One of my favorite quirks of humanity is our rampant anthropomorphization.
As a fun little side effect of our speccing into the "social animal" skill tree we're
very good at seeing ourselves mirrored in other people.
We have whole parts of our brain dedicated just to recognizing faces and the expressions
they're wearing so we can better determine what's another human to be social with and
how they're feeling and whether or not we should be feeling that way too.
And because this object recognition skill is significantly newer, evolutionarily speaking,
than the rest of our object recognition, it's got a lot more bugs to work out, which is
why we do things like read personalities and moods into animals, car headlights and rocks.
This is called "pareidolia", when we see patterns and faces in places where none exist.
On the timescale of evolution, we're still quite new at this "social animal" thing.
We're very good at it in small doses - we recognize people we like, feel an urge to
be close to them, help them with stuff, support them when they're hurt or struggling - all
very good qualities for a communal species to have that help ensure that a group will
survive where individuals might not.
But the way we define and recognize "people" isn't quite perfect.
For one thing, we anthropomorphize animals on the regular as soon as they hit a minimum
cuteness threshold, and even if we know better, we often can't stop ourselves from assigning
a motive or personality or voice to their general animal hijinks, which can lead to
us inaccurately predicting their behavior because we're extrapolating from a version
of them we've built up in our head that assumes a level of human thought and friendliness
in a completely different animal.
But even when we're just dealing with other humans, we have a tendency to universalize
our own experiences and then get confused when other people don't share or understand
them, and this can make us question if they are, in fact, people.
And as a whole, we're remarkably quick to the trigger on dismissing people as not people,
or at least not full, complete, interesting people like us.
It's tough to reconcile our inherent sociability with the fact that sometimes people do things
that we don't like or can't understand, and it's harder to reconcile that if you're seeing
the person as a person just like you with thoughts and feelings and dreams and common
experiences you've shared.
It's easier to just conclude that that person is not a person.
Only people from your group are people.
People outside that group are weird or jerks or lesser or soulless or monsters or stupid
or irrational or anything else that justifies how they are completely different from you,
and therefore you don't need to see them or treat them as human.
And that's my two-minute dissertation explaining the history of all human conflict!
Thank you, thank you, I accept speaking engagements from world leaders and people I don't like
very much.
But when it comes to fiction, where "human" becomes a speculative gradient and anything
from an alien to an android to a stuffed toy can be a person, anthropomorphization becomes
an extremely complicated subject.
And in this complicated space is where we find the Pinocchio Plot.
The premise of the Pinocchio Plot is simple, or at least it looks that way on the surface.
A character exists who is not human or broadly recognized as a person, but this character
wishes to become a Real Boy.
Over the course of this story they either move closer to this goal or they reevaluate
it and potentially conclude that Real Boyness is not actually what they want or need.
The name of this trope is obviously derived from the story of Pinocchio, an absolute fever
dream of a book about a rambunctious living puppet causing mayhem everywhere he goes until
he does a nice thing and has his soul removed from his lifeless puppet body and turned into
a Real Boy.
It's a POV shift from a fairly classic folktale archetype, where a character encounters an
animal or monster or other Wacky Folktale Thing, and by doing tasks that prove their
moral character the protagonist is rewarded when the Wacky Folktale Thing turns into a
beautiful aristocrat of their preferred gender to smooch and they live happily ever after.
The Pinnochio Plot instead puts focus on the nonhuman character, and in the majority cases
the character does not start out as a cursed or transformed human, but something else entirely
that is seeking to attain humanity, personhood or "realness."
Intrinsic in this trope is an exploration of what it means to be human or a person or
whatever fantasy synonym for "human" we're going with, because there needs to be something
specific for the protagonist to want and strive for.
In classic fairy tales it was common for the distinction to be that the inhuman protagonist
did not have a soul, as was the case in Hans Christian Andersen's telling of The Little
Mermaid, where the mermaid in question is told by her grandmother that humans live much
shorter lives than mermaids, but have immortal souls that outlast them when they die, whereas
mermaids just turn into seafoam and are gone for good.
By the end of the story she does indeed dissolve into foam, but her selfless heroism grants
her a second life as an airy spirit and another chance to earn a human soul through 300 years
of good deeds.
Sounds like goalpost-moving to me, but it is what it is.
Anyway, more modern storytelling tends to shy away from the philosophical and theological
question of the soul and will instead define "humanity" in terms of more specific things
like "physically having a human body" or "feeling emotions" or "having dreams" or "not being
a people-eating monster anymore" in the more angsty cases.
Some subjects of the Pinocchio Plot might be eternal children that want the chance to
grow up, or precise AI machines that want the chance to experience messy human emotions,
or unstoppably powerful warriors that just want to feel pain again.
But the fact is, while a lot of these stories get specific about what makes humans so extra
special that everyone wants to be one, this rather self-indulgent approach to storytelling
isn't what makes this trope interesting.
While some of these characters do get to become Real Boys trademark, the majority of them
don't.
It's not something they achieve, it's something that motivates them that they want, or are
told they should want - a form of development they strive for while only occasionally getting
to live it.
The relationship these characters have with humanity - and what, if anything, humanity
means to them - is what makes them interesting.
In the original Pinocchio Plot, Pinocchio wants to be human because he wants to grow
up and become a man.
The Azure Fairy lays out everything he has to do in order to earn humanity - which is
mostly stuff like being a good boy, going to school every day, never telling lies, finding
a job and other elements of being a Good And Honest Citizen.
Pinocchio isn't particularly pleased with this, but he works very hard, gets his grades
up, does a few acts of selfless heroism and awakes one morning having transformed into
a Real Flesh And Blood Boy as a reward for a bad boy becoming a good one, a magical act
that also restores his father's youth and cleans up their house.
Now a book that trades personhood for obedience is an interesting concept that several writers
have side-eyed a little for the implications, leading to the recent stop-motion adaptation
of the story from Guillermo Del Toro, a filmmaker whose bread and butter is the exploration
of personhood versus monstrosity.
Many of Del Toro's protagonists are physically monstrous or inhuman beings with good hearts
that don't want to change or become human, they just want to be understood and loved,
and many of his antagonists are physically flawless human specimens with monstrous interiors
that willfully bring suffering to the people around them.
His human protagonists, meanwhile, are often outcasts who are seeking the same thing as
the inhuman protagonists - love, understanding, connection, acceptance.
They don't want to change or to lose what they are, they just want people to stop hurting
them for it - a concept that resonates very strongly with a lot of real audiences.
So when Del Toro decided to adapt the iconic trade-your-personality-for-recognized-personhood
story, he did it a little bit different.
For one thing, Pinocchio does not physically become a real boy.
He does become a better boy - he starts the story a little bit horror-movie-esque and
has a habit of breaking and disrupting things without meaning to, because he's brand new
and doesn't understand the nuances of the world around him, Frankenstein's-monster-style.
In fact, the parallels between Pinocchio and Frankenstein's monster are many and very clearly
deliberate - his creator makes him in a fit of madness on a stormy night, and when his
creation comes to life Gepetto reacts initially with terror and revulsion before slowly becoming
a better dad than Victor Frankenstein by deciding he can teach Pinocchio to be a better son.
The wood sprite tasks the cricket with serving as Pinocchio's conscience and moral guide,
because Pinocchio doesn't have one of those right now.
Pinocchio starts the movie very impulsive and disruptive, but knows when he's upsetting
Gepetto and wants to make him happy, which leads to him rather heartbreakingly trying
to be the perfect son to make Gepetto stop grieving the mortal son he lost that Pinocchio
was explicitly sculpted to replace.
This is basically the approach of the original story with a little more knife-twisting - Gepetto
wants the perfect son, and Pinocchio wants to make Gepetto happy, so he wants to be the
perfect son too.
He wants to be real.
He is told by death that unfortunately Pinocchio is not a real boy because Pinocchio can't
die, and death is what defines humanity.
As he gains more experience Pinocchio begins to suss out his internal moral compass and
what things matter to him, and in the end he sacrifices his own eternal life to save
Gepetto, becoming a "real boy" for the moments he has before he dies for real - until the
cricket uses his wish to restore him to life, making him once again "not a real boy" - not
that it really matters, because the real character arc in this movie is not Pinocchio's, it's
Gepetto's.
Gepetto is the one pushing Pinocchio to be something he's not - the good son, the dead
young boy Gepetto has been grieving for years.
Pinocchio is not that boy and cannot be him, doesn't want to be him - but in his grief
and anger Gepetto lashes out at him and calls him a burden.
This leads Pinocchio to run away from home to try and stop being a painful burden on
his father, while Gepetto realizes the full ramifications of what he's said and done,
and gets a thorough talking-to from the cricket calling him out for hurting Pinocchio so thoroughly
- a boy who wants nothing more than the unconditional love every child deserves from their parent.
This Pinocchio is happy the way he is until he's told that it isn't enough, and while
he tries to be enough, in the end the happy resolution for his story comes when the person
demanding that of him - stops.
On paper, this is a subversion of the Pinocchio Plot, since Pinocchio doesn't really want
to be a real boy and never becomes one - but the message it sends is arguably significantly
healthier.
Pinocchio cultivates his own relationship with humanity, and for him that doesn't mean
changing what he is on the outside - and the only changing he does on the inside is learning
about the world around him and the people he loves.
This is extremely on brand for Del Toro and this movie is incredibly good, go watch it.
This is pretty solid evidence that the Pinocchio Plot is often at its most interesting and
compelling when it's being subverted, or at least unpacked.
Our habit of anthropomorphization, of seeing ourselves in everything, leads us to readily
conclude that it's only natural that everyone would want to be like us, that our way of
living is the best and the things that make us happy should make everyone happy.
The baseline Pinocchio Plot follows this to a T.
The miraculously magical wooden boy wants to become real so he can get a job and do
laundry and taxes and someday die.
Who wouldn't want that?!
Or does it matter what he wants?
That's what he has to do if he wants to be Real!
The price you pay to be recognized as a human being is to sell off the hours of your precious
mortal life in service to a moneymaking machine that'd just as readily swap you out for any
other cog.
If you want to be seen as an individual, you have to stop acting like one.
Humanity!
So the Pinocchio Plot becomes most interesting when it explores what the character actually
wants.
If they want to be human, what parts of humanity appeal to them?
If they're being guided by humans, what moral principles are those humans trying to instill?
It's not necessarily about what the writer thinks defines humanity, but what legitimately
matters to the characters - and how they think that relates to humanity.
In a lot of modern Pinocchio Plots, the only thing the pinocchio figure seems to really
want is friendship - to be understood and accepted by people who care about them.
Sometimes this involves becoming more human, but in many cases it just involves getting
better at understanding the humans around them, who don't make nearly as much sense
as they seem to think they do.
This is also where the Pinocchio Plot starts really resonating with certain sectors of
the audience, like the neurodivergent crowd, where understanding and parsing certain norms
most people take for granted can be a serious chore with a major miscommunication risk.
It's also where you start getting the characters who are physically inhuman in some way but
internally are practically indistinguishable from their human friends, and may even be
described by those friends as "the most human person I know" - usually meaning that they're
kind, compassionate, selfless and heroic.
This is not uncommon in superhero stories, where heroes can be all kinds of inhuman while
still being fundamentally good people who display all those good qualities.
He might be a god from space but he's still a good ol' farmboy with a strong moral compass,
you know?
But what happens once the pinocchio figure gets past the isolation problem?
Let's say this character does have friends and allies - human ones - that'll go to bat
for them, respect the bulk of their unique differences and broadly confirm that they
aren't alone.
Let's assume the friendship thing is a solved problem.
Well, many of these characters will still have internal unanswered questions about their
relationship to humanity, and those can be extremely interesting to explore.
This is a side of the Pinocchio Plot that is most commonly addressed in science fiction,
where increasingly powerful technology starts blurring the lines between human and machine.
The Ship of Theseus problem is a popular staple in these stories - the question of whether
an object is still the same object if every part of it has been replaced takes on rather
interesting implications when applied to a person being augmented with cybernetics or
copied as a clone or reprinted cell by cell or transcoded into a computer.
And of course when the concept of an actual artificial intelligence enters the story,
things can get pretty juicy, with terms like "sentience" getting thrown around pretty haphazardly
- its original philosophical definition just means "the ability to feel", but people like
using it to mean "thinking and self-aware", which would probably be more accurately described
using "sapience."
Anyway, a lot of sci fi likes to come down on the side of "robots and humans are different
because robots Cannot Feel Emotions," which is a convenient distinction because it is
absolutely impossible to prove in either direction.
There's a thought experiment called a "philosophical zombie" which posits a being that perfectly
resembles and acts like a person - for instance, responding with signs of pain when prodded
- but internally thinks and feels nothing, it just reacts as though it feels.
One angle of the thought experiment is since we can never know exactly what the people
around us are thinking and feeling, it's possible that there's literally nothing under the hood,
and we're just assuming they have a rich inner life because we have one and they're acting
in a way that we recognize.
This becomes pertinent when technology becomes capable of convincingly mimicking human thought
and emotion and people start questioning whether human thought and emotion are actually happening.
Real-world tech aside, when a sci fi story presents a robotic character who allegedly
can't feel emotions and yet clearly acts as though they experience emotions - providing
special attention and support to people they're close to, prioritizing their well-being, logicking
through the process of empathizing with their human friends and expressing eminently logical
reasons to be extra violent against people who have done particularly hatable things.
If a character cannot feel or express emotions and yet at every turn acts the way we expect
them to behave if they did have emotions, because things like friendship and compassion
and justice still matter to them, it calls into question how relevant visible emotional
responses really are in defining the humanity this character seems to embody so well.
In fact, this is a pretty logical consequence to the Pinocchio plot.
Whenever a writer addresses an inhuman character interacting with the concept of humanity,
they make a statement about what they believe defines humanity, and, more importantly, whether
or not they think that matters.
An inhuman character who doesn't feel emotions can still appreciate companionship or help
people in need or oppose injustice or otherwise act like a good person, so how much does it
matter that they don't feel good or bad about it?
Perhaps an inhuman character is incapable of love - and yet in many stories they can
still act in a loving manner, supportive and kind and valuing their comrades even if they
don't recognize that's what they're doing; not even touching on the fact that not all
humans experience love either.
This story, intentionally or not, makes a statement about love's relationship with humanity
through this inhuman character.
In some stories the inhuman character can't age or die, exploring how mortality and change
defines humanity.
In many Pinocchio Plots, the character gets a taste of the facet of humanity that intrigues
them - and in many cases they don't like it.
The formerly unemotional character finds themselves far too manipulable by ephemeral feelings,
the previously immortal character figures out that they don't like pain and aging is
scary, the soulless character faces whatever metaphysical repercussions accompany the abrupt
acquisition of a soul.
But then again, for some characters it's just what they needed - the immortal character
finds new value in a life that changes every day, the unemotional character sees everything
familiar in a new light when colored by how it suddenly makes them feel.
Different writers come to different conclusions about humanity, and different characters want
different things from it.
In a space this philosophically dense there's no real right or wrong answer - just the potential
for a lot of extremely interesting stories.
At its core, the Pinocchio Plot encourages a human writer and human audiences to ask
one key introspective question: do humans need to be this unique, special, shining species
on a hill for everyone to aspire to be?
Does humanity work as a standard against which all worth is measured?
And in the more compelling stories, the answer is usually no, because if the answer is yes,
that's where the conversation stops.
When a character ends the story by becoming a Real Boy(TM), it's a statement that humanity
- as the writer specifically defines it - really IS the ideal state of being.
A story that unpacks what concepts are picked out as defining humanity and explores how
those traits do or don't actually matter to the inhuman characters trying to understand
them is a story that can have almost infinite philosophical depths.
It can be existentially comforting to accept that humanity doesn't need to be the perfect,
ideal, ultimate life-form for humans to be worthy
of love.
So… yeah!