Meaning versus “Lore”
When I like a piece of fiction, I often enjoy getting really lost in it. I love visualizing all the stuff that's unsaid or implied. I love extending what we saw into what we didn't see (and will never see). I love imagining new things either inspired by or set in that piece of fiction.
I love lore.
And I’m not alone.
It’s awesome to feel like a fictional world is bigger than the text that describes it to you - whether that’s done deliberately by the creators (as in games like DARK SOULS) or is just an artifact of things not fitting into the final product (as is the case with W. D. Gaster, a character that was mostly cut from popular indie game UNDERTALE, who has generated enough fascination that countless theories and fan media exist trying to explain or invent their history).
From fanfics to mash-ups to shipping to videos about how a video game character from one franchise is secretly the same as a totally different character in an unrelated franchise by a different creator, people love engaging with their faves in an expansive, generative way. This isn't new (just ask Dante Aligheri), but it does feel like it's gotten a bit more recognizable lately.
Nowadays, these tendencies have been elevated to the point where they have common names, from neologisms like "fanon" and “headcanon” to existing words picking up new meanings like…well, "lore". YouTuber VaatiVidya has made a sizeable following for themselves over the past 8+ years by uploading videos explaining the details of the world and history of games like DARK SOULS and BLOODBORNE, which are now just called “lore videos”. And while yes, technically the term “lore” hasn’t really changed its definition over the past 10 years or so, it’s definitely changed its connotation - and its marketability. Just type “lore” into your YouTube search bar and you’ll get a shit ton of results, from videos by dedicated lore accounts like VaatiVidya (or “MetaNerdz Lore” or “The Sims Lore” or one just called “LORE”) to official videos by corporate retailers like GameSpot. Lore is officially A Thing™.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, it can be an extremely cool thing - especially when it happens to that thing you love.
But there’s another, more recent, usage of “lore” these days.
Like, when you hear about an upcoming movie and go “Wait, there’s going to be a new movie with Willy Wonka origin lore? …Didn’t they already do that?”
Or when Pixar announces that Buzz Lightyear is actually based on a real astronaut, whose story will be in a new movie coming out soon, and you go “Fuck man, there’s TOY STORY lore??”
Because we’re living in an age where media megacorporations’ tendencies to prefer working with established properties are intersecting with a workforce of sincere fans getting dream jobs working on those undying properties, we’re starting to get inundated with a very different sort of lore. Or, more accurately: We now have words to better describe a thing that these megacorps/properties have already been doing for a long time. And as we describe it better, we notice it more, and thus have a newer feeling of inundation.
Star Wars has always been rife with this - and I do mean always. Way before there was any "extended universe", stuff from outside the movies was used to build up and invest people in those movies - even in the days of the original trilogy. You ever wonder why a character like Boba Fett, who barely did anything in the movies he appeared in, is so beloved? Boba Fett's first appearance was actually in a short cartoon designed primarily to promote him in THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL in 1978, part of a multimedia effort to keep the hype train rolling between the first Star Wars movie and its sequel. The following year, his action figure was released. There was a two-year publicity blitz building up intrigue and excitement for the character, including people in Boba Fett costumes giving autographs at malls and parades, all before he actually appeared in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (for only a few minutes, barely more than in the cartoon). Let that sink in: They sold toys and did celebrity appearances for a new character that didn’t show up in the movies for two years, and when they finally showed up, just stood around for a few minutes. And that shit worked. It's why we even have THE MANDALORIAN today.
I was reminded of this when I saw an episode of THE MANDALORIAN which actually manages to showcase both straight-up good storytelling and manufactured lore, almost back-to-back.
Specifically, episode 13, “The Jedi”.
Let me set the stage, and walk you through this a bit:
We had known this episode would take place on “the forest planet of Corvus”. When we arrive, we find out that this forest is now a sooty graveyard of dead trees, almost as devoid of color as it is of life.
Was this what you were picturing, when you were told we were going to visit a forest planet?
Within this wasteland is a walled city called Calodan. The citizens of Calodan live in squalor and fear. The city is barely cleaner than the forest around it, and people live in ramshackle homes whose roofs and walls are a patchwork of junkyard metal.
Calodan is ruled by the Magistrate, a cruel woman who holds her people hostage and threatens to murder them by the boatload to get her way. When our hero, Mando, arrives in town, he sees that the main street leading up to the Magistrate’s residence is lined with cages to torture the helpless citizenry.
The Magistrate’s citizens plead for help from within their main-street torture cages
Then Mando gets to the Magistrate’s home. Inside this walled garden is the only clean water and living, green plant life we have seen so far. The Magistrate is standing up straight, unlike any of Calodan’s people (other than the ones forced upright in torture cages), dressed in fine robes as she quietly feeds fish in her private pond.
Immediately after main street, we see this - notice the difference in the sky from the previous image
This is great characterization.
Not only are we shown the Magistrate’s cruelty through her actions (including her bluntly stating “The lives of these citizens mean nothing to me” before we even get the title drop), we are explained her role in this setting visually. The forest outside the city is dead, but the shrubs in her garden are lush. The very first shot of Calodan features smokestacks pumping soot into the air (immediately suggesting the cause of the forest’s blight), but within the walls of her residence the air is clean and the sky bright. Her citizens weep in rags right outside her garden, while she relaxes in fineries. The meaning is clear: she thrives at the direct expense of those around her. She has been doing this for a long time, enough to suffocate an entire forest. Even her title is meaningful: She’s not a warlord or a mafioso - she’s a magistrate. She is supposed to have a legitimate station, but she is corrupt.
On top of all that, she invites Mando to her home in order to bribe him - but not with cash. She offers him a spear made out of an incredibly valuable material which, as we learned earlier in the series, was stolen from a people that were annihilated by the evil Galactic Empire. In other words, she carries around a martial weapon that is the Star Wars equivalent of being made entirely out of blood diamonds. It’s hard to establish her as dangerous and unscrupulous more clearly than that.
After a flourish showing that this is more than a trinket to her, the Magistrate shows the spear to Mando so he can see for himself what it’s made out of
This is just good, solid visual storytelling. We technically don't even know her name, but we know everything we need to know about this character, her relationship to the setting, and her relationship to the other characters in this episode.
But we do find out her name.
Later in the episode, Mando is talking to the Magistrate’s local enemy, who gives us the following info dump about her:
“Morgan Elsbeth. During the Clone Wars, her people were massacred. She survived, and let her anger fuel an industry which helped build the Imperial Starfleet. She plundered worlds, destroying them in the process.”
This is technically a bunch of new info about the Magistrate. But not really.
Up front, I just gotta point out that this is a pretty strange thing for someone to say. “She suffered a tragedy, which made her angry, which led to her being a ruthless industrialist” is a weirdly biographical take - as in, it is literally the sort of narrative you typically see in literal biographies, i.e. pieces of media based on a lifetime’s worth of research about the personality, history, and behavior of a person. If the person saying this stuff isn’t a biographer or close personal friend of the Magistrate (and she isn’t), then it’s fairly “out-of-character” (as in, it’s dialog that doesn’t actually make sense to be said by someone within the fiction). But this sort of writing happens a lot in Star Wars, and it’s not really that out-of-place for the tone of THE MANDALORIAN, so let’s move past that and look at what we’re actually told here.
One: We’re told that she suffered a great tragedy. This is maybe the most surprisingly pointless part of this info dump, because while it should add a dimension to her character, it doesn’t. By this point in the episode, the Magistrate has been emphatically and consistently depicted as vicious, cruel, and greedy. The show is giving us no indication that either redemption or empathy are on the table for the Magistrate. Additionally, the person telling us this piece of info is someone who fully intends to kill the Magistrate, soon, and doesn’t feel bad at all about it. This piece of information isn’t referenced at all later in the episode. It should change the way someone feels about this character (either in the show or in the audience), but the way it’s framed (and ignored) by the rest of the episode renders it meaningless.
Two: We’re told that this tragedy led her to contribute to bad things (i.e. that she had some vague connection to the evil Galactic Empire). But only in an indirect way with plausible deniability (e.g. being an industrialist when the ruling government is bad) that is less clearly evil than what we've already been shown on screen (e.g. torture cages on main street).
Three: We’re told that she's "plundered" and "destroyed" worlds, but that's completely redundant because we have already been shown through conventional visual storytelling that she has plundered and destroyed the world we are already on. Even the fact that she has done this multiple times is not meaningful, because it doesn't change the stakes at all - it doesn't set her up to be a bigger threat than she was already set up to be. She only fights the heroes with the same resources we were shown in the opening minutes of the episode.
Finally: Even her name doesn't matter. It’s not a bad name, don’t get me wrong. Right now, “Morgan” is a name that audiences are likely to associate with wealth (partly because of prominent financial firms Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan) and with sinister female characters (like Samara Morgan from THE RING or…Morgan, from MORGAN - two horror movies about sinister, dangerous girls). “Morgan Elsbeth” is a fine name to give to your sinister, aristocratic villain. But you know what name communicates all that even better, and is more informative, in the context of the episode? “The Magistrate”.
This moment really got stuck in my craw. It wasn't just that it was redundant, it was that it was trying to look informative or important but wasn't. It introduced new information that didn't matter in a way that seemed intended to call attention to itself. It stood out so much that my first thought was "oh, this must be a character from some other Star Wars property that they are weaving into this show" - like when you’re watching a Marvel show like THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, and some random soldier says their name is “Battlestar”, so you go “what, why would they say that, oh that must be the name of someone from the original comics”, and then you look it up and yep, it is. So right after the episode finished, I immediately went to Wookieepedia - the enormous, long-running Star Wars fan wiki whose name is a permanent reminder that there are two Es in “Wookiee” - to look her up and see where Morgan Elsbeth was from.
She was from episode 13 of THE MANDALORIAN. That's it.
Morgan Elsbeth’s bio on Wookieepedia, as of this writing. There’s so much to love here: how the body of the article just repeats, nearly word-for-word, the entire text of the episode where this information came from; how the only new thing is that typical wiki sentence saying “at some point she learned how to fight with a spear”, because she is shown to fight with a spear in the episode; how one of her “affiliations” is to an army that is only identified as being her army; how the word “woman” links to an article explaining sex and gender on Wookiee-fucking-pedia.
And at that moment, sitting in front of Wookieepedia, I realized that was the point.
This...is "lore" of the “ugh, lore” variety: When the story pauses itself to read off trivia about someone from the back of a trading card to get you to look them up and start guessing where they'll show up next or coming up with headcanons about who they interacted with in the past or whatever. (It’s working, by the way.)
Again, this is not new for Star Wars. Everyone has a name and a Wookieepedia page and a backstory. That guy who says "You wanna buy some deathsticks" to Obi Wan for a quick joke in ATTACK OF THE CLONES? He has a name. It's "Elan Sleazebaggano". Yes, I’m being dead serious. George Lucas named the character himself. There are action figures of him. (Also, when I googled the name to make sure I was spelling it right, autocomplete suggested the search phrase "elan sleazebaggano is snoke", which is a better joke than I could ever make about the Star Wars fandom.) This character was on screen for actual factual ten seconds. And this wasn’t a case of a minor character getting put into more products after fans over-fixated on them for years (like Admiral Ackbar) - these toys and shit all came out immediately after ATTACK OF THE CLONES. I can’t overstate how much "backstories and names that don't matter" is one of the core business strategies of Star Wars.
Also, when I tried to look up his action figure, I found out he also has trading cards. Featuring one of his three lines of dialog.
Again, it's not a bad thing to make stories and settings with millions of characters and hooks for the audience to grab onto and insert themselves or their imaginations into, and it's not a bad thing to indulge in all that.
And this little lore dump isn’t even that egregious, really. It’s just so striking that they read off meaningless trivia about this character, right after doing a better job of introducing the character without any of that. It’s especially funny because the Magistrate is a one-note villain who dies at the end of the episode anyway.
But in an era of consolidated corporate ownership of long-running IPs, which are endlessly elaborated upon in ever more spin-off projects, an increasing proportion of the “lore” we encounter in these IPs is manufactured to generate engagement with the IP. It’s a hijacking of fandom instincts by marketing. And I know it’s popular to compare every bad marketing habit to clickbait these days, but there are some actual similarities here: Clickbait typically communicates a promise with emotional impact to get you to click (e.g. “You won’t believe…”), but then doesn’t fulfill the promise, leaving you hanging and thus searching for more. In this case, manufactured lore promises “You won’t believe this new character’s connection to the Clone Wars that could shake up everything about THE MANDALORIAN!”, which gets you hooked, but then the tiny and irrelevant info dump doesn’t deliver on that promise - so you ride that dopamine wave over to Wookieepedia or Reddit or wherever, and keep digging.
When we consume a piece of narrative fiction - whether a movie or a TV show or a comic or a game, etc. - there’s an implicit assumption that if the author pauses and specifically calls attention to a new piece of information, that it will be important. This kind of “lore” calls attention to itself in a way that suggests importance, but that promise isn’t kept within the media itself (i.e. it’s not actually important) - so, assuming that it must still somehow be important, we keep looking. And we’ll watch the next episode, or the next movie, or whatever, hoping to finally find out who the fuck the Knights of Ren are, and by the end of that next piece of media we’ve lost track of the answers we haven’t gotten yet, because that episode/movie/etc. gave us a whole new set of promises it won’t keep.
There’s a really great line I heard in a vlog recently that seems to encapsulate these tendencies perfectly.
UNBREAKABLE was a fun little family drama deconstructing superhero tropes that came out in 2000. SPLIT was a thriller that came out in 2016, and was entirely unrelated…until the very end, where it reveals that it’s actually part of a larger story that connects to UNBREAKABLE, and sets up a sequel. GLASS, which came out in 2019, was that sequel. Video essayist and media critic Dan Olson talked about these movies in a vlog he put out after seeing GLASS, where he says that he may have ended up liking UNBREAKABLE less after seeing the later movies flimsily smash together otherwise isolated movies in a way that made the individual characters and stories worse for their inclusion.
The very first thing he says in this video is this:
“There is no meaning; there is only lore.”
And really, that’s exactly the problem with this sort of manufactured lore.
“The Magistrate” has meaning. “Morgan Elsbeth” is just “lore” - pantomimed worldbuilding with nothing behind it.
