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As a fiction writer who's read a handful of writing guides and took some writing courses in college, along with the primary project of self knowledge, something has always intrigued me about fiction. The idea of identifying with characters whose personal dramas reflect our own in either implicit or explicit ways. I understand that there's a danger of hero worship, but this is sort of different. For me, I used to be all about action and gore, but even when I was consciously chasing after that stuff, I would always get bored. For the longest of times, I wasn't aware that most of the movies, shows, or books I've enjoyed were so enjoyable because I found my self relating to the characters. I became more aware of that as I grew older, especially when I graduated from high school and even more especially when I learned about characterization that is meant to reflect aspects of the self. I don't know what I wanted to ask you guys in particular, just wondering what your thoughts are on that. It seems to me that the media people consume says a lot about their personalities and why they are drawn to it. People who watch The Big Bang Theory are usually nerds, the people who watch action films are macho-bravado kinda dudes. Not all the time of course, and much like the Breakfast Club, within all of us inhabits a variety of archetypes (hence the Mecosystem or Internal Family System), but there are some archetypical characteristics we enbody more strongly, and that causes us to connect with fictional characters that resemble them. So to watch a movie, show, or read a book, I view that as basically having a drama play out in your mind. Yes it's an external experience, but at the internal level, all those characters represent different centres of your psyche that are at war with each other and the outcome of each story basically gives you an open ended answer as to how all these different aspects of you will play out in your decision making. I have more thoughts on this but that's as much as I can verbalize right now. What are your thoughts on this line of thinking? For me thinking this way has helped my self knowledge, provided that the writing of the media has been written well to realistically portray how certain types of people WOULD behave in the situations they're put in. Just for extra fun, you can click the spoiler below to see why I decided to finally mention this topic.