2025: What We Refuse to Leave Behind
- Scott Barnard
- Jan 3
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 22
A Time to Save Your Family from Monsters
The stories I loved most in 2025 share a premise so simple it almost resists analysis: humans fighting monsters. Across wildly different genres and audiences, that was the year’s dominant shape. In anime, it was That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Solo Leveling, Shangri-La Frontier, Mashle: Magic and Muscles, Dandadan, and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. In gaming, it was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which follows a group of people banding together to confront enemies so powerful they border on incomprehensible. And the Switch 2 was released with updated versions of the magnificent Legend of Zelda games: Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom; two games where monsters have invaded a world and are corrupting it. Different tones, different worlds, same engine: a monster appears, a community is threatened, people are forced into extraordinary resistance.
It would be easy to chalk this up to personal taste - and partly it is - but this kind of storytelling resonated widely in 2025, not just with me. Which suggests something worth sitting with. Look closer at the stories that landed hardest, though, and a sharper pattern emerges beneath the broader one. The most affecting narratives weren’t just about fighting monsters - they were about abduction - about rescue - about entering darkness to bring someone home.
Netflix’s Stranger Things begins with the disappearance of Will Byers, and everything that follows is driven by refusal - his friends and family refusing to accept his loss, refusing to trust institutions that fail them, refusing to abandon a child to a world that does not care. Wednesday pivots on the kidnapping of Pugsley Addams, and the full force of a strange, marginalised family turns itself toward getting him back. The Moon Is Following Us, one of the year’s most praised comic series, follows parents who enter a hostile virtual reality to rescue their abducted daughter.
This story is ancient. Labyrinth sends Sarah into a fantastic realm to retrieve her baby brother from the Goblin King. Finding Nemo follows a single father across an ocean to recover his abducted, disabled child. Spirited Away traps Chihiro in a supernatural bathhouse where she must work to free her parents, transformed into pigs. Coraline pits a child against a monster that has captured the people she loves. More grounded thrillers - Taken, Prisoners, Ransom, Man on Fire, Poltergeist - hinge on the same core truth: something precious has been taken, and the world must be confronted to get it back.
What feels different in 2025 is not the existence of these stories but their concentration, and their grip on us. So why now?
Monsters change shape depending on what a culture fears. The dragons and demons of older storytelling had faces, names, a single lair you could find on a map. The monsters that haunt 2025 are harder to locate. They don’t issue ultimatums. They don’t want anything, exactly. They simply grind forward, and what they consume - time, safety, dignity, futures - disappears without drama, without a villain to confront. That indifference is precisely what makes them monstrous.And so our stories respond - not with power fantasies, but with protective ones. The goal is never to save the world. It’s to save someone: a child, a sibling, a parent, a small and fragile community. When the threat is too large and too faceless to defeat, storytelling shrinks the moral universe down to something graspable. The hero cannot fix everything. But they can refuse to abandon the people they love.
Children fight monsters because the world feels unsafe for children. Parents descend into darkness because it feels increasingly difficult to protect what they love. Communities band together because isolation feels like a slow erasure. The monster is not simply the enemy - it is whatever treats people as expendable, as data, as collateral, as noise.
Perhaps that’s what 2025 kept trying to tell us. Not that the monsters are winning, but that the thing worth fighting for has become smaller, closer, and more fragile. In an age where threats feel abstract and unstoppable, our stories return us to the oldest truth we know: meaning begins with who we refuse to leave behind.
