C. K. Pidgeon

So I recently read this article, Who Cares About the Lore? about worldbuilding and lore, specifically centred around the Elder Scrolls

The article is super interesting and has a take on worldbuilding that is kind of similar to mine, i.e. that inconsistency in a secondary world is actually preferable to perfectly consistent factual coherence. I highly recommend reading through all of it.

An administrator of the Library, who uses the screenname Lady Nerevar, told me: [...] “It’s not important that specific minutia matches up as long as the overall vibes remain consistent,” she said. “I think lore is a series of themes.”
[...] This idea, commonly accepted, that lore is a series of themes and not facts, can be intimidating. “That’s a terrible thought,” one user [from the Elder Scrolls subreddit] protested. “It pretty much means that anybody can say anything, that every theories and ideas are true. If that’s the case, then this whole subreddit is pointless, asking questions is pointless, any investigating work done to try to understand the lore is pointless, because everything can only be true and nobody can be wrong. That’s scary…”

First off: lol. lmao. You fell for the classic "if facts aren't important then anything can mean anything" blunder.

Second: This led me to reposting this on bluesky with the comment:

I am reading this and finding it really interesting and also really infuriating because of Redditors Being Wrong About Their Approach To Fiction. The idea that a writer should worldbuild exactly one set of absolutely self-consistent facts is so wrong-headed I can't express it in fewer than 15 posts

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— ✨hauntedtoasters✨ (hauntedtoasters.bsky.social [BlueskySocial]) July 25, 2026 at 10:02 AM

And then fantasy author Marin T. Kael asked:

ok now i want the 15 posts. are you saying the world itself shouldn't be consistent, or that the sources describing it should contradict each other the way real chronicles always do?

— Marin T. Kael ([Bad username or site: marin-t-kael @ de]) July 28, 2026 at 9:54 AM

And now here I am writing a blog post instead of a 15-post bluesky thread because it seemed a bit more organised and a bit less ephemeral and I really should have some writerly blog entries on here anyway.

In answer to Marin's question: yes.

( Yes on both counts. )