Why I love dense, convoluted lore
Find me spending hours on a game's wiki
Give me some Horizon Zero Dawn audio logs and let me live.
I know that as a writer I am supposed to present myself as an Authority on Things, but I’ll let you know something: there’s a whole bunch of stuff I don’t understand. I’ve never been a science person, and most mechanical or engineering things go over my head. I don’t understand the vast depths of the ocean and how so many things can possibly live down there. And there are some things I understand the “how” of, but not the “why.” I understand a lot of how our current capitalist society works, but I’m not alone in faltering on the reason for much of the avarice and cruelty. There are many days I don’t understand how my own brain works and why it feels the way it feels. But something I do understand? Media franchises with some deep, wildly convoluted lore. I understand them and I love them.
There’s a certain type of lore I’m talking about. It has to be something dense and on the surface hard to follow. For as much as over 20 movies would lead you to believe there’s heavy lore, I’m not talking about something like the MCU. While there are a lot of movies, you can watch each of them once, do nothing else, and understand the whole story of everything that’s happened. I’m more talking about something like the original media swirl around Star Wars. Disney is quickly expanding its Star Wars universe, but it’s nothing compared to what it was before they took over. Every character who has ever appeared on screen in a Star Wars movie had a deep, intricate background, and probably had a book or comic series appearance. In video games I’m talking about something like the Assassin’s Creed franchise, with comic books outside the games and copious audio logs and hidden documents within them to explain the never-ending war between two factions and alien species (seriously).
This is the type of shit I eat up.
The easiest reason for me to say why I love all of this lore is that done well, it’s incredibly fun. Gleaning secrets that don’t immediately affect a game’s plot but flesh out the world is exciting. Of course I’m stoked to find out that in Assassin’s Creed world seemingly every single important historical figure from the Founding Fathers to famous scientists is either an Assassin (good guy) or Templar (bad guy). Finding out what Darth Vader was doing in between movies or giving the Jedi a more rounded history is exciting for fans of the franchise. Done right, it adds flavor and context to the main plot and fleshes out the world. The horror game Outlast is a lot scarier when we find out through various files just how depraved the experiments were that unleashed the paranormal horror that follows you through the entire game. The Matrix is even more fun when you follow all the bizarre things that happened in the MMO after it, to say nothing of all the lore packed into The Animatrix.
But what I really love about media that does lore well is that it helps me to understand more about the world it has created, and by extension the people who made it. It makes sense that a certain character in Assassin’s Creed will betray the heroes when you learn her backstory from the audio logs. The shock of Horizon Zero Dawn’s twist midway through the game is given more context and emotional weight when you listen to the architects of it fail to see how their ambition could lead to unintended consequences. Part of the clarity that can come from these revelations is aided by the fact that the creators are starting from an endpoint and working backwards, but it can still be illuminating on a personal level. The parallels between HZD’s reveal and how technology has consumed us are easy to identify. And when we learn more about the characters in these worlds, we can empathize with them and learn a bit about ourselves. Obviously I’m never going to run around fighting alien people in Ancient Egypt, but I know what it’s like to lose people or to feel hopeless, and discovering that in a character’s backstory and seeing the hero they are now makes me feel like I can make it, too.
There’s another Assassin’s Creed and Horizon Zero Dawn on the way, and hopefully the MCU will get a little bit weirder now that Disney+ series are going to be in the mix. Whatever form the lore they make chooses to take, I’ll be there dissecting it.