Captain Kirk’s Enterprise. Thor’s Mjölnir. Indiana Jones’s fedora.
You’ve discussed how to build attachment to a character, but how do you build attachment to a vehicle or vessel, a weapon, or any other object? Attachment to the point where we care about the object and don’t want to see it destroyed? To the point where if a character mistreats, steals, or threatens the object, we hate that character exactly as if they’d done that to a person?
Thank you
Dave L
Hey Dave, that’s a fascinating question!
We don’t have as firm an understanding of building attachment to objects as we do with characters, but in most cases I think it’s a similar process, just with more limited options.
For characters, attachment is basically a function of likability multiplied by time. While a lot of things can make readers like a character, the most common qualities are selflessness, sympathy, and novelty. The more time we spend with characters who demonstrate those qualities, the more attachment we build. Yes, that inclusion of “novelty” means one of the ANTS is nested inside another in this case. Stories are weird.
Anyway, at least one of these is directly applicable to objects: novelty. Indiana’s hat is cool looking, though as a recent Epic Rap Battles of History pointed out, he’s hardly the first one to rock that particular look. The rise of certain online subcultures have also significantly decreased the coolness factor of anything that resembles a fedora. In contrast, Mjölnir has significantly more distinctive traits, like returning to Thor when called and requiring its wielder to be “worthy,” whatever that means.
Meanwhile, the Enterprise was extremely novel at the time Star Trek first aired, looking highly distinct from other popular scifi ships of the era. That’s a big reason why each Star Trek show tries hard to give their ship a new spin and why the main characters’ ship is usually rare in the larger fleet. When the Enterprise D meets other Starfleet vessels, they’re most likely to be Excelsiors or Mirandas, rather than another Galaxy Class.
The other two categories are a lot harder to define for inanimate objects. Can a spaceship be selfless and sympathetic (without being a sapient AI, that is)? Sort of. The best analogy for selflessness in an inanimate object is how much it helps the characters. If the characters depend on an object to do things that no other object in their position can do, that will build attachment. Sympathy is more direct: If an object is old, in poor repair, or otherwise less obviously capable, it will still create feelings of sympathy in the reader. That’s why Serenity, a modest cargo hauler, often feels more endearing than top of the line warships like the Enterprise.
A lot of this already depends on relationships to the main characters. In Battlestar Galactica, the eponymous Galactica generates some sympathy because it’s old and out of date compared to newer ships like the Pegasus, and it also puts our heroes in the position of having to fight off the Cylons in a near obsolete warship. This primes us to cheer for the old ship so much that we don’t even mind when it can actually chew up Cylon ships two at a time, which feels odd if it’s old and out of date.
From there, you can also build attachment simply by how much time and effort the characters put into the object in question. If the heroes are always repairing and upgrading their ship, or if they forge a sword themselves, that builds attachment. We can see this in the novel Chilling Effect. The hero is trying to get her old ship back, but we don’t have any attachment to that ship. On the other hand, we’ve seen her rebuild her new ship from the ground up, so it actually feels more important.
Using these various metrics, it seems like the Enterprise would score highest on attachment, followed by Mjölnir (specifically talking about the movies), and then Indy’s hat. That certainly matches my experience.
- The Enterprise was the main focus of a series and several movies, nearly as much as the characters.
- It was new and cool. It made the crew’s mission possible. It even got some sympathy toward the end after getting mauled in Wrath of Khan.
- The characters often repair and upgrade it.
- Losing it in Search for Spock is a real gut punch in what’s otherwise an okay movie.
- Mjölnir is Thor’s main weapon for a bunch of movies, and it’s just a cool item.
- Plus, Thor needs it to fight baddies.
- Ragnarok gives him new lightning powers to ease the blow.
- Losing Mjölnir is very sad, but not heartbreaking.
- Though replacing it with the super boring Stormbreaker is a bit insulting.
- Plus, Thor needs it to fight baddies.
- Indy’s hat is a neat hat that completes his look.
- Unlike his whip, he doesn’t use the hat for anything other than looking good.
- And keeping the sun off, but the movie doesn’t emphasize that.
- If Indy lost his hat, it would be somewhat sad, but we’d probably move on with our lives.
- The biggest loss would be to Indy’s aesthetic, and he could fix that by getting a new hat.
- Unlike his whip, he doesn’t use the hat for anything other than looking good.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your story!
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Other two case studies of inanimate objects are the Going Merry from One Piece (she happens to be partially sapient, but we only learn that during her funeral) and, of course, the Weighted Companion Cube.
Rest in peace, Weighted Companion Cube. You will be missed.
“How do I build attachment to objects?”
You use Ultrahand. Obviously.
It forms an unbreakable bond!
I have three seal plushie shields proving it
I would go at this from another angle and look at the object through the lense of your characters. What meaning do they attach to the object, what attributes. For instance, a stuffed animal may provide a source of comfort and security to a person. It doesn’t matter, if a stuffed animal is physically able to protect a person or not, it just matters what the person sees in the object.
If it gets clear what the object means to a person or a group, then we can easily imagine what happens if the object gets lost or damaged.
As long as you show how the characters get attached to an object and why, the reader can get attached as well.
The object doesn’t need to have any magical or novel properties for this at all, but it certainly helps.
It’s notable in Star Wars that at Ben’s first meeting with Han, Han doesn’t talk up himself or his piloting skills, but the Millennium Falcon – it’s not even clear from what he says that he was the one flying it during the Kessel Run he refers to.
Yeah. I think the best example for attachment to a regular object is Wilson, the volleyball from Cast Away. The ball in itself doesn’t have any special attributes, but it transform almost into a character because of the attributes Chuck gives the ball.
Or it could be an object that represents the last connection to a lost family member or friend, like a certain watch in The Last of Us.
I absolutely agree. All the best examples are ones where the characters that you like really care about the object. Indiana Jones drops his hat behind a slowly closing stone block, but risks his arm to grab it, rather than just buying a new one.
I actually think that the hat ranks higher for me than Mjolnir, because I feel like Thor cares more about his powers than the hammer as an object. In Endgame he even decides to use his new hammer instead
Someone mentioned the Going Merry, which I think is the perfect example to compare that with. At a certain point in One Piece, their ship, the Going Merry, is damaged to the point that they believe that they can’t fix it, and might need to buy a new one. From a purely mechanical perspective, even with the time spent repairing it, this is an upgrade. But instead, it’s a big deal to them. They don’t want to do it, and they even fight over it, with one of them comparing it to leaving behind a member of the crew for being injured.
People who never cared about the ship before this arc often still end up emotional and even crying by the end, and I think it’s mostly carried by the emotional weight it has for the characters. There’s more going on in the arc, but I think that’s what’s at the core of it.
I think, another reason for attachment to vessels like ships and spaceships is, that it is the home of the main characters.
They travel through dangerous places into the unknown, they experience adventures and the environment constantly changes. But the ship remains the same, reliable and trustworthy. Parts might get broken and must be repaired but over the long term it may appear that the ship is protecting the travelers.
I agree. A vessel used often or constantly (such as the Enterprise or the Falcon) is home, not just a way to get from point A to point B.
It’s part of the crew, I would say, not just the place they live in. As humans are so good at team-bonding, they can easily include the ship in the team. The fact that ships or similar vessels usually have a name and thus, to a degree at least, an identity, helps with that. If you’d say ‘that sailship is part of the team,’ it might seem a little weird to the person you’re talking to, but if you say ‘the Glory of the Seas is part of the team,’ it’s quite different.
I reject the idea that Indy could just get another hat. In universe, yes. In fiction, no. A big part of the attachment to that hat is that the hat always comes through, come death trap or tank. Despite objects having no agency one of the things that builds attachment is a kind of loyalty, when the object is always there, whether it has extensive utility or no. If he replaced the hat, and we knew that he’d replaced it, the attachment would be gone.
In one of the later seasons of Angel, Spike loses his signature coat and then immediately gets a new one. The aesthetic is maintained, but not only does the new coat not have the attachment of the old one, retrospectively the old coat doesn’t have the same attachment either, because now it’s just a coat.
I agree. The hat is also a signal that Indy is about to go adventuring away from his professor life; it’s essentially a token of identity, viewed that way. When he puts the hat on, he’s an adventurer. It’s his magical girl transformation moment.
The attachment to the hat, and the hat’s significance to Indy, is one of the reasons I’ve heard people say they’re relieved that Shia LeBeouf’s terrible character didn’t get the hat in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
(Indy’s hat also has a backstory that we learn in Last Crusade, but it was an object with high audience attachment even before that.)
>people say they’re relieved that Shia LeBeouf’s terrible character didn’t get the hat
Me
I’m one of those people
With objects there can also be an important element of symbolism that’s rarer in characters. Like, you mention the practical functions that a ship provides to its crew, but it also has the strong symbolic function of being what MAKES the crew a crew as opposed to just a bunch of coworkers, such that the loss of a ship can raise the question of whether the cast even has a reason to stay together now. It’s not just the object that’s gone, but potentially even the very identity of its crew.
This is especially prominent in objects that are acting as proxies for an actual character, often someone who is gone.
In Disney’s animated Mulan, for example, there is a little ragdoll that appears twice. First when the villain and his henchmen pass it around to get clues about the village they’re about to attack, and again when Mulan finds the doll in the ruins of the sacked village. In the first scene the doll acts as a proxy for an actual little girl being kidnapped and tormented by a gang of scary bad guys, and in the second, it symbolizes the tragic annihilation of an entire populace we never even saw.
Or in Pixar’s Up, where the house Carl and Ellie built together acts a proxy for Ellie once she’s passed away at the end of the prologue, and Carl’s devotion to the house is symbolic of his inability to let her go and move on.
Thank you for answering my question
In your review for the Scum and Villainy TTRPG you dinged the game for not enabling players to trade in their ship for something bigger and better
However, given that one of the main progressions in the game is to modify and improve your ship, I can understand how the players can become attached to it, for the very reasons you outlined here
Mazel tov on ten years. May you have many more
It’s definitely true that some players will get attached to their ship and never want to trade it, so modification rules are great. Others will see a shiny new frigate and want it with the passion of a thousand suns. I’ve played with both kinds, and the second scenario is so easily predictable that it’s just weird for Scum to have no rules at all for getting a new ship, especially with how detailed its economic rules are for every other situation.
I ran into a similar problem in a game system I was adapting from Fire Emblem for a play-by-post forum RPG. I was using a feat system to replicate FE’s unit classes, with certain feats limited to later levels by prerequisite feats, which mostly worked fine. But I kept running into a stumbling block with the Flying Mount feat in that it was obviously superior to the standard Mounted feat available at character creation, but I felt like I couldn’t make it a higher level feat requiring Mounted first because while that made clear mechanical sense, it would in-story force players to abruptly abandon the mount that had been carrying them for the first half of the game for a new one.
I ultimately compromised by giving Flying Mount a drawback that it couldn’t benefit from terrain bonuses, but it never really closed the gap in practice.
Allow the Standard Mount to gain the ability to fly
I considered that, but then I would have had to make custom non-flying sprites for the pre-flight forms of any flying mount that wasn’t a horse, and I wasn’t remotely good enough at spritework to pull that off when I started that game.
I think this posts omits one of the important aspects of Indy’s hat: it started as a running gag of sorts, with that iconic scene of Indy reaching inside the deathtrap he escaped to grab the hat.
Thus Indy and the hat being inseparable became a sort of a meme in our minds. If he lost it, it’s not that there’s a lot of emotional attachment to it as an item, but it would feel like… breaking convention? I’m not sure how to put it in words.
That’s why I think Indy both could get a new hat (since the item itself isn’t significant) and couldn’t (because him losing it would break that iconic image of him coming to save the hat).
So it is a form of attachment, but I think it’s a different kind of attachment than, for example, Han Solo and Millennium Falcon (another Harrison Ford staple), which is a much more typical kind of attachment, that this article describes (we spend a lot of time on the Falcon, and it’s useful in saving our protagonists’ lives multiple times, and it’s sort of a rickety underdog).