Lore is Boring
When I read/play/watch a piece of media and I’m presented with thick bundle of lore, I always skim it, skip it, or tune it out. Yes, you’ve thought out your world, good job, have a gold star. Can we get back to the stuff I’m invested in please?
This is why I don’t ever want to read the Silmarillion, Tolkein’s 500-page textbookesque companion to the Lord of the Rings. While I have been known to go down Wikipedia rabbit holes for all sorts of random bullshit, at least I feel like I’m learning something when I do that. The vast mythology of Middle Earth may be well thought-out and deep, but a thick tome of fantasy facts holds no interest for me. I know plenty of people who love the Lord of the Rings and bounced hard off the Silmarillion. You may think you want that much background detail on the history of Middle Earth, but most LOTR lovers, it turns out, really don’t.
About the only exception I’ve come across to my lore-averse tendencies is the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, but even this proves my point: the fantasy-genre-mandated history dumps in these books are themselves self-contained, compelling narratives on their own. I think it says a lot about the quality of lore entries in video games or 99% of all fantasy novels that they read like Fantasy Encyclopedia Britannica articles. If you don’t want me to skip all your extravagant worldbuilding, maybe make it… interesting?
Yeah, I know that’s one of those things that’s easy to say, hard to do. I’m sorry, but if you think this is compelling shit:
From Destiny 2. I’ve read this entry three times and it just slides out of my brain. And frankly, I think this is one of the better-written lore entries I’ve come across. At least they’re trying to evoke something.
— then you are much more easily entertained than I am. Which, honestly, I envy.
I do appreciate that lore exists. It’s neat to know that someone thought about the history of their created world so deeply, and I will admit that I’ve spent time reading deep lore for characters I want to know more about. But that’s the thing: I sought it out, I wanted to seek it out, because I became emotionally invested in a character. I like having the option, but when it’s thrown at me crammed in a chapter, or flashed up on the screen as a gameplay-interrupting collectable, or hurled at me through babbling dialogue, that’s a skim from me at best. Ultimately, most lore just isn’t worth reading into.
Continuity Means… What Exactly?
There is something to be said for the epic, serial tale. I can list a dozen long-form stories that mean the world to me. But in an age of binge TV where stories keep extending, never satisfyingly ending, I would like to champion the episodic or the stand-alone tale.
Let’s talk about Bob’s Burgers
In a show like Bob’s Burgers, everything you watch has happened. And yet, it hasn’t. If you start to ask questions like “why have there been ten Thanksgiving episodes when no one ages?” then you’re missing the point. Because in order to answer a question like that, it requires coming up with a whole story scaffolding to explain it that the episodes themselves don’t actually need.
There’s a lot of Discourse online about people “reading too much into things.” Generally, that sort of logic is deployed in bad faith to discredit deep textual analysis and encourage sticking to “objective” measurements as though art is some sort of checklist (more on that later). Taking a view at a text from different critical lenses is an important aspect to media analysis, hell, even basic media literacy.
Which brings me back to the question about Bob’s Burgers: “why have there been ten Thanksgiving episodes when no one ages?”
Answer: It doesn’t matter, just roll with it.
Bad answer: Bob’s Burgers takes place in a multiverse where the same year in the Belchers’ lives exists ad infinitum.
An answer like that is not like reading from a different critical lens where insights are gleaned from a text by looking at it a certain way. An answer like that is fabricating connections and consistency for the sake of having connections and consistency. There are other answers to the above question that resolve continuity, and I find them all overdone and boring. Alternate timelines. A multiverse. A computer simulation. These concepts are not inherently boring, but they become boring by feeling the need to crowbar a coherent timeline into every story.
I’m using Bob’s Burgers to make a point — I think most people recognize how silly it would be to demand some sort of continuity out of an episodic adult cartoon that makes no pretense of having an overarching narrative. But there are other properties that people feel the need to wrangle into continuity and I contend that that is often just as futile of an exercise.
It’s all connected. Neat.
The Legend of Zelda video games are a fever-dream for anyone trying to put it in a coherent order. The games reuse tons of characters and names, but the Link in Windwaker can’t possibly be the same Link from Twilight Princess. The in-universe explanation for this is that there are certain cycles of the hero that manifest in this world over the course of time.
For me, that is enough.
But no, fans have to know in exactly what order these games take place in. In order to make a “coherent” timeline of the Legend of Zelda games, you need a slew of divergent time threads.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER AT ALL?
It’s nonsense. And does it enhance the experience of playing a Zelda game? Not a bit. Because each game (with a handful of notable exceptions) is its own self-contained story. Knowing where it fits in one of the five timelines creates zero emotional resonance for me, and it annoys me that Nintendo has started acknowledging the Zelda timeline as if it matters in the slightest.
If something includes references to other entries in the series, I don’t mind that at all. Being self-referential is fun. Recurring elements in a series can create a sense of emotional resonance because you’re seeing something familiar in a new situation. It’s basic use of storytelling motifs, just extended over multiple entries. References or recurring elements are not worthless, but I think the exercise of tying every loose string together in narrative knot is ultimately worthless beyond a, “neat, I guess.”
Another example: “All of Tarantino’s movies take place in the same universe!” …okay? Neat? Outside of the occasional wink to another project of his (again, many creators love to be self-referential), does that consistency actually mean anything? I posit: no. Outside of references to previous projects being a cool reward for the eagle-eyed viewer, the “they all take place in the same universe” idea means absolutely nothing until Tarantino decides to collide his filmography together in a more substantial way.
I’m just not convinced anything is gained by connecting a bunch of disparate stories together other than… “neat!” If a story is weighed down by needing to pay lip service to a dozen other characters, locations, plots in a contained universe or multiverse, has it gained anything at all or has it become bloated with extraneous flab it doesn’t need?
Here’s a completely unrelated image of the MCU timeline.
It’s why superhero comic books are a nightmare to get into and why DC reboots their universe every couple years. Continuity preserves lineage, but it also creates confusion. For me, I always appreciate an arc or an issue that stands on its own, or at least doesn’t feel the need to be so deferential to what’s come before. It’s part of why Chip Zdarsky’s run on Daredevil has been so fun. It is ultimately beholden to everything that came before, but the story is told in a way that one doesn’t feel like they need to have read the entire Daredevil wiki just to understand what the hell is going on.
With endless of rosters of characters, there are many fun potential stories for DC and Marvel to tell just by letting an author play mix-and-match with characters the reader may or may not be familiar with. And for that reason, there are endless spinoffs that are “non-canon” from the ongoing main storyline, like DC’s Dark Knights of Steel, which sets the Justice League in sword and sorcery fantasy, or Marvel’s What If…? series on Disney+, which is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s the only Marvel TV show I’m actually considering watching for that very reason.
But if you know anything about comic books, then you know that even these “non-canon” stories are not safe from being stirred up like a blender full of giblets with a massive multiverse crossover event and made “a part of the universe.” Ultimately though, that can be safely ignored because picking up Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum doesn’t require you to know the damnedest bit about Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thank god.
Checklistification
Which is not to say “all long-running, serialized stories are bad” — far from it. I just find the lore-dense, connection-laden fandom method of serialized storytelling mind-numbingly dull at this point.
Griffin and David on the Blank Check podcast have talked some about the checklistification of media and it’s an idea that’s gotten hooked in my brain. If a movie or story hits all of these Important Fan Moments, then it’s good, actually. Who cares about emotional resonance when everyone is mind-reading studio executives and making excuses for shoddy storytelling because “well yeah, there’s a lot of ground to cover?”
I’m still a staunch defender of the Last Jedi because goddammit, that is a story that made me feel things in a way no other Star Wars entry has. The Rise of Skywalker feels like a studio executive checklist. “People had a divisive reaction over all of the interesting ideas explorations of the character’s deepest insecurities in the Last Jedi, best keep the fans happy.”
Lore, continuity, factoids, and, highly-detailed fan wikis have their place. That place is not at the forefront of storytelling, rather these elements should be the sweet, tasty dessert of worldbuilding to compliment the main course of the story — if you find you still have room.