The problem with Balgruuf is that he never picked a side. Call Ellisef wishy-washy if you want, but at least she backed a team. Balgruuf only picks a side once he's absolutely forced to.

We can argue about Stormcloaks vs Imperials until the cows come home but overwhelmingly the most damaging scenario is the civil war continuing indefinitely. Neutrality is more damaging than going either way.

Balgruuf's entire thing is he's on the side of Whiterun - which would be fine if it wasn't at the expense of the rest of Skyrim.

As for Ulfric... the White-Gold Concordat seemed like a slam dunk for the Thalmor at first glance, but let's go through the three major terms. The Thalmor get a big chunk of Hammerfell? Whoops, they've conveniently seceded from the Empire, how sad for the Thalmor, better deal with that yourself - what's that? Second Treaty of Stros M'kai? How tragic. The Blades get disbanded? The Blades were already all-but destroyed, and the remainder were already deniable assets. No more worship of Talos? They just mothballed the Talos shrines and everyone turned to their home shrines instead, nobody cared. The Thalmor slam dunk turned into an absolute nothing, and the Empire was gearing up for the next war...

Until Ulfric Motherfucking Goddamn Stormcloak is released from Thalmor custody and immediately starts manufacturing resentment towards the Empire while handing a political coup to the Thalmor on a silver goddamn platter with his bullshit in Markarth. Then the next thing he did was to head over to Solitude, challenge the King to a duel - the King that idolized Ulfric and would have fought by his side against the Empire if Ulfric had asked - and killed him with a Shout. Then he raises half the goddamn province in rebellion.

Ulfric is a Thalmor creation and his dancing to their tune, period, full stop, the end. The only unknown is whether he's aware of it. The best you can say for Ulfric is that it's impossible to be sure whether he's a traitor to his race, his country, his gods and his ancestors, or whether he's just the dumbest, most easily manipulated motherfucker to ever walk the face of Tamriel.

 

Balgruuf says he's on the side of Whiterun. That doesn't mean it's true. Whiterun is labeled as under Imperial control on every Civil War map in the game you care to check until and unless you take it over for the Stormcloaks, its guards are armed with Imperial Bows and Imperial Swords, the guards will occasionally use Imperial dialogue in their lines, especially when arresting you, and Balgruuf's older brother thinks they should "stop all of this prancing about, and just take the fight to the Stormcloaks already."

If you actually believe Balgruuf when he says he's not openly supporting or being supported by anyone, then I'd say that's true. He isn't. Not openly. It's kind of obvious who he's rooting for and who must be funding him, if you stop to think about it, though.

It's true that the worst possible outcome for the Civil War is that it continues on. The Thalmor like and encourage that state of affairs, and if you bother to go poking through their documents and missives, that becomes extremely clear. Ulfric may not be the best option, but he's still better than "everyone keeps killing each other."

That beings said, I think you're confusing Balgruuf's neutral stance with "he'd just let thinks keep going the way they are." He wouldn't. That's exactly what he doesn't want. He's neutral, but not in the sense that he wants the current state of affairs to continue. He wants everything to be resolved in the best possible manner, with respect to both current and future concerns, and I can respect that. It's just that he can't do it himself without picking a side. Balgruuf wants a third option. He just doesn't know what that option would be.

Quite frankly, I kind of feel where he's coming from on that front.

 

And this is where the Dragonborn for High King/Emperor should have come in. :3

 

I love how with all the different people we have on this thread, all the different opinion and theories, and all the disagreements, there is one thing we can sit around a fire and agree about:

Fuck the Thalmor.

 

So say we all...

 

The Thalmor are literally an apocalyptic cult. Their entire belief system resolves around how they were immortal beautiful spirit beings before they were bound to Mundus, ergo fuck Mundus. Sure, that was always a staple of mer backstory, but they never actually did anything about it until the Thalmor came to power.

So they're trying to literally destroy reality. This is why they focus on Talos, even though Arkay is also said to have been a mortal who apotheosis'd into godhood - because Talos was the Shezzarine, an embodiment of Lorkhan, and Lorkhan caused the creation of Mundus. According to Thalmor beliefs, Talos is an aspect of the most unholy of all higher powers, which is why they focussed on stamping out his worship so hard during the White-Gold Concordat.

Now, if you think back, you may remember another Altmer-run society dedicated to the destruction of all things - the Mythic Dawn who caused the Oblivion Crisis, who worshipped Mehrunes Dagon, Daedric Prince of destruction.

You may remember that the Thalmor came to power during the Oblivion Crisis by being amazingly - some may say suspiciously - ready to fight against the Oblivion incursion.

You may put two and two together.

Fuck the Thalmor.

 

Balgruuf has reasons to actively distrust both factions; he has some vauge feud going with Ulfric and none of the Jarls care much for how the Empire is doing things (except Elisif, but she honestly barely qualifies). Also the dude in Falkreath, I suppose.

Elisif seems like a sweet girl on the whole, but the idea of her as High Queen is frankly laughable. So...yeah.

On top of that, Balgruuf's in an impossible position to begin with what with the dragons. I don't think it's fair to get on him too much. His hands are pretty epically tied, but he still tries to help you when he can.

@Raine - Riften's pretty fucked no matter what you do really. Maven's a colossal bitch (and I love the Thieves' Guild to death), but Lalia or whatever is utterly fuckin' clueless >_>

Markarth's also pretty fucked, with Silver-Bloods on one side and Madanach on the other.

e: I will say this for the Civil War- it gives Ulfric and Tullius the chance to spout some awesome rhetoric. I particularly like the bits during the ceasefire quest. Watching Elenwen get shouted down never gets old.

e2: It's also pretty nice to know that either side winning would scare the piss out of the Thalmor (for different reasons- think High King Ulfric might be interested in repaying that whole torture deal, with an army of proud warrior dudes and a Dragonborn? Think the Empire might want to ah...renegotiate their position vis-a-vis the Dominion?)

Still though: Motherfucking dragons coming to kill everyone. And vampire lords who want to turn off the sun. And eldritch abomination Dragonborn. Bigger fish to fry, people!

 

Yeah but the thing is you can root out all those guys yourself, alone and to the last man.

The fucking Thalmor though? You build up this huge hatred for them which the little incident at the embassy doesn't diffuse. The reason we keep talking about them, is because really all we want is to go up to sommerset isles, and slaughter every single last one of them.

With a spoon!

 

They're the main villain of the setting. Literally. Nu Mantia talks about how Ayleids are responsible for all the bad things that seem to have happened in recent years in Tamriel - but that these 'ayleids' weren't racially ayleids but ideologically ayleids. The only people in Tamriel who have ever advocated "Tear down the world" as their method to Godhood are the Thalmor and the Ayleids - the Altmer are generally more into dracochrysalis. The Thalmor are the Ayleidoon, the main villains of the setting, and are responsible for everything from the Imperial Usurpation to the Sharmat to the Oblivion Crisis.

If everyone didn't hate them, Bethesda would have fucked up something pretty important.

 

Well, yes, but you're supposed to. As Tehan and Fiat already noted, the Thalmor are an extension of the Big Evil that's been present throughout the entire series.

It can be hard to see if you don't read all the books, or pay attention to the background lore, but there's a firm trend going on here, and we have to go back to the creation of Mundis and what happened to Lorkhan to understand it.

Stay with me here, because this is going to take awhile, but we're going places. Go make a sandwich and loop a song you like. I'm serious. Yes, most of that scrolldown space on the bar is mine. I'm not kidding about the sandwich thing.

The vastly abridged version of it is that the big bad and final villain of the Elder Scrolls series is not a single individual or even a god or entity, so much as it is a perpetually recurring philosophy that keeps cropping up over and over again throughout history.

You see, in the beginning, Everything was the Same. It was all just one giant ball of potential energy and stuff that had no form or shape or function. This tangled snarl of potential was inhabited by the Et'Ada, or the Original Spirits. And this state of affairs had been set in motion by Padomay and Anu, the two opposing Creator-entities of the universe (Padomay is the Anthropomorphosis of Change (and thus possibility), where Anu is the Anthropomorphosis of Stasis (and thus stability)).

So, Padomay and Anu created this Beginning state of things, and the Et'Ada lived there.

But so did Padomay's son, Lorkhan. And Lorkhan thought that the current state of affairs was terrible, because there was all this potential sitting around, but nothing was happening or coming from it. So he tricked/convinced/coerced the Et'Ada into creating Mundis, aka Everything As It Currently Exists in TES.

So everything was all potential and boring, Lorkhan (in keeping with the nature of his father, the personification of Change) changed that by creating everything (generally agreed to be through some form of deception or trickery, hence his status as the original Trickster Deity), and then everything existed.

After this point, Lorkhan was killed, mutilated, or otherwise separated from his divine center, which became known as the Heart of Lorkhan, and was used to hack reality by the dwarves, be a battery for a giant robot, and turn some individuals of questionable sanity and morals into immortal demigods, among other things. Some say this was voluntary on his part, others say it was punishment for daring to create everything and not be a useless bag of glowing light and potential like every other Beginning Spirit. It depends on who you ask (and the 'who' in question is going to become relevant in a minute, and is the reason we're going through this).

Now, there were two types of Et'Ada, or beginning spirits. Those with a leaning towards Padomay, and those with a leaning towards Anu. The Padomaic spirits were called the Aedra, and the Anuic spirits were called the Daedra. The bold is there for a reason, because now we're starting to get into terminology that isn't five lore-layers removed from what most people would be familiar with.

I’m also going to take a quick sidestep over, and explain that the “Lunar Lorkhan” thing that came up a few times and which may have confused some people, is essentially the theory that the two moons of Nirn, Masser and Secunda, are Lorkhan’s “Flesh-Divinity,” i.e. his literal corpse, and the two pieces of it stayed up there while his “Spirit-Divinity,” or heart, fell to Mundis. Whether this is true or not remains unclear, but it bares mentioning, as another quick aside, that the Aedra are all planets (and in a few instances, planes of existence), so the Lunar Lorkhan theory has some solid logic behind it, because planets don’t disappear very easily.

Yes, that’s right. Mara and Dibella and Julianos and Kynareth are all planets, sentient god planets, and they just have human/elven shaped statues for our convenience. The creation of the universe in TES was exactly like our own, only the planets spinning around was what made everything, and not just a side-effect of everything coming into being. Their spinning is what keeps everything going literally, because that’s the gods physically keeping everything spinning with their own metaphorical hands. It’s metaphorical, because the gods don’t actually have hands, because they’re fucking planets. Standard fantasy can eat a dick.

The Aedra were the ones who agreed to help Lorkhan create the world. The Daedra were the ones who refused. The very words "Aedra" and "Daedra" are High Elven terms. "Aedra" means (roughly) "Our Ancestors," whereas "Daedra" means (approximately) "Not Our Ancestors."

The first elves were the Aldmer (First Folk, or Elder Folk, depending on who translates for you), who were supposedly descended from the Aedra, and supposedly lived on a possibly Atlantis'd city-continent called Aldmeris full of wonders and magic and technology the likes of which have never been seen since, not even by the Dwemer (see: Before the Ages of Man). Other sources say that this is pure unmitigated horse shit that was concocted by arrogant racist High Elves for other arrogant racist High Elves, and shouldn't be believed. Seeing how the first is from a book that was written by someone with a High Elf name, and the second is from an Elder Scroll, I know which I believe.

What we do know for a fact, however, is that the Aldmer were the first technologically sophisticated species in Nirn that we know of (unless the Hist trees actually turn out to be sentient, and not just weird as fuck or the corpse of some old god or physical form of an unknown Padomaic spirit, in which case that crown would go to the trees, and not the elves. Standard fantasy can eat a dick), and they used that to steamroll over the ancestors of the beast-peoples like the Argonians and the Khajiit.

The Aldmer and their descendents, the Altimer, or High Elves, absolutely hated Lorkhan, and in their stories he is always the most terrible and unholy of all higher powers, because they believe he forever broke their connection to the spirit plane (or at least, their more intimate connection to it; they can still cast magic, after all). The Aldmer actually created a Mary Sue warrior god (who may have been based off of a real Aldmer warlord who lead the Aldmer in an extinction crusade against early humanity) named Trinimac specifically for the sole purpose of defeating Lorkhan and tearing out his heart in their mythology, which is how they argue the Sundering Event happened (i.e. that thing with Lorkhan’s Heart and his maybe-moon bodies). You can tell he’s a Mary Sue because he came out of nowhere and could do everything The Best.

After a short while, though, Boethiah got sick and fucking tired of the Aldmer and Trinimac spreading lies about Lorkhan (and you’ve got to lie pretty fucking hard to annoying the devil-god that rules over deceit, murder, treason, and lying in general), and got up off of her throne and fucking ate Trinimac. She then told a bunch of the Aldmer that they were fucking full of it, and that they should base their civilizations off of Daedric principles, which is where Dark Elves come from: they are descended from the Chimer, or the original Aldmer who were persuaded by Boethiah to tell the Aldmeri and their Mary Sue god to eat a dick and went off to make their own civilization. This is the Dark Elf version of events. The Orcs also tell this particular version of the story.

It’s worth noting, since we’re in the neighborhood and talking about it, that in the Orcs creation myths, Boethiah either created them from Trinimac’s faithful after murdering/eating Trinimac as punishment, or that Boethiah turned Trinimac into Malacath and rewarded some people that she really liked by making them Orcs, again depending on who you ask.

This is the source of the whole “Malacath isn’t a real Daedric Prince” thing, though as many have pointed out in-universe and out of it, Malacath is the Prince of Outcasts, so he’d logically be outcast by his own kind (i.e. the other Daedric Princes, who don’t consider him legit), and that he is outcast in such a manner thus does not actually prove anything. It also means that it’s possible that Boethiah and Malacath are the same entity, and it’s just fucking with everybody, because that’s what Boethiah does when she’s not fucking with mortals and trying to convince Shezzarines to kill people. Well, more people than they usually do.

Again, try to keep in mind that Boethiah is one of the Good Daedra, at least by Dunmer reckoning. I’m not sure if that says a lot about how bad Dagon, Molag Bal, and the rest of the House of Troubles is, or if it says more about traditional Dunmer society. Probably both. Hell, this is TES. Definately both.

Anyway, some tellings also say that Trinimac was legit (guess who tells that particular story), and that Boethiah corrupted or possessed him to decieve and lead astray the Aldmer into a corrupted and lesser version of elves (again, not too hard to guess who this theory comes from).

Or maybe Trinimac was always Boethiah, and the whole shebang was just a big plot to trick some of the Aldmer into worshiping her. That particular one fits her MO better, so if pressed to side on that argument, I’d probably go with that telling of it. And that she might also be Malacath, maybe.

Then again, the Orcs and the Dark Elves tell the exact same story, and that’s the TES lore equivalent of a unicorn letting out a glitter fart that then coalesces into another unicorn, so there’s that as well in favor of their version of events. Anyway, that’s where the Dark Elves come from. But we’re off point here. But we went off point to get closer to the point behind this entire post, so at least we’re making progress. It’s just going sideways and a little bit backwards and inside-out to get there.

That’s totally not an analogy for TES lore in general. This is highbrow stuff you guys, geeze.

Now, here’s where we get to the whole point of this convoluted lecture that I’m sure has compelled a fair number of you to backpage to something else. Who the hell are the Thalmor, and what are they doing?

The Thalmor are believers in the oldest and most purely conservative branch of High Elf mythology. They believe Mundus is a prison and a hell hole, that Lorkhan created it because he was an evil fucker, and that’s what evil fuckers do, and that they must escape this prison/living hell by any means necessary.

They want to accomplish this by returning Mundus to it’s previous state of existence, like it was god-knows-how-many paragraphs up when I was describing The Beginning Place; one big snarl of potential and power with everyone just sort of drifting around being all glowy and transcendental. And by everyone I mean the High Elves, because they believe that they’re the only ones who are actually directly descended from the Aedra, which may possibly be true, or maybe not.

The astute among you may point out “but that means they basically want to destroy the entire world and kill everyone that isn’t a High Elf.”

Yes, astute reader. Yes it does. The Thalmor are not a new ideology. They inherited their views from a long line of successors, including the original Aldmer (who were dicks) and the Ayleids (who emulated the Aldmer and were even bigger dicks, to the point that a Shezzarine by the name of Pelenial Whitestrake had to step up and punch the motherufuck out of them, and then another one known as the Hero of Kvatch had to finish the job, because they were evil sorcerous fuckers, and evil sorcerous fuckers always die hard and come back at least once. It’s in the union rules, not that I should have to elaborate on that in this forum).

Now, you may ask, does this mean all Altimer are evil? No, it does not. The situation is more complex than that. Because this is the Elder Scrolls. The situation is always more complex than what you thought it was. You see, only some of the Altimer view Lorkhan as evil and Mundus as a cage. There are other views out there as well.

One of them was mentioned by Fiat; dracochrysalis. Many High Elves believe that they must emulate their chief deity, Akatosh. Akatosh was once an Et’Ada, but then became a dragon. They believe that since they too were once Et’Ada, they must also become dragons, as it is the ‘correct’ and ‘divine’ path for their kind to walk. Their god did it, and they must emulate him. They don’t particularly like or dislike Lorkhan, though would probably cast him as “evil” if pressed, if only out of cultural tradition.

Likewise, there are other schisms as well. According to Orc and Chimer creation myths (I told you it would become relevant; now I don’t have to explain all of that shit, because I already did), Boethiah got pissed about the lies that were being spread around about Lorkhan, particularly those being spread by Trinimac and his followers. So (according to this specific version of Altimer lore that is based off of/agrees with Chimer and Orsimish lore) Boethiah killed Trinimac, took his form, and then began to spread “the truth of Lorkhan’s test” among the Aldmer, and convinced many followers of Boethiah and Trinimac to abandon Aldmeri society altogether for something else. This ‘truth’ was known as the Tri-Angled Truth.

The Truth of Lorkhan’s test is the claim that Lorkhan instigated the creation of Mundus with the intent of creating a giant test that would allow mortals to equal or surpass the gods that created them, and that this was in fact the entire purpose behind Mundus and everything that was in it. Lorkhan is not evil, according to this particular telling. Rather, his intent was to create an environment that would allow mortals and the descendents of the Et’Ada alike to climb to an even greater state of existence than what was present at The Beginning Place. He did not want to cripple the Et’Ada and their creations and descendents. He wanted them to surpass themselves, and claim something even greater.

This theory (which again, is coming from the Altmer, the High Elves) states that the Beginning Place, while great, was itself a prison and a cage that could not be escaped, and that they owe everything to Lorkhan, the god and creator of Men, the being bold enough and clever enough to find a way to break everyone out of it and even forge a path to climb yet higher.

This Lorkhanic process was championed not only by Boethiah (which is odd and kind of bad, as she’s prone to lying, like, a lot), but also by Saint Veloth and even Vivec, who all claimed that it was equally true. Seeing how Veloth was able to see through a cosmic amount of lies and deception to identify the Good Daedra and the Bad Daedra from each other, won the aid of the Good Daedra like Azura, while also teaching his people (the Chimer, who became the Dunmer) how to carefully negotiate and avoid the ire of the Bade Daedra like Boethiah and Mehrunes Dagon, while Vivec was Vivec and also wrote the Sermons of Vivec, it’s kind of hard to believe that this one could be a lie. Or maybe she told the truth and thought it would be funny to double bluff everyone into believing that the greatest truth was in fact a lie solely because she was the one who said it. It’s Boethiah, who fucking knows.

Anyway, this process, the Lorkhanic process of ascension, the adherence to the Tri-Angled Truth, is diametrically, intrinsically opposed to the philosophies and ideologies of the Ayleids that the Thalmor adopted. It also happens to have a name.

It is called the Psijic Endeavor.

Told you this was going places.

Now maybe some of you will understand why I wanted one of these DLCs to allow you to visit Artaeum and join the Psijics. It’s because fuck the Thalmor.

And the Psijics are cool. That too.

And before any of you lorefags of equivalent mass and density say it, yes, officially, there is no concrete connection between the Endeavor and the Order. But come the fuck on. You know they’re connected. We just don’t have a link that proves it. Not yet. Hell, the Monomyth, which was written by freaking Kirkbride and listed as being authored by “Temple Zero Society,” flat out starts with a quote that states “In Mundus, conflict and disparity are what bring change, and change is the most sacred of the Eleven Forces. Change is the force without focus or origin. - Oegnithr, Tahertae, Order of PSJJJJ.”

Bold emphasis mine, because it’s not like Change is Padomay or what Lorkhan did to create Mundus or anything. That’s totally not related to the Psijic Endeavor at all. High Elves calling what amounts to Lorkhan himself “most sacred” is totally normal. And it's not like the Psijics are completely opposed to the Thalmor or anything. Not even a little.


Also, Padomay is Sithis, probably. Just in case you were wondering what the hell the Dark Brotherhood was on about, and what Sithis actually was.

Yes. One half of YHWH is a bloodthirsty psychopathic eldritch abomination. Or maybe not, and the Dark Brotherhood have completely, utterly misinterpreted what he wants, and you've basically got a situation where Jesus is being worshiped by a bunch of bloodthirsty psychopaths that keep creatively reinterpreting things into being bloodthirsty and psychopathic, and Jesus keeps facepalming and trying again, but the Dark Brotherhood really wants everything to be all murderey and stabby. Or maybe Sithis is Padomay's ghost, his dying dreams, or his whispering corpse.

Or maybe Sithis is the shadow Padomay casts from his position standing outside the universe (because he can't come in to the place he created as part of the way he created it, according to some sources), and he/it is watching on in horror as a giant evil cult worships that shadow, in the process imprinting their desires upon it and thus molding and shaping that shadow into a semblance of what they mistakenly believed it to be in the first place, thereby allowing the Dark Brotherhood to self-actualize and give birth to their own dark god, one murder at a time, and all Padomay can do is belatedly beat his hands against a cosmic glass wall and scream silently at the creation of both a new and terrible dark god near-equal to his own stature but free to act in the universe, as well and what may very well be the longest run-on sentence I've ever seen.

Or maybe he isn't Padomay. Like, it could be a Daedric Prince shitting around out of boredom (my bet would be Hermaeus Mora, because his sister is Mephala, and she's behind the creation of the Morag Tong, so there would be a lot of logical and symbolic synergy to the idea that her brother is behind the Tong's archrivals). Or maybe it's an actual Eldritch Abomination that nobody knows about, because it has wiped all records of it's existence from the universe, and it motherfucking kills anybody who starts to get close to uncovering what it really is, possibly in person and possibly also by using this really handy murder cult that it sponsors for funsies.

Or maybe all of the above is correct. As in all of it, all at once.

Welcome to TES lore. Where the facts don't matter and everybody is probably insane, potentially nonexistent, or possibly both.

I’m talking to planets that are also gods, the trees are the most technologically advanced species on the planet (maybe), and the answer to absolutely everything is always either yes, both, or maybe. Because Vivec’s two-tone color split between wasn’t symbolic or anything.

I'm not breaking down the fourth wall. I'm floating five feet above it and painting it purple, and the password is Almsivi.



Traditional fantasy can eat a dick.

 

Holy fuck. I don't believe I read all that.

As someone's who's a totally casual faggot about TES that was all kinds of awesome Raine. God planets. Awesome. Fuck.

 

Ah, a Raine Rant. It's been a while since I've enjoyed one of them.

 

I might've said this before, but while I find aspects of TES lore interesting, but there's too much in there that just make me think it's just being complicated for the sake of it for me to truly like it. In particular I don't like its over-reliance on gods.

 

I'd be inclined to agree with you, except on planet Earth there's only one species, and how many creation myths have there been in recorded history? Dozens, at least. And how complicated and convoluted are they?

Tamriel and the Mundus have god knows how many species. I wouldn't say it's convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, but convoluted because that's what this shit is like.

 

Also, the Gods (and not-gods, and god-mortal-avatars) actually do shit, and intervene pretty regularly. Also, magic is a thing they have. TES is a good example of how fuckign complicated history would be if there was magic and actual gods running around DOING STUFF.

 

Re: Sithis and the Dark Brotherhood - tis bullshit. Anu is (light, stasis, order, immovable object), Padomay is (darkness, change, chaos, irresistible force), and Nirn is what was created when the two met. Because people get sick of the high concept of the Monomyth, they also have stage names for when people decide to describe the creation of the entire universe and all forces in it as an incestuous love triangle, cough Annotated Anuad cough. Anu is Anuiel. Nirn is Nir. And Padomay is Sithis.

Do you really think that the personification of the tied-for-most powerful force in the entire universe is going to be whispering through some dead chick he apparently married so a bunch of stooges can murder people for money?

Who comes to mind when you think of murder and lies?

To quote from Vivec and Mephala:

The Morag Tong are subtle, assassination/courtship/tact. The tact of plausible deniability. The Dark Brotherhood are violent, genocide/orgy/poetic truth. The poetic truth that Sithis is the Dread Father of the Brotherhood.

 

Yeah, I get that. That doesn't make me dislike the idea any less. I just don't like creationism and divine intervention, and unfortunately TES is practically built on those. Actually, fantasy in general seems to really like the idea of a god or gods actually creating worlds and people. I don't like that there are gods and angels and whatnot in Lord of the Rings either, but that does a better job of keeping it behind the scenes. My preferred fantasy series are the ones where religion is kept in the background and left as vague, unproven myths, or it's subverted in some way.

 

I broke the Dark Brotherhood with my last char just to do it. It was fun. Might do it again with my current character.

Fuck Sithis, anyways.

 

Are you seriously saying that the deities of the Elder Scrolls offends your atheistic sensibilities?

 

So...ones that ignore the fundamental nature of people, especially people living in pseudo-medieval eras with strange magical happenings that they cannot hope to explain? Fair enough, but I don't see why it'd be a surprise that a lot of fantasy has those tropes.