This was supposed to include Disgust, but she hated the idea.
Emotions, a series of abstract processes that influence human behavior, are a major part of psychology. When depicting them in fiction, the preferred method to communicate an emotion is as an Anthropomorphic Personification—in essence, a character who is literally the emotion given substance.
In fiction, the emotional embodiment can be a specific character's emotion or the universal emotion itself. Oftentimes, there's more than one embodiment, and in this case, a Cast of Personifications can form. Most scenarios opt to portray these emotions as sapient beings that operate as a Ghost in the Machine to depict how these abstract concepts work together in the brain. Other stories can involve the emotion achieving independence from the character, manifesting as its own physical being. Although many feelings and emotions can be personified, common emotions tend to appear with defined character traits:
- Happiness - 100% positivity, an excitable go-getter, or Fun Personified.
- Sadness - Morose, grieving, usually The Eeyore.
- Anger - Wrathful and irate without cooling down for one second. Often a literal hothead.
- Fear - Afraid of literally everything, overly cautious, and nervous.
- Greed - Selfish and only cares about their belongings.
- Courage - Brave and determined, often The Leader. Embodies Heroic Spirit.
- Disgust - Snobbish, sassy, and judgmental over others' standards.
- Hope - Soothing and idealistic, always looking forward.
- Wisdom - The Smart Guynote .
- Compassion - Empathetic and soft-spoken, a pacifist.
- Embarrassment - Anti-social, awkward, and hates attention.
- Love - Seductive and romantic Love Freak.
- Anxiety - A Nervous Wreck who stresses over the smallest detail.
- Envy/Jealousy - Clingy, insecure Green-Eyed Monster, desires what others have.
- Apathy - The Stoic, representing depression and anti-emotion. May also function as Boredom/Ennui.
These sentimental personifications may also be Colour-Coded Emotions, such as anger being red for Red Is Violent, happiness being yellow for Yellow Is Cheerful, sadness being blue for Feeling Blue, and so on. Sometimes, the emotion may come with Emotional Powers and the ability to manipulate emotions themselves.
Super-Trope to Made from Fear. Sub-Trope of Anthropomorphic Personification. Compare with Anthropomorphized Anatomy, which deals with the body's other organ systems. Also compare Sin Demons, Embodiment of Virtue, and Embodiment of Vice.
May overlap with Tulpa, when a sentimental belief creates a living being (rather than being an emotion given life), and Literal Split Personality when the emotion physically offshoots from the character. May result in Peeve Goblins, which can be personified annoyances.
See also The Heartless, which represents a creature born from negative emotion, and Emotion Eater, which may be a parasitic take on this trope.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Hantengu, Upper-4 of the Twelve Kizuki and one of the Arc Villains of the Swordsmith Village arc, has the power to split himself into younger clones that each represent one of his emotions, while his main body represents fear. Hantengu's first four emotion clones are Sekido (Anger), Karaku (Pleasure), Urogi (Joy), and Aizetsu (Sorrow). When Hantengu's main body is threatened, Sekido will absorb the other 3 emotion clones to transform into Zohakuten (Hatred). And if Zohakuten is preoccupied and unable to protect the main body for any reason, Hantengu will form Urami (Resentment) around himself and hide within his heart as a last line of defense.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
- Goddess!Madoka is the anthropomorphic personification of hope.
- The witches are the anthropomorphic personification of despair.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion implies that Homura has now become the personification of love; after dying twice, she remakes the universe while waxing lyrical about how love has empowered her and fully eclipsed her moral compass. Both angels and scientists have time to realize just how screwed they are before Homura mindwipes them. And the girl she's in love with.
Comic Books
- Green Lantern: The Emotional Spectrum is a Sentient Cosmic Force consisting of Energy Beings that personify the emotional energies that the Green Lanterns and similar corps draw power from: rage (the Butcher), avarice (Ophidian), fear (Parallax), willpower (Ion), hope (Adara), compassion (Proselyte), and love (the Predator). The entity, Nekron, is also part of this force, embodying death. The embodiment of life (simply called "The Entity") includes all emotions.
- The Sandman (1989): While the older Endless are personifications of abstract concepts (Destiny, Death, Dream, and Destruction), the three youngest ones (Desire, Despair, and Delirium) personify those feelings, with forms that reflect what they are. Desire is pale, dark-haired, and irresistibly beautiful in an androgynous way, with a capricious, selfish, and callous personality. Despair is a squat, ugly woman with extremely pale skin and a dour manner who Self Harms using a hooked ring. Delirium looks like a vaguely teenage girl in ragged, mismatched clothes with wildly multicolored hair and heterochromic eyes whose colors constantly shift, and she tends to speak in disjointed non sequiturs. Before her distortion into Delirium, as Delight, she was a cheerful girl with flowers growing around her.
Fan Works
- Played for Laughs in Professor Riddle's Chronicles. Riddle has to take his class to a small theatre in Diagon Alley, and they struggle to watch a horrendously boring play, with the personification of World Grief trying to give meaningful speeches throughout the first act, and the Power of Love joining her onstage in the second act, at which point Riddle starts to suspect the author's Dumbledore using a pseudonym and tells his students they're leaving. They Apparate to West End and watch "The Wars of the Roses
" instead.
Film — Animated
- The main characters of Inside Out are the personified emotions of an 11-year-old girl. Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust live in Riley's head and operate a control console that influences her response to the situation at hand, generating memories that are color-coded by whichever emotion is in control. Versions of the same emotions in the heads of other characters are occasionally shown. The rest of Riley's mind is depicted as a Mental World of memories and imagination. The sequel introduces five more emotions: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Nostalgia.
Literature
- The Berenstain Bears: In one book, Sister Bear wants a bike like her brother's, which causes her to have a nightmare about a literal Green-Eyed Monster, which looks like a monstrous version of her and personifies her jealousy.
- In the children's book Felix and the Worrier, Felix's worries are personified through "the Worrier"; a little man who tells him that bad things are happening or will happen.
- Franny K. Stein: The tenth book Mood Science has Franny upset her dog, Igor, by accidentally ruining a jigsaw puzzle he was working on and making things worse when her attempt at restitution was simply to make him a two-piece puzzle. Deciding that she'd be better off without emotions, she uses her Mixer-Upper to remove her feelings and put them in separate bodies, resulting in personifications of Franny's anger, sadness, silliness, and fear. Without emotions, Franny becomes apathetic to the point that she doesn't care to do anything when events lead to a virus spreading throughout the town and turning everyone into toads. It takes persuasion from the personification of Franny's sense of duty (who had the door to the Mixer-Upper shut on her before the situation escalated to requiring her intervention) and her grandmother to get Franny to focus on restoring her emotions and finding a way to cure everyone.
- In The Quetzal Paradox, spirits embody emotions and abstract concepts, such as Pride, Insight, Concern, Compassion, and Sorrow. As shown by a spirit of Concern in Issue 1, they can influence people around them, making them feel the emotion each represents.
Live-Action TV
- Amazing Stories (1985): The protagonist of the episode "Guilt Trip" is the personification of Guilt, who is forced to go on vacation for messing up on the job, and meets and falls in love with the personification of Love.
- Red Dwarf: In "Confidence and Paranoia", Lister falls ill with an illness that brings to life his confidence and paranoia. His paranoia is a sickly-looking man in a black suit who is mortified at anything that Lister does, whilst his confidence is a brash man who praises Lister... and who turns out to be the more dangerous of the two.
- Star Trek: Voyager: In "The Thaw", the crew encounters a simulation that has a Monster Clown who's the personification of fear, and so scares people to death.
- Super Space Sheriff Gavan Infinity: The Emorgears are battery-like creatures born after responding to strong bursts of emotion, creating Emorgy in the process. The Transformation Trinket-style Emorgears that the protagonists use include the anger-based Gekido, the sadness-based Hisoo, and the joy-based Kanky.
Mythology & Religion
- Classical Mythology: Greek mythology depicted abstract concepts as either minor gods or spirits. For instance, while the Olympian Aphrodite was the goddess of love, her son Eros was the personification of love. Several minor Greek gods were largely abstract personifications of emotional concepts such as fear, sadness, strife, mercy, hubris, and tumult, many of which were the children of Nyx, the primordial goddess of night.
Radio
- Les 2 Minutes du Peuple: There's a skit illustrating the brain as a dysfunctional office building with various departments (memory, judgement, the various senses, curiosity, etc...) with two feuding employees: emotionality and reason, who constantly fight much to their manager's displeasure.
Tabletop Games
- Mage: The Awakening: Goetia are entities of pure thought and concept. People's psyches contain a lot of those, some of which embody that person's emotions; if one's goetia of (say) hatred was to be removed from their Oneiros, they'd be unable to hate, while their hatefulness would be free to act on its own.
- Magic: The Gathering: Incarnations are a rare creature type representing the living, physical embodiments of specific concepts and emotions. They are distinct from Elementals, which are living manifestations of natural forces and substances instead of philosophical concepts, and Gods, which are generally much more powerful and hold much broader purviews. They are also all named after the specific thing they embody, such as Anger or Dread.
- Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000: All four of the Chaos Gods embody various emotions and abstract concepts, being born of The Warp, formerly the Realm of Souls, itself formed from every thought, belief, and emotion that sentient, souled beings produce. Primarily, Khorne embodies honour and rage, Tzeentch embodies change and hope, Nurgle embodies stagnancy, resilience and despair while Slaanesh embodies love and excess. Fitting the nature of the setting, even these positive concepts are twisted, warped, and exaggerated so far that they might as well not exist, with all four Gods being Mad Gods Of Evil at present.
Video Games
- Block Tales: The climax of Chapter 3 has the player battling four beings that personify their emotions, called the Embodiments, so they can revive and obtain the Ghostwalker: Greed (a manic and sadistic conman), Solitude (a nigh-emotionless and solitary being), Fear (a nervous wreck trying to protect the Player), and Hatred (a fiercely powerful and sinister devil who manipulates the Player into getting rid of the rest to corrupt their soul).
- Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: The Unversed, the game's main enemies, are revealed to be the physical manifestations of Vanitas's volatile emotions, with their faces reflecting emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger.
- Monster Strike: The Gouzetsu monsters are all embodiments and incarnations of something like emotions and fears.
- One character in OMORI represents suicidal depression and guilt. It's none other than Omori himself.
- Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: The Legendary Pokémon Mesprit of the Lake Trio is the personification of Emotion.
- Touhou Project:
- Warframe: Tales of Duviri is a children's book meant to teach emotional regulation to the kids of the colonists of the Zariman Ten-Zero. Fittingly enough it has a character for each sort of emotional excess it portrays, and thanks to the Drifter's anxiety, them being trapped in the Zariman in the Void and Conceptual Embodiment, those characters — Mathila the Harbinger of Joy; Lodun the Prince of Fire; Bombastine the Covetous Courtier; Luscinia the Sorrowful Soprano; and Sythel the Fearful Conspirator — have become actual people.
Webcomics
- Glitter and Guilt's Monsters of the Week are Vents, creatures formed from humans in the throes of extreme emotion. Various types exist, and can be formed out of such emotions as sorrow, rage, and excitement, and each gets a unique array of powers for each emotion.
- Widdershins: Spirits embody human emotions, and normally, they're summoned to do small tasks. However, if the spell to summon them is miscast, the wizard creates a spirit who is basically a personfication of an emotion. The Seven Deadly Sins, as emotions, also exist, and they are noted to be especially dangerous.
Western Animation
- Aladdin: The Series: In "The Seven Faces of Genie", Genie tries to conduct himself during a diplomatic mission by managing his emotions, but the stress builds up to the point he literally splits apart into seven versions of his personality: Laughter, Anger, Courage, Kindness, Wisdom, Fear, and Weirdness.
- Dragon Tales: In "The Grudge Won't Budge", Zak is mad at Wheezie for damaging his new flute. This creates a purple furry creature known as a Grudge meant to embody his anger that clings to his neck (as in, he's literally holding a grudge). As it has an iron grip on him, Zak finds that the only way to make him let go is to forgive Wheezie, which he finds hard to do.
- The Fairly OddParents!:
- In "Tiny Timmy", Vicky's brain is a Mental World where emotion people like Pettiness, Jealousy, and Anger control Vicky's personality with computers. Humorously, Anger is a little girl with a violent temper, and Kindness is the only one absent because they "never showed up for work", hence why Vicky is the the way she is.
- In "Emotion Commotion", Timmy wishes for all of his emotions to be sealed away, resulting in his emotions getting physically ripped out of him into anthropomorphic Waddling Head-like forms. During the episode, Cosmo struggles to babysit them; Anger keeps beating up Happiness, Fear keeps crawling under the bed, Envy and Jealousy are arguing over who loves Love more, and Bravery keeps climbing on the roof and jumping off. They're returned to Timmy at the end just as Timmy is about to perform a death-defying stunt—except for Common Sense, whose absence causes Timmy to do the stunt anyway.
- Miraculous Ladybug: The peacock kwami, Duusu, is the kwami of emotion, and they're shown to be sentimental and melodramatic. Instead of controlling emotions, Duusu's power allows the user to create living beings from a certain emotion. The pig kwami, Daizzi, embodies jubilation, where his powers cause people to feel happiness.
- Muppet Babies (2018): In "Kermit Gets the Grumpies", Kermit is in a bad mood, but refuses to talk about what's upsetting him and is unable to cheer himself up. He has Bunsen create something to put him in a better mood, but this results in his bad mood becoming its own person, which looks like a purple version of him with Big Ol' Eyebrows. His bad mood begins to follow him everywhere as a symbol for emotional repression until Kermit finally admits what's got him down — his fishing trip with his grandfather was postponed.
- The Simpsons:
- In "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", Lisa's brain is represented by Jealousy, Honesty, and the leader, Conscience. There's also Libido, who has to be locked inside a box until Lisa turns 16.
- In "The Cad And The Hat", Bart's sense of guilt manifests as a trollish version of himself. We also see Lisa's guilt, as well as several personifications of Homer's emotions, which mostly consist of vices (including Sloth, who's also Drunk for some reason).
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Destiny", the Five Priestesses are depicted like this, in a sense, since their names, voices, and the expressions of their masks all represent a particular emotion—Serenity, Confusion, Sadness, Anger, and Joy. In this case, it seems as if they are personifications of what Yoda must resist on his Force journey (and they even say as much when he is to travel through the Valley of Extinction).
- Teen Titans (2003): In "Nevermore", the facets of Raven's personality take the form of Raven with a different colored cloak and corresponding emotion. There's Happiness (pink), Timidity (gray), Bravery (green), Love (violet), Knowledge (yellow), Rudeness (orange), Sloth (brown), and Anger (red). Raven herself is indigo, creating a Rainbow Motif.
- Teen Titans Go!:
- In "Colors of Raven", one of Dr. Light's prisms ends up separating Raven into her five core aspects: Pink is Happy, Purple is Flirtatious, Grey is Timidity, Orange is Sloth, and Red is Anger.
- In "Some of Their Parts", Robin gets the idea to isolate each of the Titans' personalities to form an efficient crime-fighting team.
- Cyborg gets split into his jokester, lazy, lack of inhibitions, enthusiastic, and soldier personalities.
- Raven is split back into her five core personalities so her anger can be put to good use.
- Starfire is split into her flirtatious, indifferent, crazy, timid, and barbarian personas.
- Beastboy's individual personalities are all equally lazy and hungry, so none of them are effectively good at fighting crime. Soldier Cyborg suggests using one as a Human Shield in combat.
- Robin ends up using the prism on himself, thinking that 5 Robins on one team will be even better, but his personalities make things even worse: craziness, perfectionist, overly obsessive ("detail oriented"), paranoid, and control freak.
- Silkie also gets transformed into his barfy, lazy, hungry, seductive, and intelligence emotions.
- Transformers: Animated: Using shards of the Allspark, Starscream creates clones of himself. The clones are based on an aspect of his personality. The clones were later given names based on their color scheme, as it matches previous characters who were repaints of him. Each of them represents a different emotion that defines him.
- Dirge represents Starscream's greed.
- Skywarp represents his cowardice.
- Thrust represents his jealousy.
- Thundercracker represents his egomania.
- Ramjet represents his dishonesty.
- Sunstorm represents his bootlicking.
- Slipstream didn’t reveal which emotion she represents, though she’s a sarcastic Deadpan Snarker who hates the original Starscream.
- Yin Yang Yo!: In "Touchy Feelings", Yang's emotions get separated from his body after Fred turns Yang into an emotionless husk, prompting Yin to get them back before the emotions influence other people.