Why are monsters so fascinating?  Is it because they represent challenges—real and unknown—that we must face and overcome?  Are they a reflection of our bestial nature, our proclivity for sinfulness, even and especially towards the ones we love?

I think these reasons are accurate, but here’s the simplest explanation:  monsters are cool.  Every little kid who gets into monster movies doesn’t do so because the monster is a metaphor for grief, or nuclear war, or our darkest inclinations.  No, it’s because we want to see the monster—and see the good guys defeat it in some intriguing way.

Yes, we can appreciate monsters at a deeper, more sophisticated level as we grow older and experience “monsters” in our lives, but at the bottom of it all—after all of our high-browed interpretation of what are, essentially, B-movie fairy tales—we just love a cool, scary, weird monster.

Female readers may not understand this concept as intuitively as male readers, but anytime there is a big, scary beast in a video game, men’s first instinct is “how do I kill that thing?”  In games that permit early access to monsters way over the player character’s abilities, there is a thrill in surviving—often narrowly!—an encounter with a far stronger foe.  Even failing to defeat him is a lesson learned, and an opportunity for new growth.

I’ll never forget when my younger brother defeated an incredibly challenging enemy in the Nintendo classic Dragon Warrior.  He went into the encounter with a copper sword, one of the weakest swords in the game.  I still don’t know how he did it—he had wandered way off the intended path of his quest—but defeated this evil wizard-knight.  That was over thirty years ago, and I still remember it.

Yes, there are real monsters.  Yes, monsters in fiction are often symbolic of some deeper fear or anxiety.  But monsters—and defeating them—are also just really, really cool.

With that, here is 24 October 2024’s “TBT^16: Monsters“:

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