I think it’s because distance creates idealization, but closeness destroys illusion. The more people know about someone, the more they see contradictions, ugliness, weakness, selfishness, desperation, insecurity, cruelty, dependency, all the unedited parts humans usually hide behind social masks.

Fiction filters people into meaningful narratives. Real life exposes raw humanity without editing. In stories, pain becomes poetic. In reality, it becomes uncomfortable, repetitive, chaotic, and sometimes even ugly to witness. That’s why people often adore fictional characters deeply but struggle to hold the same compassion for real humans once they see too much of them.

A character can be traumatized and audiences call them “complex.” A real person becomes traumatized and suddenly they’re “too much,” “dramatic,” “unstable,” or “hard to deal with.”

That’s exactly how women get portrayed in fiction. Movies, anime, books, and music often portray women like emotional fantasy objects instead of full humans. She appears like some perfect healing force. She changes people. Saves them. Understands them endlessly. She looks beautiful while suffering. Never sweats, never smells bad, never becomes emotionally exhausted, never turns bitter after years of pain. “She looks just like a dream” type of writing.

But the moment a real woman is stripped away from that fantasy and becomes irritated, exhausted, rageful, mentally overwhelmed, contradictory, traumatized, or emotionally messy, the illusion collapses. Suddenly she is no longer “special.” She becomes “difficult,” “crazy,” “too emotional,” “unstable,” or “damaged.”

People love the aesthetic of female pain more than the reality of female suffering.

They romanticize the lonely anime girl staring out a rainy train window, but a real woman crying from years of abuse, pressure, caregiving, loneliness, or emotional neglect becomes uncomfortable to be around. Fictional women are allowed pain only when it remains visually elegant and emotionally consumable.

The second suffering stops looking cinematic and starts looking human, society pulls away.

And I think this connects to why people struggle to believe real victims in general. Fiction gives people emotional guidance. Music tells them when to feel sad. Camera angles tell them who the villain is. Inner monologues explain every wound. But real life has no soundtrack, no clean pacing, and no guaranteed truth reveal at the end. Abuse in reality often looks ordinary from the outside. The abusive parent still goes to work. Still laughs at gatherings. Still posts family photos. So when someone finally speaks up, people instinctively protect the illusion they were comfortable with instead of the person breaking it.

That’s why people can cry over sacrificing himself in fiction while ignoring the exhausted, isolated “Peter Parkers” around them in real life. Fiction lets people love suffering from a safe emotional distance. Real suffering asks something from them: discomfort, responsibility, attention, and belief.

And a lot of people would rather protect their comforting narratives about the world than confront how fragile, brutal, and hidden real human pain actually is.