Feruchemical Duralumin and parasocial interaction

[Oudeis he/him]

As I sit here bored on a Saturday afternoon without a lot going on, I'm watching an episode of Voyager (quit judging me and stay on point) and thinking this would be a good time to store my spiritual and emotional connection to people in a duraluminmind. After all, I'm being pretty anti-social, no one is around, no one is especially on my mind at the moment, I wouldn't be losing much.

 

But then I wondered... is it only your connection to actual people that gets stored? What about fictional people? I'm enjoying this episode because I care what happens to Kes and Amelia Earhart. Psychologists call this a parasocial relationship, and taken too far it's why Sandra Bullock found a stalker in her bedroom a few weeks ago.

 

Would I enjoy the show less, would I care less about the characters in the show, if I were storing feruchemical duralumin? Would it affect my ability to care about fictional people?

 

Do fictional people have spiritwebs and cognitive aspects? After all, a big part of a rock's cognitive aspect is, "how do people think about the thing"? I should think there are a great many people out there who have a very strong, firmly held and reasonably homogenous idea of what Captain Malcolm Reynolds is like. Even though he has no physical form, shouldn't he have a cognitive aspect? If he doesn't, where do all these thoughts and impressions go?

 

If he does have a cognitive aspect, why can't he have a spiritweb? If he does, and I watch the episode where he stands naked in a desert telling himself that everything went according to plan, do I care about the plot because my spiritweb has a connection to his? And isn't that exactly what feruchemical duralumin stores?

 

I've built a very flimsy bridge of speculation, assumptions and outright guesses. This is certainly not something I for-sure believe is true, myself. I just thought it might be something that could spark perhaps some speculation or a discussion. Or maybe someone will immediately reply with the WoB saying, "Nope, it's like this," and I'll feel like a right muggins.

 

Tentatively, personally, and until I am shown evidence to the contrary, I'm going to say that storing in a duraluminmind would lessen the experience of watching Voyager for me.

[Silus - Shard of Flame he/him]

I would imagine that, because all relationships generally have different levels of connection coming from each participant, that your relationship with the person on TV (and btw, I'm totally a fan of Voyager too, so I offer you my solidarity) is like an entirely one sided relationship.  I would agree that yes, storing duralumin connection would lessen your relationship with the characters, but I would say this does not require the fictional people to have anything at all.  I do think that once TV is invented on Roshar they'll start seeing spren of fictional people start popping up more and more due to that same cognitive existence you referred to with your Firefly example.

 

As sorta mini versions of the godspren?

Edited July 27, 2014 by Silus - Shard of Flame

[digitalbusker he/him]

Outis, that's a really interesting question, and I think it's going on my personal list of questions-to-ask-if-and-when. Have an upvote.

 

Intuitively it seems like it should reduce your capacity for parasocial interaction, but I don't see an obvious Realmatic framework for it unless fictional characters are actually "real" in some Realmatic sense.

 

...and I'm pretty sure reducing my capacity to form emotional connections with fictional characters would make Voyager more enjoyable for me.

[Shaggai]

Feruchemical duralumin stores Connection, so it's pretty likely that you would feel differently about characters in books. In fact, you could probably store more things than just connection in the sense of caring about someone. Someone with Feruchemical duralumin could probably store a spren bond. I don't know what would happen if they tapped it, though. Perhaps it would repair a broken bond. If someone else tapped it, perhaps it would bond them to the spren.

 

Incidentally, I wonder what the Spiritual Realm looks like. Part of it is probably mapped to the Physical and contains various entities, which are then connected to other entities in all sorts of ways, forming a spiritweb. But it apparently contains ideals, which is fascinating, since ideals seem like they would be (at least partially) Cognitive. Another part of it is probably mapped to the Cognitive realm, as there are plenty of Cognitive entities with Spiritual properties. So the Spiritual Realm is probably at least four-dimensional, containing a certain number of three-dimensional areas. (Of course, if it isn't, that just makes it even more interesting.) The Physical would be one, the Cognitive another, and possibly ideals as a third, which might overlap with Cognitive. If it doesn't overlap, then it is probably still affected by the Cognitive. 

[Swimmingly he/him]

Might it be that place Dalinar saw during his highstorm vision? The one with stone, and images made of smoke billowing into the sky?

[Oudeis he/him]

...and I'm pretty sure reducing my capacity to form emotional connections with fictional characters would make Voyager more enjoyable for me.

 

 

lol, well done, sir.

 

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