Allusions in College Essays

I’m writing a supplemental essay under the prompt “what excites you?”. Obviously, this is an extremely broad topic, but I ended up deciding to write about the marvel cinematic universe. I think my essay is very well written, interesting, and pretty unique in the way I wrote it, but I made some allusions to the movies to get the full effect. I tried to limit these allusions to characters/ideas I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of (i.e., spider-man, iron man, captain america) and only made about three just in case the college admissions officers have never seen the marvel films (which is very possible). You definitely would not need to be an in-depth marvel fan to understand what I’m trying to say, and I’m fairly certain that even if you have never seen a marvel film, the essay would still be 100% understandable and coherent. I’m just wondering if there is still a reason I should avoid doing this in case the college admissions officer have, in fact, never seen one of these movies. If someone could let me know that would be great.

It’s fine. Not everyone has seen everything. If you are conveying what the prompt has asked you for, that’s all that matters.

Awesome, thank you so much!