Basically what’s your favorite part of Skyrim lore? Or Elder Scrolls lore in general?
Stormcloaks are basically just right-wing separatists and they genuinely suck even without the political “symbolism” that fans come up with.
But Ralof told me I don’t have to be a Nord to fight for Skyrim’s freedom?! How’s that separatist?
Oh I know what their “freedom” looks like
The Stormcloaks are just generic racist proto-fash
Imperials suck too but not for any of the reasons the Stormcloaks hate them. Even their chief deity, the guy who founded their empire, was like “yeah these guys kinda suck, probably need to try something new” 200 years ago. and that was while his descendants were still on the throne. the ones you see in skyrim are ruled by some random warlord('s descendants*) who took over after the end of the septim dynasty. it’s the decaying zombie of an already dysfunctional empire
Skyrim’s backstory is incredibly stupid. The White-Gold Concordat was like if after driving the Nazis from Paris the Western Allies went and agreed to a new Treaty of Versailles that imposed all the onerous conditions of the original, but on the Western Allies instead and additionally let the SS operate in all French and British territories with impunity and legal authority, leaving the Soviets out to dry.
Like the story is literally “the Thalmor blitzkrieg the Imperial City, then the Empire slaps the piss out of the overextended Thalmor and completely routs them, and then the Empire surrenders to the defeated Thalmor for reasons of narrative contrivance,” and everything else follows from how absurd that is and how pissed off everyone is that Hammerfell was left out to dry and how the genocidal elven secret police are allowed to run around carrying out genocide in the Empire.
“the Thalmor blitzkrieg the Imperial City, then the Empire slaps the piss out of the overextended Thalmor and completely routs them, and then Empire surrenders to the devastated Thalmor for reasons of narrative contrivance,”
I’m pretty sure the idea is that the Aldmeri Dominion was believed to have plenty of reserve strength to carry on the war, and that pushing them back basically left the Empire with dregs. Like they were convinced that if the war continued they would just slowly lose. So they used what bargaining power they felt they had to negotiate a conditional surrender, intended to give them the time to rebuild strength (maybe even operating under the idea of human birth rates significantly outpacing elven ones, resulting in a faster recovery in the Empire than in the Dominion)
the Thalmor aren’t Nazis, they’re British. it’s like if the Qing had routed the europeans at the Summer Palace and still agreed to an unequal treaty afterward
They’re a paramilitary ultranationalist organization whose primary motivation is the eradication of all life (especially all non-elven life, but also elven and even altmer life because they believe that will return them to their primordial spirit forms from before the ehlnofey took static mortal bodies) founded in their current form as a callback to past aristocratic altmer supremacist organizations that served as shock troops, secret police, and genocidaires for the old Aldmeri Dominion. They’re basically all the weird mysticism and death cult shit that runs through real Fascist ideology transplanted into a fantasy world and then handled with kid gloves because Bethesda can’t commit to actually showing how evil and horrible the Elder Scrolls world is outside of like Saturday morning cartoon terms. I swear ESO does a better job of making the world weird and horrible than any mainline Bethesda game.
my favorite part of elder scrolls lore are all that things that are no longer canon
the great thing about elder scrolls lore is that canon doesn’t matter. your fanfiction is just as canon as the games, as far as the community is concerned
I’ll tell you this much, the whole politics in the Reach is really fucked up, like Khmer Rouge or 80s Guatemala levels of fucked up
I killed Madanach by the way
