Fictional objects are sometimes modelled as abstract entities; according to some theories, fictional objects are abstract artefacts, i.e. entities that are created by their authors, while according to some other theories, fictional objects are eternal Platonic entities. Both kinds of theories usually suggest that there are two types of relation between such an abstract object and its properties: to use a well-established nomenclature, a fictional object can be said to exemplify certain properties and encode some other properties. The aim of the present paper is to show that the exemplification vs. encoding distinction is not general enough. This is because it is possible to find properties that a fictional object obviously has in some sense, but it makes no good sense to say that it either exemplifies or encodes them.