I’m sorry, its terminal
We live in an era of massive self referentiality, of things looping back on themselves over and over and over. This is, to my mind, destabilizing and upsetting in a way most people aren’t totally equipped to think about or explain. There is a sense of an ever-closing wall of possible fictions, that most things that could be made or said have already been. This idea isn’t that different from the eternally relevant Mark Fisher’s (RIP) notion of Hauntology, the idea that we are haunted by different possible futures, and the foreclosure of our own future. Whether it is literally in the form of hegemonic global capitalism and impending environmental collapse, or an inability to imagine and articulate other futures. You can see this bleeding over into our popular culture space, very rarely is anything like an “IP” one of the blockbusters of the year. All of our most popular movies are sequels or prequels, television shows are largely based on books or re-articulations of commons tropes, and even most fantasy books suck. That might be my own personal bias creeping in but I digress.
I could go on and on, there are countless instances of this idea, but there is one in particular I want to hone in on. This is a particularly “online” neurosis, one that I feel like I was even on the ground floor of, and maybe even guilty of at times myself. It is what I and some others like to refer to as “lore-brain”, a dangerous condition that passes over the victim in vicious fits, distorting their view of fictitious realities into a claustrophobic, copyright friendly view of it’s possibilities. Lore-brain is primarily a condition of those in the writing rooms of major cultural content, and I use the word “content” there pointedly. In these narratives, there is nothing that doesn’t refer to something else, every detail is in some way a call back to a previous icon or logo from the brand of that media. You might be tempted to say “well thats just worldbuilding, things in this world are interrelated”, but I think it’s precisely the opposite. In a genuinely real and living world, things are often apocryphal, happening for no deeper meaning or relation than mere chance, and its those things that do happen to be related that are remarkable enough to form the core of a narrative. Its almost conspiratorial in this respect, it forces connections where there need not be any, and as a result tends to tighten the narratives ties in a constrictive and even boring fashion. Furthermore, it tends to reduce the impact of events in that world, as these events are always brought to heel by the persistence of certain iconography, and motifs. This on its own has a simpler name, branding. These characters and imagery are part of how the content is marketed and made accessible for the layman, when it fully transmutes itself into “lore-brain” is when those who engage with this media imagine that they themselves are actually seeing exciting new connections between different parts of the narrative, which is in reality simply branding. In this fashion they interpellate themselves into this claustrophobic narrative universe, where they seek out the evidence of things that already exist in everything else. This is what is particularly frustrating about lore-brain, it takes all of the energy and excitement of developing understandings of media, and transmutes it into a boring game of I-spy.
These are all somewhat vague concepts that I’ve been bandying around here, but I think I can get a bit more specific with a recent example. The Fallout TV series recently premiered on Amazon Prime, which should already be warning enough to the viewer, but I digress. In this series, almost every story point is about the most obvious marketing pieces from the series, Vault-Tec, the Brotherhood of Steel, or the Enclave. At no point is an interesting or new idea introduced, even the prospect of a world other than “sheet metal buildings and rusted cars” is quite literally thrown out, as the writers nuke the capital of the expanding post-war democracy that was the NCR, part of what made New Vegas so compelling. There is a sense in which nothing new can be allowed to pollute the marketing here, no ambiguity or progress. This world must remain in a state of perfect stillness, in a sort of endless loop of evil Vaults, weird dogs and blue jumpsuits. What’s even worse is the community reaction to say “wow! I wonder if this is a reference to something from the games!” rather than turn off the program.
I think the most powerful comparison between this and the varying presentations of the lore-brain illness is the Dark Souls video game series, though we can take the blockbuster success of 2022, Elden Ring as a prime example. This is a fully new world, one where absolutely nothing is certain. Time and its progress is dubious here, though its not without a deep and even “loreful” history. As the player you are entering a world whose story is almost complete, one marked by sadness and regret, something distinctive of most of FromSoftware’s games. There are countless connections and stories interwoven throughout the game, but they are all in service of telling this story and expanding it into different directions and tones. The story of the Crucible Knights reflects a nobility in decay, while Shabriri reflects a sort of ravenous acceleration of destruction, each different and authentic reactions to a world coming to a close. There is much more interesting stuff to be said about Elden Ring, so stay tuned for that, but I think it shows that a constant need to self reference can become suffocating and detrimental to the development of a fictitious world. As a result, the discussion of “lore” in these games is rife with debate and different interpretations of stories or character motivations. There are interesting connections to be found in item descriptions, but at every point there is a sense you are revealing a deep and complex world, a far cry from Fallout‘s obviously signposted “exit through the gift shop” atmosphere.
There is a sense in which “lore” should run counter to this hegemonic flattening of imagination. It should be freeing! It should be a way to mutually explore and create a shared and imagined world. The entire Souls series is well known for spawning lengthy and painstakingly detailed lore discussion video essays, threading together new interpretations in a way that engages its community in fun and interesting ways. I think that this desire to learn about the stories beneath the story has become sort of perverted and ruthlessly exploited to create immensely boring things like the Fallout show, which is only capable of referencing its marketing material, and makes its consumers think they are doing the same thing as in Elden Ring. Instead of suggesting an entire world lost to time and decay, its more like copyright, it ruthlessly contains what is possible.
I don’t want this to come off as “consumers are stupid and all mainstream media is for LOSERS”, even though it probably does in certain areas. What I want to suggest is to be wary of marketing disguised as worldbuilding, and ultimately you don’t have to accept anyone else’s construction of a world. Write your own version of what happens in Fallout or Dark Souls, engage with people about it, tell actual stories rather than buy into funko-pop versions of once cool ideas like Vault Tec or the Brotherhood of Steel. To warp Fisher’s phrase, I do think that we can imagine an end to these things, a new world, before we have to imagine the end of the world.