Of Gods and Waifus

Fictional, or narrative reality has been surrounding people from the very cradle and accompanying them during their whole life for generations. Media, literature, cinema, video games, even music creates and forms informational environment, laying down certain tastes and values, and also leaves an imprint on the child no worse than the parents themselves. Since our brain doesn't perceive a difference between the real and artfully simulated, often feelings towards a fictional character can be as bright and sincere as feelings for a real person. From an early age, children, under affection of these feelings not only create imaginary friends, but also find role models in the characters and archetypes, trying to idolize and even imitate them. It's logically to assume that every properly accurate fictional character is able to cause deep feelings of any spectrum on a subconscious and associative level.

The concept of waifu and husbando is built upon it: the characters who are wittingly made to be one's partner in accordance with features like appearance, character, temperament, and many other aspects. In other words, a person themselves chooses their own virtual partner, not entering into a real relationship. The waifu phenomenon is much individual, and it's based on an attempt to express oneself through the unconscious. For someone it is a defense mechanism, an attempt to avoid responsibility from relationships, to which the person is not ready or doesn't want to deal with. Someone has a waifu because of the cognitive dissonance which is caused by a non-competitiveness in the date field, a lack of partners, and/or a disappointment in real people. It's also worth to note that, despite the purely Japanese origin of waifu, it can be applied to the fictional characters of all cultures.

If we go deeper, the roots of our feelings lie in the experience, its lack or abscence, and reflective moods. Like in the case of the real people, we estimate characters from the point of experience, consciously or unconsciously associating them with us, or our environment. For example, a character who reminded us about our past relationship experience, can be a waifu or a husbando as well. No less curious, but also no less obscure phenomenon, especially on the western Internet, is a god or goddess. In contrast of waifu, such a character serves as an object of worship, which excludes carnal love and sexual objectification of the virtual partner. If a waifu indirectly comes into contact with the ego of a person who finds themselves in a fictional character, a goddess in some way denies it, being an ideal which is needed to be idolized but cannot be reached. It's interesting that pop-culture has been imposing "real" idols on the consumers for about half of a century, presenting them as something perfect, which leads to depersonalization of these "celebrities", thus creating the images that have nothing in common with the real stars' personalities. In this way, a massively deified idol loses all traits of the "original" and becomes no more than yet another fictional character. Although nowadays this tendency becomes a thing of the past (thanks to the Internet), idols are still common in the Japanese show business and culture generally.

The even less known concept is daughteru/sonfu, but in fact it's also tied up with experience and paternal/maternal feelings. It is even possible to suggest a whole layer of such concepts, but there is no real need in them because of the versatility of social relationship and specifics of personal perception. However, nominal mazuru/fazuru (mother/father), comurado/furendo (comrade/friend), and burada/shishuta (brother/sister) have the right to exist (yes, all their names are intentionally weeaboo-esque just to not deviate from the original waifu/husbando style). Thus, I created the concept of a relationship pyramid which, however, doesn't depend on awareness or unawareness of the images. So, an alter ego, a character that a person associates them with, is situated at the bottom, waifu is higher, and god/goddess on the top, while all the made-up terms are in between.

Anyhow, I will highlight five levels of feelings to the characters:

1. Empathy. A person begins to empathize with the character who causes their internal associations from the subconscious.
2. Sympathy. The character predisposes to a person on an emotional level, causing a soft attraction.
3. Appetence. The level of deeper attachment to the character. Usually on this stage people face the mild form of cognitive dissonance, realizing the illusiveness of the character's personality.
4. Passion. Here a person is able to fall in sincere love with the character, dulling the cognitive dissonance with deep feelings or exacerbating it, which leads to the next stage.
5. Obsession. The highest form of affection and the most keen one. The cognitive dissonance returns and becomes a real problem which a person wants to "solve" immediately by, for example, marrying the character, or creating a tulpa. It's notable that on this level the character begins to acquire the attributes of an idol. A person slowly loses connection to the real world and claim their love as only true and unique, often becoming aggressive to others.

At first sight, it could seem that the social role of waifu and similar concepts is inconsistent, which leads to a quite ambiguous attitude of masses that brand such people as losers. Actually, when a person doesn't go beyond fourth stage, their only problem is the misunderstanding among the people around. Indeed, it's necessary to understand that waifu/husbando are the idealized images of the partner, projected onto a character; nothing than a romanticized idea. One can say that escapism in any form is dangerous, but it can even help some people in many fields, for example, in art and creative processes, and I personally know these people. Eventually, everybody creates the reality that they want to see.