They were cautionary tales about the ills of man. Basically, be temperate in your ambition.
Almost all of the stories about ambition based on foreboding oracle prophecies were about not overreaching.
Classics like The Odyssey and The Iliad were -- despite having cautionary aspects -- still very aspirational, about life, love, family and fame. Achilles and Odysseus are still two very popular and heroic figures that many men find aspirational given their drive, their goals, and their resilience, despite their flaws. That was usually the ebb and flow of the Greek tragedies.
Sophocles' tales were a bit more dire, but still dipped into heroism and the necessity of ambition for man to become what he was meant to be (even if the tales had tragic endings).
If we go by just the mediums of games and anime, there are maybe half a dozen "legendary masterpieces" per decade that inspire people and are remembered and still consumed in the future, while the hundreds to thousands of "okay" to outright garbage pieces were left mostly forgotten by memory and history. And that's just stuff in our direct lifetime, in a century or less they will be truly lost to time by being too milquetoast for anyone to bother cataloguing their existence outside one line indexes.
Given that humans don't change much, I'd say the escapism of the past that escaped the annals of history would be the legendary and mythic ones because of how powerful and timeless. Not that they were all that existed.
Escapism of the past was myth and legend, and it inspired men to greatness. Nowadays it's more advertising than anything else.
Myths and legends weren't escapism per se. They are abatractions of reality. If anything, greek myths were cautionary tales, for the most part
Ehhh, yes and no.
They were cautionary tales about the ills of man. Basically, be temperate in your ambition.
Almost all of the stories about ambition based on foreboding oracle prophecies were about not overreaching.
Classics like The Odyssey and The Iliad were -- despite having cautionary aspects -- still very aspirational, about life, love, family and fame. Achilles and Odysseus are still two very popular and heroic figures that many men find aspirational given their drive, their goals, and their resilience, despite their flaws. That was usually the ebb and flow of the Greek tragedies.
Sophocles' tales were a bit more dire, but still dipped into heroism and the necessity of ambition for man to become what he was meant to be (even if the tales had tragic endings).
If we go by just the mediums of games and anime, there are maybe half a dozen "legendary masterpieces" per decade that inspire people and are remembered and still consumed in the future, while the hundreds to thousands of "okay" to outright garbage pieces were left mostly forgotten by memory and history. And that's just stuff in our direct lifetime, in a century or less they will be truly lost to time by being too milquetoast for anyone to bother cataloguing their existence outside one line indexes.
Given that humans don't change much, I'd say the escapism of the past that escaped the annals of history would be the legendary and mythic ones because of how powerful and timeless. Not that they were all that existed.