Projecting Personalities on Others & Creating Characters

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One of my favorite things to do is look at photos of people and make up personalities, voices, and traits for them and make up stories about them. Every now and then I will get really attached to some of these characters and they will appear in everything in my mind: I will cast them as characters in books, I will pretend I am playing as them in a video game, and I even pretend some Internet posts were written by them. I just like to look at everything from their perspective and/or imagine their reactions to things.

I was just wondering if anyone else does this? Is this an Aspie thing? Or just some isolated case of weirdness?

My experience is conceptually similar, I think. In my fictional writing (I was a member of a literary roleplaying board for many years) I created characters, though they were generally based on real life or fictional people. I would get (and still am) tremendously invested in them, and I think the total wordcount for all the stories I've written about them must be well in excess of 2 million by now. They're real to me in a way that humans seldom are (perhaps because I've created them, I can "get inside their heads" much more easily than real life people), and I will often come across things day-to-day that I know they would say or agree with or enjoy. I do recast plotlines from films and books with those characters, too.

I don't know that it's an "autistic thing" per se (so few things exclusively are, after all!) - non-autistic friends of mine from said roleplaying board have been similarly invested in characters. That said, it's very possible that the focus and intensity of your interest in the idea is related to "autistic" ways of engaging with interests.

Thanks for your insights, Jimothy! You bring up an interesting thought that such characters seem more "real" or "human" than real people because you can get inside their heads. I very much agree with this and find that a lot of my frustration with interacting with real people is that I don't know what they are thinking and am not in control. Perhaps the fact that I control my characters is why I am so attached to them. I know what they will do at every turn.