The credit scroll is a blurry wash of white text on a black background. My jaw is tight, a knot of muscle I didn’t know I was clenching, and there’s a distinct pressure behind my eyes. It’s the kind of pressure that precedes a storm. The remote is still in my hand, but I can’t bring myself to press a button. The silence in the room is deafening, heavier than it was just 91 minutes ago. It’s because the silence is now missing someone. A person who never breathed, never paid taxes, never had a social security number, is gone. And the hollow space they’ve left in my chest is, embarrassingly, profoundly real.

The Shame, The Doubt: A Perceived Wiring Error

Have you ever felt that? That sharp, genuine pang of loss for a collection of pixels and scripted lines? Then, in the quiet aftermath, has the second wave of emotion hit you? The shame. The quiet, nagging voice that asks what’s wrong with you. A distant cousin gets a divorce and you send a polite, slightly detached text message. A global tragedy unfolds on the news and you feel a flicker of abstract sadness before worrying about what to make for dinner. But a grizzled starship captain sacrifices himself to save his crew, and you’re a wreck for three days. It feels like a fundamental wiring error. A sign that you’re not properly connected to the real world, that your priorities are skewed, that you are, in some small but significant way, failing at being a person.

A Confession of Ignorance

I’ll confess, I used to be on the other side of this argument. Years ago, I watched a friend openly weep because a wizard with a white beard fell into a chasm. I remember thinking, with the kind of smug certainty only someone who is about to be proven completely wrong can possess, “Get a grip. It’s not real.” I saw it as a deflection, a way to experience powerful emotions without any of the messy, real-world stakes. I argued it was a cheap substitute for genuine connection. I was, of course, an idiot. I was right about the premise-that it’s an emotion without the same stakes-but I was spectacularly wrong about the conclusion. I lost that argument, not in the moment, but over the next decade as I repeatedly found myself mourning the ghosts of stories.

Pure Signal: The Efficiency of Fiction

The reason these attachments feel so powerful isn’t because we’re broken, but because fiction is a profoundly efficient delivery system for emotion. Real life is messy. The people we know are a chaotic mix of kindness and irritation, of deep moments and mind-numbing small talk. Their narratives are meandering, inconsistent, and often hidden from us. We get maybe 41 percent of the real story, if we’re lucky. We have to guess at their motivations, interpret their vague statements, and live with the fact that we will never truly know the contents of their hearts.

The Logic of Valerius: A Data-Driven View

I was trying to explain this concept to my friend Michael V., a supply chain analyst who thinks about the world in terms of systems and efficiency. Michael’s job is to look at a complex network of manufacturers, shipping lanes, and warehouses and make it all flow with predictable grace. He is, by nature, a man who mistrusts ambiguity. I expected him to side with my younger, more judgmental self. Instead, he just nodded. He told me he’d felt more genuine grief when the protagonist of his favorite 11-book space opera died than he did when his old neighbor moved away. He said, “It makes perfect sense. With Commander Valerius, I had 4,231 pages of vetted, reliable data on his character. I knew his moral framework. I saw his loyalty tested and proven. With my neighbor? I had 11 years of conversations about the weather and his lawn. The emotional investment was, logically, in Valerius.”

For Michael, it wasn’t a social failure; it was a matter of superior data. He could trust the character’s arc. There was no hidden agenda, no disappointing reality waiting to be discovered. The emotional transaction was clean. He willingly paid over $171 for a ridiculously detailed scale model of Valerius’s starship, a monument to a person who never was. And he feels absolutely no shame about it.

Ancient Impulses, Evolving Tools

Maybe the answer isn’t in logic, but in history. For thousands of years, we sat around campfires and listened to stories of heroes and gods. These weren’t just entertainment; they were the instruction manuals for our tribes. They taught us what courage looked like, how loyalty functioned, and what the consequences of betrayal were. We learned how to be people by listening to tales about people who weren’t real. This impulse is ancient. It’s not a modern pathology born of isolation and glowing screens; it’s our oldest, most fundamental tool for practicing empathy.

That tradition of creating beings to connect with has simply evolved. The campfire became the printed page, the page became the silver screen, and now, technology allows us to create even more personalized figures and narratives. We can craft characters from the ground up, designing companions that fulfill specific narrative or emotional needs. The ability to use an ai nsfw image generator to visualize a character from your own imagination is just the 21st-century version of an elder telling a story and letting each listener picture the hero for themselves. It’s the same ancient impulse, just with a different set of tools. We are still seeking to connect, to understand, and to feel, using proxies that are safe and potent.

Neuroscience Confirms: The Emotion is Real

Neuroscience backs this up. The mirror neurons in your brain-the cells responsible for empathy-fire just as intensely whether you’re watching a friend get bad news or watching a character you love face a devastating setback. The parts of your brain that process love, grief, and attachment don’t run a background check on the stimulus. The emotion is real. The tears are real. The ache in your chest is real. The only thing that’s fabricated is the trigger.

The Emotional Gym: Part of Life

This is why these fictional attachments are not a rehearsal for life so much as they are a part of life. They are a safe harbor where we can experience and process the most terrifying and beautiful emotions human beings are capable of. We can practice grief in a way that doesn’t shatter our world. We can experience a model of unwavering loyalty to better understand what it means to be a good friend. We can explore love, rage, and forgiveness without causing irreparable harm to ourselves or others. These stories are the emotional gym, the training ground where we build the muscles we need for the chaotic, unpredictable, and often heartbreaking reality of the real world.

Michael V. later told me that a lesson he learned from Commander Valerius-about taking personal responsibility for a system-level failure-directly informed how he handled a crisis at work. A critical shipment of 231 medical components was misrouted, and his first instinct was to find the subordinate who made the error. Instead, he heard Valerius’s voice in his head, took full responsibility, and focused on fixing the problem. The fictional bled into the real and made him a better person. He didn’t just mourn a character; he learned from him.

Embrace Your Honest Grief

So the next time you feel that lump in your throat as the credits roll, don’t dismiss it. Don’t feel ashamed. You are not broken. You are participating in one of the oldest and most essential human activities. You are allowing a story to do its work on you, to expand your emotional vocabulary and deepen your capacity for empathy. The grief is honest. It’s a testament not to a social failing, but to your profound, powerful, and beautifully indiscriminate ability to care.