The Appeal of the Unattainable

I have been playing some Starfield lately and whenever I play Starfield I spend an unreasonable amount of time going to one specific area of Neon City’s underbelly, where a homeless panhandler sits perpetually begging by the dumpsters and a collection of blue barrels labeled “ORGANIC WASTE.” And there, I use Starfield’s photo mode to take pictures of her.

This is Huong Le, and I have talked about her before, because I have developed a strong fixation on her. I’m kind of in love with her. Which is pointless, because she’s not real. She’s a 3D model with a handful of stock animations and a voice-over. She doesn’t actually exist. And what does exist of her, this minor NPC tucked away in a dusty corner of the game, involved in precisely one optional side quest… is just not very much. She’s been homeless on the streets of Neon for six years, but there’s no information available on what she has done in that six years or what she did before.

She eats out of the garbage thrown out by the fish market, and comments “I can’t eat everything they throw away, but I can eat enough.” This isn’t a complaint that they throw away too much garbage and she can’t eat that much; she’s observing that most of what they throw away isn’t fit to eat. She wears a dirty yellow sweatshirt with a plastic bag over it for warmth and waterproofing. Her trousers are rubberised fishing waders. Her footwear is a pair of heavy rubber rain boots.

And yet, her voice is cheerful and upbeat. She is unflappably optimistic about her prospects, keeping “spreadsheets” on discarded napkins using condiments as ink to track her finances. In the aforementioned side quest, you find three of these spreadsheets, showing that she collects about 150 credits a month and can only save about ten to twenty of them. While admitting she does not have, and has not had, a place to stay… for the future, it is a “work in progress” that depends on the next fiscal quarter. Once per day, you can give her 25 credits, but she won’t accept more because she doesn’t want you to “go poor.”

This is just about all the information there is to be had about her. And if you look it over, something should strike you: this is not a whole person. It is a small slice of a person, just enough to look and feel like a person without actually being a person. And that reminds me of a couple other things.

It reminds me of parasocial attachments to celebrities. We don’t really “know” celebrities. We know the roles they have played and the public face they show during interviews, but that too is not a whole person. It is just a small slice of a person.

It reminds me of “waifu” culture. People get very attached to anime characters. There are also people who get very attached to other cartoon characters; one of my friends is constantly going feral on Tumblr over the Hazbin Hotel character with a television for a head. These are not whole people either - they are archetypes, the tsundere, the dandere, the kuudere. The friend going nuts for the TV-head character has a marked interest in several other cartoon characters with household objects for heads. It’s surprising how many of those there are, when you see someone actually collecting them.

And it reminds me of the people leaving their spouses for AI. Again, not a person. Not even a good representation of a person. It’s a machine, and you know it’s a machine, and you know they’re faking the entire thing. But people fall in love with them anyway.

And looking at all of these, I got to thinking about how one of their most obvious commonalities is that you can’t have them. It doesn’t matter how hopelessly lovestruck you are by any of these things, they can never love you back.

Except the celebrities, I guess, but you know they won’t. If you went out to a bar right now and Scarlett Johansson was there, she would absolutely not take one look at you and fall madly in love. She would not want to go out with you. She would not give you her phone number. If you gave her yours, she would never call.

I think this is actually part of the appeal. It removes the uncertainty. When you consider the possibility of developing a crush on a real human being, you would have to tell them; you would have to put yourself out there and risk being hurt.

When you have a crush on someone you can’t tell, they’re never going to hurt you. If I want to develop some kind of fantasy about Huong Le, she won’t object. She can’t object. She’s not real. I am in complete control of that fantasy, just like I would be if she were a cartoon or a computer. And I think a lot of people’s fantasy is to have that control, not necessarily to order someone about and have their orders followed, but just for the person to do exactly what you want all the time.

I feel like I am one of the few people in the world who doesn’t want this. Like, not only isn’t this my greatest fantasy, I wouldn’t even like it. When I imagine the conversations my Starborn is having with Huong Le, because there really aren’t any interesting ones left in the actual game, I imagine offering repeatedly to do various things for her benefit.

I own this sleepcrate upstairs, here, take the key so you have somewhere to sleep. I also own the Astral Lounge penthouse; move in there. Let me buy you some food. Let me buy you some clothes. Tell you what, you don’t have to move in, but here’s the key and if you need anything just take it. Come in and eat. Take a shower. Sleep in a real bed. I’ll give you a room of your own and I will never ever ever go into it. Come live on my ship; I’ll give you a job, you can be part of my crew, you will have your own private living quarters.

And because she won’t take more than 25 credits a day, I know she will never accept any of this. No matter how many times I offer. Even if I assure her that I am a millionaire, and this expense really is like nothing to me.

There’s no romantic fantasy here. I can’t even rescue her, let alone sweep her off her feet and be her Prince Charming and start planning a wedding. Just the little bit I know about her tells me, even if she were real, a romance is simply not attainable.

I think a lot of the appeal people see in these slivers of people, personalities that aren’t at all complete, is that they can fill in the gaps with whatever they like and make the rest of that personality anything. I don’t think they really ask themselves what would realistically be in those gaps.

I wonder if they would still like the character so much if they weren’t the perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy they came up with.

Meanwhile, I keep taking these pictures in photo mode. And I continue to imagine offering anything I can think of to make her life easier, to get her off the streets so she can stop eating garbage, and just continuing to be turned down. Because that’s who she would be.

And I think maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the reason people want these fake partners they can control is because they don’t like having to deal with who people actually are, instead of just making up who those people have to be.

I don’t know what the solution is. But I think we really need to be looking for one.