Lore Basics

The three bare-minimums of Lore, and a good to have.

Good lore, bad lore, everything in between. As with other arts, this is subjective. To a point. What makes someone interested in the lore of one story and not the lore of another story will depend on the person. But there are some helpful universal points that most people will agree make the lore good. I think we can all agree on some basic rules for “good lore” vs “bad lore”, beyond it being personally interesting to us or not based on the theme or topic or genre.

First and at a bare minimum, lore has to be consistent with the characters, events, or worlds it relates to. The audience has to be able to read the lore and be able to see the logical connection to what it pertains to. This can be generally divided into cause-effect, temporal, and geographical consistency of lore.

First, the cause and effect of the lore should be reasonable. If two characters are shown to hate each other to death, and the lore of their feud is later revealed to be that one of them once told the other “have a bad day” instead of “have a good day”, the audience is going to think “that’s it? That doesn’t make any sense”.

Second, the timeline of events should be consistent within the universe. If a kingdom is stated to have lasted for two hundred years, but the lore also says at another point that Queen Helen founded the kingdom one hundred years ago, that breaks the timeline of the lore. This is a basic example, but it applies to any piece of lore.

Third, where events take place and characters are at one point or another in the lore should make sense. Obviously, a character cannot have been at two places at the same time (unless somehow that is logically consistent with the character like Dr. Manhattan). Also, the geographical lore should be taken into account. If the lore of an alien species is that they come from a planet covered in water, and they live their whole lives below the surface, they must come to invade Earth with fishtanks on their heads, for example. Or vice versa, if the aliens are shown to have two legs, arms, lungs, and no scales, they cannot logically come from a planet completely covered in water. And if they do, there should be a reasonable explanation for the audience.

As with everything, there are exceptions. The main one being comedy, as usual. Every one of the above examples would make the audience frown, lose belief, and break immersion in the story. Except if these lore inconsistencies existed within the confines of a comedy. Genre satires, for example, can use these to great effect. Not that it will always be funny, but at least the audience shouldn’t complain that the lore is nonsense. Just that it doesn’t make the story funny. Comedy, then, may purposefully reverse these bare minimum ‘rules’ of lore to (potentially) comedic effect.

After the bare minimum requirements (except for comedy) are fulfilled, the rest is mostly subjective and whether they matter to you or not will be a question of taste. Or of how well it’s delivered.

One important, but not crucial aspect, is originality. How fresh is the lore, how many Roman Empire clones do we have to go over where a kingdom rises and falls due to its overextension and corruption? Really, you are telling me the elves of this world also have a low birthrate but incredibly long lifespans, much in contrast to the prolifically procreating yet short-lived humans? At some point, the stories end up blending together, and you might as well skip the lore completely. Or simply stop reading the stories.

Now, I realize this isn’t fair for stories created in our linear flow of time. Of course stories are going to be less and less original the more stories are written, and the more stories one consumes. Naturally, stories written earlier in time will benefit from originality. And understandably stories will be inspired or pay homage to prior works the author or general audience enjoyed.

It’s one thing to be inspired by the Odyssey and write the harrowing story of someone trying to find their way back home, focusing maybe on the importance of working together and relying on each other to make it back, or on the temptation to escape the responsibility and run off to adventure. But it’s another thing to simply copy and paste the story of Odysseus but, say, have it take place in modern-day Beijing. These are gimmicks, curiosities at best. The audience will go into the story under the illusion that the story is a fresh take, and think “Wow, I wonder how that would work!”, only to end with “Well, I guess that’s about what I should have expected”. Not only do they not really add anything, in many cases the lore and point of the story stop making sense. It feels like wasted effort and talent.

There are ways to do this and still have a fresh story. “Bend it like Beckham” is clearly inspired by “Billy Elliot”; both protagonists fall in love with an activity that is traditionally associated with the opposite sex, their parents forbid them from pursuing it, only to ultimately concede and support them after witnessing their passion and talent. However, “Bend it like Beckham” is less about the ‘opposite gender’ aspect of it, and more about the cultural rebellion of Jess going against her parents’ wishes. It’s a fresh take, it changes the lore of the characters to change the moral and message of the story. It’s not that Jess is joining the ‘manly world of football’, but that she is going against her Indian immigrant parents’ wishes she focus on academics instead of sports, as well as against her father’s prior experience with anti-Indian racism in cricket.

By updating and changing the lore of the characters, their backstory let’s say, a story is able to be inspired without feeling like a regurgitated copy.

Another good recent example is the manga and anime “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End”. In this case, the creator kept the well-established lore of the lifespan of the fantasy races we know and love (humans are shot-lived but plentiful, dwarves are somewhere in between, and elves are long-lived but few), and uses it as the main focus of the story: what happens after the journey is over, and the elf has to keep living while her companions grown and die of old age? This is an interesting concept, but how do you make it work in a non-gimmicky, sustainable way? In Frieren, the journey to defeat the Demon King is not the main story; instead, the main party’s journey and battle with the demonic armies (which is another well-worn story archetype in itself) take place years prior. The journey to save the world is the lore of the story instead of the story itself. This drifts somewhat into lore delivery, which is not the point of this post, but essentially the author is able to use well-established lore in an original way by shifting the timeline of the story. The lore of the world revolves around the main character’s past battle against the Demon King, and uses it as the starting point for a beautiful fresh story about remembering and being remembered.

In stories where the lore is the goal, where the cast spends every arc chasing a secret, or some lost knowledge, originality is even more important. After all the effort and tensions, and potentially multiple movies, books, games, sequels, the payoff for the audience should be worth it. It should be surprising somehow.

I don’t mean in a way where the lore revealed at the end doesn’t make any sense, that would break the three “bare-minimums” of lore I outlined above. I mean in a way it hasn’t quite been done before. If anything, the audience guessing or surmising what the ultimate mystery or lore is should be a sign of good story-telling (if done subtly). It means the author has been able to write the clues in such a way that the mystery is kept until the end but makes satisfying sense.

“One Piece” is probably the most famous ongoing example of this. The main crew (and really, everyone in the world), is trying to solve the mystery of the One Piece, a treasure left at the end of the world by the last king of the pirates. The lore of this treasure is that it is able to change the world, and was hidden away by mysterious forces hundreds of years in the past in the hopes someone able to use it would reach it in the future. Fortunately, the author has confirmed the One Piece is something tangible, perhaps a weapon or object, not something intangible. Imagine how disappointing it would be if, after thirty years of adventure, the One Piece was the friends they made along the way? All the lore and history of the characters, the treasure, the factions vying for it…all would feel wasted on the most cliche “lore mystery” there is.

All this not to bulldoze over audiences who know what they enjoy, and much rather go over the comfortable, slightly different stories over and over. It is perfectly valid, for the audience to know what they like, my issue is with creators copying and rehashing lore with little effort to make it original.

Anything else is, for the most part, up to the individual reader. Or even at what point in their life the piece finds them. Someone may prefer stories where the lore revolves around religious conflict, others where it deals with the fallout of an apocalyptic event.

Even preference for the scale of the lore will vary. Large-scale, eons-old, galaxy-spanning lore such as in Warhammer 40K, is more engrossing to some. You could get truly lost in the intricate schemes that go back thousands of years of that universe, to the point many become more interested in the lore of the game than the game itself, reading the dozens of lore books without ever purchasing a single figure set.

Others would rather get familiar with the lore of a character or small group of characters, forgetting the rest of the world around them. This is naturally easier to do with non-fantastical fiction but happens in stories like that of “Floating Hotel”, where the lore of the hotel spaceship and the characters that work and live there is the real focus of the story, rather than the galactic empire within which they exist. That empire is used only as the trunk connecting and advancing the story in the background, but the real pleasure of the book is discovering the stories and past of the individual characters present in the titular hotel.

This is all leaving out the fundamental aspect of lore, what makes the lore good or bad (interesting or boring, appealing or forgettable); the way it is delivered. But more on that, next time.