remember exactly when I lost my taste for fantasy as a refuge from real-world woes. 

Chechen separatists took 1,200 children and adults hostage at School No.1 in Beslan, North Ossetia in September, 2004. Amid the horrors of the siege, one child later described breaking down in tears and praying to be saved by Harry Potter. In despair and panic, trapped in an unthinkable situation, the boy voiced the hope that the hero of Hogwarts would come with his invisibility cloak and spirit the children to safety. Many adult hostages sacrificed their lives to save the children in their charge, and stories emerged of even the terrorists protecting them from the military’s insane attempt to break the siege, which would end with Russian forces pouring artillery fire into the building in an indiscriminate massacre.

It would be heartbreaking in any case, but the invocation of the boy wizard seems particularly poignant, for Harry Potter failed to inspire heroism, but only hero-worship, and joined Jesus and Superman in the canon of magical heroes who will save us only in dreams.

Even that thin tissue of empowerment is lost to millions as her continuous hostility towards trans-folk has left many readers feeling betrayed by J.K. Rowling, and thus by Potter. Rowling, whose genius for forcing us to identify with the plucky orphan (forget the magic; the true wish fulfillment of the Hogwarts books lies in having every adult you encounter slavishly praise you), failed to grasp how deeply millions of fans looked to her creation, and her, for validation of their own battles with darkness, and came away betrayed.

Of course, we know that heroes like Harry Potter are intended to inspire us to emulate their courage. But they only have to trust in their own magical destiny; their wishes seem to come true at the expense of ours. They cannot and never will save us, even if they can stir in us the resources to face what seemed impossible and survive it. 

Which is one more reason why I’ve always rooted for the monsters.

Monsters, like Disney’s many orphan protagonists, are also coldly calculated to win our hearts. Misbegotten, misunderstood, they reflect the ugliness the world makes us feel, while defiantly asserting their right to exist and thrive. Show me a movie-lover who can’t shed a tear for King Kong, the Gill-Man or Frankenstein’s creation, and I’ll show you who the real monster is.

As no end of merchandise also forcefully proves, monsters are powerful totems that let us show the world how aberrant we feel in this world, while gleefully embracing it. But unlike Disney’s junk-food self actualization, monsters don’t set impossible standards that leave us feeling mundane and inadequate. Monsters, we know, are always nuked or hunted down by angry, pitchfork-wielding villagers, yet they always return, so long as we love them enough.

My daughter scares more easily than anyone I’ve ever known. Her imagination is a feral force that overwhelms her with the slightest provocation. This girl once suffered recurring nightmares about bats that we traced back to a fleeting glimpse of a scene in Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom as she walked by the TV. Even most classic children’s features leave her in hysterics. There was never any question of letting her watch a real horror movie. 

But then she saw Godzilla.

Her first taste was late Showa-era (Godzilla Vs. Megalon), with a googly-eyed, marginally heroic Gojira and awesomely obtuse Jet Jaguar, but she was exhilarated, excited because she identified not with the panic-stricken hordes, but with the monsters. She was trampling the buildings, raking the sky with radioactive fire, exerting her power. It was wondrous to behold, and led me to reconsider my own lifelong monster obsession.

I was an angry child. Kicked out of three preschools. Pre-kindergarten juvenile delinquency. Night-terrors. My parents got divorced when I was three, and I guess I was reacting to that. My father was a loving, kind man who was missing an eye after an accident when he was twelve. A monster to himself, he drank and used drugs to excess, and couldn’t stop when my mother threatened to leave. My father largely disappeared from my life at age three and died not long after, and I took refuge in whatever janky, half-assed fantasy early 1970’s TV could offer. Mostly, that meant monsters, and whenever possible, a Cyclops. Polyphemus blinded by Kirk Douglas in Ulysses. The 7th Voyage of Sindbad. The hideous phantom of the graveyard of ships in the “Dragon’s Domain” episode of Space:1999; even the crappy cyclops on Lost In Space.

My overworked mother was unable to stop me watching creature features all night long on TV, sneaking into monster movies when I was dropped off to see matinee cartoons. At some point, I realized the night-terrors were nothing more nor less than bonus monster movies in my brain. And shortly thereafter, they stopped. 

It wouldn’t take a Viennese therapist to crack my case. Monsters were my security blanket, my totems. They didn’t meekly plead for acceptance from a world that reviled them. They raged and schemed and pillaged and devoured and left no witness unshaken. Even when they are defeated and destroyed, they never fail to show us that the world is a far weirder place than we want to accept.

And they never have. Whenever the banality of human evil seems to triumph, whenever a celebrity or politician turns out to be an asshole, or a creator launches an ill-conceived tirade that repulses their audience, I look to my own cherished heroes, and find them forever unbroken.