Why We Love Superhero Stories

The cultural significance of our metamodern mythos of superheroes

Jul 14, 2025

I love comic books. I love the storylines. I love the history behind the stories. I love the characters—some I love to hate. So, ever since the tidal wave of superhero movies flooded the past two decades, I have been all in.

Sure, there were superhero movies before the year 2000, but well-made movies were few and far between. It should also be said that not all comic book movies made since then are worth watching. (I’m still bitter about the 123 minutes I will never get back thanks to 2011’s Green Lantern!) However, comic book movies have had unprecedented success in the new millennium.

Believable CGI, brilliant casting, and skillful adaptation of classic storylines. Long-time enthusiasts like myself have welcomed multitudes of new fans. I’ve watch through the first ten or so years of the MCU with my students and now my children. It has been true joy to watch on the big screen what I formerly only knew from the printed page and my imagination.

For while, we were getting multiple superhero movies every year. And box office records were being made and broken on the regular. It all worked so well, I often wondered if and when we would just get a break. The flood may have receded a bit in recent years. But now, we have new phases and reboots that seem to keep on working.

With that many movies, making that much money, over that amount of time, there must be something that makes them that popular with that many people. I believe there are several themes common among superhero movies that connect to the heart of the human experience.

Here’s the thing: I love superhero stories, and you probably do too.

Here are three reasons why.

You can give a one-time support by buying me a coffee. (Although, full disclosure, I’ll more likely spend it on a book.)

Buy me a coffee

1. They explore our biggest ideas.

Ideas have consequences, and as John Stonestreet is well-known for saying, “Bad ideas have victims.”

In history, people are frequently lured into following bad ideas based on their immediate promises to solve our problems and improve our lives. What is worse, we are just as likely to reject good ideas because the solutions are difficult, and the gratification is delayed. We often don’t realize how bad an idea is until we are suffering the consequences of following it. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and we are left wishing we had chosen a different course.

For millennia, philosophers have used imagination as a tool for thinking clearly. Thought experiments (e.g. Plato’s cave, Descartes’ evil demon, or Rawls’ veil of ignorance) create small fictional situations to test ideas. They help us see what we really believe by showing what would follow if those beliefs were true. Superhero stories do something similar on a larger scale. They build imaginative worlds where the limits of power, justice, identity, and sacrifice are pushed to extremes. They allow us to ask, what if this idea shaped the world? And then they show us what might happen if it did.

Over the years, superhero stories have adapted the biggest ideas in the real world to be played out on the printed page and the big screen. Superman grappled with nuclear disarmament. The X-Men mirrored the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s. The Avengers attempted to stop Thanos from exacting a Malthusian holocaust. What we see in superhero stories is a retelling of history with some superpowers mixed in.

Superhuman abilities notwithstanding, we know that those stories are at their best when they hit so realistically close to home. As we observe our heroes’ plights, we may stand to learn a thing or two. We can’t punch through or fly over our problems, and in the best stories neither can the hero. They have to figure it out like the rest of us. A thought-provoking storyline helps us consider the pivotal moments of our story.

Superhero stories present us with the opportunity to explore the logical ends of our biggest ideas without experiencing the consequences of them. However, we must be active in identifying those ideas and thinking through their implications.

2. They exemplify our sincerest convictions.

For most of human history, right and wrong have been determined by divine revelation. On the Christian view, God reveals his nature by way of his law and fulfills that law in the person of Jesus Christ. For centuries, Judeo-Christian ethics formed the Western tradition, establishing moral ideals such as human dignity, individual worth, and basic equality.

There is a story to be told about how stories have been told over the past century or so. We’ve seen our culture shift from modernism to postmodernism.

Modernism gave us superheroes as moral absolutes. They embodied the belief that truth could be known, evil could be defeated, and the world could be fixed through willpower and virtue. Superman didn’t just fly; he stood for a kind of moral optimism that reflected the modernist confidence in human ability. Captain American didn’t just carry a shield; he embodied ideals.

Postmodernism changed the story. It made us stare at the reality that power corrupts. In a world suspicious of meta-narratives and institutions, heroes became fractured, uncertain, even cynical. Batman broods. Iron Man compromises. We see the vicious faults of heroes and the virtuous motives of villains. What we’re left with is not the death of heroism, but its morphing. There’s still longing for redemption and justice, but it’s all wrapped in moral ambiguity. The shift reveals something about us: we still want a savior. We’re just not sure anyone qualifies.

Now, there’s talk of metamodernism. Supposedly, the 2025 Superman is a prime example of what our culture is long for—an honesty about the tensions between sincerity and irony, hope and doubt. In superhero stories, this means we no longer settle for either naive idealism or total cynicism. (More on that another time perhaps.)

With each superhero story revisited, ethical norms are revisited. Some say morality is just a social construct. That we invent right and wrong to keep order or gain power. But when we watch someone give their life to save others, we don’t just admire it; we call it good. Deep down, we believe that sacrificial love isn’t just useful or popular. It’s right. Always. That kind of moral intuition points to something deeper than cultural expectations. It suggests there’s a moral fabric woven into reality. And if that’s true, then we’re not just making up stories, we’re responding to something real.

Superhero stories present us with the opportunity to confirm the basis for our most sincere convictions as we hold to them in real life. However, we must be aware of the reality of those convictions and wonder where they came from.

3. They express our deepest longings.

Why is it that superhero stories have received such unprecedented popularity in recent decades?

Reflecting on his role as Batman, actor Ben Affleck candidly offers an explanation:

There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world, from natural to man-made disasters, and it’s really scary. Part of the appeal of this genre is wish fulfillment: Wouldn’t it be nice if there was somebody who can save us from all this, save us from ourselves, save us from the consequences of our actions and save us from people who are evil?[1]

This is a sentiment we all have in common. No matter how different we may be from one another, we all can agree on at least a couple of things. First, the world is not as it should be. Second, we do not seem to be capable of an ultimate solution because, as Affleck says, we are part of the problem.

The strength of Superman, the nobility of Captain America, the virtue of Wonder Woman, the ingenuity of Iron Man, the cunning of Batman—these all echo hope for salvation in the real world.

Superhero stories present us with the opportunity to express that for which we ultimately long and to which we guide our lives. However, we must be honest in considering the longings which make these stories so appealing.

Sacrifice Saves the Day

One of the prevailing themes in comics and their corresponding movies is that of salvation through sacrifice. Timothy Paul Jones writes, “Whatever the reason, nearly every comic-book hero is part of an overarching metanarrative that requires supernatural sacrifice to save the world.”[2] It is here that we cannot help but see reflections of Christ.

Jones continues:

Whatever works in these superpowered metanarratives works precisely because the artist has borrowed remnants from the comprehensive coherence of a biblical worldview. The unbeliever sees these world-saving wonders and may experience a passing sense of awe or appreciation. And yet, any goodness or truth that the unbeliever glimpses becomes, in the words of John Calvin, like “a flash of lightning that enables a bewildered traveler to see far and wide for an instant, but then the light vanishes…before the traveler can take a single step in the right direction.”

Sacrificial salvation is a common theme throughout superhero mythos because it is a common need of the human condition. Superheroes are at their best when they fix what is broken by giving themselves to be broken. They do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

Sacrificial salvation is a common theme throughout superhero mythos because it is the common need of the human condition. Sound familiar? If you are a Christian, it should.

If you are not a Christian, I pray you soon see the reality of what C.S. Lewis called the “true myth.” After all the ancient mythology that Lewis studied, he concluded:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.

Superhero stories don’t demand belief. They do something else. They stir the imagination. They awaken longing. They echo something deeper, something older, something true. They don’t carry the weight of evidence; they shape what we find believable. And I think that’s what makes them so important. They help us recognize the story we were made for when we hear it again.

Please don’t here me say, “Jesus is the real hero!” (Although, I mean, he is!) It’s just that the story of Jesus Christ is a story that works on us in the same way all the others do. However, the story of Jesus has this tremendous difference: it really happened!