Emotional attachment to fiction: a historical perspective
The piece explores why people form emotional bonds with fictional characters, suggesting it may be rooted in our long history of oral storytelling where fact and fiction were blurred. It cites examples like the Iliad to illustrate how even ancient audiences likely couldn't separate real events from invented ones. The discussion continues from reader submissions.
The piece draws on New Scientist's "Last Word" reader forum, where scientific questions receive reader-submitted answers. The response highlights how oral transmission inherently distorts information, making ancient audiences unable to reliably separate historical events from invented narratives. The Iliad serves as a key example: its Catalogue of Ships preserves Bronze Age Greek geography that differed from later classical geography, while the name Achilles appears in Mycenaean Linear B tablets—though not as the heroic figure we know.
The argument implies that emotional investment in characters doesn't require factual existence. If ancient listeners cared about Socrates (historically real) and Achilles (possibly legendary) with equal intensity, our modern attachment to fictional characters follows the same psychological pattern.
This perspective could reshape how readers understand their emotional responses to fiction, framing attachment to characters as a natural extension of humanity's long oral tradition rather than a modern quirk. It may encourage audiences to view their bonds with fictional figures as culturally continuous with ancient practices, potentially deepening appreciation for storytelling's role in human cognition. The piece could also prompt reflection on how contemporary media—where fact and fiction increasingly blend—mirrors historical patterns of information transmission, affecting how people evaluate credibility in news and entertainment alike.