I liked Dante's post coining this idea of "direct" and "indirect" lore, and it immediately made me realize that what Really Annoys me about Lore as a modern multimedia franchise concept doesn't have anything to do with it. I know now exactly what I dislike about lore and it's not about how important or relevant the franchise apocrypha is to my understanding of a work, though I agree that when storytelling gets catalogued and summarized into a page on a wiki, something is happening that can leave a funny taste in my mouth. What I'm reacting to isn't the way that corpo-centric media tries to snare me with breadcrumb-trails of building context that necessitates me obsessing over everything they put out and thus buying all their shit, it's that reading storytelling as lore does something weird to the original story that can strip out its emotional heart and necessary context. My idea here is that Lore is actually a process, a way of reading a story, and not the substance of the story itself.
Lore Is A Process
Try this theory if you'd like: "Storytelling" is the primary sources, the actual thing itself you're watching or reading and "Lore" is an explanation of what happened in the primary source. Storytelling becomes lore at the point that someone has to explain what happened in the story; this is something like the distinction between primary and secondary sources. I think of this as the distinction because what shows up in fanwikis, explainers, criticism, and casual conversation is the Lore, because the Storytelling is just the Thing Itself. This is true because when you look at a story answering any questions about what happened in it, why and how and what motivated the actors in it, necessarily means interpreting the text.
This is true even if the text is incredibly obtuse, like Bloodborne or something by Gene Wolfe, or as on the nose as possible, like Star Wars or something by C.S. Lewis. Sure, the author can be screaming at you to interpret the text exactly like so, but why should you believe that jerk over your own eyes? Authors love to say their text means something, only to fall on their ass trying to depict it and end up with a text that can actually say something else. At a certain point you have to do the work to decide what happened in a story and what it meant, either on your own time as a fan or with others as part of a fan community or as a substantial portion of your actual real life job (like mine!).
I realize this is a very different idea of lore than the common one, which probably most people would define as something like “text strings that appear on item descriptions” or any other in-game storytelling that purposefully provokes the reader’s interest and imagination, and most importantly their tendency to speculate. I secretly think these text strings are actually still Storytelling, we just call them lore because they are designed purposefully to be interpreted by the readers and thus have a close relationship with the sort of information and minute details that end up on wikis. But text strings attached to an item and text strings attached to NPCs are basically the same from the author's perspective (because I write them both) and are also the same to the reader's perspective, because reader interpretation is a process that happens to both. Yes, it's easier to quote a character directly saying a truth about the world and gleaning obscure facts about a fictional world's economics from an item description, but you actually have to interpret both! If you write in the fan wiki page that two characters were in love, how do you actually know? how much? How sincere? In what way? Once you start trying to describe the relationship, you've left primary source town and are doing work. Sometimes that work is really beautiful to witness and read and sometimes it sucks and also in the process teaches people to read and respond to storytelling in a way that also sucks.
And The Process Sucks
The Wikia-fication of storytelling and lore is bad not because cataloguing the obsessive tiniest details of a fictional universe is bad (I think it’s fun!), it’s because trying to process human Storytelling the same way we’d try to catalogue real life physics or historical events or biographies leads to a disturbingly infectious tendency to forget the essential context that fiction is fiction, and the events of the story happen not because of the forces of history or physics or human interaction but because an author or authors made it up. Wikis specifically have this tendency to want to discuss everything from an “in-universe” perspective, something that feels to me as overly literal and lacking in self-awareness, and it models that way of reading stories and perpetuates it further.
I’m sympathetic to this a little bit the literal events of the story are important to catalogue. But presenting the fictional events of a story as if they were facts is inherently missing something important about fiction. The wiki-fication or lore-ification of storytelling is the tendency to only see this layer, and miss out on what the text is actually saying. Fiction is not just a sequence of events, and even the cataloguing of those events is subjective. Thinking it isn't is a consequence of not recognizing the subjective layers of fiction and treating it all as if it were the real history of another universe. This matters for readers to have healthy relationships with fiction and it matters for artists because while you want your story to make sense within the context of the fictional universe the only reason you are telling a story in the first place is to say something true to your authentic beliefs, as meaningful and true as you can.
But Not Always and Not Forever
That's the end, that's me on lore right now. But while lore annoys me sometimes, I also love it, and I don't think this process is inherently wrong or bad. Cataloguing the rules of a fictional universe and taking them seriously can be really fun and make for good storytelling as well, when it’s applied with some self-awareness.
I mean, you KNOW I love Mobile Suit Gundam, a series that is nothing but a compilation of various interpretations of a universe in practically all imaginable directions. A lot of work that isn’t necessarily very sophisticated itself can provoke the imagination, and it’s not bad to look at a setting and ask yourself what life in it would actually be like especially when you have a clear goal in mind.
Gundam wouldn’t be what it is if there wasn’t this deep conviction in the text itself that what mattered more than anything was to convey how chaotic and horrible and tragic and unfair war is. Even when Gundam completely fails to convincingly achieve this, even when it's chained to looking like a toy commercial and the budget hits rock bottom, this conviction guides it, so strong it inspires you to keep believing in the text even when it fails. That’s the good lore; when you look at this shoestring budget toy commercial’s aspirations and take it seriously enough to be inspired to try to make something new.
