Why Rural Superheros?

 Spider-Man, Batman, Superman. 

New York, Gotham, Metropolis.

It's almost a given that superheroes live in a city. The stakes are usually thought to be higher and bigger buildings = bigger destruction. So this begs the question, why write a superhero novel in a rural setting? What evil is there to fight in the middle of the woods?

To begin with, even though only 1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas,  97% percent of American land is considered rural. That's a lot of land! (Source 1, Source 2)

Additionally, rural communities often face more difficulties in recovering from natural disasters, with small towns often not having the same resources to rebuild. Take North Carolina after Hurricane Helene last year; floods destroyed infrastructure and homes, roads were washed away preventing transportation and EMS from getting where they needed to go, there were prolonged power outages, and some areas went without potable water for over 50 days. (Source 3) These are serious issues that need to be addressed in both the real world and in fiction.

 So, Project: Emergence is about rural superheroes. There's clearly a need for them, and I grew up in various rural areas of Georgia, from the south of the state surrounded by pecans and onions, to the farmland of cows and corn, and to the very mountains where the book takes place. (Last year was my first time ever NOT living in a rural place, and that city was in Asia and so barely counts for the purpose of this discussion.) But the question remains, what do rural superheroes do? After all, they aren't fighting aliens or keeping skyscrapers from falling.

Firstly, they would help with search and rescue. Going back to my point about Hurricane Helene which had multiple S&R teams going out in its wake, if we lived in a world with superheroes they could help locate survivors of natural disasters and provide them with medical aid more quickly than regular EMS and S&R. (Source 4, Source 5)

Expounding on my first point, rural superheroes would be extremely beneficial serving in an EMT position, providing emergency medical care to people too remote for normal EMS to help in time. Many of the injuries that happen in a rural setting are time sensitive, and having the ability to get to a patient more quickly than otherwise possible would be a huge aid for those in need. Wilderness medicine is something I'm passionate about, as well as medical accuracy so I do my best to be as accurate as possible in my writing, but that's another blog post.

 Lastly, having superheroes in rural communities helps these communities not feel so isolated from the rest of the world. Again, 97% of American land is rural, but is very rarely depicted in media. People talk about representation in media for all sort of identities, but the identities seen in books and TV don't matter if the setting is unfamiliar. The United States is a beautiful place, but the only times I've seen where I live on TV is in maybe 2 Hallmark movies where they filmed here and claimed to be somewhere else. North Georgia in particular is filled with history, specifically, we are the site of the first major U.S. gold rush 20 years before the one in California (Source 6). And we can't forget the Appalachian Trail which is approximately 2,198 miles long and starts at Springer Mountain and heads all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine (Source 7)

  There we have it, 3 reasons why rural superheroes are vital in media. Hopefully these reasons make you more excited about Project: Emergence and about rural superheroes in general. If you happen to know of any stories about rural superheroes, leave a comment down so I can check it out!