We Keep Turning Pop Culture Into Mythology

A person disappoints us and gets a villain arc. Someone survives a public failure and earns a redemption story. A relationship reaches the moment that was apparently inevitable all along and somebody calls it a canon event. We describe coworkers through sitcom characters, politics through movie villains, family dynamics through prestige television and courage through superheroes whose fictional biographies have been rewritten more often than most constitutions.

None of this requires believing that Batman is real because that is not how mythology has to work.

Myth is often misunderstood as an old false story involving thunderbolts, monsters or gods. Its more durable social function is narrative: a culture keeps certain stories around because they provide repeatable ways to discuss authority, sacrifice, betrayal, justice, transformation, belonging and the limits of human behavior. Modern pop culture performs some of those functions with extraordinary efficiency.

The surprising part is not that people have turned popular media into mythology. Human beings have always used stories to explain themselves. The surprising part is how much of the shared symbolic work once distributed across folklore, local tradition, civic institutions, religion, family history and national culture can now be carried by a movie franchise, a pop star or a television character.

Myth does not need to be ancient

Scholars have been making the comparison for decades. Richard Reynolds's 1994 study Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology examined superhero stories as narratives about consensus, authority and moral choice.¹ Douglas E. Cowan later argued that fantasy culture continues an older human appetite for mythic vision: stories larger than the individual into which people can imaginatively place themselves.²

That does not mean Iron Man is Zeus with better licensing. It means both kinds of stories can become containers for questions that exceed the plot.

Why should someone with power restrain it? What does a good person owe strangers? Can a damaged person still be heroic? When does revenge become corruption? What is a family? When does loyalty become complicity? Pop narratives answer those questions repeatedly, then revise the answers when the culture changes.

Superman has survived since 1938 not because every generation wants exactly the same strong man in a cape. He survives because the character can be made to carry changing arguments about immigration, power, decency, identity and belonging. Batman can be detective, vigilante, traumatized child, authoritarian fantasy or warning about authoritarian fantasy depending on who is telling the story.

A myth stays alive by being retold badly, brilliantly and differently. Corporate intellectual property has accidentally become very good at that.

We understand ourselves in stories

Psychology supplies part of the reason these narratives stick. Dan McAdams and Kate McLean describe narrative identity as the evolving internal life story through which people connect a reconstructed past to an imagined future and create some sense of unity and purpose.³ We do not merely remember events. We arrange them.

A breakup can become the moment someone learned independence. A humiliating failure becomes an origin story. A difficult childhood becomes either the explanation for later damage or the first act of a survival narrative. The facts matter, but identity depends partly on the plot we build around them.

Popular culture provides preassembled plot structures. That can sound trivial until someone reaches for one in a serious moment. People describe a parent as their Atticus Finch, a difficult period as their dark night of the soul, a loyal group of friends as their Avengers, a workplace as Succession, a romance as a rom-com, an impossible responsibility as Spider-Man's lesson that power carries obligation. The reference compresses explanation. A whole moral architecture can fit inside a character name.

The stories work because both people already know the map.

Shared language in a fragmented culture

This becomes especially useful in a culture with fewer universally shared institutions and increasingly fragmented media habits. The point is not that everyone watches the same thing anymore. They clearly do not. The old broadcast model, in which tens of millions of people could encounter the same episode at the same hour, has fractured into streaming libraries, social platforms, games, podcasts and personalized feeds.

Yet a smaller number of durable cultural properties can become more valuable precisely because the rest of the environment is fragmented. Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, Harry Potter, Batman, Barbie, Taylor Swift or The Simpsons do not need every person to be a fan. They only need enough cultural reach that the symbols remain intelligible to people outside the fandom.

Media scholar Motti Neiger's work on collective memory emphasizes that media does more than record shared memory; media products help construct and narrate what communities remember.⁴ Pop culture participates in that process constantly. It gives generations timestamps. A movie becomes where people were in childhood. A song becomes a marriage, a funeral, a road trip or the summer before everything changed.

Eventually the fictional artifact and the real memory become difficult to separate. The movie did not cause the childhood. It became one of the objects through which the childhood is remembered.

Fandom turns story into community

Mythology also requires more than a text. It needs repetition, interpretation and people willing to argue about what the story means. Fandom supplies all three.

Research on media fandom shows that fan identities can operate psychologically like other social-group identities. A 2016 study of Harry Potter and Twilight fans found that strongly identified fans responded to affirmation or threat around their fan identity in ways consistent with social-identity processes.⁵ More recent research continues to examine fandom as a source of belonging and self-definition.

This is where premieres, conventions, midnight screenings, cosplay, fan theories, tattoos, tribute events and annual rewatches begin to resemble ritual without needing to become religion. The point of the ritual is not only the object on the screen. It is the confirmation that other people know why the object matters.

Scholars of religion and fandom have repeatedly warned against saying fandom simply replaces faith. Sean McCloud argued that fandoms are better understood as modern projects of the self and community rather than automatically classed as religions.⁶ Matt Hills similarly cautions against the easy 'fandom equals religion' formula while acknowledging that fans can sacralize objects and practices through ritual.⁷

The distinction matters. A person can go to church on Sunday and Comic-Con on Saturday. Pop mythology does not require a vacuum where religion used to be. It can coexist with religion, civic identity, family tradition and ordinary life because it operates in a different register.

Celebrities become characters too

Fictional characters are only part of the system. Modern celebrity culture turns actual people into ongoing narrative figures.

A celebrity career develops eras, reversals, betrayals, comebacks, feuds, origin stories and moral tests. The public learns a simplified character while the actual human being remains mostly inaccessible. Social media intensifies the illusion by allowing celebrities and influencers to narrate themselves directly into the daily lives of audiences.

Parasocial relationships - one-sided psychological bonds with media figures - have been studied for more than six decades. A 2024 review examined 281 studies published between 2016 and 2020 alone and found that research had shifted heavily toward social media, nonfictional figures and cross-media environments.⁸ A 2026 scoping review similarly describes perceived familiarity and imagined intimacy as recurring features of parasocial experience.⁹

The result is a strange form of modern mythmaking in which the character can post back.

Religious-studies scholars have explored celebrity culture through concepts such as 'parareligion,' not because fandom and religion are identical, but because celebrity culture can generate communities, rituals, sacred objects and emotionally charged narratives that resemble some religious forms while remaining categorically different.¹⁰

The celebrity becomes simultaneously a person, a product and a story about the person.

The morality play never left

Pop culture also carries moral rehearsal. Stories let audiences encounter consequences without living them. A character lies, sacrifices, betrays, forgives, retaliates or refuses. Viewers can decide whether the act felt justified before the same category of decision appears in their own lives.

Research does not support the simplistic claim that one movie teaches a person to be good. The effects are slower and messier. Work on moral cultivation argues that repeated narrative exposure can contribute to long-term perceptions about norms, values, moral judgment and acceptable behavior.¹¹ A 2026 randomized study found that structured discussion of narrative fiction could improve children's moral reasoning, underscoring that stories can become material through which people practice ethical thought rather than merely absorb lessons.¹²

That is what mythology has always done especially well. It converts an abstraction into a person making a terrible decision. Justice is difficult to debate in the abstract. Batman can argue with Superman for us.

The corporation owns the gods

There is, however, one distinctly modern complication: much of this mythology is proprietary.

Ancient myth could be retold because nobody owned Hercules. Modern cultural mythology is often controlled by companies that own characters, archives, trademarks, distribution systems and increasingly the platforms through which audiences encounter them.

That changes the relationship between myth and society. A culturally meaningful character can be removed from a streaming service, rebooted for market strategy, licensed into advertising, withheld during a corporate dispute or reshaped because a franchise requires another decade of output.

The audience still performs mythmaking - interpreting, remixing, arguing, remembering - but the raw material arrives through an industrial system designed to monetize recurrence.

That does not make the stories fake. Commerce has always surrounded culture. It does mean modern mythology can be both emotionally communal and legally private property at the same time.

We can all know the story but we do not all own the campfire.

Algorithms accelerate canonization

The digital feed adds another layer. Myths traditionally gained force through repeated telling across generations. Platforms can now manufacture repetition in hours.

A scene becomes a clip. The clip becomes a meme. The meme becomes a reaction format. A line from a film is detached from the film and used to explain politics, romance, work or parenting. Someone who has never watched the source material may still understand the reference because the reference has achieved cultural independence.

This is one reason pop mythology now evolves at unusual speed. The internet does not merely distribute stories. It continuously annotates them.

Fandom once waited for the next installment. Now it builds theories, alternate endings, video essays, rankings, moral prosecutions and entire secondary canons between installments. The story does not end when the credits roll because thousands of people immediately begin negotiating what the story was allowed to mean.

Mythology has always been collaborative but the comment section simply made the argument visible.

The danger of thinking in franchises

Shared narrative language is useful until the metaphor replaces the thing it was supposed to explain. Real people are rarely heroes or villains with consistent motivations. Political conflicts are not movie plots. Trauma does not reliably produce character growth. Justice does not arrive in the third act. A public figure's downfall is not automatically a redemption arc waiting for the correct sequel.

Pop narratives are powerful precisely because they simplify. They select a protagonist, establish stakes, arrange causality and move toward an ending. Life resists all four.

The danger of pop mythology is therefore not childishness. It is narrative overconfidence: the temptation to assume that because a familiar story shape fits the facts, the shape explains the facts.

Sometimes there is no villain. Sometimes everyone has incomplete information. Sometimes the hero causes damage. Sometimes the person who changed did not learn the lesson the audience assigned them. Sometimes the story ends because time passed rather than because meaning arrived.

Myth gives chaos a shape. Journalism, history and adulthood occasionally have to put the chaos back.

We were always going to do this

Modern society does not rely on pop-media narratives because people have become unusually shallow. It relies on them because humans remain unusually narrative.

We need characters large enough to carry arguments. We need shorthand for complicated feelings. We need stories that strangers recognize. We need rituals that turn individual enthusiasm into community. We need ways to rehearse moral choices and ways to file memories where we can find them later.

Popular culture is simply one of the most efficient story-distribution systems humans have ever built. The old myths traveled through oral tradition, scripture, theater, folk tales and civic memory. The new ones also travel through opening weekends, streaming menus, playlists, fan edits and convention halls. The delivery mechanism changed. The appetite did not.

That is why the useful question is not whether Superman, Star Wars or a pop star counts as mythology in exactly the same way an ancient pantheon did.

The better question is what work we keep asking these stories to do for us.

We ask them to explain power. We ask them to hold grief. We ask them to name betrayal. We ask them to model courage. We ask them to give strangers something in common. We ask them to remember who we were when we first encountered them.

And then, because humans are incapable of leaving a good story alone, we tell it again.

Reporting & references

1. Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
2. Douglas E. Cowan, Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes: How Myth and Religion Shape Fantasy Culture, University of California Press, 2019.
3. Dan P. McAdams and Kate C. McLean, “Narrative Identity,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2013.
4. Motti Neiger, “Theorizing Media Memory: Six Elements Defining the Role of the Media in Shaping Collective Memory in the Digital Age,” Sociology Compass, 2020.
5. Samantha L. Groene and Vanessa E. Hettinger, “Are You ‘Fan’ Enough? The Role of Identity in Media Fandoms,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 2016.
6. Sean McCloud, “Popular culture fandoms, the boundaries of religious studies, and the project of the self,” Culture and Religion.
7. Matt Hills, “Sacralising fandom? From the ‘loss hypothesis’ to fans’ media rituals,” Kinephanos.
8. Holger Schramm et al., “Research trends on parasocial interactions and relationships with media characters,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2024.
9. “Characterising the Influence of Parasocial Experience on the Media Figures’ Audiences: A Scoping Review,” Behavioral Sciences, 2026.
10. Pete Ward, “Celebrity Worship as Parareligion: Bieber and the Beliebers,” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, 2017.
11. Helena Bilandzic, “Moral Cultivation: The Slow, Subtle, Small Effects of Filmic Narrative on Moral Understanding,” Oxford University Press, 2023.
12. Luciano Gasser et al., “Improving children’s collective and individual moral reasoning through small-group discussions about narrative fiction,” Child Development, 2026.