Epic!

***

I feel like epic has become a pretty popular adjective, at least among those of my generation. We want our movies and books to be epic. Superheros, Lord of the Rings and Brandon Sanderson are all pretty epic. Epic stories, and epic visuals.
But then I was thinking about what actually makes things epic. If Vin*, bounding across a smoke filled landscape with a sword twice her height, was not fighting for the survival of her world would it still be epic? Would Eowyn's** defeat of the Witch King with her famous line "I am no man" be epic if she and the others weren't fighting for the protection of Middle Earth?
I'm not sure they would. And yet when I hear people talking about things in real life being epic they tend to be  like this picture of me on the top of a mountain.

But really I'm not doing anything epic. I'm not saving the world, or even someone's life. I just went for a walk one evening after work. (Granted I was living at high altitude for an Archaeology Dig). So I find myself asking why don't we call doctors saving someone's life epic? Or a child standing up to a bully?

*One of the main characters from Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy.
**A character from J R R Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.
***A fairly "epic" pose I did of a character from the book I'm writing. (Harrock).