Holy fuck, thank you for saying this. Every single time someone talks about the lore of Dark Souls or Elden Ring or whatever the fuck else I'm sitting here, screaming in my mind "what fucking story."

I read online that Miyazaki was a huge fan of western fantasy (why all the Souls games are all medieval fantasy with dragons and knights and shit), but coming from a Japanese background he didn't really understand all the stories and details at first; he basically was just drawn to the "rule of cool" with medieval fantasy, and he wanted to emulate that disjointed feeling when you play his games.

That all could be entirely wrong though.

If the message isn't compatible with the existing lore IMO pick a different message, make up an original story without the pre-existing lore, or find a different world to make a story about where it does work.

Though I doubt it's often the case where the existing lore is incompatible with whatever message but lazy or negligent writing where they either didn't know or didn't care about the conflicting lore but it would have been possible to massage the story to work with both.

Yeah.

I don't mean to attack lore as a concept, by the way. Lore is art all the same.

I just don't like the way that some people hyperfixate on it so much that an artist trying to do something new, risky, or interesting becomes basically impossible.

People will get stuck on details so much that they end up choking their favorite works to death without even realizing it. As a broad example, I would point to Star Wars.