Had a thought…

And you know how dangerous that is.

I was watching one of those crime shows about the hacker who can get into any data base on the planet in two seconds while making wisecracks at the same time?

I love those shows.

I mean, hands down– have fallen completely in love with them.

I’m mesmerized.  I don’t care if it’s impossible for one person to out-hack a battalion of cyber-criminals and police in two minutes of snarky banter.  I don’t care if serial killers usually succeed by using simple stuff instead of hyper intelligent “No mouse is smarter than me!” mousetraps, and that there are (thank Pete!) not nearly that man psychopaths in such a limited space (even New York!) and that one of these shows usually covers a thousand years of serial killer and mysterious death and psychopath history + embellishment in the course of one season.

Doesn’t bother me.

It’s like magic.

In fact, it’s exactly like magic.

Like the fairy princess and the snarky belligerent prince use their magic wands and various fairy godparents to elude the dark sorcerer and slay the dragon, with full acknowledgment that even if they slay the dragon and elude the sorcerer the battle will continue tomorrow.

And that’s why we love those shows.  Because the cyberworld is scary, and it’s such a specialized science that to many of us, it is magic.  Because monsters are real, whether they wear human form or not, and we want to believe that there are spunky princesses and snarky belligerent princes who can slay the dragons and vanquish the sorceress.  Yes, computers are beyond our ken (some of our ken) and it’s gotten to the point where the people at the help desk of our porn companies know more about our OS than we do, and that seems like a modern problem, but it’s not.

A thousand years ago, people didn’t know what was out there in the dark and they invented Grendel and Grendel’s mother and Nimue and dragons and scary bears and giant sea monsters, because they knew there were monsters even if they didn’t have a clear picture of what the danger was.  We’re the same people–we know there is danger, we know there are monsters so we invent shows that give us hope the monsters can be slain, that’s all.

And it doesn’t hurt that the princesses are pretty and spunky and brave and the princes are snarky and loyal and true.

I’m sure they were that way a thousand years ago too.