Fiction is naturally a part of most of our lives, and has been for a long time. When we were younger, fiction was there when our parents read us a bedtime story, silly voices and all. Now, it can be found when picking up a book, watching a movie, or turning on a TV show. It can even be a story told through the songs of your favorite musician, the plotline of the video game you’re playing, or the play on Broadway you’ve been dying to see. The point is, most of us encounter fiction regularly, more often than we realize.
Part of the allure of fiction is that it’s an escape. Whether it’s how we get away from our own problems or relax after an exciting, yet busy time, consuming fiction means leaving our own reality, even if it’s just for a little bit. Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes what happens in a fictional world hits closer to home than we expect. While the characters in our storylines aren’t real, sometimes that fact alone, and the unexpected emotion that comes with it, makes us notice something about our own lives in a way reality can’t.
Still, for most of us, we think about how cool it would be to have a spark of that fictional world in our real life. We dream about playing Quidditch with Harry Potter and battling with Luke and Leah against Darth Vader using lightsabers. We think about our Hunger Games strategy and which Disney character we could be, and if we’re lucky, we get to visit Disney and Universal, or have a killer Halloween costume and get that spark, if only for a day.
However, none of that prepares us for the day when our world looks eerily like our favorite characters’. In today’s political climate, that’s exactly what many of us are seeing: that fictional world that we escaped to, with issues we could have never imagined, that are starting to look a lot like our own.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we aren’t flying on dragons or fighting Demogorgons. And for many creatives, their stories, although fictional, are naturally based on reality in some shape or form. In fact, in middle and high school, much of our assigned reading was to do just that, draw out the similarities between the protagonist’s world and ours. However, many of us are seeing parallels between some of our favorite stories and our lives, remembering what was learned by those characters, and by extension, us. Now, the scenes of those lessons are coming back and landing harder than ever.
Take the show Jack Ryan, for example. After the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, many Americans wondered why President Donald Trump would do that. In a now-viral clip from seven years ago, the protagonist, Jack Ryan, explains the political significance of Venezuela, and people on social media are saying it was a warning. Co-creator of the show, Carlton Cuse, told Deadline that the scene was fictional and not “imagining an outcome.” However, Cuse also said, although it’s surprising “how often real-world events catch up to fiction,” as a creative, “when you ground a story in real geopolitical dynamics, reality has a way of making it rhyme.”
Similar connections between fiction and reality were made when President Trump announced plans for his “Patriot Games,” in celebration of the U.S.’s 250th anniversary. In The Hunger Games, a dystopian book series by Suzanne Collins, later adapted by Lionsgate Entertainment, a boy and a girl are pulled from a lottery across 12 districts, each fighting for survival for the government’s entertainment. In his games, one boy and one girl from each of the 50 states compete in an athletic event, President Trump said. While it is unlikely that competitors will be fighting for their lives, people across the internet couldn’t help but notice the eerie similarities.
Various other connections have been made between books and today’s politics. Most notably, people have made connections between the current administration’s recent cuts in government spending and George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Published in 1949, the novel explores a dystopian society where the government conducts mass surveillance and constantly spreads propaganda.
However, it isn’t just books, movies, and TV shows that are resurfacing. Recently, Disney asked people to share how they’re feeling using a Disney quote, in a now-deleted Thread post. Well, social media users did just that, with an overwhelming amount of replies referring to the current administration’s immigration enforcement policies, especially after the death of Renee Good and the protests that followed. While many of the quotes came from various Star Wars movies and shows, other Disney animations and movie quotes were also mentioned.
As Cuse told Deadline, it’s important to note that while many of these fictional stories may have significant elements of real-life events and politics, they do not definitively depict what the future will look like, nor do they intend to. However, these stories, and their resurfacing, serve as a metaphorical reminder for us to be vigilant of the politics of our nation.
After all, while fiction isn’t meant to predict the future, it isn’t all that far away from reality and often tells us more than we initially realize.