Why We Feel for Fictional Characters

Fictional characters don’t exist. Why do we feel so deeply for them?

My kids love to mock my mawkishness as the movie Coco draws to a close. It is a psychological impossibility for me to watch it end without unseemly wailing and snurfling.

But why on earth am I crying? I obviously know Coco is not a true story. In fact, I don’t think it could be. So, what gives?

When I ask people for their thoughts, they often challenge me: Why shouldn’t we emote at fictional stories? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with emoting at fictional stories. It’s one of the great joys of my life! But my curiosity persists: Why do so many of us engage so frequently in this puzzling behavior?

Usually, if the object of our emotion (that is, the thing we’re scared of or happy for or cringe at) does not exist, the emotion evaporates —or, at least, it should. My youngest child is terrified of tornadoes. When he gets scared, we look at weather radar. The non-existence of nearby tornadoes is calming to him.

Philosopher Colin Radford gives another example: you’re catching up with a friend, who tells you that his sister has cancer and is absolutely miserable. You feel great pity for his sister. Then your friend says, “I’m just kidding! I don’t even have a sister!” Immediately, the pity is gone (with anger likely now in its place). Why? There’s no sister. She doesn’t exist.

But fiction is different. If you tell me that the events and characters in Coco don’t exist, it doesn’t stop my crying.

Most people offer an explanation of our emotions toward fictions along the lines of, “Well, it’s suspension of disbelief” or “the characters are real to us” or “our non-conscious minds can’t readily distinguish fictional events from real events.”

In general, most seem to think the emotions we feel for fictions are either the same as we have toward actually-existing people or events, or a watered-down version of those. They seem to think that we, on some level or other, really believe—if only temporarily—in fictional characters.

Earlier this week, I posed the question on Twitter, and most agreed with this line of thinking.

The reasoning feels intuitively correct. We normally have emotions for stuff in which we believe, so if we have emotions for fictional characters, it follows that we on some level believe in them.

However, I don’t think this is quite right. I’m inclined to think we often don’t believe these characters exist; that is, I’m inclined to think we retain a sense of their “fictionality.”

Philosophers have long been interested in emotional responses to fictions. Plato characterized the phenomenon as an irrational, effeminate weakness that ought to be severely curtailed in an ideal society. Aristotle was moved to answer a related puzzle: why we enjoy tragedies.

More recently, the phenomenon has been seen by Anglophone philosophers as a paradox, known as “the paradox of fiction.” In this sort of paradox, we have a group of statements that all seem to be plausible but cannot all be true at the same time. The challenge lies in deciding which of the plausible statements is not true.

1. Emotions require belief in the existence of their objects.
2. People have emotions for fictional characters and events.
3. People do not believe that fictional characters and events exist.

Since these obviously cannot all be true at the same time, the question is which statement we should deep-six. Most (but definitely not all!) of the replies to my tweet would get rid of (3). They argue that we do, in some way or other, believe that fictional characters exist.

Different philosophers have defended denying of each of these. I’m inclined to ax (1). Sometimes we have emotions for things that don’t exist.

Kendall Walton is a philosopher who has made a famous argument arguing that we don’t actually believe, or even half-believe, in the existence of fictions. He offers as an example a movie-goer named Charles, who screams and clutches the armrest when the Green Slime slowly slithers toward him.

What would Charles do, Walton asks, if he actually believed that the Green Slime was approaching? Just sit there and scream? Surely not. He’d probably at least run away. Perhaps he’d call 911.

Charles does none of those things. In fact, he’d probably be pretty annoyed if someone else in the theater called 911 and the fire department burst in the theater and interrupted the movie.

In short, we don’t act like we believe that the fictions are real. An exception may be jump scares. If the slime did not slowly slither but burst into the frame, we might have a gut-level bodily reaction that more or less takes the slime as real.

But those kind of quick, gut reactions are not the majority of our movie emotions, and probably next to none of the emotions we might feel at other narrative art forms: novels, graphic novels, etc. These emotions are sustained over time, and are often the product of reflection.

There are other reasons besides our behavior to suspect we don’t believe in the fictional objects for which we have emotions. The emotions we feel toward fictional events is often quite different than what we would feel if we believed the events were happening.

Take this scene from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup.

Let’s say I believe that a man exists, wearing a huge curly wig and communicating solely by blowing a horn. Further, I believe that this man is harassing a lemonade vendor by repeatedly stealing his hat and eventually by jumping in his lemonade tank and stomping on the lemons. I am honestly not sure what my emotional response would be. I suppose I would have something like pity for the lemonade seller, and be simultaneously unnerved by and concerned for the harasser. I definitely wouldn’t find it funny, as most audience members do.

It’s not only the events of a fiction that make us. The work’s style and context of its creation (such as the genre or the author) are major factors in our emotional responses to fictions. If we believed on some level that the events were real, the context of the creation of the work wouldn’t be relevant.

In an Agatha Christie murder mystery, someone is (of course) murdered. When I hear about real life murders, I’m sad; yet I can’t imagine grieving for the victim in an Agatha Christie novel.

That’s not to say that someone who cries for an Agatha Christie corpse has had an illegitimate reaction. Rather, the fact that most people don’t feel any sadness whatsoever at what is objectively a sad occurrence means that—at least some of the time—it is not the case that people are emoting toward fictions because they believe they are true.

We could not experience the humor of parodic fiction if we simply take the depicted events at face value.

When someone binges a TV show or reads, she is not simply believing that the events are happening in a fictional world and emoting accordingly. Fictional works are a kind of communication. She is aware of the identity of the author, aware of the manner in which the story is told, aware of the context of the work’s creation, guesses at what was meant by the work. In short, in addition to the events of the fiction, she keeps simultaneously in her mind several facts that are true of the actual world.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the factors that can affect our emotions toward fictions which do not directly arise from the characters and events that we are watching or reading about.

• Degree of resemblance to actual world. Emotional responses are often more vivid if the fiction resembles the actual world. Uncle Tom’s Cabin famously moved readers because they recognized that events similar to the ones in the novel really occurred. Relatedly, if a work involves real people, that may evoke different emotions. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter may not be all that close to the actual world (so far as I know), but in using Abraham Lincoln as a character, the novel and movie can evoke a number of emotions an audience already associates with Lincoln.
• Identity of author, and attitude of author toward events in work. A serial killer depicted with approval by the author will generate a very different emotional response from a reader than a serial killer depicted with horror by the author. Facts about the author’s life may also play a role. If a reader knows that a moralizing author is being hypocritical, a book will be read differently.
• References to other fictional works. In the James Bond movie Casino Royale, Daniel Craig playing James Bond emerges from the ocean, clad only in a bathing suit, much like Ursula Andress as the iconic Bond Girl in Dr. No. The moment is funny as a role-reversal, and it also serves as a signal that this movie will take a different attitude toward women than previous James Bond movies. Again, our emotions might be affected by something other than what we are directly perceiving.
• Style or tone. Whether a work comes across as humorous, satirical, nostalgic, parodic, self-serious, pedantic, etc., will affect emotional response above and beyond actual events of the novel.
• Aesthetic value. We are less likely (with some guilty-pleasure exceptions) to be moved by works of lesser quality.
• Facts about the audience member’s life. If a movie closely resembles an emotional experience one has had, or one greatly fears having, or one greatly desires having in one’s own life, that will affect the response. Ask any parent about watching a movie where kids are endangered.
• Plausibility. When a scene seems especially emotionally plausible or implausible, or seems to evoke some truth of human nature (or fail to evoke it), an emotional response can be affected.

To sum up, we do not behave as if we believe fictional characters and events exist, and the emotions we feel are often different than the ones we would feel if we believed those characters and events existed. I can’t, then, go along with the idea that we generally suspend our disbelief when we engage in fictions, or that a non-conscious part of our minds believes the events are true.

That, however, is not at all diminution of the importance and richness of fiction. Quite the contrary! Our feelings for fictions are like nothing else. They have an added richness and complexity and subtlety that are simply extraordinary.