I am interested by how big a deal this is to you! Not because you are wrong (because you are not) but because I feel like I’ve had a number of experiences where I was emotionally engaged/bleed-y out of proportion to other people at the table (in either direction), and that it doesn’t seem weird to me that it happens, maybe?

I think in tabletop it may be that we see less demonstrable evidence of emotional engagement than we tends to be able to in larp, perhaps? I know that when you said you were wrecked at the end of that game I was a little surprised, because I didn’t see much difference in your play from beginning to end, you know? 

In my experience, sometimes I have a surprisingly deep engagement in my character and I get some bleed from that almost independent of the actual content of the game. That’s basically why I wrote Annalise, because I had a character experience in a one-shot that that game was unsuited to exploring, so I wrote a game where I could explore it.