Pop Culture Rewind: Before Real Boys, There Were Movie Crushes

My first crush didn’t sit next to me in class or pass me a note at recess. He lived in a labyrinth, wore eyeliner, and hung out with goblins. I was very young and completely in love with David Bowie as Jareth in Labyrinth.

It wasn’t just the hair (though, objectively, the hair did a lot). It was the presence. The confidence. The way he filled a room with total authority. There was also the ballroom scene: the music swelling, the masks, the glitter, the feeling that something magical and slightly dangerous was unfolding. And yes, fine, the tights. We can acknowledge the tights.

Looking back, it’s a slightly unusual first crush. But that’s the thing about fictional crushes; they don’t need to make sense. They arrive out of nowhere, wrapped in music and lighting and narrative tension, and they imprint on you before you have any framework for understanding them.

Not long after, I found myself equally taken with Val Kilmer in Willow. Madmartigan had everything a young imagination could want: a roguish grin, sword-fighting skills, quick wit, and just enough vulnerability to balance it out. One moment, he’s a swaggering hero; the next, he’s cradling baby Elora with surprising tenderness, or stumbling around reciting poetry under the influence of a love potion. It was my first introduction to the appealing combination of competent and soft—a theme that in hindsight has stuck around.

Then there was the wildcard: the fox from Disney’s animated Robin Hood. I would love to tell you there was some deeper reasoning here, but the truth is simpler. He was funny. He was kind. He had that easy confidence of someone who could outsmart authority while still doing the right thing. And, inexplicably, he was…handsome!. It's a slightly confronting realisation as an adult that your early ‘type’ may have been shaped in part by an animated woodland animal. But I stand by it.

And I know I wasn’t alone in any of this. Entire generations quietly fell in love with characters who were never going to text them back. Some were drawn to the rebellious charm of Jack Dawson in Titanic, others to the brooding mystery of Edward Cullen from Twilight (or were you team Jacob?). There were the fantasy heartthrobs—Legolas with his effortless grace in The Lord of the Rings—and the animated awakenings, like Aladdin or, for some, the quietly devoted Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Fiction, it turns out, has always been very good at manufacturing first loves.

By the time I reached my teens, my taste had evolved—or at least shifted into slightly more socially acceptable territory. Enter Fox Mulder from The X-Files: intense, curious, obsessed. His devotion to his work, and his respect for Agent Scully, and those eyes...my young heart swooned.

And then there was Trent from Daria—scruffy, laid-back, permanently half-awake, and completely unattainable. Watching Daria navigate that awkward, tongue-tied admiration felt uncomfortably familiar.

What ties all of these together isn’t just attraction—it’s distance. Fictional crushes are safe. They don’t require anything from you. There’s no risk of embarrassment, no awkward conversations, no possibility of rejection. You can replay their best moments endlessly, freeze them at their most charming, and quietly build your own understanding of what you find appealing. They’re also, in a strange way, formative. Long before we articulate our ‘type,’ we’re absorbing it: the dramatic entrances, the softness beneath bravado, the quick wit, the sense of mystery. Fiction gives us heightened versions of these traits—exaggerated, idealised, sometimes completely impractical—but deeply felt all the same.

Perhaps that’s why they linger. Even now, years later, there’s something disarmingly sweet about revisiting those early crushes. They exist in a kind of emotional time capsule: a reminder of what it felt like to be young, impressionable, and completely sincere in your affections for someone who wasn’t real. So if your first crush was a vampire, a cartoon, or a goblin king in very questionable trousers—you’re in good company. We were just learning about what made us swoon.

by Vanessa Bland