When does "enigmatic" become "deliberately obtuse"?

[Drakevarg]

This is less a question and more a think piece for discussion, but when writing lore, such as a setting's mythology, at what point do you go from being thoughtfully mysterious to just being pretentiously nonsensical? A good example that comes to mind is the Elder Scrolls game series, whose mythology is so vast, complex, metaphysical and often downright contradictory that one is inevitably lead to wonder how much of it is deliberate and how much of it is sloppy self-indulgent writing trying to play itself off as clever. Or perhaps Dark Souls, which leaves so much open to interpretation that you might question if there even is an answer or if they just left the story unfinished to seem deep.

Don't really have any point to make here, just wondering what the forum thinks of such matters.

 

[TheKillerBs]

I don't think there is a point. You can't beat real mythology in terms of complexity and contradicting and nonsensical nature.

 

[Heliotrope]

I've only ever played Elder Scrolls... It is, actually, the only game I've ever played (not a gamer lol).

I liked the inconsistency of the lore because I feel like in the real world it made sense that stories would change depending on the region and the accounts of those involved. Most of the lore came from ancient texts discovered in old caves and tombs and stuff, and yeah, it changed based on where you were, but I liked that. The same is true in the real world. Go to Egypt and you will get a different origin story in every region, and different again in Rome, Ireland and North America.

I don't write large, sweeping epic fantasy, but I feel like nonsensical can be fun. There is GRRM which I think is wonderful, but frankly sort of boring, then there is CS Lewis who has a lion god king randomly with no explanation, then there is Lewis Carroll who has little girls shrinking and growing and talking Cheshire cats. It all works.

 

[Drakevarg]

I like inconsistency myself, the feeling that the world is being looked at through different eyes... but then there's what I somewhat affectionately call the "deep end" of TES lore - particularly when referring to the primordial, pre-Daedra creation of the world - where things become utterly bizarre, barely coherent and filled with vague metaphysical notions. Which makes me wonder whether they're actually trying to build a world at that point or just smugly confuse the reader. Not that the two are inherently contradictory.

 

[Heliotrope]

I've been thinking about this more. For me, I don't actually want to know where magic came from or how it all started at the beginning. Gandolf was amazing to me as a child because he was so mysterious. Peter Pan as well. I don't need an in depth scientific explanation about how magic came to exist. I love the mystery of it. The potential. I like it to not have too many rules.

 

[Drakevarg]

I'm not necessarily thinking about 'rules,' so much as history. Like I said I don't consider complexity, contradiction or ambiguity BAD, only that after a certain point it feels less like you're being mysterious and more like you're trying to sound clever. In my own setting, I make a point to explain less and less the further back I go. Nobody needs to know the actual political structure of the first civilization from long before recorded history. Just that they were powerful and scary and that they eventually died off. Explaining more would only damage the audience's impression of them.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, that makes sense.

 

[skip.knox]

>When does "enigmatic" become "deliberately obtuse"?

That's easy. It happens when "enigmatic" is badly written. I'm not sure if anyone is deliberately obtuse. Most times I've seen it, it's been entirely unintentional.

 

[FifthView]

Enigma makes me curious, intrigued, interested. Obscurity bores me; it's tedious.

(Maybe not what being asked.)

 

[Heliotrope]

hmmmmmm, good point though FifthView… once you got into the deep end of Elder Scrolls the history did become Obscure. That was why I never bothered reading it. It was boring and confusing and it was most definitely tedious lol!

I always thought they did it on purpose so that it could fill the books, but people wouldn't try to dig any deeper or search out answers…

 

[Miskatonic]

I've only ever played Elder Scrolls... It is, actually, the only game I've ever played (not a gamer lol).

I liked the inconsistency of the lore because I feel like in the real world it made sense that stories would change depending on the region and the accounts of those involved. Most of the lore came from ancient texts discovered in old caves and tombs and stuff, and yeah, it changed based on where you were, but I liked that. The same is true in the real world. Go to Egypt and you will get a different origin story in every region, and different again in Rome, Ireland and North America.

I don't write large, sweeping epic fantasy, but I feel like nonsensical can be fun. There is GRRM which I think is wonderful, but frankly sort of boring, then there is CS Lewis who has a lion god king randomly with no explanation, then there is Lewis Carroll who has little girls shrinking and growing and talking Cheshire cats. It all works.

Then you get texts translated to different languages, old languages die off and people can't decide on what translations are the most accurate, etc.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

hmmmmmm, good point though FifthView… once you got into the deep end of Elder Scrolls the history did become Obscure. That was why I never bothered reading it. It was boring and confusing and it was most definitely tedious lol!

I always thought they did it on purpose so that it could fill the books, but people wouldn't try to dig any deeper or search out answers…

It's the gaming world, somebody somewhere will read it and collect it all... sort of like somebody somewhere will always try to turn snippets of a language in a popular book/movie into a full fledged conlang. LOL. A friend asked a while back if I was going to do a full language for the world, I said, neah, if it gets popular enough to need one somebody will do it for me, heh heh.

 

[Heliotrope]

This is true. I'm not that intense.