2025 Was the Year to Save Your Family from Monsters
- Scott Barnard
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
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 shape beneath wildly different genres. Again and again, the stories I loved were not about conquering the world, accumulating power, or even defeating evil in the abstract - they were 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 not by heroism, but 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 Pugsley.
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. Once again, the monsters are real, the world is dangerous, and the motivation is intimate. Survival is secondary to restoration.
The premise isn’t new. Stories have long asked characters to descend into peril to retrieve the lost. Labyrinth sees Sarah journey through a nightmarish 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, captured and transformed into pigs. Coraline pits a child against a seductive horror that captures her parents in a false world. 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 grammar. They may not have involved the abduction of a family member, but monsters appear. Communities are threatened. People are forced into extraordinary resistance.
Even 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. The year’s top-rated game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, follows a group of people banding together to confront incomprehensible enemies. Once again, the narrative engine is not domination, but preservation.
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. Today’s monsters feel different. They are rarely singular villains. They are systems. Environments. Forces without faces.
They 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, institutional failure. These forces don’t roar or gloat. 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, stories shrink the moral universe down to something graspable. I may not be able to fix everything, but I can refuse to abandon you.
This is why the family has returned as the emotional centre of so much popular media. Not as nostalgia, but as triage. When large systems feel hostile or unreliable, meaning collapses inward. Attachment becomes resistance. Love becomes the weapon.
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, then, is not simply the enemy. It is whatever treats people as expendable. As data. As collateral. As noise. And the human response is not conquest, but care.
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.
