#ajhshdhdh I’m so sorry this took so long

[sailforvalinor]

I saw you post on seasons 1 through 4 of Dr. Who and I wanted to know more about your accidentally Christian pile. What are some other works do think unintentionally emphasized Christian doctrines or morals?

Ooooooh, really good question!!

So the first thing that comes to mind here is Marvel’s Agents of Shield--each season has it's own story arc and themes, so it's hard to pin down just one thing here, so I'll just talk about a few. I'll talk about the obvious one first: Season 3 in particular has a lot of Christian imagery (though in this case, it's definitely on purpose). You see a flash-forward of a cross necklace at the beginning of the season floating in a spaceship in space right before it blows up, and then you watch as that necklace get passed around from person to person, knowing that whoever ends up with it at the end of the season is going to die. I won't spoil anything more, other than to say that it results in quite a bit of Christ/crucifixion imagery and themes.

Other than this, there's a lot about the redemptive power of love (Fitzsimmons my beloved), individual guilt and how to handle it, how to let go of shame, the inevitable defeat of evil--I know there's more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. (AOS girlies/gents, feel free to chime in!) Additionally, one of the main characters explicitly a Christian, and while he's not portrayed perfectly, he's never ridiculed for it by the other characters or the narrative, which is a breath of fresh air. There are of course some things I don't approve of (prepare to have your skip button ready once or twice in the earlier seasons), but it's still a fantastic show, and by far the best show Marvel has ever come out with.

Harry Potter’s a pretty obvious one—Harry has to sacrifice himself and be fully willing to die to kill Voldemort, the fight with the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets has some Biblical parallels—but I’m fairly certain that these themes were deliberate, so I suppose they don’t really count. But they do to me, so 😂

Star Wars is another big one for me—of course, a la George Lucas’s original vision, SW is much more directly influenced by Buddhism, but I find that it often can’t help dipping into Christian themes. I find this is especially true with anything that has Dave Filoni’s name attached, likely because he in turn is pretty influenced by Tolkien and Lewis (Ahsoka is meant to parallel Gandalf, the World Between Worlds in Rebels was inspired by The Magician’s Nephew’s Wood Between Worlds, etc). Mandalorian season 3 in particular blew me away—baptism! Redemption! Rebirth! Mandalorian denominations/sects! Seriously, I was expecting them to come down hard on the strange rules that sect holds themselves to and for Mando to completely reject them—but they didn’t?? It was SO fascinating.

Kingdom Hearts is probably one of my favorite demonstrations of John 15:13: “greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Otherwise, I can’t really think of any super prevalent Christian themes I noticed, but that one is just so strong and so important to the themes of the series, I couldn’t not mention it.

Final Fantasy XV has something similar going for it—although what I’m going to say has MAJOR spoilers, so if don’t want to be spoiled, go ahead and skip this (and play the game because it’s great—but Noctis having to willingly sacrifice himself by sitting on a throne in order to purify his kingdom is as blatant as you get. For crying out loud, he’s called the One True King. However this only holds true for the base game—the dlc’s (except for Episode Prompto, but that’s just because it doesn’t really apply to that plotline, also it’s incredible) and the novel in my opinion kind of ruin it.

Legend of Zelda is an interesting one, because it is of course heavily inspired by Shinto, but a few Christian themes sort of snuck their way in there. In Skyward Sword (oh and spoilers for Skyward Sword). Hylia, though certainly not meant to be a direct Christ figure, chooses to be reborn as a Hylian (basically a human) in order to save her people. The difference here is that Zelda does not know that she’s Hylia, and she never regains her goddess status (at least presumably until she dies of old age), but it’s an interesting parallel nonetheless. Also, there’s a famously creepy cutscene in Twilight Princess where we get the story of how the Twili were banished from Hyrule for dabbling in dark magic, and the sequence has always reminded me of the Fall.

Those were just a few that I thought of off the top of my head—I’m sure there are more, but that’s all that’s coming to me at the moment 😂