Fiction is Real

When I was, maybe, ten years old, the world was populated with villains and heroes. The superheroes would fly around and save the day using their impressive and extraordinary talents and the villains were always overpowered.

Books, movies, and TV had beguiled my young mind into thinking good can always overcome evil. All it takes is a willing hero and a training arc. I was captivated, I was that hero in the rough, and I was going to grow up to be a super Saiyan from Dragon Ball Z.

I honed my kamehameha before bed every night and joined aikido but when the inevitable happened or, rather, didn’t happen, I was inconsolable. I couldn’t kamehameha. Little girl depression set in and I had to come to terms with an obvious fact about life – there is no magic in the world. Young me thought fiction had poisoned me, had lied about everything. There were no elves, hobbits, or dragons. No pocket monster friends – and there were definitely no super Saiyans. Good guys didn’t vanquish nothin’ and there weren’t any bad guys to trounce either, not really.

But Bad Guys are Real:

The last few years have been a lot. I don’t know about you, but I spend just as much effort dodging the news as I do reading it. I open my phone every day and squint at the battered landscape of my feeds. A thousand caped crusaders, on Reddit or X, war all night, fighting for, or strangely, against, basic human freedoms. Strewn all over the comments, the casualties are barely visible over the “actuallys.”

Those who lived through the Nixon administration, McCarthyism, and watched war waged on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the rest (read the whole list here), may not be all that shocked by recent events – including the most recent development with Iran. The United States of America participates in, if not start, a lot of overseas conflicts and maybe it starts to get old over time. Some American’s are sure to have believed in supervillians for some time, but I for one, was not prepared for the madness that has set in on Capitol Hill.

This e-battlefield defies our understanding of boring mundane reality. Authors named these things, painted them with strong imagery, but fiction didn’t create them. The inexplicably evil villains, and our growing feeling of heroic purpose to thwart them, are as real as can be.

What a realization! Now when I read a book with a bad guy I wonder if the character was based on someone from the author’s life. There are so many people ripe to be the villain of a novel. The wizard from “The Wizard of Oz” is a fraud, a snake oil salesman. Frank Baum’s characterization of the man is so convincing, he must had run-ins with one or two con-men in his day! Read Matilda, and you can guess by the description of Miss Trunchbull, that Roald Dahl was criticized by women growing up, and never recovered.

Tolkien’s Big Baddies:

In his novel, “Lord of the Rings”, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote one of the most dramatic and engaging depictions of good versus evil and his antagonist are, in my opinion, the best and baddest in fiction. Tolkien crafts each of his characters to be multi-faceted and fierce. They are so convincingly odious that I have to think Tolkien knew some of them in person. Was the sycophantic Wormtongue, based on a bully from school? Was Saruman the White some Machiavellian soldier with whom Tolkien was unfortunate enough to share a barracks during the First World War?

Sauron, the devourer of light, Tolkien’s biggest baddie, is widely seen as an allegory for Catholic concept of demonic evil. Sauron strikes me as an evil that’s a little more worldly. I see Sauron in the tedious tendency for people in groups to be self-interested. Sauron is the force that makes a collection of “good people” do bad things. Well-intentioned or not, an organization of any size is full of people with varying levels of ambition, competence, and interest in the organization’s mission. As it turns out, some people are just a 16 oz cup of coffee away from committing genocide.

Villains are, as villains do:

To view the news is to watch in disbelief as the antagonists, blinded by ego and brain rot, bumble through their cameos. It’s astonishing to watch current events become the drama we read in books. These real-life bad guys are creating a perplexingly petty and mutually self-destructive theater right before our eyes. It’s straight out of fiction.

The drama, The intrigue! Ten-year-old me would be thrilled!

Adult-year-old me is not.

Child me may have been right, that the world needs saved by heroes but it hasn’t turned out as cool as she had hoped. Saving the world is actually very dull and being super! may just consist of getting up in the morning, eating a good breakfast, and trying to not become a jerk-face like the bad guys. Not really the kamehameha I had hoped for.

The battle for the future of earth isn’t easy, and it will take until the end of our days. During our lives we will watch many battles from the sidelines and fight a few too. And then our children, and our children’s children, and their children’s children, will be called upon to pick up the bow, and discover some innate superhuman ability to vanquish the creatures that crawl from the underworld.

To stay a little more grounded, I silently remind the young girl who marveled at heroes and wished to join champions, that it is only in fiction, that the universe rumbles from unseen cosmic forces. Maybe it would disappoint her, but we will never witness all life snapped out of existence by a crusty man with gemstones in his glove. It’s not as galactic as all that.