2025 Was the Year to Save Your Family from Monsters
- Scott Barnard
- Jan 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 3
2025 Was the Year to Save Your Family from Monsters
Looking back over my favourite media of 2025, I couldn’t help but notice a recurring pattern beneath wildly different genres. The stories I loved were about abduction - about rescue - about holding onto family - about entering darkness to bring someone home.
Netflix’s Stranger Things - one of the platform’s most watched series of all time - began with the abduction of Will Byers, setting in motion a story driven by refusal. His friends and family refuse to accept his loss, refuse to trust institutions that fail them, and refuse to abandon a child to a world that does not care. Similarly, Netflix’s other highly successful show, Wednesday, revolves around the Addams family, and when Pugsley is kidnapped, the full force of the family focuses their strengths on finding and rescuing him.
This pattern extends beyond television. One of the most highly praised comic series of the year, The Moon Is Following Us, centres on parents entering a hostile virtual reality to rescue their abducted daughter. Similar to Stranger Things and Wednesday, the monsters here are real, the world is dangerous, and the motivation is intimate.
The premise isn’t new. Stories have long asked characters to descend into peril to retrieve the lost. Labyrinth sees Sarah journey through a fantastic realm to rescue her baby brother who was kidnapped by the Goblin King. Finding Nemo follows a single parent crossing an ocean to recover his abducted and disabled child. Spirited Away traps Chihiro in a supernatural bathhouse where she must work to save her parents who have been captured and transformed into pigs. Coraline pits a child against a button-eyed spider-like monster that has captured her parents. Even more grounded thrillers - Taken, Man on Fire, Prisoners, Ransom, or the horror Poltergeist - all 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 sheer concentration - and their popularity.
Alongside these family-centred narratives, many of the year’s standout series I loved were explicitly about humans fighting monsters: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Solo Leveling, Shangri-La Frontier, Mashle: Magic and Muscles, Dandadan, and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Different tones, different audiences, same premise. They may not have involved the abduction of a family member, but the hero enters a new realm - monsters appear - communities are threatened - people are forced into extraordinary resistance.
Gaming reflects this fixation. On the Nintendo Switch 2, two of the highest-rated titles of the year remained The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom - both games structured around protecting a fragile world from encroaching monstrosity. 2025’s top-rated game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, follows a group of people banding together to confront incomprehensible enemies.
It would be easy to say there’s simply a strong pattern in my personal tastes - and there is - but it’s also undeniable that this kind of storytelling has resonated widely in 2025. Which raises a more interesting question: why now?
Tales of humans fighting monsters are as old as storytelling itself. But monsters change shape depending on what a culture fears. The dragons, demons, and goblins of the past often represented natural forces, invading armies, or divine punishment. There are monsters that represent systems, environments, and forces without faces. There are monsters that are indifferent rather than evil. In 2025, many people feel surrounded by threats that cannot be reasoned with: opaque bureaucracies, algorithmic decision-making, economic precarity, environmental collapse, rising crime, and institutional failure. These monstrous forces don’t look like a demogorgon (from Stranger Things) or Slurp (from Wednesday) - they simply grind forward, consuming time, safety, dignity, and futures. That indifference, more than violence itself, is what makes them monstrous. And so our stories respond accordingly.
These narratives are not power fantasies in the traditional sense - they are protective fantasies. The goal is not to save the world, but to save someone: a child, a sibling, a parent, a small vulnerable community. When institutions fail, and our real-life monsters are too overwhelming, our stories shrink the moral universe down to something graspable so we end up with heroic characters that may not be able to fix everything but they can refuse to abandon their family and friends.
This is why the family has returned as the emotional centre of so much popular media. When large systems feel hostile or unreliable, meaning collapses inward and attachment becomes resistance. Love becomes the weapon wielded by the heroic.
Children fight monsters because the world feels unsafe for children. Parents descend into hell because it feels increasingly difficult to protect what they love from forces beyond their control. Communities band together because isolation feels like death. 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 has been trying to tell us through its stories. Not that 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.
