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Lore unduly justifies narrative issues in fictional media.
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if we define "lore" as in "the details of the setting" and "narrative issues" as in "problems that result in ineffective storytelling"
then i'd say it can go both ways, and depends
i can think of at least one example of setting details being set on the wayside or determined on the fly to tell a compelling story, and at least one example of potentially more emotionally impactful storytelling being set on the wayside to do something that makes sense according to the setting details
the simarillion seems ok though. maybe because it's about a bunch of crazy shit instead of short people?
not necessarily extratextual
though i guess one could argue it's necessarily extratextual since it requires inferring information, unless it is extratextual by way of the creator giving the information in a separate work
I'm just being my ignorant self so feel free to disregard me.
so the latter probably
so like, sitcoms have lore, but it's lore because it's only the nerds in the audience who are going to remember or care about it, the sort of people who buy the series bible or trawl the wikia for interesting trivia
also it tends to be a word i'd associate with serialized media, like comics or TV series or movie trilogies, while in a standalone movie, book or video game similar details would be 'foreshadowing' or 'easter eggs' or just 'interesting details'
but actual 'nerd media' is unusual in that there is often an expectation that you were paying attention to lore (to varying extents, depending on the work), so sometimes plot events are comprehensible only if you remember something that happened earlier in the story
sometimes, i think, particularly in SF, this can be quite clever and appealing as a storytelling device. the story develops an internal logic peculiar to its setting, and viewers can follow it but they are not 'at home in it' so it can catch them off guard
for me, one of the most satisfying types of moment while reading or watching something is when something happens which surprises me, i didn't see it coming, but with retrospect it was expertly foreshadowed, even inevitable, it's just that its inevitability was a direct consequence of aspects of the lore which, although i know it in theory, there's so much of it that i can't always keep track of all the different mechanics involved and predict how they will play off one another
on the other hand i believe that creating a convincing story may require tweaking the settings to get the desired story result
HOWEVER! arguably the problem there lies in the expectation that every event in the story must be explicable, that there must be some 'justification' for events that are, after all, entirely fictional.
there are no absolute rules in writing, any rule can be broken effectively
but there are rules, and if you don't know the rules you won't know when it's right to break them
now that's me basically parroting back a piece of trite advice i've heard and read many times
however i think there's something in it. i would contrast, for instance, my own attempts at writing plotless short stories, versus the work of a writer like Borges or Barthelme; the former felt like stories that didn't go anywhere which is maybe a bit frustrating or disappointing from a reader perspective, the latter are plotless *for a reason* and so the lack of a conventional plot is not an issue
the Thalmor are *wrong*, as evidenced by the beneficial effects of Talos worship
(my brother once pointed out to me that there are parallels you can draw between the political situation in that game and that of the American South during the 20th century. In this analogy the Thalmor are stand-ins for the USSR, which puts that conflict in a very different light. The problem, for me, is that regardless of how powerful the Thalmor might be, attempting to overthrow them seems a lot saner than nuking Moscow)
i attempted a definition of sorts here
compare and contrast the 'webs' spun by Agatha Christie with those spun by Raymond Chandler; they are greatly dissimilar in how they approach worldbuilding and foreshadowing (i.e. 'lore'), despite superficial similarities in narrative structure
True! Nevertheless i think there is an expectation, in much SF and fantasy, that something resembling real-world logic is in play, perhaps because doing so grounds the narrative in something the reader can recognize, while things a reader of other genres might take for granted - such as social conventions, geography, history, human psychology and the laws of physics - cannot be assumed.
(An alternative approach is to introduce a character who has the same set of assumptions as the average reader, which i think accounts for the fantasy cliché of the protagonist being a visitor from 'our world'.)
i guess also, a point i wanted to make but didn't - one might point out, very reasonably, that there are substantial thematic and character differences between the works of Christie and Chandler. So one might then say, these differences are what really make the two authors so different from one another, nothing to do with 'story logic' or 'lore'.
But i don't think that's quite true, because themes and characters do not exist in isolation from plot or setting. The murkiness, the greater incidence of unknowns and seeming inconsistencies in Chandler's mysteries is not merely a question of him 'not playing fair', it's reflective of serious philosophical differences between the two authors. Chandler simply did not believe in the orderly, carefully structured world Christie's characters inhabited.
All of which is, i guess, just a wordier restatement of what Naney said about narrative affecting thematic structure. But i think it's inevitable that the two bleed into one another.
i think to some extent 'narrative issues' are perceived to exist when a story appears to be adhering to a certain logic and then breaks away from it. For instance, i've heard it said of LOST that it kept introducing mysteries but never supplying solutions. i think that's inaccurate - LOST supplied plenty of solutions even during the early seasons, but provided no clear demarcation between mysteries with and without solutions, and indeed, the mysteries which viewers were most encouraged to speculate about were never solved. The show operated on something far more closely resembling dream logic than viewers were initially led to believe.
Oh, and has anyone yet figured out why "homura" is in the tags?
See also: Primer. Shane Carruth, for who knows what reason, took a story about time travelers rewriting their own personal history, then left a bunch of scenes completely off-screen. There's just enough information to suggest a coherent narrative in the gaps, but enough ambiguity to sustain years of debate. In spite of that, the character arcs are crystal clear, so the whole film works. The fact that those character arcs work is, I think, the whole reason anyone gives enough of a damn long enough to debate about the plot in the first place.