Normies could understand the emotion of trying to reform a broken system and set out to save the realm with your oathsworn brothers.
Of a child emperor with torn silk robes wandering with tears in his eyes, then to have the vulnerable child abducted in the hand of a fat brutal tyrant at the head of an army. Unless you are deeply interested in the subject it is largely only in the realm of academia.Ĭonversely almost all people in the would could understand what a burning palace looks like, with imperial soldiers running amok inside. To study the Han requires so much exposition, it's like reading Wikipedia articles, dates, dry descriptive paragraphs about terracotta architecture and imperial bureaucracies etc, and if you are lucky, some accompanying photos of tomb murals to give an imrpession of the colors and humanity of those who are but dust and ruins. Normies might have absolutely zero interest in the Han dynasty, for which might be as alien and uninteresting as the dark side of the Moon or Saturn. Hence it's popularity- the digestible stories (even for normies) also makes it very easy to be transmitted across cultures. ROTK makes it come alive and when it is arranged in digestible and dramatized fashion makes it very easy to be remembered.
History itself is not only record keeping and archaeological investigations- part of history is actually closer to how the French described history~: l'histoire, which means history but also simultaneously means "story." A part of history is how people remember the past, or how we chose to view and interpret our past.