Love at first sight is a popular cliche that is used in writing. Most recently, in an incredibly popular poorly written novel that has been turned into a poorly written and poorly acted movie. It’s a terrible cliche, one that helps to rob stories of any effort to make characters experience personal growth and reflection in establishing interpersonal relationships with others. This is especially true when two characters mutually “fall in love at first sight.”
In truth, love at first sight doesn’t really exist. It’s a logical fallacy based off a type of selection bias. People think it exists because they only remember the exceptional results and frequently forget the ordinary. They remember they were attracted to a person and then later had their physical attraction confirmed with an emotional attraction.
In reality, people find others physically attractive all the time. In some cases, it’s an exceptional attraction. Their hair, their face, their body all fall into a “narrow” band that a person finds ideal. In actuality, because there’s so many people on the planet, and depending on lifestyle a person will run into a few dozen other people a day, chances are they’ll meet someone that falls into this ideal band fairly frequently.
Most of the times, nothing comes of it. The encounter with the person is fleeting and quickly forgotten. That initial attraction becomes nothing more than a distant memory. Love at first sight is avoided.
Other times, the encounter has more substance, but the emotional connection isn’t made. The other person holds an outlook on life that doesn’t match up. They have terrible breath. They’re actually a Neo-Nazi. They enjoy the music of Nickleback. Again, the initial attraction is forgotten or at least pushed to the rear.
On rare occasions, everything clicks. The mental confirms the physical. Things develop and love actually develops. And a person remembers it as love at first sight.
Of course, in stories, this is often times not portrayed. What is shown is the classic fallacy of “love at first sight.” A person meets another and literally falls in love at first sight. There’s no emotional depth to the relationship. It’s just love for no good reason.
It’s a very lazy way of writing and forming relationships between characters. In novels and novellas, its unforgivable for me as a reader. In shorter forms, it’s somewhat tolerable, but is still generally a cop out.
Video games make terrible use of the cliche. More often than not, when two characters in a video game are meant to fall in love, they do so through the cliche of love at first sight. There are a couple of reasons for this.
First (and probably foremost) is that the main target for video games are males. And traditional thinking says that most males don’t care for a love story. Time spent building up a realistic relationship in a video game can instead be spent on things the target audience cares about. Spend less time showing a budding romance between Cloud and Aeris and instead get straight to taking revenge on Sephiroth.
A secondary reason is the whole wish fulfillment thing. Love at first sight is easy. It requires no effort on the participants of the relationship. It just happens. It doesn’t require personal skills. A girl falls in love with a guy and vice versa and it’s just that simple. For the stereotypical nerd (in this case both the writers and the consumers of the story), this effortless love is quite attractive.
Of course, marketing considerations and wish fulfillment don’t make for deep, interesting, smart writing. It might be compelling on a shallow level, but it won’t be of any true merit.
If story telling in video games is ever going to take the step from a vast blackness with points of light to a galaxy of quality writing, it’s going to have to leave the love at first sight cliche (and others like it) behind.
