Why Do We Fall In Love With Fictional Characters?

A Psychological Journey Through My Own, Albeit Ill-Advised, Character Bonding

Written by Natalie Walsh

I thought I was in love with Raúl León, despite him being identifiably sociopathic. If you haven’t seen the series Control Z on Netflix, it is about a girl, Sofia, who desperately works to uncover the identity of a hacker blackmailing students at a Mexico City high school. After many theories and twists, the hacker is revealed to be fellow classmate Raúl–the man of my affection–who admittedly committed the blackmailing acts as a means of getting closer to and assuaging Sofia’s all-consuming boredom. 

As I gazed upon this beautiful ocean-eyed boy, descending into a spiral of confused adoration, I decided to learn more about this so-called character bonding. As a result, I have realized that the characters we grow infatuated with, tending as if out of compulsion, reveal more about ourselves than one might expect. They are, in essence, a motif for our inner world. 

To begin, one must look at neurocognition mechanisms, namely that of empathy. Empathy is activated within the lobe termed the right-hemisphere supramarginal gyrus. When communicating with others, the supramarginal gyrus assesses variables such as body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions, as well as our own internal experience to navigate our interactions. Sociopaths, for example, have a low-functioning gyrus whereas empaths, conversely, have a distinctly-high functioning one. However, recent analyses of the supramarginal gyrus show increasing trends in egotism, which report that individuals are more likely nowadays to project their own emotional states onto others. 

One function that assists us in empathizing is our attempt to fill in the gaps of what we do not know about someone else’s situation. We do the same with fictional characters, which is in fact two-fold. On one hand, it can sometimes be easier to empathize with fictional characters because we are often given expositionally detailed and intimate knowledge of them, more so than we arguably would be about someone in our everyday lives. And, on the other hand, as in life, it is our nature to fill in the details of a character’s life and personality which live outside of what is presented to us on the screen. Because of the manner in which they are exposed to us on screen or in a book, it is often psychologically easier for us to fill in those gaps more readily. In addition, we innately fill those gaps with traits that are specifically to our own feelings and wantings, which is critical because this principal strengthens the relationship we feel with said character, thus enacting what is referred to as character bonding. 

Furthermore, the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences determined that our own feelings can distort our empathetic capacity. In this way, when we are watching characters exist in a film, it is very easy for our brains to project our own feelings and wants onto them. And interestingly, the supramarginal and angular gyri also generate the fictive dream-space. Thus, when you combine the empathy that allows us to suspend our disbelief when reading a novel or watching a movie with our capacity to dream, i.e. fill in the gaps of the character presented to us with our own specific fantasies, there is no question that we subsequently feel genuine emotion toward them. 

Moreover, there are schools of psychological thought which deem that almost every trait we find attractive–even those at a subconscious level–can be traced back to the shadow version of ourselves. That is, the version of ourselves we either do not feel safe presenting openly to the world or wish the world would notice about us. In other words, the shadow self is the part of the ego closely linked to deep feelings of personalized identity. This shadow self is therefore readily projected onto characters who, in some way, mirror those deep and personal feelings. Empathy, then, is hyper-activated because we not only feel a strong connection to the character we are watching, but also feel seen in our own deep and often repressed longings. 

Perhaps I was so captivated by Raúl because he looks strikingly similar to the first real-life boy I thought I loved, though, upon years of reflection, my adoration was, in fact, grangerized infatuation. Nevertheless, those we are consumed by in our formative years serve as the framework for our future obsessions and loves. It can be argued that everyone we obsess over is directly correlated to the parts of ourselves we keep most hidden. In some ways, I thought that real-life boy I knew at fifteen was going to save me from all of the things I was terrified of facing. So, being enthralled by his spitting image with piercing blue eyes, tousled hair, and raspy voice–a character who is also rich, cunning, and obsessively consumed by his adoration for and urge to save Sofia, could not be more enticing to me. In that way, it is normal for one to engage in character bonding, for it feeds our suppressed shadow self needs, and therefore, with which fictional characters it is enacted is entirely dependent on the individual.

In conclusion, the ego–or self-identity–is inextricably linked to empathy, and when the mechanisms that supply our ability to empathize and fantasize are activated–especially when presented with characters who tap into our shadow self–character bonding is likely to occur. This is why we see BTS “stans” and fanfiction all over the internet today. And I would argue that in an age with such a decreased lack of interpersonal connection, the rise of character bonding is unsurprising. We all have an inherent need to feel seen, even if that recognition and connection is in fact, sadly, a falsehood concocted in our brains with a manufactured other party such as K-Pop idols or fictional characters of a Netflix series. In a way, character bonding should remind us of our own untended need to connect with others beyond the screen, but rather real-life people who we can feel before us. It is also understandable, however, that there is such an increase in fictive character bonding and a decrease in real-life connection because to be seen by another in real life is so much more daunting but, I would argue, also much more rewarding.