The Fictional Places We Call Home

There are places that we have never visited yet feel painfully nostalgic for. Whether that is a castle in the Scottish Highlands, a quaint little cottage in a seaside town, a magical school that is off the map, we miss places we have never seen, some that are removed from reality itself.

'Home' goes beyond a physical space. It is less about geography and more about feeling safe, comforted and like you belong. Home is a space where you are both recognized and accepted. Perhaps then, fictional spaces offer us solace in the sense that they offer an alternative way of finding a home to belong to.

Physical spaces hold memories. The childhood bedroom where you first learned how to braid your hair. The school corridor that watched you walk to class with your friends five to six days a week. The neighbourhood coffee shop that has grown older with you. The park where you experienced your first crush. Spaces see and know more than we think they do. And yet, fiction complicates this idea, as we feel drawn to places we have never physically occupied. Our memories of Stars Hollow and Hogwarts exist through a television screen and somehow we mourn them as though we had actually lived there ourselves.

The appeal of what I like to call 'emotional geography' is not just tied to escapism but extends to feelings of belonging, being chosen and feeling understood. For young girls who grew up watching Winx Club, Alfea represents a specific sort of belonging and kind of home. A place where differences were celebrated, where femininity and strength coexisted and where healthy, safe female friendships were formed. The fantasy isn’t just about being a fairy and magic, it is about having a home where you can embrace and understand your own uncertainties.

Real homes change as rooms are repainted, families move away, coffee houses open and close, schools become buildings we drive past rather than the places that you once spent hours in daily. The geography of life is constantly rewritten. Meanwhile, fictional homes remain suspended in time. Stars Hollow will always prepare for another town meeting. The Outer Banks will always have another adventure to look forward to. Alfea will always await the onset of another semester. We return to these places, even years later, and find them as we left them. In the process we may even rediscover the version of ourselves that first fell in love with them. 

It's like how revisiting childhood stories feels intimate. It is a return to fictional places we once loved but it is also a return to younger versions of ourselves that first encountered these places. The comfort is beyond just familiarity – it is in remembering how these places became familiar and homely. 

And such fictional places are rarely random. They reflect something that is missing in our lives or something that we are craving, whether that is belonging, feeling understood and vice versa. Then, perhaps, fictional worlds are not blueprints for escapism but are mirrors of the worlds we hope to build around ourselves. We may close the book, watch the credits roll or the screen go blank, yet the place lingers. Not because they're a different version of reality or subversion of the fact, but because in some small way, they help us imagine what belonging could feel like.