There’s something about the strong characters we like that makes us feel deeply attached to them. Like, genuinely attached as we feel their pains and joys just like they were our close friends or relatives.

The topic is no stranger to academic scholars and Howard Sklar, a postdoctoral researcher in the English Philology Unit at the University of Helsinki, has his own theory. Turns out, our bond with fictional characters reflects our bond with people in the real world.

“We’d have no way of processing a character cognitively if we didn’t have experiences with people outside of the fictional world,” he explains. “The experiences with fictional characters resonate with us because of the fact that we’ve had deep experiences with people throughout our lives.”

And as we invest our attention, time, and empathy in the characters of a particularly engaging film or novel, we begin to respond to them as though they were real individuals. Even if we cannot truly connect with their circumstances, e.g. we have never been in a war, our ability to feel emotionally for fictional beings can transcend these details and make them unimportant. This is what powerful filmmaking and the art of storytelling do to us.