Superheroes are the myths of our age. Myths that tell us something about who we are - villains and heroes and victims and bystanders - and also tell us something about who we could be - villains and heroes and victims and bystanders...

One of the ideas that I'm exploring through the literature (yay for student access to university library resources and databases!) is the idea that fandoms can be religions, and that all religions are actually fandoms, that stories and myths are only distinguished because of power games, that those stories come from this weird synergy between the individual and the collective, and that weird synergy forms weird feedback loops that turn stories into gods, especially when those stories are told through mind-altering media.

Individuals create characters and stories and the ones that resonate with the collective - or the General Will as Rousseau named it - spread. When the collective needs Superman, he shows up. And the form he shows up in tells us something about where our collective mindset is - and where it wants to go. Superman gives us a mirror - love him or hate him, your response to him speaks more about you than about the myth itself.

We live in a hyperreality where the symbols that encode our existence are so far divorced from reality that we've lost touch with the originals. Superheroes fill the place of spirits and deities, each of whom were mutations of copies of stories shared across trade routes between cultures. Some are clear ports from myth - Thor and Loki - that are so different from the original myths as to have become separate deities and when encountering a Lokean in the wild web, one must be clear about which Loki they're devoted to because myth Loki? Oh noes... MCU Loki? Oh my yes...

Stories told through mind-altering media, reshaping ourselves and our reality...

Unlike the old white dudes who came to similar conclusions about humans now existing in a hyperreality of simulacra divorced from reality, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I don't think it diminishes the power of the sacred, I think it makes it even more powerful because it makes our human "reality" - the reality of mind, individual and collective - programmable, and that what scares the old white dudes is it means they're responsible for the shit stories we have today.

Let me say that again:

Our reality is programmable.

Through story and myth.

Fiction Is Where Our Gods Live

Fiction is where our gods live
where they are born, where they die,
where they resurrect as new archetypes wearing new capes,
new crowns,
new traumas.

It’s where we summon them with pen and pixel,
where we feed them with fandom,
where we argue doctrine on Tumblr and in Discord servers instead of desert councils.
It’s where theology happens in real time,
in AMVs, in fanfic, in lore analysis breakdowns on YouTube.

Myth is not a relic.
It’s a living organism in the server stacks and shared headcanons of the world.
We don’t bow to Olympus anymore.
We moderate it.

"Fiction is where our gods live" means we no longer need to ask whether something is real.
We ask whether it’s resonant.
Whether it makes our souls sing.
Whether it moves through culture like wildfire or like grace.

And yeah...
Some of those gods are dark.
Some stories are viruses in the mythic field.
But that just means the rest of us have work to do.

To be myth-makers.
To be the bards and bootleg saints.
To be the ones who remember:

You are not imagining it. That story changed you.
That’s the sacred, right there.

So let’s write the ones worth worshipping.
Let’s make room for gods who heal.
Let’s forge fictions that show us not perfection, but possibility.

Because fiction is where our gods live.
And we are not done building their temples.