Do you ever wonder what it is about a certain character that makes your heart wrench for their pain, makes you grin in solidarity when they finally get the dream girl, or makes you binge watch the clichéd drama as it plays out on late-night television (although you’ll likely deny this guilty pleasure to your friends)? According to recent psychological theory, it turns out that these characters and their accompanying tropes are influential to us not only because of the entertainment that they provide us, but more significantly, because of the social information that they offer. The intuitive acquisition of social information is a necessary component for the advancement of human beings – this information is the guiding force which allows us to successfully function as social beings by allowing us to communicate with, understand, and trust one another.

Blakey Vermeule’s “The Fictional among Us” from her book Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? illuminates the nuanced ways in which the audience connects with, and learns from, fictional characters. These characters – portrayed through various tropes, schema, and mediums – offer the audience social information that may have otherwise not been afforded to them; allowing us to be privy to insider information that enables us to better navigate our world and the social realms around us. Through our engagement with fictional characters and their social interactions, we may theoretically engage in these interactions which provide us with information, while maintaining a safe distance from the repercussions or consequences of such interactions, as Vermeule argues: “…fiction pays us back with large doses of really juicy social information, information that it would be too costly, dangerous, and difficult for us to extract from the world on our own” (14). In this way, fictional stories are a shortcut to attaining social information that is necessary to our intellectual growth and survival – on an individual and personal level, as well as a collective society.

Following from our engagement with Vermeule’s literary and psychological theory, we extend these theories to encompass the fictional characters of film and television, as a means of broadening the scope of these theories to better illuminate the reoccurrence of these character tropes. This endeavor is supported by the universality of fictional characters and the information they provide, as Vermeule asserts the transference of these concepts across varying mediums: “…fiction is a tool for delivering information and sensation as seamlessly as any other medium – film, print, painting, and so on” (13).

We will be using cult classics to discuss these concepts – the most popular and recognizable characters of our contemporary moment – not only because of the widespread recognition of them, but because their popularity derives from the fact that they offer us such valuable social information. Therefore, to better explore the social implications of these fictional character tropes, we must engage with the characters themselves.