is "meme lore" a literary genre?

yes, and here's a definition

“Lore” is a word you can get addicted to using, because it hits so different. More sensible synonyms like “information,” “story,” or “context,” feel dry and technical, like peel rather than fruit. But “lore” is a pleasure to say.

“Lore” has been used on the internet for years. It seems to come from the word’s usage in fandoms around video games, novels, and movies that center on fictional worlds. And it seems to mostly define the type of knowledge that isn’t immediately available to an outsider, but isn’t necessarily hidden either. So, 2014 Tumblr-era controversies of an influencer prior to their main internet fame can be “lore.” So can the communal traditions and histories that build up on a place like Reddit’s /r/dankmemes, where posters have been interacting for years.

Last week, I heard a use of the word “lore” which made me rethink exactly what the term points to in online culture. It was a French TikToker discussing a brain rot video series posted by lakaka.land, which I am a big fan of — the Lakaka videos are truly worth your time, if you have any interest in brain rot as a genre.

“C’est un lore” he said, describing this series of videos which feature distinct characters, repeated stylistic tropes, and echoing visual and audio effects. What I heard there was a pretty straightforward classification: one work of art might be a “lore” in the same way another might be a “novel” or a “poem.”

“Lore” denotes a literary form, and it’s one that has been everywhere online throughout the last two decades of internet culture. Whether it’s Skibidi Toilet, last summer’s Gnomes vs. Knights craze, the classic SCP Foundation Wiki, Goncharov, Floptropica, Quandale Dingle, Meme Man and Orang, or the sprawling traditions of Dogelore, Pepelore, Wojaklore — it would seem as if the lore form (I almost want to say lore process) has been a key avenue of online creativity. If you have not heard about any of those lores I just listed — and many people never do, it’s totally fine — let me explain what I mean.

Take as an example Tumblr’s Goncharov, which dates from 2022. Goncharov was an imagined 1973 Martin Scorsese film about the Russian mafia. Robert DeNiro stars as the titular Goncharov, while Harvey Keitel and Cybill Shepherd round out the cast. Using their own artistic skills, alongside some AI generators, Tumblr users created all the paratext which might surround Goncharov, a film that doesn’t actually exist. They made theatrical posters, a score, thoughtful critical reviews, threads discussing the film’s homoerotic subtext, academic articles examining it in the light of the Cold War, and fan theories about whether Shepherd’s character Katya really died or not. Martin Scorsese himself, playing along, told his daughter in a TikTok video that yes, he remembered making Goncharov quite fondly.

Goncharov, as an artistic product, is not a movie (Scorsese never made it) but a lore. It’s collectively-authored, eternally incomplete, and without a center. It is open-ended, interactive, and social. Just as a novel is written in a book and a song is played on an instrument, a lore unfolds across a webpage, in a community.

But it’s not just the transposition of storytelling to a digital medium. It’s something weirder than that: Goncharov seems to more meta-narrative than it is narrative. Throughout the whole Goncharov trend, people in on the joke loved it because of how ridiculous and ornate it became. Goncharov was the number-one trend on Tumblr, and seeped into every other platform. There was not much story in Goncharov (which, again, did not exist) but there was a story around Goncharov — the real-life practice of making fan art for this film and the sustained bit of doing so. I’d argue this is another characteristic of lore as a form: it is often anchored on a radical suspension of disbelief or good taste, which, when collectively practiced online, takes on its own narrative force as a kind of “happening.” That’s part of why the whole thing died down after Martin Scorsese acknowledged it — that’s the furthest this bit can go.

But lore is more than a bit, even as it remains kind of a joke. Consider lakaka.land, the French brainrot account I’m enamored of lately. Most Lakaka videos are about two minutes long, centering on one among several characters, each of whom is a derpy picture of a cat. About a third of all videos begin with a “scary story, try not to be afraid” title card, and then a first-person voice-over narrator (some call this narrator “le savais tu?” because the stories are often punctuated with this phrase) encounters one or several of the characters in Lakaka land. These characters include Oupi-Goupi, le Lobotomisateur, Larry le malicieux, la Créature, le Mastermind, L’homme génial, and (my favorite) L’electricien.

Then there are videos narrated in third person, where “the origins of” each of these characters are described. These all fit within a particular schema. Le mastermind is a force of pure evil who has corrupted the others, often finding them at a vulnerable point in their lives. L’homme génial (French for “the nice guy”) opposes le Mastermind and seeks to prevent his corrupting influence. All the characters are somewhere along a spectrum between evil and good. In my view, Lakaka and the audience seek to examine the nature of evil through this lore, asking to what extent the tragic pasts of le lobotomisateur or la Créature explain or fail to explain their evil actions. The content of lore becomes serious, reflecting the ways people feel about the world. It offers a frame of reference for understanding others met through the community around the lore and their experiences.

I don’t think it is too far a stretch to say many of these same dynamics are at play in contemporary conspiracy theory — what is QAnon if not a lore, operating through these same modalities? And many of these lores rely for satiric effect on parodying the style of conspiracy content (e.g., the role of red circles and arrows in Quandale Dingle lore) which most internet users are familiar with because it’s everywhere nowadays, a piece of our common visual language. This may be another post down the road.

“le savais tu,” the narrator (perhaps) of Lakaka lore

To finish the provisional definition of memelore I’ve offered here, I’d like to add three other points.

First, that lore has a distinct temporality and spatiality. What makes lore different from a conventional narrative, as far as I can tell, is the lack of progress through time. Things happen in lakaka.land or Skibidi Toilet, but they happen in the way tides happen: slow, gradual shiftings in the world. From post to post or day to day, we experience a lateral movement across the imagined space — as the handle lakaka.land suggests, this is a “land” as much as it is a story. It is more likely for the series to add a new character or go deeper into the past of an existing character, than to introduce a conventional plot development. Rather than moving forward in time, the series goes outward, inward, and through the fourth wall. This lateral movement makes it so any entry point along the sprawling web is as valid as any other. More popular videos end up becoming more central nodes, but the entire lore is built so you can miss the majority of episodes (which most viewers do) and still get the gist.

Second, while lores are often centered around specific creators, they exist under conditions of plural authorship. Remixes, commentaries, and even outright copying are fundamental. Lakaka.land, for example, borrows a number of characters as well as an overall style from English-language account Offlain (which has a German alt as well) and adapts them into its own lore system. The Gnomes vs. Knights trend may have centered around Crawly and his gnome character, but it was random users who owned armor that filled in the knight side of the story. The intertextual net is thick in all these lores, crammed with references to other memes.

Third, what may distinguish lore from oral tradition is its source of authority. In oral tradition, authority seems to be generated by a connection backwards in time — the story is “traditional,” it has been taught by someone older, passed through generations. In meme lore, however, authority seems to be generated by a sort of democratic frenzy shown through the numbers attached to posts and the genuine interaction of a community. Goncharov mattered because all of Tumblr was doing it. Skibidi Toilet is crazy because the videos have been viewed billions of times. Implicit in lore is a connection to the community and a collaboration with it. You feel special because you know, and others have known with you.

Some of the most moving comments I received on my video about Lakaka.land, which so far has nearly a million views — and I suppose that makes me a minor co-author in this lore — say things like “I have no one in my real life to talk to about this.” And maybe that’s where the authority in lakaka.land comes from — through lore, a piece of you is expressed and understood which just can’t be manifested in real life. I might say this is the condition of my generation, if you’ll allow me to grandly conjecture for a moment — that the online world offers this expressive abundance and shimmering possibility of connection, while the real world seems to narrow and darken. Jobs and friends are harder to find, the climate gets worse, all the products and services seem to get less efficient and satisfying, everything costs more. But the scroll is never scarce.

I may write further about lore in future posts, so if you have any tips or recommendations, let me know.