Akihiko Kondo is the face of fictosexuality. Often understood as a niche expression of asexuality, this is the label given to those who are only attracted to fictional characters. And like people who experience “objectum sexuality” — a sexual attraction to objects such as trains, roller coasters or balloons — fictosexuals are adored by the tabloids, which leap on stories like Kondo’s. A few years ago, he married a hologram of a fictional pop singer, only for their relationship to hit choppy water this spring when his wife’s software expired. Others have reported feeling attracted to Mario Kart’s Luigi and Disney’s Robin Hood.
If the Western media presents these individuals as digital freakshows, in Japan the fictosexuality phenomenon is widely known: it has been a named trend since at least the Eighties. There, fictosexuals aren’t anomalies, but rather outgrowths of the otaku subculture, which attracts people whose interest in pop culture is so intense that they retreat from public life, becoming “hikikomori” or “shut-ins”.
Though sometimes described as “suffering” with a 2D complex, as they call it, Japanese fictosexuals see their proclivity as an orientation; in fact, some are fighting for legal recognition. In the fascinating Fictosexual Manifesto, the authors claim that they are “beyond the heterosexual matrix”, boldly stating that they must “denaturalise interpersonally oriented sexuality” — a conception of sexuality that privileges human-to-human attraction.
Academia has also been known to take orientations such as fictosexuality and objectum sexuality seriously — much more so than the media. However, the literature is sparse and concentrated outside of the Western world. In the West, meanwhile, a handful of existing studies have suggested that fictosexuals — and objectum sexuals — exhibit a few important qualities. One, they’re not crazy: they’re not like the delusional erotomaniacs who believe their objects return their affections. Rather, the “fictophilic paradox” is that you know your love is one-sided, but your emotions persist regardless. Two: preliminary data shows they’re more likely to have autistic qualities, suggesting a link between fictosexulity and difficulties with interpersonal relationships. And three, despite the traditional belief that romantic love revolves around personhood, even more important is the feeling that the object of one’s affection has a personality. In other words, there’s reason to believe that for fictosexuals, one-sided love is real love.
Some outspoken fictosexuals, such as the authors of The Fictosexual Manifesto and people on the r/fictosexual subreddit, have argued that their delegitimisation and stigmatisation, such as the claims that their partnerships “aren’t real”, is a form of bigotry. But it’s not hard to see why some people prefer to laugh at fictosexuality. It destabilises our most basic assumptions about love. Or at least what we think our most basic assumptions about love are. But what if those assumptions are worth revising?
The truth is that there is already some acceptance that you can feel attracted to someone who largely exists inside your own head. Centuries ago, it was common for mystics to describe ecstatic love after visions of divine entities. And Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he claimed to adore despite having met her only twice, is usually presented as romantic.
In fact, I suspect that fictosexuality is an extreme version of something we all experience occasionally, even if we are not used to naming it. Most people have experienced celebrity crushes; they are usually seen as a normal part of fandom. So many people love Taylor Swift or Harry Styles or a member of BTS, knowing they will never receive any affection in return — a dynamic very like the fictophilic paradox. And sometimes this love is extreme or even genuinely delusional, for instance, in the woman who recently went viral on TikTok for her belief that she is “in a relationship” with Enrique Iglesias. It is also not seen as pathological to feel attracted to, for instance, Mr Darcy. In Cassandra Clare’s 2003 essay, “Fictional Character Crushes”, she writes that such attraction is “one-sided, but strangely satisfying for all that”.
In some ways, all crushes begin as one-sided crushes on fictional characters. When we first meet a person, we imagine them to be a certain way, but they will invariably turn out to be someone quite different. Perhaps Janet Malcolm put it best in 1980: “The most precious and inviolate of entities — personal relations — is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.”
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