Are there really people without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?
Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others.
There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.
Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Lathe of Heaven”
If anyone wants to know why I love sci-fi and fantasy, in particular the superhero/tokusatsu genres, this is it. These genres aren’t as afraid as most are of showing the hero archetype, of reveling in it and dissecting it but still ultimately upholding it, and I will forever love them for that. Because I do believe there isn’t anyone who hasn’t seen a hero, at least once. And hopefully we can make it so that there are enough heroes to keep us going.
