Alan Turing saved the world.
That is not hyperbole. His legacy is that he saved a world that hated him. Shortly after doing this, he was prosecuted for homosexuality, chemically castrated, and poisoned with cyanide. His crime? Existing as a gay man.
He worked with a team of ‘code girls’ who were a group of women smart enough to crack cyphers and help build the Bombe machine which was allied forces' answer to the Enigma. These women were ordered to never tell anyone the truth of what they did in their work, even their own families couldn't know. They were specifically ordered to tell anyone who asked about their work that they “got coffee and emptied the waste baskets.”
Sometimes, fiction is the place where people like us go to hold out hope that our stories will end in something other than misery and tragedy. And not because we're weak, but because you are.
Because in real life, you keep killing us, and we keep showing up to save you. You cannot survive without us and we cannot survive with you.
So, we're always relying on make-believe to show us something better. We don't need fiction to show us that we're great, we already know that. We need these stories to escape into a world where you aren't threatened by our greatness.
A place where the price of heroism for us is not obscurity, loneliness, or death. So it is, in fact, that deep. It's never just a tv show, or a just book, or just a movie.
These people and people just like them saved the world with intellect, determination, courage, and unmatched intelligence. You could never.
"But wait, are you talking about the real-life heroes or the fictional ones?"
Tell me the difference. I'll wait.