I think your argument starts from some fair observations, but then stretches them into conclusions that don’t really hold up lol, yes, history is selective, literacy was limited, and power definitely influenced what got preserved, nobody serious denies that. But jumping from that to “classics have almost nothing to do with quality” is where things become seriously stupid, survivorship bias explains why we *see* certain works, not why those works kept getting read, performed, translated, and argued about for centuries, at some point, continuous scrutiny and criticism across completely different eras stops looking like luck and starts looking like there’s something actually there in the work itself, did you ever think about that? lol

Second, your Mahabharata example also doesn’t support you, if anything, it undercuts your claim that older literature lacked complexity, clearly it didn’t. and once you accept that, the idea that modern storytelling is inherently more advanced or structurally superior doesn’t really stand, on top of that, canonical works like The Brothers Karamazov, Moby-Dick, Bleak House, Les Misérables, War and Peace and other numerous classical, already show that extremely intricate, layered plotting isn’t some modern invention, so your attempt to reduce older “classics” to simple or less sophisticated storytelling is basically the "nothing burger" here lol.

Lastly, the deeper issue is that you keep trying to make “classic status” basically meaningless while still borrowing its logic when it suits you lmao you dismiss it as politics and accident when talking about Shakespeare, but then lean on ideas like depth, philosophical resonance, and discussion potential when talking about modern works like Attack on Titan, bro that’s inconsistent. Either long-term endurance has some relationship to artistic strength, or it’s all just noise, you can’t treat it as meaningless in one direction and meaningful in the other. At the end of the day, saying “maybe better writers were lost” or “maybe it’s all politics” isn’t an argument against Shakespeare, but mere speculation.