Super
A lot of fiction is about super heroes of varying degrees. Some of it is explicit to the point of being over the top, like many famous comic books and the movies based on them, but a lot of it is more subtle. So there’s this whole range, everything from barely super, like when Mr. Smith goes to Washington and learns that he can stand up to the system, to something a little more explicit, like King Arthur pulling Excalibur out of the stone, to the essentially magical nature of Superman. I asked God if we were attracted to this sort of thing because of a distant racial memory of a time when he was a lot more active in our daily lives on Earth, to a time maybe when we had occasional glimpses of the goings-on on Mt. Olympus and Heroes really were the offspring of Man and God.
He just sort of shook his head at first, as if to tell me that sometimes I just let my imagination get carried away, but I pressed the issue, I wanted a real answer.
Finally, he told me that I was dreaming too big, looking too far. If I wanted to see the real prototype for super heroes I only needed to look back as far as when I was a small child. When we start out our lives are parents are magical to us. They can do anything and they can protect us from anything. As we get a little older they seem to see right through us, look into our cores and see not just the things we try to hide from them but our motivations too. They mete out justice. They answer every question.
So just as we learn to live on our own, to go beyond needing our mothers and fathers, we can learn that even though we don’t need heroes in our daily lives, they can still make for good entertainment.
Strange – psychology tells us that superheroes (and the gods from mount olympus) are fantasy wish fulfilment to compensate from parental separation anxieties.
My parents, on the other hand, said that comics were a waste of my money.