I feel a little misrepresented, but that's my own fault. I think we'd have to do quite a bit more unpacking to continue this conversation - you seem to want to mean the same thing by "love", "care about" and "sympathize with", and I think they all come apart for me. Like, maybe (warning: I'm tired) "love" feels like a timeless relation to a particular person-moment, whereas "caring" is timeful and inherently about wanting a possible-future-person to be better than a present-person, including morally better - surely something like that has to be the substance of caring? Like, what else is caring supposed to do? Just give me warm fuzzies?

I also think that I use different cognitive strategies to deal with real people I actually know, versus fictional characters (though I'm not necessarily endorsing that).