#grief processing

The grief clawed at you from the inside—a raw, unrelenting void that left you shattered. You'd locked yourself in your apartment. The world outside was a blur. Your body curled into a tight ball on the bed as sobs wracked you. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt. Existing hurt.

That's when Sylus materialized, slipping through your defenses like he always did, his presence announced only by the soft click of the door. You didn't look up, didn't acknowledge him. "Get out," you snarled through gritted teeth, your voice hoarse from crying. "I don't want you here. I don't want anyone here."

He ignored you, of course. Sylus never did what anyone wanted, especially leaving when you needed him. He crossed the room, dropped his coat on a chair, and sat on the bed's edge. "No," he said, his tone firm but edged with softness. "I'm not going anywhere, kitten."

Your pain exploded outward, and you slammed your hands against his chest with what strength you had left, your fingers clawed and knuckles white, trembling with a fury carved by grief.

"I said leave!" you yelled, voice wobbly and scraped raw. "I don’t want your damn pity.  Get out!" Tears scalded your cheeks, their heat as bitter as your rage, not at him but at the circumstances, at the world. You tried to push him away again and again, desperate to make the world around you as empty as you felt inside.

But he caught your wrists gently, his grip unyielding yet careful, refusing to let you drive him off. He pulled you closer, holdingyou in his arms as you struggled.

"Stop fighting me," he murmured, red eyes locking onto yours with an intensity that pierced through the haze of your pain. "You're breaking, and I'll be damned if I let you do it alone. I won't watch you shatter without me here to hold the pieces."

You thrashed against him, your body betraying the exhaustion creeping in. Still, your will burned hot. "Why won't you just go? I can't... I can't handle this with you watching. I don't want you to see me fall apart!" Your voice cracked, sobs choking you as you pounded weakly at his chest. But he held firm. He absorbed every blow. His arms were a cage you couldn't escape—or maybe didn't truly want to.

"Because I refuse to," he whispered into your hair, his hand stroking your back in slow, soothing circles. "I've got you. Scream, hit me, whatever you need—but I'm staying. Let me be here for you."

Time blurred in his unyielding embrace. The minutes stretched as he held you through the storm. He didn't offer empty platitudes. Just his solid presence, a rock in the torrent of your grief. You fought it longer than before, twisting and cursing under your breath. Gradually, the fight ebbed, leaving you raw and exposed.

The sobs came harder now, unfiltered, as you finally let the walls crumble in his arms. He didn't pull away, didn't judge; he just held you tighter, his fingers threading through your hair in gentle, rhythmic strokes, his breath steady against your ear.

"I'm here," he whispered, his voice a quiet rumble that anchored you. "You don't have to be strong. Let it out." His palm brushed your cheek, catching tears with a gentleness that startled you, his red eyes reflecting a silent understanding. He gathered you into his lap, cradling you against his chest, where the slow, steady thud of his heart echoed in your ear—a fragile promise that life endured, even when the world felt lost to shadow.

When the storm of tears faded to hiccuping breaths, he remained, silent and steadfast, his presence a barrier against the cold world. The ache lingered, but it was no longer yours alone—softened by the warmth of his embrace.

"I'm still here," he murmured, lips brushing your forehead, his fingers drawing slow, aimless shapes along your spine. In the shelter of his arms, for the first time since the loss, a faint ember of hope flickered to life, or perhaps simply the courage to meet the next day.

I think many of us are at the point right now, or have been in the past, when a story we love takes a turn we didn’t expect or want. Sometimes it’s disappointment. Sometimes it’s sadness. But sometimes, it’s something much more intense: rage, depression/despair, or feelings so overwhelming they spill into our interactions with fellow fans and/or our daily lives.

If you’ve noticed particularly strong reactions in our corner of fandom lately, you’re not alone in wondering what’s happening. A lot of people are struggling with very intense emotions around a fictional character/narrative right now.

And that’s because our brains are really quite sophisticated storytelling machines, but they’re also somewhat indiscriminate about what feels “real”. When we become deeply invested in characters and stories, our neural networks fire in ways that mirror real relationships and experiences. The attachment we form to Morpheus, for instance, can activate the same brain regions and hormones involved in our attachments to real people.

So when something happens to a character we love, our brain sometimes processes it similarly to loss or betrayal in our actual lives. The grief is neurologically real, even if its source is fictional.

These, albeit one-sided, emotional connections feel genuine and meaningful to many of us. And they can provide comfort and even models for understanding ourselves and the world. And at the end of the day, that’s the purpose of story.

For some of us, Morpheus represents something very specific: hope for change, the possibility of growth, or perhaps a mirror of our own struggles with identity. And we therefore get invested in the hope that everything will turn out okay for him. Because of course we want to be okay.

So what happens if a character’s arc doesn’t align with our emotional needs or expectations? It can unfortunately feel like personal rejection or emotional abandonment. Or very real hurt.

For some people, stories can serve as fictional spaces where they feel they have more agency than in real life, and you might understand where I’m going with this: It’s a lot of fun to theorise, predict, and imagine outcomes. We invest mental energy in hoping for specific resolutions (the collective sleuthing about every breadcrumb in the lead-up just shows you what I mean 😉). But when the story or adaptation diverges from the narrative we have built in our heads, it can trigger a deep sense of powerlessness that also echoes frustrations from other areas of life.

And that’s particularly acute in adaptation situations, where we feel we “know” how things should go, or we’ve built expectations for the narrative outcome for three years (maybe longer if we’d hoped the show would diverge from the comics—that’s a long time to convince ourselves of a certain outcome). And then those expectations aren’t rewarded.

Projection and Personal Meaning

We inevitably see ourselves in the stories we love, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Sometimes we project our own traumas, hopes, or unresolved conflicts onto characters and their journeys. But when the story resolves in a way that feels counter to our personal healing or growth, it can reopen psychological wounds or challenge our coping mechanisms.

Especially those of us who saw Morpheus somewhat as a metaphor for their own possibility of change, his death can subconsciously feel like a statement about their own capacity for growth.

And his loss can feel just as acute as real-life grief for some people, particularly if they’ve also made experiences with loss in real life. But it’s also a grief that society often doesn’t recognise as valid because “it’s just a story”. And yes, it is just a story, and we should be aware when it starts to affect our mental health and step back if that’s the case. But it’s also important to say: it’s okay to mourn.

And during that process, it can help to consider what the story might represent in us. Sometimes, our intense reactions point to deeper needs or unresolved feelings in our own lives.

Our fellow fans can provide understanding, but we need to be mindful not to project our anger or pain onto others who might have different perspectives. And I’ve seen that happening quite a lot over the past weeks. Just because we don’t agree doesn’t mean we have to be at each others’ throats.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do for ourselves or others when emotions run too high is to step away from discussions, mute tags, or take breaks from online fandom spaces entirely. I mean, I constantly filter tags, follow/unfollow and block/unblock people, but 9/10, it has nothing to do with the person behind the blog but everything with me, and what I don’t want to see at that particular point in time. I remember blocking a lot of people when a certain event affected several fandoms on here. But that wasn’t because I had a problem with those people but rather because I simply couldn’t stomach to see that stuff on my dash anymore, and no tag filtering got a hold of it. So if someone posted a lot about it, they got “muted” (and I often unblocked them again after a while). We owe it to ourselves to curate our fandom experience in a way that makes us feel happy, not constantly exhausted.

And on that note: Mutual support is great, but it can also very quickly turn into an echo chamber that takes on an “us vs them”-dynamic just because we don’t agree about certain points. When that gets entangled with projecting our feelings on people we don’t even know (but we presume they surely can’t have life experience X “like we do”), it gets ugly.

Everyone’s relationship with a story is personal. What feels like betrayal to one person might feel hopeful or otherwise meaningful to another. And that’s okay (as long as communication around it stays respectful).

The Role of Displacement

One of the most significant psychological processes at play in intense fandom reactions (and particularly the ones that don’t always stay respectful) is probably displacement, which is essentially a defense mechanism where emotions from one situation get redirected toward a different, often “safer” target. And stories do provide a psychologically safer place to express difficult emotions than their original, real life sources. It’s often easier to rage about an adaptation (and at someone while hiding behind a screen) than to confront feelings of powerlessness about our job, relationship troubles, or social injustice. Fiction gives us a contained space where we can feel and react without the complex consequences that come with addressing real world problems.

And I’d hazard an educated guess that one of the most common displacement patterns in fandom has to do with control and agency: If someone feels powerless about something in their personal life, they might become intensely angry about narrative choices they can’t change because they trigger the same sense of helplessness. And I’m not talking about a simple, “That made no sense, what were they thinking?” here, but rather anger and disappointment so profound that it basically makes us mentally and emotionally unwell.

But it’s not that alone. If we’re dealing with real-world rejection or loss, we might experience a character’s death as a deep betrayal, and we feel loss and abandonment all over again.

And those of us who experience a lot of unfair treatment in their daily lives might channel that frustration into arguments about what characters “deserve” or how stories “should” resolve. And we have those arguments with people who are in no way responsible for those narrative choices and just see things differently—for reasons that aren’t inherently less valid (that’s why I always want to encourage people to stop generalising what kind of storytelling “we” need in “these times”. There is no “we” in this context, and times have quite frankly always been shit, just in different ways).

In short: If we feel unseen or invalidated in our daily lives, characters we identify (or at least strongly empathise) with suffering, dying or not getting what we feel they deserve can feel like personal attacks on our worth or existence, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. And it takes a lot of reflection and inner work to start noticing when these things are happening, and that they aren’t truly about the story, but about us.

It’s worth gently checking if we might be experiencing displacement when emotional reactions to a certain story feel much more intense than our usual responses to fiction. Or if we find ourselves obsessively thinking about the “narrative injustice”. Or if our anger and grief feel urgent and personal, as if the story choices were deliberately meant to hurt us. Or if we even experience mental and physical symptoms (like insomnia, agitation, or a bout of depression or anxiety brought on by a show or book).

Sometimes, working through the feelings the story brought up can actually help process whatever is bugging us in real life. Other times, addressing the root causes can diminish the intensity of our reactions to fiction. In any case: If it’s particularly severe, it’s absolutely worth talking with either your therapist or a person you trust.

Stories are a gift, but you don’t have to accept it

Ultimately, our capacity to be moved deeply by stories speaks to something beautiful about human nature: our ability to empathise, to find meaning, to care deeply and to invest emotionally in experiences and people beyond our immediate reality (I tangentially wrote about this here as well).

Stories matter because we are meaning-making creatures. The intensity of our reactions (both positive and negative) is often proportional to how much we need the story to represent something important in our own lives, even if that intensity feels disproportionate looked at on its own.