VR as a metaleptic possible world of global citizenship embodiment: a cognitive stylistic approach.

This article investigates how the virtual reality (VR) movie *Baba Yaga* employs immersive narrative techniques to foster global citizenship values through participants' avatarian embodiment and metaleptic interaction. Produced by Baobab Studios in partnership with the United Nations, *Baba Yaga* is a 30-minute interactive VR experience that engages users in a story about environmental conservation and moral responsibility, inviting them to embody multiple possible selves—including empathetic, responsible, and moral selves—within a dynamically reconfigurable virtual world. Using a cognitive stylistic framework centered on storyworld possible selves (SPSs) and interactional metalepsis, the study analyzes how VR affordances and narrative discourses (such as flashbacks, performatives, and doubly deictic "you") enable participants to experience self-transformation and develop empathy, agency, and intercultural awareness. The findings suggest that VR narratives like *Baba Yaga* create hybrid extra- and intra-diegetic spaces where participants co-author the story through embodied actions, promoting experiential understanding of global citizenship and encouraging reflection on real-world social and environmental responsibilities.