All about “The Lore”

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

When local pro wrestler Sid “Vicious” Eudy died earlier this week, I got a lot of texts, Facebook messages and calls from folks, not because I’m editor of the paper but because people who know me, know that I’m a big pro wrestling fan, and they, I think, wanted to be able to sort of connect with someone who would care about Sid’s passing in a sort of cathartic shared experience kind of way. And it did cause me to dig deep into my bag of wrestling lore.

The term “lore” has come into common use online in regard to all of the deep knowledge and content fans of certain pop culture have acquired about, well, everything…

Take “Star Wars” for example. Now, for most folks, Star Wars means those movies that came out 40 years ago with Darth Vader and R2-D2 and Luke Skywalker, and that is true. If you

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know that much, you can have a nice normal conversation in which Star Wars in mentioned and go on about your day. But oh, my friend, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, there’s the three movies that came out between 1977 and 1983. But there’s also the three movies that came out between 1997 and 2003. And then there’s the three movies that came out between 2015 and 2019. Oh, and the standalone movies, and the cartoons and the comic books and the video games and the novels and the TV shows, and well… about a million other things that happened “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

The same is true for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and even the Nightmare on Elm Street series. And you might like Batman or Spider-Man, but do you know the “lore” behind those characters that goes back to before World War II? And speaking of World War II, there’s “lore” about the real world as well.

We’ve all heard of D-Day and Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Bunker Hill or the Battle of Bull Run, but there’s so much about those events that you could fill a book just about one battle.

While I am nowhere near the modern dating scene (thank the Lord), people are now starting to put their own personal “lore” on their social media. Like before you “swipe right” on someone’s photo on Tinder, you can check out their lore, with everything from regular stuff like name, age, location to stuff like your hopes and dreams, personal trauma, and all kinds of information.

It’s almost as cool as Star Wars… almost.