Fallout lore videos easily can get 50K views on some random topic if the creator understands the formula for lore videos. You either need a compelling video essay on some oddly specific topic or you need a good list. Because Bethesda and their predecessors put so much effort into the specific story elements you can discover in game, Fallout is an almost endless pool of content.
You’d think there is a cap, but then the modding scene will create some new nifty something or another and all of a sudden there is new stuff to talk about. There are entire fan-made Fallout games that are playable in the Fallout 3, New Vegas or Fallout 4 engines, each taking place in new locations. Most of this is only available on PC but it’s truly fascinating to watch millions of people band together for the sake of a fictional universe we all explore alone, but together.
As a fan of history, I get it. Unlike real history we can all investigate the truth of our curiosities within the confines of a universe that IS man made. The attraction here is lore, we are all lore junkies. Unfortunately, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have that much of a community yet, but it’s coming, I been saying y’all are sleeping on Cyberpunk.
What is “lore” anyway?
If this is your first language exploration blog with me, we start with a definition. Google, provided by Oxford Dictionary defines lore as, a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.
You can think of lore as the stories and ideas that drive culture. It takes a moment, or an object and adds the pizzazz to make it interesting enough to share with others.
I was having a chat with Pickle Girl. I’m convinced travel makes anyone inherently more interesting and she was like naw, travel can be boring, trust. Her main argument is that you can travel and come back with some garbage quality lore that ruins the mystique entirely.
I suppose there is merit that your ability to tell stories will impact how good the story of your vacation/trip goes. If all you do is some basic stuff, and you describe it in a basic way, there only boring lore. To make it compelling, you need to tap into relatable aspects of the shared human condition that allow people to insert themselves into your story.
It can be something basic like getting too high and ordering too much Chinese food on Spadina street. The extra details of being too high and spending too much, make it more than just a simple food excursion. It can also be superfluous, like escorts failing to seduce you at the same restaurant.
I may be obsessed with lore
I’m a history junkie and I like learning stuff. My obsession with backstory and nuanced world building may not be shared by all of you. However, if we really want to be better at marketing it’s probably worth studying communities that thrive over time.
Fallout 4 came out November 10, 2015, and there are people who can still get half a million views on a video related to some arbitrary topic. For real, I quickly found a video, linked below. In case you don’t want to click it, dude has 45.1K subscribers, and this video got 193’000 views in a month.
It isn’t just the negative topics. I’ve watched a ludicrous amount of Fallout content. You hit me with the “the hidden story of random NPC you talk to twice in game” and I’m in. I don’t care about the story as much as how much effort went into making that story believable.
I study how these masters of storytelling drop hints in 8 random locations to help you piece together something believable. The effort put into making sure that if two characters are cousins, when you really run the details in game, you are like oh say word, they are cousins.
This adds to the “immersion” of the game, which everyone else is obsessed with. I don’t care about getting immersed in games, I geek on studying the lore, I’m okay with spoilers. One time I even dabbled in lore content for Cyberpunk 2077.
The more I learn the more I want to know
It takes me awhile to get into a new game universe. Once I am obsessed, I am obsessed and will spend an unholy amount of time learning about the game. I watch videos that break down context, and I go out of my way to enhance my experience with knowledge.
I don’t have the time or desire to learn everything through my own in-game discovery. I’d rather watch YouTubers who did the work break down all the stuff. Then, when I do experience the game, I can appreciate the subtleties.
Think of it like you can travel to a new country with 0 experience and just take it in or you can Google the country incessantly and walk in already knowing the local language.
I want to be able to notice things and have those “aha” moments on my own. For the most part my life won’t allow me to play a game twice, so if this one adventure is what I got, then I will milk it for all it’s worth.
A well-designed game will cover everything a society needs to be believable. It may not operate with the rules of physics we understand, but if the internal logic structure of the game world is sound, “it’s magic” is a good enough reason for surreal shit.
The more you know about a particular world, the easier it is to follow the charm of the nuanced tiny things. Those tiny things make it fun.
The pickle phenomenon wasn’t an accident
One day I’ll dedicate a blog to the whole pickle story. Since the third pickle song is underway, it feels premature. If you want to know why I’m going as far as to buy a pickle chain, talk to me. I tell everyone who’s down to listen about it.
My day job skills include organic community building. Everything I’ve said thus far has focused on video game communities and many people may feel disconnected from that world. For me, it’s market research.
I once spent 6 months watching and studying the phenomenon of ARGs. I pay attention to how OnlyFans creators market their content across TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. I study how billion-dollar video game franchises keep a bunch of people addicted to their brand for their entire adult lifetime.
Let’s say video games aren’t your thing, Marvel and Harry Potter are two excellent parallels. Hell, even the Sherlock Netflix show created a micro version of this.
When you pay attention like that, you learn that within the patterns that make people become addicted to a brand, there is one strong constant. Anything with good lore is sticky and people will come back. Look at Apple products and the history of Steve Jobs as another example.
One day I was sitting there and saw all the pieces of a lore wave falling into place with this pickle thing. I embraced the meme and doubled down and here we are 😉.
Okay I’ll talk about music marketing now
If you know me, you KNEW this was going in this direction. If your lore isn’t good enough for a biopic, are you even doing art right? Now here’s the thing you don’t need to have an exciting backstory to craft exciting lore out of the boring.
Your artist persona is a fictional being however real you keep it. You are exaggerating your strengths and adapting yourself to meet some market or another. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.
I know that maybe every bar a person spits may be truth a la max. But what about all the stuff they don’t talk about? I have maybe mentioned my parents and childhood 15 times across all the content I’ve made. As long as my parents are living, certain things won’t get discussed.
How real is that then? There are entire chapters of my life that you will never hear about. If I talk about it, it’s controlled and redacted.
Instead, I took a lot of time to define “Holden Stephan Roy” the character and what his story is. I have an entire superhero arc to the way I can spin my life from rags to one day riches. Currently in a funny place with income but thank God a younger me made smart choices.
This lore is all over my music. As time goes on various catchphrases can summarize phases of my life. Lose weight motherfucker, if you know you know.
Marketing is storytelling
Since our artist personae are fiction and marketing is storytelling that connects your product with an audience, you need some lore. The main difference between basic and lit in the artist world is the backstory behind the art.
Think about it, the entire reason Genius exists as a website is to give backstory to lyrics. People care passionately about what songs and art really mean. The fans go extra hard when lyrics reference real life things they can understand and connect with.
The Before They Were Famous guy also adds to the lore of people. The biopic genre and true crime are other examples where lore is the attraction. If you wanted to know why true crime is dominating, it’s because it’s simply lore breakdowns of historical figures.
True crime fans love the same thing I love about Fallout, the storytelling. When the story is that deep, the marketing becomes easier. You can find ideas that go beyond, oh I dropped a new song.
I won’t forget that time Nate Husser released an IG video where it looked like he was being arrested. This led into the Water With The Candy video. In this video he runs through his old hood in what looks like could be a police chase from his youth, on the exact same streets he grew up on.
Nate Husser’s lore is tied into Little Burgandy and it adds to everything he does. His hood believes in him.
Boring and interesting
One day we can dedicate a blog to this concept. I think I’d have to do more research, but I’ve been low key studying the idea of what makes something interesting for most of my art career. This is driven largely by how often people don’t care about my interests.
When you talk as much as I do, it’s easy to bore people if the subject matter is boring. A lot of boring and interesting is about the room you are in. When you can read said room and understand what that room cares about you can deliver interesting content.
Artists that have a lot of lore to their backstory, whether creative or historical in nature, are more interesting. MF DOOM had a rap beef with himself across characters that crossed albums and it was amazing. Jay-Z can rely entirely on the life of Sean Carter to make his case.
There are a lot of routes to being interesting. The ones that will work for you probably won’t be the same as what I do. I was literally watching a video called “10 Most CURSED DECISIONS in Cyberpunk 2077” that had 12K views in 14 hours going I wonder how long until this is 120K views in the same time frame.
That jumped my brain down a rabbit hole, and I started writing this blog. The combination of interests and passions I have allow me to take this route, but this is practiced and deliberate.
Talent is the minimum requirement
I’ve been complimented heavily about my skill as a writer in this blog, often with a keep it up. I appreciate it but I am confident in my writing ability and am doing this to maintain a writer’s portfolio. When you make your living off the literal strength of your pen game as I did for so long, you know you are good at it.
Unfortunately for a past me, none of my writing is in my name so you can think of me as a dude with like 20K hours of ghostwriting prose for others.
While this is bragging, the point is that being a good writer isn’t enough. To maintain this blog, I have to add to my personal lore by having adventures and consuming knowledge. The more I read and the more events I go to, the more I can craft a better story of Holden.
The same thing applies to music. I know many people who can write better songs and rap better than me, but to what avail? The question really should become, who can out-lore who?
This is a lifestyle blog where because I have a talent for writing I can try and convince you to join the Holdiverse. If I wrote like ass but still had the lifestyle, you’d read that blog faster than if I wrote well but stayed home every day, I promise.
A Natasha Marie example for me is, we know you perform so your PRSPCTVS on performing count for something.
Build your own culture
The early phases of a music life (first 5 years or so) probably focus a lot more on talent as it takes awhile to start living life. The next level for this is to cultivate a community around your ideals and lifestyle.
It’s hard for me to explain the beginnings of this. Over the next bit I’d like to work with some people for free so I can develop a real course around culture building. The one thing I know I’m not is some 90’s NYC Hip Hop.
I never lived that life so for me, it’s now a matter of creating a lane for people who lived like me. As I rose in the world, I started realizing that I could be a voice for people with my life journey. The people who want to be weirdos but are stifled by a fake ass corporate culture.
I was literally once told I couldn’t do a demonstration over my beard. I was definitely the right person for it, but the middle-class cares way more about corny norms than efficiencies. I can be very anti-middle-class in my rhetoric, fair warning.
Since I don’t feel I fit in anywhere, the goal is to create a space where I feel like I can be me. I put the call out into the world and am trying to collect the people I will get rich with. If you don’t like what we do, that’s okay, we aren’t trying to be like other things.
It’s all Bethesda’s fault really
I feel my focus waning so it’s a good time to wrap it up. Bethesda introduced me to Morrowind when I was a teenager (thanks Paraish). Morrowind consumed a teenage me with the depth of its world. I’ve been an open world deep lore junkie ever since.
That lead me down the path of studying history. Video game history is interesting, so is real life history to be honest. Don’t believe me, go watch some true crime.
Still Bethesda kickstarted that obsession or me. This has led to me spending a decade learning about community building and now professionally I’m now pretty good with organic (not free) marketing.
I write this blog because I want to see us all collectively focus on Montreal Anglo Hip Hop lore. If we can craft a story that is fire, we can get the rest of the world to eat it up. We speak the universal language is all I am saying.
Thanks for reading my takes and opinions, have a lovely weekend.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone