I just watched a video by Daryl Talks Games titled “What Artificial Romance Does to People“. Although crushes/romance/relationships with artificial characters are stigmatized, Daryl discusses psychological research that suggests that they often have beneficial effects (although not uniformly beneficial). I’m not responding to the video, I just felt inspired to comment on the same subject matter, from an ace lens.

I believe that part of the stigma around artificial romance comes from the idea that they are replacing real girlfriends. “The guy who married Hatsune Miku should get a real girlfriend.” That’s people’s gut reaction, and I am not immune either.  Some degree of crushes on fictional characters seems fairly common, but that degree of artificial romance strikes me as weird. However, I do think we should take our initial reaction, and consciously reject it.

A core ace principle is that nobody needs to get a real girlfriend. No exceptions, not even for allo people. It is irrelevant whether or not a person has a romance with a fictional character–there is no moral imperative for them to form a romance with a real person. We could say that if someone is in love with a fictional character, they’re really just in love with a mental projection, so it’s really just a kind of self-relationship. To this I would say, having a positive self-relationship is a good thing, and it is eminently reasonable to prefer it over a romantic relationship with another person.

It is not my intention to completely dissolve every concern surrounding artificial romance. For example, it is plausible that a person wants to form romantic relationships, but their artificial relationships is a barrier to getting something that they themselves want. (I am posing a hypothetical, and not stating a belief one way or another. The opposite scenario, where an artificial relationship actually helps them find the relationships they want, is also plausible.) There are also other relevant psychological outcomes that I can’t speak to.

Legitimate moral objections could in principle be articulated on these grounds. However, I think dissolving the initial reaction–“they should just get a real girlfriend”–takes most of the wind out of our sails.

In ace spaces, there has been plenty of discussion of aces who get crushes on fictional characters, or celebrities that they would never realistically meet. There’s even a label that gets thrown around, “fictosexual”.

As a lead on the Ace Community Survey, I can say that “fictosexual” always been a bit subthreshold–we are certainly aware that people use the term, but it’s <1% of responses. I strongly suspect that aces forming crushes on characters/celebrities is a much more common phenomenon (as it is also very common among allo folks)–it’s just that people do not necessarily self-label as fictosexual. Often, when people adopt obscure identity labels, they have a good reason to do so. For example, suppose that when someone comes out as ace to her friends, all her friends say, “But aren’t you always going on about your beloved elf vampire?” Or, “How can you be ace when you write such good horny fanfic?” The label “fictosexual” could provide an answer to those questions.

But I’m also sure there are lots of aces who experience various degrees of crushes on fictional characters, but feel little need to assign a word to it. No judgment, I’m just explaining this for readers who aren’t familiar with how obscure identity labels tend to work.

I don’t think people really need a word to deserve respect. But just in case it helps, there’s a word.