This was hilarious and also spot-on. I’m currently reading Stephen King’s new novel, Fairy Tale, and one thing I like about it is there is absolutely no lore whatsoever. The hero enters a hidden world, and all he knows before he descends the stairs is that the world exists (and there are huge but harmless cockroaches). We discover the rules and history of the hidden world as he does. It’s much more interesting that way!
Great rant. I’ve done similar rants myself. Some of my case studies for bad opening lore-dumps include:
- TMNT (the cg animated version) and its “every thousand years the planets align” boilerplate special
- Tangled and its attempt to use Zachary Levi’s cheeky narration to excuse its egregious overcomplication of a simple fairy tale (“so one day a drop of sunlight fell and made a flower, and then this witch started using this flower to do a magic to stay young, but then the queen got sick, and the servants looked everywhere for a cure, and then they found the sunflower and took it, and the queen got better, but then the witch was super made about her flower, but luckily the queen was pregnant, so the flower magic got in the baby, you know how it is, so the witch stole the baby to use the magic, but to activate it you have to brush her hair and sing a song, you know, like it says in the magic manual that came with the sun drop...” SHUT UP)
- Green Lantern, which dumps lore on you at the beginning and then repeats it in the middle (and whose lore-dump made it into the trailer, effectively selling the movie with the most boring part)
- Eternals, which names all its characters after misspellings of known characters from folklore for extra confusion and which uses and opening text barrage and a mid-movie flashback montage to dress up the extraordinarily stupid backstory of a bunch of giant robot space gods who have knocked up the earth and are using it as an egg for another giant robot space god, so they’ve created a bunch of immortal person-sized robots with wooden personalities to sit on the egg till it hatches
I’m not sure if I should feel dorky or extra cool for having no idea what ‘TMNT’ means. Even with the hint that there seems to be a live-action version and a CG version…..
We seem to be reaching a tension point right now between the clear economic incentives to serialize stories so that dedicated audiences stay invested in every iteration for the long term, and the iterations being stand alone enough to interest new viewers and bring them in smoothly to the lore.
Sometimes new movies are too accommodating to fan service or expectations. Blade Runner's opening scrawl was really a symbol of the budget constraints and audience complaints about not knowing what the replicants even are, but Blade Runner 2049 provided one despite infinite budget and audience familiarity simply to match the original movie's opening roughly blink for blink. That's just not necessary.
Great commentary. You’re not wrong. Elfstuff has always been my least favorite part of any thing, ever. It’s like the Begat chapters of the Bible. Who cares? When do we get to see Samson slaying all of the Philistines with a donkey jawbone?
I nearly didn’t watch the second episode, the first was so boring. It appears to have picked up.
An opening lore dump that, to my surprise, worked really well was in Shang-Chi. I think the reason is that it’s not just a bunch of nonsense about magic rules, but it’s essentially the story of one man, so you can experience it through the lens of character and actually invest in it.
The lore at the beginning of each Star Trek episode was about all I could take. Five year mission? Why five years? Didn't they go back to Earth frequently? Did that restart the clock on the five years? Going where no man has gone before -- were they forbidden to revisit a place they (or someone else) had visited before? And voyages, plural? Was each episode a separate voyage? Did that suggest that, Matrix-like, they knew they were in a television simulation?
I think the problem is, especially with a show like Lord of the Rings prequel, Phantom Hobbit (I’m not looking up the title either), is there is a certain amount of lore you need or you’ll be completely confused when folks like Sauron show up at some point. The fact that the opening sequence was something like 20 minutes before the title cards were shown was a bit much. They probably could have boiled it down to: “There was a 500 year war between Morgoth. Morgoth created the orcs and had a lieutenant called Sauron. When the war ended, Morgoth was defeated, but Sauron vanished.” That's all the Lore that is necessary to jump in and know (because it's a tv show) to be on the look out for Sauron and the orcs to make appearances.
The issue with Lore is writers/producers can become too focused on it and not realize that a lot of it isn’t really necessary. Or sometimes they focus on the wrong sort of Lore. The Netflix series Cowboy Beebop comes to mind. As someone who came into that show having never seen the cartoon version, a lot of the lore they threw at me was useless. I didn’t really need to have every character’s entire backstory explained to me in granular detail. But it would have been nice if the show had explained why every moon in the solar system looked like either 1) New Zeeland, or 2) a movie set for a sleazy Mexican Bordertown.
That's funny, for me the first example of good lore exposition that came to mind was the original Cowboy Bebop. In the anime, the viewer is dropped into the world with no context, first gets to know the characters as they are now, and only then comes slowly to learn about their pasts and their world. I had a sustained sense of wonder and intrigue--and just plain fun--thanks to the original focus on character and the gradual unfolding of background detail. (Haven't seen the Netflix series so not sure how it compares, but based on your comment the producers were trying to fill a lore deficit that wasn't even there.)
I couldn’t get through the Netflix version but I seem to remember them pushing up a lot of character backstory that worked better in the original where it was revealed later.
That's a shame. The late reveal after following the characters for a while mad the backstory that much more satisfying. I wonder if this storytelling shift is related to the growing prevalence of the "trauma plot," where characters' personalities are all explained as results of past experiences rather than just, you know, being their personalities. If you see personality as a mere function of trauma, you might feel an urge to lead with the "explanation" of why they're the way they are, rather than trusting your characters to be distinctive and compelling enough on the basis of the personalities you've written for them.
You could argue that the original Bebop follows the trauma plot, since their backstories do go a long way towards explaining their behavior. But it also trusts us to find them interesting before we know the backstory, and in fact not knowing the backstory makes them more intriguing. The new Bebop is just plain bad in most ways, but I think in Faye’s case they might have felt she’d be more likable if we understood her, and there’s also a trend lately to highlight female characters’ victimhood so they couldn’t resist leading with it. For Spike it seems they wanted to make Vicious a more prominent present day antagonist, which didn’t work because Vicious was miscast and ridiculous. They also had ambitions of fleshing our present day Julia, to “correct” the flaw of her being basically an idealized love object in the original.
It all started with Tolkien. I blame him for everything. Crazy sumbitch created ancient languages and maps just for fun. Now, every fantasy "epic" has to be at LEAST a trilogy, with a fake map and made-up languages and often brutally racist history "We won't call them Arabs, we'll call them, uh, Orcs or something." Then come the D&D nerds, and thence the deluge.
I definitely think that even tho The Hobbit is a simple children's book compared to LOTR, it to me got lore right where its sequel didnt. The Hobbit starts with a page explaining what a Hobbit is, which is understandable as it's something JRR made up, then immediately gets into what the appeal of the book is: interaction between charming characters. Lore is a lot more minimal than in LOTR, the dragon is bad because he ate the dwarves and stole their land. LOTR has a prologue chapter explaining Hobbits and Pipeweed and then Gandalf shows up and explains what Gollum did ten years ago and why he did it and the origin of the Ring and why it was made and all that. It's more necessary sure but to me the appeal of LOTR is less in the characters and more in what it represents. Whereas with the Hobbit the clue is in the name: it's about the character progression of Bilbo
Lore fatigue has kept me from checking out a lot of stuff. It feels like homework.
There’s a Loremaster job in some parts of the entertainment industry like movies and video games. I imagine that it must be brutally competitive and staffed by people who can argue about Gandalf’s underwear color for 12 hours without needing so much as a bathroom break. People in this job are in the business of inventing and specifying trivia like it’s kudzu.
I think that lore is allowed to grow wild because if the stars align, it builds a Franchise. Media companies love little more than franchises. Disney hardly has to convince anyone to take a chance on a Star Wars product, do they? The fans are in for a penny, in for a pound.
Jeff. Thank you. For the laughs, as always, but also for the support. I hate the lore, too, and sometimes I feel a little bit alone in my hatred. But now, if I cave and decide to watch the second episode of RoP, having thought the first episode could not possibly have been worse, lore-wise, and, having watched it, the second episode, I mean, and, presumably, hating it, I can, in my self-loathing, always reread this post and know that I'm not alone. So, thanks.
Having now seen the first episode of The Rings Of Power, it struck me how much that series is also polluted with lore. There's a ten minute prologue about who betrayed whom and where the elves came from and how Sauron killed blah blah and all I could think was, this show is already an expansion of the ten minute prologue to the Lord of the Rings movies. Why on earth is it piling backstory onto the backstory?
Amen & thank you for making me cackle in an airport. I feel your pain, as well as a related pain for the uptick in incredibly boring board games that take longer to explain and set up than they do to play (and are then deeply disappointing). Settlers of Catan, I'm looking at you. I feel this way about many novels as well. If I need a map, a family tree and/or a pronunciation guide in order to follow a story originally written in English (map for decoration/ambiance -- fine, confusing names in a translation -- cool), I'm out.
I almost laughed out loud on the 1 train at 6:30am; thanks for a fun read on the way to the gym😂 I 100% agree.
This was hilarious and also spot-on. I’m currently reading Stephen King’s new novel, Fairy Tale, and one thing I like about it is there is absolutely no lore whatsoever. The hero enters a hidden world, and all he knows before he descends the stairs is that the world exists (and there are huge but harmless cockroaches). We discover the rules and history of the hidden world as he does. It’s much more interesting that way!
I'm sorry, but "huge but harmless cockroaches" is an oxymoron (shudder). XD
Ha! Fair enough!
Great rant. I’ve done similar rants myself. Some of my case studies for bad opening lore-dumps include:
- TMNT (the cg animated version) and its “every thousand years the planets align” boilerplate special
- Tangled and its attempt to use Zachary Levi’s cheeky narration to excuse its egregious overcomplication of a simple fairy tale (“so one day a drop of sunlight fell and made a flower, and then this witch started using this flower to do a magic to stay young, but then the queen got sick, and the servants looked everywhere for a cure, and then they found the sunflower and took it, and the queen got better, but then the witch was super made about her flower, but luckily the queen was pregnant, so the flower magic got in the baby, you know how it is, so the witch stole the baby to use the magic, but to activate it you have to brush her hair and sing a song, you know, like it says in the magic manual that came with the sun drop...” SHUT UP)
- Green Lantern, which dumps lore on you at the beginning and then repeats it in the middle (and whose lore-dump made it into the trailer, effectively selling the movie with the most boring part)
- Eternals, which names all its characters after misspellings of known characters from folklore for extra confusion and which uses and opening text barrage and a mid-movie flashback montage to dress up the extraordinarily stupid backstory of a bunch of giant robot space gods who have knocked up the earth and are using it as an egg for another giant robot space god, so they’ve created a bunch of immortal person-sized robots with wooden personalities to sit on the egg till it hatches
I’m not sure if I should feel dorky or extra cool for having no idea what ‘TMNT’ means. Even with the hint that there seems to be a live-action version and a CG version…..
Dearest Jeff, you are not alone.
We seem to be reaching a tension point right now between the clear economic incentives to serialize stories so that dedicated audiences stay invested in every iteration for the long term, and the iterations being stand alone enough to interest new viewers and bring them in smoothly to the lore.
Sometimes new movies are too accommodating to fan service or expectations. Blade Runner's opening scrawl was really a symbol of the budget constraints and audience complaints about not knowing what the replicants even are, but Blade Runner 2049 provided one despite infinite budget and audience familiarity simply to match the original movie's opening roughly blink for blink. That's just not necessary.
Great commentary. You’re not wrong. Elfstuff has always been my least favorite part of any thing, ever. It’s like the Begat chapters of the Bible. Who cares? When do we get to see Samson slaying all of the Philistines with a donkey jawbone?
I nearly didn’t watch the second episode, the first was so boring. It appears to have picked up.
Being stuck in the body of a Philadelphia Eagles fan forever is worse than any hell anyone can possibly imagine.
An opening lore dump that, to my surprise, worked really well was in Shang-Chi. I think the reason is that it’s not just a bunch of nonsense about magic rules, but it’s essentially the story of one man, so you can experience it through the lens of character and actually invest in it.
The lore at the beginning of each Star Trek episode was about all I could take. Five year mission? Why five years? Didn't they go back to Earth frequently? Did that restart the clock on the five years? Going where no man has gone before -- were they forbidden to revisit a place they (or someone else) had visited before? And voyages, plural? Was each episode a separate voyage? Did that suggest that, Matrix-like, they knew they were in a television simulation?
Anyway, the greatest lore ever is unanimously known to be the introduction to "It's About Time" (https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/itsabouttimelyrics.html) Try topping "It's about Caves/Cavemen too"
(Honorable mention to the intro song to Gilligan's Island, of course.)
I think the problem is, especially with a show like Lord of the Rings prequel, Phantom Hobbit (I’m not looking up the title either), is there is a certain amount of lore you need or you’ll be completely confused when folks like Sauron show up at some point. The fact that the opening sequence was something like 20 minutes before the title cards were shown was a bit much. They probably could have boiled it down to: “There was a 500 year war between Morgoth. Morgoth created the orcs and had a lieutenant called Sauron. When the war ended, Morgoth was defeated, but Sauron vanished.” That's all the Lore that is necessary to jump in and know (because it's a tv show) to be on the look out for Sauron and the orcs to make appearances.
The issue with Lore is writers/producers can become too focused on it and not realize that a lot of it isn’t really necessary. Or sometimes they focus on the wrong sort of Lore. The Netflix series Cowboy Beebop comes to mind. As someone who came into that show having never seen the cartoon version, a lot of the lore they threw at me was useless. I didn’t really need to have every character’s entire backstory explained to me in granular detail. But it would have been nice if the show had explained why every moon in the solar system looked like either 1) New Zeeland, or 2) a movie set for a sleazy Mexican Bordertown.
That's funny, for me the first example of good lore exposition that came to mind was the original Cowboy Bebop. In the anime, the viewer is dropped into the world with no context, first gets to know the characters as they are now, and only then comes slowly to learn about their pasts and their world. I had a sustained sense of wonder and intrigue--and just plain fun--thanks to the original focus on character and the gradual unfolding of background detail. (Haven't seen the Netflix series so not sure how it compares, but based on your comment the producers were trying to fill a lore deficit that wasn't even there.)
I couldn’t get through the Netflix version but I seem to remember them pushing up a lot of character backstory that worked better in the original where it was revealed later.
That's a shame. The late reveal after following the characters for a while mad the backstory that much more satisfying. I wonder if this storytelling shift is related to the growing prevalence of the "trauma plot," where characters' personalities are all explained as results of past experiences rather than just, you know, being their personalities. If you see personality as a mere function of trauma, you might feel an urge to lead with the "explanation" of why they're the way they are, rather than trusting your characters to be distinctive and compelling enough on the basis of the personalities you've written for them.
You could argue that the original Bebop follows the trauma plot, since their backstories do go a long way towards explaining their behavior. But it also trusts us to find them interesting before we know the backstory, and in fact not knowing the backstory makes them more intriguing. The new Bebop is just plain bad in most ways, but I think in Faye’s case they might have felt she’d be more likable if we understood her, and there’s also a trend lately to highlight female characters’ victimhood so they couldn’t resist leading with it. For Spike it seems they wanted to make Vicious a more prominent present day antagonist, which didn’t work because Vicious was miscast and ridiculous. They also had ambitions of fleshing our present day Julia, to “correct” the flaw of her being basically an idealized love object in the original.
It all started with Tolkien. I blame him for everything. Crazy sumbitch created ancient languages and maps just for fun. Now, every fantasy "epic" has to be at LEAST a trilogy, with a fake map and made-up languages and often brutally racist history "We won't call them Arabs, we'll call them, uh, Orcs or something." Then come the D&D nerds, and thence the deluge.
I definitely think that even tho The Hobbit is a simple children's book compared to LOTR, it to me got lore right where its sequel didnt. The Hobbit starts with a page explaining what a Hobbit is, which is understandable as it's something JRR made up, then immediately gets into what the appeal of the book is: interaction between charming characters. Lore is a lot more minimal than in LOTR, the dragon is bad because he ate the dwarves and stole their land. LOTR has a prologue chapter explaining Hobbits and Pipeweed and then Gandalf shows up and explains what Gollum did ten years ago and why he did it and the origin of the Ring and why it was made and all that. It's more necessary sure but to me the appeal of LOTR is less in the characters and more in what it represents. Whereas with the Hobbit the clue is in the name: it's about the character progression of Bilbo
Lore fatigue has kept me from checking out a lot of stuff. It feels like homework.
There’s a Loremaster job in some parts of the entertainment industry like movies and video games. I imagine that it must be brutally competitive and staffed by people who can argue about Gandalf’s underwear color for 12 hours without needing so much as a bathroom break. People in this job are in the business of inventing and specifying trivia like it’s kudzu.
I think that lore is allowed to grow wild because if the stars align, it builds a Franchise. Media companies love little more than franchises. Disney hardly has to convince anyone to take a chance on a Star Wars product, do they? The fans are in for a penny, in for a pound.
The worst Civil War film of all time, Gods and Generals, is also the most accurate-according-to-the-reenactors. There's a close analogue for you.
Jeff. Thank you. For the laughs, as always, but also for the support. I hate the lore, too, and sometimes I feel a little bit alone in my hatred. But now, if I cave and decide to watch the second episode of RoP, having thought the first episode could not possibly have been worse, lore-wise, and, having watched it, the second episode, I mean, and, presumably, hating it, I can, in my self-loathing, always reread this post and know that I'm not alone. So, thanks.
Having now seen the first episode of The Rings Of Power, it struck me how much that series is also polluted with lore. There's a ten minute prologue about who betrayed whom and where the elves came from and how Sauron killed blah blah and all I could think was, this show is already an expansion of the ten minute prologue to the Lord of the Rings movies. Why on earth is it piling backstory onto the backstory?
Amen & thank you for making me cackle in an airport. I feel your pain, as well as a related pain for the uptick in incredibly boring board games that take longer to explain and set up than they do to play (and are then deeply disappointing). Settlers of Catan, I'm looking at you. I feel this way about many novels as well. If I need a map, a family tree and/or a pronunciation guide in order to follow a story originally written in English (map for decoration/ambiance -- fine, confusing names in a translation -- cool), I'm out.