2026-03-26 Let the lore die. Kill it, if you have to.

We need to put something in the water supply that makes the children stop caring about lore. Children are far and away the worst about it, but it's a debilitating illness that infects the young and old alike and I hate it. I'm so tired of people yearning to have the most utterly inane bullshit explained to them. There's this whole desire (having partially already been lampshaded by us vis-à-vis: "What's the looorrree?") to want to know all the lore about some world, some property, some movie, some game. Some whatever. And it's always always such a wrong and terrible thought process. Kill the part of you that wants everything to have an index and for that to somehow be the most crucial part of the book.

This rant was precipitated by one of my favored podcasts where they talk about horror movies and stuff finally going over Alien. They brought up the above water supply plan that I happily cosign. And they have the correct opinion that like literally everything after Aliens is as best totally misguided because of the franchise's incessant need to explain everything. To have lore. The space jockey is So Fucking Good! Literally no one on this cursed Earth needed the space jockey to be explained. It shouldn't be. It is so much better as an inexplicable thing that is deeply evocative, but largely unknown. There is some enormous alien creature, so incredibly old that its body has completely fossilized into its surroundings. Its rib cage has been violently burst outwards by something. And its ship is infested with strange leathery eggs. Done. Ship it. You fucking got it, brother. Immediately aced the test. Let's lock that in and go home.

But no...we gotta know what the space jockey is. We gotta know its birthplace, its mother's maiden name. What it had for breakfast that morning. And there are so so many people that eat this shit up. They fly to YouTube to have some dipshit drone on about the world of Alien to them for 5 hours, going over every little intricate detail. Disgusting! Zero media literacy! You fail! I do suspect there is an inverse relationship between someone's media literacy and their autistic-like interest in lore as an abstract concept. That lore unto itself is an unalloyed good.

This rant isn't specifically about Alien. It's just a very easy punching bag. But to give a counter-example. Disco Elysium is the best. Every interaction you have in the game is a vignette into a much wider world. Each conversation suggests a dozen other interesting ideas. That world of Elysium is so good and compelling. Literally at no point have I felt any desire to watch some "Disco Elysium Lore EXPLAINED" video which I have no doubt proliferates YouTube. Why in the fuck would you? I do not look at the Mona Lisa and get sad that the frame is looking at Mona Lisa. I don't wish that I could make the canvas bigger so we could see more of the landscape. It's just such a gross misunderstanding of what art even is. The process of making it. The choice of where to look. The artist is showing us something. Do you think maybe perhaps it's purposeful that we are not shown everything, but only what they have chosen to highlight? These lore fuckers would insist that Caravaggio stop making everything so dark because they'd like to see what's going on in the background. Incapable of parsing the fact that what we are being shown is the thing that is important.

I don't think this is a new development per se. I suspect that there have always been nerds that have an obsessive interest in something but for whatever reason do not parse it as the art it is, but rather as some exercise in archaeology. Something to be explained. A collection of dots waiting to be connected. But I do get the sense that this is getting worse. My guess is that the impulse comes from a combination of a lack of media literacy and an anxiety towards the unknown. The lack of media literacy causing people to interact with the art purely on a surface level. They don't see that an absence of detail can be purposeful. And I think some people just have a weird discomfort towards the unknown.

I don't understand this personally, I don't feel that at all. But it's like they're sat down at a fun little puppet show. And when it starts, they look at the little puppets and they scream. They get up and out of their seat. They run up to the stage and point at the puppets, screaming "What is this! What is this! How is this working? I don't get it! Where are the people? Is there any people?!" They then glance down and see the shocked faces of the puppeteers gazing up at them from below the stage. And this straw man I've conjured returns to their seat, turns to their friend and with a shit-eating grin says "You wanna know how it actually works?" These are your Freddies Fazbear lovers. Your Cinema Sins-ers. I don't understand them and I want them to be corralled somewhere off of the internet for their safety and ours.

I've seen that I am not the only person who wonders if media literacy is genuinely decreasing. I've seen it discussed all over. And I think it's worth genuinely getting into. Because the internet consuming the world does mean that you always need to keep in mind the possibility that nothing has changed. That you're just being exposed to morons who would not have previously had a comments section they can gleefully show their asses on. They've always been here, they just didn't necessarily have a platform. I'd be curious to see if there's been any actual studies on media literacy. It's a fairly abstract concept, difficult to pin down. Because you're largely just testing for how observant someone is and how well they can apply previously gained knowledge to new material.

My one thought on how this may genuinely be getting worse is I do feel basically everyone has been on the internet for at least 10+ years. And it feels like critical discussion has plummeted since 2016 or so. I used to frequent Reddit all the time for TV discussion. Just various shows that I was watching. They all had a subreddit that did post-episode discussions. And I just reached a point of frustration a couple of years ago. Where I was getting absolutely nothing out of it. I felt like I was seeing more and more examples of people just...not seeing what was on their screen. Very surface-level "Why did character do X?" To have someone exasperatedly reply "Because {thing that happened two seconds prior}..." So it feels to me that there was a time where we were all in the internet and things were fine. But then things started to get worse. So it doesn't seem like the answer is purely the internet. Though I don't doubt that it plays a part. I'd say it's the phones but this shit is all over the gaming world and I dunno how people could en masse both hold a controller/keyboard and mouse whilst also scrolling on their phones. So I dunno. But it worrries and angers me.