Saviors

Despair runs deep when the belief in saviors is no longer. Maybe that’s why we’re so drawn to saviors in art. From literary allegiances between High Fae and mortals, a fellowship among Hobbits, wizards and kings to teams of superheros and legions of resistance fighters that loom large before us on our screens. The fight against evil, the dark side. It’s a battle that art has allowed us to fight within our own human world, in Prythian, on Middle-Earth. The war has been fought throughout the multiverse and the galaxy.

I’m drawn to art in all forms, and I sometimes long for these tales to be true. My growing darkness in days past is a reckoning with reality. An admittance that no magic, no force, no billionaire-made-hero’s technology is going to save us.

I’ve thought about what those molded saviors have in common, why we’ve shed tears for them, clapped and cheered for them, felt a surging in our chest for them. Certainly it’s their willingness to sacrifice themselves for ‘us,’ but I think it’s more than that. It’s their fallibility, their internal darkness, their heartache, their contradictions that we’re so drawn to. In them we see bits and pieces of ourselves.

So who is going to save us from the darkness? When the saviors we willed into existence don’t have a living, breathing counterpart, who do we turn to?