrealists against these proposals, by highlighting its counterintuitive features and explaining why they are bad in this theoretical setting.