Response: Confused Emotions

In response to Kelsey Phifer's post "Genuine Emotion and Fiction as a Game" (February 14, 2012):
In this post, the statement that people can become upset if an author is inconsistent in portraying a character caused me to think about why that might be.  I think that a lot of it may be due to the fact that inconsistency in a character can confuse readers, because they no longer know how to react to that character's behaviour; if a character had at one point been portrayed as having a problematic aversion to water due to their almost drowning as a child, and then later that incident disappears from canon but the aversion remains, reader might not know whether to feel annoyed at the character for their now apparently irrational phobia, or understanding towards the character because of their (now nonexistent) past.

This is actually a bit similar to how people sometimes react to confusion in real life.  If something happens and people are not certain why, or what the event's consequences are exactly, or even if those consequences are merely unfamiliar, they may feel confused and fluctuate between different emotional states.

As such, I don't think that people's abiding by certain conventions set by an author, or feeling upset when the author violates those conventions, invalidates the reality of the emotional reactions they have to fiction.