Fantasy: The World's Greatest Form of Escapism

I find it fascinating that we as a race seem to have a universal love of fantasty and fiction. When you think about it on the purest and simplest levels, you would think we'd have grown past becoming emotinally connected and invovled with stories that don't even exist in the planes of reality. Why are we even interested about what happens to Frodo and Sam? Why do I care if Luke gets blown up along with the Death Star? And why oh why do I get all misty eyed during the last few episodes of Eureka Seven? They are cartoon characters after all, and really have nothing to do with my real life and day to day activites. Yet we feel concern, sympathy, even emotion when we invovle ourselves with a story that we truly love. But why? Wouldn't we much rather be improving our lives through activity, instead of diving into a creation of pure imagination with no truth and no 'real' substance.

The real truth is, we need fantasty to escape. When the waves of reality come crashing down around us, and there's no shelter in sight, what keeps you going? The belief that things will be better, and the image we create mentally to help us through the storm. We all have an ideal image of what life should be like in our minds, and that is usually what keeps us stumbling forward. The hope that some day we may be able to attain that kind of life, and watch as all our burdens drift away like grains of sand into the ocean. We no longer notice them, even though the problems and issues are still there. You've become bigger then the problems, solving everything with a cool head and a kind hearted determination. Is this not a form of fantasy?



We begin formulating scenarios and possibilites in our heads of what our lives or what the future may hold. Ultimately, thanks to our ever clever human nature, we inadvertently create stories for ourselves. Despite the fact that it's purely fantasy, the emotions attached to it can be very real. Mentally visualising how loved ones may eventually leave you, or how you might find true love at an anime convention (xDDDD okay, that one is mine) can cause a wall of feelings to wash over you. That's why when someone else's story is unraveling in front of us, in the forms of film or novels, we immediatelly connect to it. Because the emotions and thoughts of the stories creator appeals to all of us. We need the fantasy to block out the bad things, even if only for a few moments.

We connect to it because of an undeniable need to get away from it all. We want to see how that figment of imagination is doing in his little world, because we have a desire to participate in a scenario that has nothing to do with us or our lives. We want to see how someone else deals with issues, we want to see how the world around him changes because of his actions, we want to see if everything turns out well for him in the end.



Think of the limitations modern society would have if it wasn't for the imaginations of scientists and inventors. We wouldn't have any sort of robotics, we wouldn't have television, heck we wouldn't even have the light bulb. Wired into us from birth, human kinds hunger for fantasy triggers our imagination. Its lead us to the moon and back, and there's a very real possibility that it'll take us much further then that.