The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [7]
The notion that belief is essential to emotion underlies what is sometimes called the paradox of fiction: we care about characters that we don’t believe in. When you play Wind Waker, you feel sympathy for some of the non-player characters, such as the Deku Tree. If you find the story compelling, you are very happy to see Link finally plunge his sword into Ganondorf’s head, and at the end of the game you feel a mix of sadness and satisfaction when Link leaves Outcast Island (for good?) and sails off with Tetra’s pirate ship.
But you don’t believe that there is or was a Deku Tree, you don’t believe that a boy named Link leaves a real place called Outcast Island, and you don’t believe that the game is an account of actual events. Given that this is all made up, why should you respond emotionally to it? When you stop believing that you won a raffle, your happiness disappears. Why don’t your emotions disappear when you realize that you don’t believe in the characters of Wind Waker?
But It All Seems So Real …
Several philosophical theories have been developed to explain this apparent paradox. A common view is that when we watch fictional stories we perform a mental activity we call “the willing suspension of disbelief,” a phrase first used in 1817 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.4 According to this theory, we have emotional responses to Wind Waker because we temporarily believe in its reality. Once we suspend our disbelief, we forget that the Boko Baba we are looking at is not a real carnivorous plant. This view is sometimes called the illusion theory because it suggests that we are under the illusion that what we are seeing is real.
There’s a clear problem with this position, however—we don’t act as if we think the events we are watching are really happening in front of us. When we throw a Bomb Plant to blow up a boulder on Dragon Roost Island, we don’t move the GameCube off the top of our TV so that it doesn’t get knocked to the floor. When we see Aryll taken away by a huge bird, we don’t call the police and report a kidnapping. We never really suspend our disbelief; we always have some disbelief in the events on the screen or else we would respond to them as we respond to real events.
Defenders of the illusion theory may say that suspending our disbelief doesn’t mean that we think the game events are real; it means only that we suspend any belief about the game’s level of reality. We neither believe in them nor disbelieve in them. This response attempts to ward off the objection that we do not act as if we believe the film is real. This response isn’t compelling, however. Since emotions seem to rely on beliefs, why would someone who does not literally believe that the events of Wind Waker are real have an emotional response to the events and the characters in the game?
Think about Link’s Grandmother
Noël Carroll suggests that the illusion theory is based on the false premise that we need to believe in the existence of something in order to respond to it emotionally. He argues that emotions can, in fact, be generated by thoughts alone, and he proposes what he calls the thought theory.5 He gives the example of standing on the edge of a dangerous precipice. We are in no real danger of falling off the edge; our feet are planted safely, there is no wind, and we have no intention of jumping. But if we vividly imagine going over the edge, plummeting, and hitting the ground, we can be genuinely scared. We’re scared, not by a belief that we are in a dangerous situation, but by the mere thought of something bad happening. Carroll also notes that when something bothers us emotionally, we often try not to think about it or to deflect our attention from it to lessen our emotions.
According to the thought theory, we’re sad when Link leaves his grandmother on Outcast Island because the idea of