: It's not just about the culture - the companies behind the fiction, like
: Marvel and Microsoft/343i, have made shit tons of money off this stuff.
: If that never happened, the lives of millions of people (employees, people
: who gave them the money, etc.) are likely to be completely different. Who
: knows what they did instead of working sixteen hours a day at a printing
: company, or playing Halo 5 hours every day?
: Additionally, the economy is probably very different, with different
: companies at the forefront, and it might be doing worse (or better).
: Superhero stories have also had significant effects on national morale
: during wars, which could have some backlash if they never existed, too.

Kid gets sucked into a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Within the reality of the film, there is no such actor; however, the movies for which he was famous still got made. At one point, the kid sees a cardboard cutout of some other dude advertised as The Terminator and makes a fuss about how that's not right.

Assume that in any future fictional universe that the fiction itself does not exist, but rather an alternatve form: in the Haloverse, there was never a videogame series called Halo made by Bungie. Instead, they made a different but equally significant game. No major cultural changes, as far as the universe is concerned, and no prophetic fiction.