Yes.
When I read Terry Goodkind’s Faith of the Fallen, and how he transformed a dystopian community into a utopian one, all through the power of CAPITALISM (making a profit the whole time), it makes me reflect on capitalism and its failings.
When I read FILM CRIT HULK’s reviews of superhero movies, it makes me think of how to be a better author, and of what messages are being sent, both consciously and unconsciously, by a superhero movie, or a Bond film, both of which are extraordinarily escapist.
When I watch Anita Sarkeesian’s critiques about women in video games (pretty much the height of escapist media), it makes me see how real-life women are treated differently in real life, and that the world looks very differently from other perspectives.
The best stories are the ones that teach us things about the world around us today. “Fantasy” stories are what made me look critically at, and eventually disown, my patriarchal religion, my teenage homo- and transphobia, and my belief that people who were raised to different moral standards than mine are “evil” and subhuman.
@ChargingSkies linked the Bad Astronomy blog; that blog posts a dozen pictures a week of awesome celestial images that no one has seen before. There is enough wonderful stuff in this skies that we don’t have to lie about how wonderful the mundane is, especially when the moon is quite wonderful without any exaggeration.
I disagree. In the last decade - the last fifty, and hundred, and thousand years, we have learned much. We have grown much.
“'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
