What If We Reframed Our "Obsession" with Fictional Characters?

There are a lot of things that I look at our culture and think "why is this how we view X thing?" It came up the other day when I was trying to find a word to describe the feeling of wanting someone to take care of you. The only words anyone could come up with were negative: "needy", "clingy"- passing the message that needing something or someone is wrong or shameful somehow.

One that's been coming up for me a lot lately is how society views people who form strong emotional attachments to fictional characters. This is framed as "obsession", attempted to squash because it's not "real human connection." They don't exist so therefore it "doesn't count." They're "not real."

But let's reframe that. They aren't a real-life person who you can have a conversation with, but they are very much real, because they came from someone's imagination, and that person put their life and their emotions and their personality on paper, on screen, or in audio. It's also worth looking at the people who turn to fictional characters for comfort and why. From what I've observed, a lot of these people are neurodivergent, meaning they have conditions such as Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, or OCD, among others. A lot of them don't have friends in real life. A lot of them have troubled home lives. Even the ones who don't have any of those things may connect deeply to a fictional character, and why is that bad? Why does it have to be squashed? Can't a person have meaningful connections to real life human beings and fictional characters? At the same time? As a side note, I think it's also worth noting that in our culture, any job involving film or television is not seen as a "real job."

I write about this because [***SPOILERS AHEAD***] I've spent a long time carrying around shame for how deeply upset I was by the death of Dr. Lance Sweets on Bones- because "no one actually died, and he was a fictional character, so why the hell are you letting this trivial thing mess with your emotional well-being. It doesn't matter."

Except it did matter. Lance Sweets is not trivial to me.

Besides being endlessly adorable, Sweets is kind, compassionate, wicked smart, is constantly searching for the truth, and his calling to become a psychologist mirrors my own calling as a storyteller. It comes from a similar place, which is childhood trauma fueling a desire to heal people (however that looks). The character speaks to me deeply, and I'm not ashamed to admit is basically the reason I watched Bones (besides Angela and Hodgins and the squinterns).

And this has been true my whole life. It didn't start with him. I grew up with the Fellowship from Lord of the Rings. Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Borimir, Gandalf, and Arwen were part of my every day life. Before that, barely out of toddlerhood, I had a deep connection to Harry Potter. Since I was born, I had such a deep connection to the characters in Winnie the Pooh that even as the 25-year-old I am now, there's a certain type of anxious I get that only they can fix. When I was a little kid, I stacked my Winnie the Pooh stuffies on top of me so that monsters couldn't find me.

I look to my TV grandmas (Dorothy Zbornak, Sophia Petrillo, Rose Nylund, and Blanche Devereaux) for comfort when I can't sleep, or when I'm sick, or just for any reason I see fit. I've formed connections that don't always make sense to me right away to characters like Anakin Skywalker. I've commiserated as a purple loving professional worrier with Amber Brown, and I've been inspired in bravery by Alanna of Trebond. I've giggled along to Dharma & Greg and their families, I've howled at the antics of Shawn and Gus, I've cried at Elizabeth Swann's battle cry, and sat shocked when Will Turner was stabbed in the heart. I went from actual dislike of Tony Stark to sobbing at his death.

Someone told me recently that they think it's beautiful that I have strong connections to fictional characters, and they hope I can release my shame around that. I cried. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Because I'm not crazy, and neither is anyone else. It made me realize that strong connections to fictional characters are not only not trivial, but they may be vitally important. They are how we make sense of the world. They are how we deal with our wounds or our hardships. They provide information on what our values are and the parts of ourselves we may not like. Somebody once said that movies and TV are basically modern mythology. Storytelling has been around since the dawn of humanity, and it's how we navigate a groundless world.

I formed strong connections to Winnie the Pooh when I was a baby sick in the hospital.

I formed a strong connection to Harry Potter at a time when, even though not literally, I was metaphorically orphaned.

I formed a strong connection to the Fellowship for reasons I still don't fully know, but I know I relate heavily to Frodo, essentially have a Sam in my life, laugh with Merry and Pippin, and view Aragorn as a protector.

I formed a strong connection to The Golden Girls when I was becoming sick again and in desperate need of some laughter and uplifting.

I formed as strong connection to Anakin because, whatever anyone says about him, I recognized the fact that he was a child being manipulated, and I came to understand later that I was in an eerily similar position. And I recognized, even though I couldn't articulate it or even formulate it in my brain, how his descent into darkness was 100% because his sensitivity was not properly cared for and it was preyed upon.

And I formed a strong connection to Vincent Nigel-Murray, Angela Montenegro, Jack Hodgins, Daisy Wick, and especially Lance Sweets in a time when I felt virtually alone in a house full of people. Some of the darkest times in my life, and I looked to them for comfort. I would literally sometimes just watch Sweets scenes, and for reasons I'm sure I wasn't even aware of at the time. I believe whole-heartedly that because the character is a psychologist, and he fueled my interest in psychology, that he's the reason it even occurred to me to seek therapy when things started to feel wrong.

I think the answer here is not to trivialize people who seek comfort in or even prefer fictional characters to real people. Maybe sometimes they're trapped in a situation with toxic people. Or maybe some people just aren't sure how to navigate their world and so they look to these characters for help and guidance. Maybe their life is just fine, but Grogu's just so cute and cuddly. In any case, I think instead of squashing the "obsession" with fictional characters because a person isn't making connections in their real life, maybe the solution is to help them make connections in their real life in addition to that fictional character. Don't take that away from them. They can both be important.