The majority of the story takes place in Fantastica... a world being destroyed by the Nothing, which represents and constitutes people's lack of imagination in the real world.
The first protagonist is a young warrior, who is asked by the Steward of The Empress of Fantastica, to set off and find a way to stop The Nothing...
Fantastica is a representation of the dreams and fantasies of the real world; the Nothing and the sickness of the Childlike Empress are the effects of the lies humans use in their greed for power; it is the denial of dreams and fantasy which is destroying Fantastica.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Never_Ending_Story
My kid liked this story because of being bullied at school, and the boy hiding out from his tormentors in an attic entered into the book, which was a window into a paralled reality. But despite the characters and the fantasy setting, it was to me, a very terrifying film. Everything that was loved and precious was being sucked away, the very ground under their feet gone. It was a metaphor for what I see the Republicans doing.
The Nothing reminded me of Republicans and their dead reality, full of greed and hatred, love of death and power, denying and destroying the creativity and dreams of Americans and people around the world.
Martin Luther King claimed that America was not a place as much as it is an ideal of what could be... in other words, a place where people could move forward to a better world, never complete, but working toward that which is the way we felt back in those days before decades of Republican rule.
When human rights were being expanded and there was a reverence for the environment that gives us life was being respected. Their desire to profit no matter who or what they destroyed was being pushed back as a form of insanity. They have almost strangled this out of us and mock us for wanting to remake this country into something better.
So
the Nothing has expanded to MA and other places where it was previously fought back.