Posthuman Love: Influences of Romantic Relationships with and Attachment to Fictional Characters on Intimacy and Romance

With the growing popularity of the virtual world, an increasing number of people have become attracted to the fictional characters they encounter in animation, comics, and video games (ACG). Sometimes, attraction can evolve into strong and lasting feelings of love and attraction towards some fictional characters and this is referred to as fictosexuality. However, in the allonormative and anthropocentric world, fictosexuality is often considered abnormal because of its imaginary nature and stigmatised as a pathological effect of addiction to ACG in contemporary popular culture (Karhulahti & Välisalo, 2021). Liebers and Schramm (2019) reviewed studies on one-way bonds established between an individual and a character since 1956. They discovered that these studies often consider parasocial relationships problematic and focus on the negative psychological characteristics of individuals engaged in them (Liebers & Schramm, 2019).

To address this common conception towards fictosexuality, this paper first examines the engagement of romantic and sexual attractions and the relationship with fictional characters from the posthumanist perspective. The Posthuman theory points out that the boundary between human embodiment and technology has been blurred and that the anthropocentric assumption that supports asymmetrical relations between humans and nonhumans can no longer be sustained (Åsberg and Braidotti, 2018; Hayles, 1997). According to this interpretation, fictosexual relationships are as valid as all allosexual relationships and carry with them the potential to transform our conception and practice of (allonormative and anthropocentric) intimacy. Then, through in-depth interviews with 20 young adults in Taiwan, who were engaged in romantic relationships with fictional characters from ACG, this paper addresses how engaging in fictosexual relationships influences individuals’ sexual and romantic conceptions. In particular, it discusses how allonormativity and the ontological difference between allosexual relationships and fictosexual relationships induce fictosexual individuals to be conscious and reflexive of their romantic and intimate feelings.