Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:01:55 +0200

Short socio-cultural ‘analysis’ of lores

I find modern lore culture of video games and fiction fascinating. We had mythologies, but they were associated with particular peoples and cultures. They often do go away from standard images of our culture, and commonly they are so distant that they draw upon realities that are far from points in our reality, that it is only the similar conditions that allow for any relatable events. On the internet, they allow people from various backgrounds to have better connection, as they both participate in these ‘fake’ cultures, and both understand the sets of deterritorialized mythologies. The main stories in them will often follow similar patterns, as with Hero’s Journey which is way too boring and way too repetitive for this blog. As always, I aim at a ‘strict’ analysis and ability to predict whether their later effects will be good or bad and what are going to be their consequences.

The roots

In any reasonable analysis, one ought to look for roots. Simple reasoning leads one into reinterpretations of mythologies and slow development of different time-realities during the enlightenment era. In that I mean that portrayals of the past through the enlightenment changed from simply actions being done in the contemporary aesthetical visions (i.e. the medieval bible inscriptions, drawings) to a different aesthetical spaces. Therefore, the certain architectures and fashions became separate realities from ours, and we were able to look at the past as “past” and not just alternative place in the same world (despite modern physics would not consider this narrative differentiation quite sensible).

How does this statement relate to lores? Well, it allows for other narrative imagination, when spaces do affect the narrative and are not equavilent for all narratives. This is first visible in painting and sculpture (classicism, references to the past, portrayal of Jesus as coming from a different reality (despite it being the same racial reality)). Then the gates have been opened, the most visible example of such perspective appeared with the start of romantic era as suddenly the first critique of enlightened chronocentrism showed up. The houses of collapsing families, the fallen kings, etc, etc are all becoming new spaces for becoming, and with Kantian and Hegelian philosophies such narrative spaces have their own form (still with respect to contemporary reality, which is still visible in modern genre fiction and related).

From this I consider that the lore and genre fiction is widely unique to modern events - commonality of literature, lack of dominant metanarrative, easy access to all ‘world knowledges’ and so on. They do show extreme need for stories, but all those stories are depersonalised and deterritorialized as I have said before. The identity of the reader is most often empty, and the reader ought to stay distanced, and maybe put themselves in the world of the fiction, but will never be part of it. This is the main distance from past stories, and histories where the narratives were partial to the identity of the reader. This impartiality is the cause of further alienation, which is result of leisure instead of work, which makes it even more fascinating in its removal and existence.

The effects

One of the main effects of such development is the fact that most people will have temporary identities which can be controlled by a small and discrete group of people. This already puts them away from majority of relgio-cultural identities which usually were quite open about reasonings behind ‘creative’ decisions. In case of lores such openness is purely dependent on the creators choice, and not seldom it takes research to find out the reasons behind these choices. So far, most of the cases seem simple and continuation of literary, but for example political, economic etc. I don’t think I need to say what repercussions might result from such possibilities.

The results might be positive, but who gives a shit about good things. Yeah, if someone makes you happy, nice for them. It is a complete waste of time to speak about those things, as anyone is able to verify if something makes them safe, and thorough analysis which would deal with issues of previous paragraph one might be able to identity. The theological nature of lores also makes it secure against religious authorities, as they also have been known for doing stuff that wasn’t that good. Maybe your grandma is wrong.

They bring into question our predisposition about our folk nature. As it is similar to religions, and cultures it shows their manufactured nature, and therefore allows to put all our values into questioning and act within the freedom or suffering given. Again, I will not give solutions as it does not benefit me to speak of them. I just ask: Has history really happened? Or is it another lore, created by some random historians which just read random events into nice narratives for their own reasons, and we are back at that paragraph. People are crazy for many things. Vicious, vicious beings.

Conclusion

This looks like an essay, and this is not an often occurence on this blog. I have used no sources as they do not prove anything except I read other books and/or learned some fun names. This also creates lore of this blog, and I can not even say if I am controlling it or not. I just write what I feel, and what I feel greatly changes from hour to hour, day to day, month to month, year to year. The reality of lores is difficult, and their popularity and commonness makes them seem eternal, but as many things, they are not. Just to say, the first big modern prose fiction book was Don Quixote, before that a good story was the story you could sing or show in a theatre. The ways in which we tell ‘myths’ are always changing, and we are unaware of these changes as they happen. What will be result of my blogging for the future, that I cannot say.

The question of fakeness and reality stays. Does existence of lores offer us important insights into how all of this might be intentional and towards goals? In my opinion it fully does. It might be my Straussian bias, but the society exists to be controlled, and the best control is the one of which nobody is aware and acts within these ideas. And currently there are ideas without territories, without borders, without limits and they even do use the terms from the Church (i.e. the Canon). The most predictable evolution is to go for even these fictions to be reasons for violence. People died in riots related to horse races. People will die in riots related to what should be canon in Star Wars, especially in the era where people’s political influence gets smaller. And on this optimistic note I wish to end.