Why do I like this character so much?

Por Carolina Armada Ciuccie

These last few days I started asking myself why do I like this particular character from Genshin Impact named Kaveh so much? Like, I didn’t even get to the part of the story where he actually appears, and everything I know about him is either superficial or it’s someone’s opinion about his backstory. What about him made me so invested to the point of buying a giant pillow with him printed on top of it? Having these thoughts, I started digging.

I found out that this feeling is related to our capacity to empathize and sympathize with others, which we experience almost everyday. This capacity allows us to at least try to feel and understand what someone else is feeling, sometimes using our own experiences as a starting point, or even picturing us in their shoes, in case we never experienced anything remotely close to what they’re going through. 

Basically, when it comes to empathy and sympathy, our mind doesn’t distinguish real life from made-up scenarios, and we apply the same logic to fictional characters. Howard Sklar, a post doctoral researcher in the English Philology Unit at the University of Helsinki, once said “We’d have no way of processing a character cognitively if we didn’t have experiences with people outside of the fictional world (...) The experiences with fictional characters resonate with us because of the fact that we’ve had deep experiences with people throughout our lives”.

Furthermore, Sklar also said that “As anyone who has watched an engaging film or read an engaging novel knows, we invest ourselves deeply in the experience of living with those characters (...) We tend to respond to them as though they were real individuals”. I wholeheartedly agree with that and I’d go even further and say that sometimes we relate even more to the characters than to real people.

For example, I think I know Kaveh’s whole backstory. He had a loving family until his dad went on a trip in the desert and disappeared. From that point on, his mother fell into a profound depression that deterred her from properly taking care of him, which led him to an early maturity and necessity of taking care of himself on his own. One day his mother left and he was all alone until he met his very close friend… and I’ll stop here because his backstory is enormous.

My point is that, when it comes to characters, you can know their whole lives, motivations and thoughts, and when it comes to people, it’s more complicated. Even if the person is very close to you most of the time you won’t know everything about them. You have to fill in the blanks and even then they can do very unpredictable things. People are multidimensional and characters aren’t, which can lead to people finding more comfort in fiction than real life.

Well, that’s my food for thought for today. I hope you liked it! Don’t forget to share this post with friends you think would like to understand why they like (insert character name) so much.

Bye :3