you got fucking kings, Torygg, Helseth, living gods of the Tribunal.... under an "Emperor"? who puts some garrisons around but does.... what exactly?
theres an "East Empire Trading Company"? whats that do?
it kinda seems like a holy roman empire, kinda seems like a regular roman empire. they've got knights, dukes, but a Legion...
yes i know the answer is technically "these jackoffs just made it up as they went" and don't care a lick about political theory but this is exactly the kind of excercise that makes fun speculative historiography
In Morrowind they're en explicitly expansionist empire teetering on the edge of their decline. Tiber Septim's force of personality and military strategy got him conquest of everything but Morrowind and Summerset, and activating Numidium got him those. From there it was just the material interests of those who make up the machinery of Imperial government carrying it along, and then the Oblivion Crisis damaged things enough that new political changes were possible. That's when shit started falling apart at the seams. By the time we're in Skyrim the "Tamrielic" empire has been reduced to three provinces, one of which it's about to lose to civil war.
As fictional empires go you could write worse.
(i havent played morrowind so take away my gamer card now) but i thought the empire was relatively healthy in the early installments? whats decline-y about it during morrowind?
The events of Arena have made it so that everyone doubts that the Emperor's heirs are legitimate, and at one point your crackhead handler gets recalled to Cyrodiil to help out with the situation. There's grumblings of secession/rebellion as always, but nothing ever happens. Mostly though it's got the vibe of an empire that's run out of territory to conquer. The colossal failure of the efforts to invade Akavir set back the Empire a ways, and by the time Uriel and his heirs are dead in Oblivion it's just the final nail in the coffin. Later on the Thalmor rises up and absorbs Valenwood and Elsweyr, Hammerfell breaks away, Morrowind just basically stops answering the phone after the Red Year, and the Black Marsh expanded into Morrowind as vengeance for centuries of being enslaved.
Uncritical (ok somewhat critical) support for our An-Xileel comrades in their fight against the dunmeri oppressors
:grumpy-lizard: :rat-salute-2:
The empire doesn't exist yet before and during the events of Morrowind. At the time the game takes place, the Tiber Wars are ongoing, as Tiber Septim is still unifying the human realms before trying to face Black Marsh, Elsweyr, or the Mer kingdoms.
:agony-shivering: damn you got me real confused but UESP got my back
Tiber septim 2E828-->3E38
Morrowind is in 3e 427.
im pretty sure Tiber Septim is in like... Redguard? and maybe Daggerfall? but Morrowind he's won and theres an imperial garrison on Vvardenfell
:edgeworth-shrug: i think like we could figure this out in quite less than 8 hrs
I think the more important question is how come there are no rocket powered horseless carts driven by mages using fire magic.
The Elder Scrolls canonically had space travel (mananaughts) exploring the aetherium. Elder Scrolls isn't a story about how people work through class struggle to achieve higher levels of technology or magic, it's a story about decay and things getting worse and worse.
It's funny how the games on their own end on somewhat upbeat notes but the entire series can be seen as a Dark Fantasy story about imperial decline and cosmic horror.
Mage's GUILD. we know how actual guilds stifled economic progress, its not hard to stretch that to magick ones.
also most the industrial applications of magicka make no sense for a feudal economy. literally no purpose for a really fast carriage except the army & civil service.
commerce? you mean the thing those flea-ridden catfolk do?
In Oblivion, necromancy was still legal in Cyrodiil. However, it was also somehow legal for the Mages Guild to uh, root out and kill necromancers in the countryside because uhh, I don't know because nobody would find out or care either way I guess
heres a lil secret. Necromancy was only illegal becuase undead laborers completely bankrupted liege lords who had to feed & maintain their laborers. so they got with the religious freaks and violently suppressed them
:stuff: i do not have a real opinion on undead labor idk if theyre sentient but if they are :john-brown:
i do not have a real opinion on undead labor idk if theyre sentient but if they are
Don't even get me started with how soul gems and enchanting works in the TES franchise. You're literally using people/animals trapped forever in a rock to power your magical shirt that makes you slightly better at smithing.
Not necessarily. Regular soul gems can only capture a normal "soul" which is simply just the vague life force transferred into a shiny rock while the actual consciousness of the (non-sapient) creature passes through Mundus, like Arkay intended. The reason why Black Soul Gems are so taboo is that they trap the whole soul (consciousness and personality and all), including/especially from sapients, and exchange them with a group of eldritch beings in exchange for a more potent enchantment.
how does the soul cairn keep people... forever? but enchantments reduce on use? how do dwemer animonculi still run on a 3 milennia old skeever soul?
"As the books and other artifacts in Dwemer ruins rarely show signs of wear or age, I believe that the Dwemer knew of a preservative effect, perhaps a device still active which denies or controls the Earth Bones governing time and decay." (Baladas Demnevanni), and also "In their denial of both phenomena and noumena, the Dwemer found comfort in the creation of Animunculi, which in their operation, combined two incompatible principles, thus denying both." (ibid)
I reject the notion that centurions are powered by standard enchantment, and any souls present in the loot tables have been placed there by impish Daedra
how do dwemer animonculi run on a 3 millennia old skeever soul.
The soul gem doesn't directly power the automaton itself at least according to this journal in Skyrim.
To further Dolores' point, it's because that could jeopardize the guild's monopoly on teleportation magic. 👀
(Also in practice, that would probably turn out like the mage with the jump spell & no featherfall.)
That's a good question, actually. Usually the answer to "why is this dumb and incoherent" with Elder Scrolls stuff is "the games are executive-meddled into bland mush and while the lore is better, that doesn't make it in except as in-game books," but here I think the lore is also pretty lacking.
It's basically just mimicking the aesthetics of historical empires without really understanding what's happening or why people don't like those things, it's a deeply liberal rendition of imperial systems as just "sort of like a big state that's bringing people and places together with trade and stuff and the only opposition is from established power figures who want more for themselves" which is almost entirely backwards from the reality that an empire is a system of extraction and hegemony that favors some regions over others, while local power figures are comprador fucks reaping the benefits of this arrangement themselves while the populace suffers. And where the Empire is shown as "also bad" it's usually something watered down or downright sheepish, because the games try to avoid anything too harsh in general and stick to "fantasy bad" instead of "actual bad." ESO does that last bit much better than any mainline game, but is still overall pretty toothless.
roman empire looking organization that is unaccountably the abolitionist faction in morrowind :scared:
although im way more generous in that i think the toothlessness of critique makes it a bit more like Chinese dynasties (complete with multiple iterations). like noone denies the Ming were an empire but they weren't terribly extractionist because there wasn't much periphery to exploit. besides the Orismer and Reachmen i cant think of imperial periphery, though argonia was peripheral to morrowind and morrowind to skyrim in skyrim's timeframe.
its very strange that the setting has 1 political center so any kind of compelling political threat has to come from within it? and undermine the concept of a united state. actual China had the steppe peoples to destabilize them, and was like a fourth, at best, of the Old World
roman empire looking organization that is unaccountably the abolitionist faction in morrowind
It does have the tenuous justification in that the Empire's civic cult was literally founded by an abolitionist revolutionary movement, although in practical terms one would imagine that would have been weakened into tolerating first serfdom, then indentured servitude, and then full-fledged chattel slavery again. Though thinking about it, I believe it's gone back and forth on the issue over the millennia so it's probably more just the abolitionist bloc being on top at that time.
although im way more generous in that i think the toothlessness of critique makes it a bit more like Chinese dynasties (complete with multiple iterations). like noone denies the Ming were an empire but they weren’t terribly extractionist because there wasn’t much periphery to exploit.
That sort of fits the closest, doesn't it? A distant central bureaucratic hierarchy on top of otherwise autarkic regions that have only a tenuous connection to it apart from taxes and the provision of soldiers. That's more or less how I've seen Chinese marxists describe the state of things under the various imperial Chinese dynasties, at least (also literally where I first saw the word "autarky" ever was in a description of historical China from Chinese marxists).
besides the Orismer and Reachmen i cant think of imperial periphery
Black Marsh, Elweyr, and Valenwood fit the bill the best, I think. I get a definite sense that they're being subjugated and extracted from, although Valenwood is arguable there.
its very strange that the setting has 1 political center
I mean there are regional capitals and the regions themselves are pretty autarkic and more or less autonomous. The Imperial City is important for geographical and symbolic reasons, but in practical terms is distant and unimportant.
yeah the lore is consistent on the Empire being antislavery but its a mismatch when that's paired with real-world roman iconography-aesthetics. and empire is not antithetical to chattel slavery, they can figure out other ways of exploitation
im not certain i can endorse your peripheries though, like argonians and khajiit got enslaved by dunmer but that was illegal so its difficult to fold into the continent-wide economy? not that the word of law renders reality impotent but we dont know the extent of slavery in other province at that time. be very easy for Elswyr or Black Marsh to be perifery if imperials/other empire aligned people were running plantations there but we dont know if they actually were
skyrim is a very poor reflection of a medieval economy, because it was made by people with no understanding of non-capitalist systems
but housecarls being non-compensated is, in a vacuum, completely real. Housecarls were not paid. you have your 'Thegns' being entrusted with some piece of land of the realm, and they've got a group of warriors in their household who benefit solely from war-loot and the gifts from the thegns and jarls. again, its not capitalist so feeding these guys and letting them keep what they loot, plus an odd gold bracelet and sword is all it took.
get a food/sleep mod with companion functionality for all the immersion required in skyrim's housecarl system. they autonomously take weapons they want so it counts
ESO does that last bit much better than any mainline game, but is still overall pretty toothless.
In Elder Scrolls Online, the Aldmeri Dominion's outright genocide attempt in Shadowfen where (CW: genocide details)
spoiler
they poison and attempt to mass murder an entire generation of Argonians before they hatch and attempt to psychically poison the Hist network to obliterate the entire species ever after
made me go :sus-soviet: at each and every Dominion apologist in the game that tended to have arguments like "well Argonians also fought back too sometimes all sides equally right and wrong" and/or "Kate Beckingsale is :awooga: so that's the best faction."
Any time altmer show up in a storyline there's like a 90% chance the story is going to be "the dipshit altmer are extremely racist and stupid and are probably trying to cause the apocalypse for explicitly the reasons that they're both very racist and also just the biggest dipshits in existence."
The Thalmor, at best, tend to be Florida brained. They violently despise outsiders and are nostalgic for a mythical past that may have never quite happened the way they imagined it, and will kill and destroy whatever they please to try to crawl back to it.
The topic of "Thalmor" is weird because they were basically just a racist country club which was inexplicably elevated by Ayrenn into being Summerset's FBI despite their storylines all being "so yeah looks like those dumbfuck Thalmor agents are conspiring to commit treason again lmao" and their organizational mission openly being at odds with Ayrenn's policies, then a few hundred years later another, different organization was created to be a colonial puppet government in Valenwood, and then finally around the Oblivion Crisis a virulently racist militia started calling themselves the Thalmor for nationalist reasons.
I guess it would like fascists in Europe naming themselves after Sparta, the Praetorian Guard, the Templars, or whatever.
I guess it would like fascists in Europe naming themselves after Sparta, the Praetorian Guard, the Templars, or whatever.
That's how I see it, too.
Way I see it, considering how much underhanded bullshit Ayrenn did to become the Le Epic Chosen One Of Epic Destiny backed by intelligence/blackops manipulation (the protagonist included), she's basically :hillary-apartment: complete with the military adventurism and girlboss fandom. Any post-Ayenn legacy of the Thalmor is just the aftermath of her colonialist policies. :die-motherfucker:
Probably misremembering here but, aren't Thalmor elevated by Ayrenn during ESO because they're loyal to her instead of her brother?
They end up filling the spaces they do because most of the spy masters and shit defected to Veiled Heritance and the Aldmeri military is busy fighting a war so she needed a pool of loyalists to help end an ongoing coup.
don't elves live for ages maybe they are literally the same people hence keeping the name
It appears to be class-based, big name mer wizards seem to live forever, nobles age but live for as long as the plot requires, and commoners just keel over before their 200th birthday
So any overlap would be minimal
doesn’t the empire barely function anyway?
So it is the Holy Roman Empire
this is precisely the contradiction. how we got an "empire" that seems to have a negligible effect on its subjects that is also omnipresent in the setting?
imagine if jesus was a warlord who conquered europe and called himself the roman emperor. so that even after he was long gone and the empire collapsed there was still a lot of inertia in favor of his empire
its basically that.
so the empire is the caliphate :thonk:
wait unironically this makes the most sense. the emperors are religious authorities. and even deified (this is not okay in islam fyi), but most the continent shares this religion, theres a feudal state attached... Imperial City is Baghdad, the Septims are the Umayyad and the Medes are Abbassid or Fatimid :galaxy-brain:
Also, he acquired a giant walking brass golem whose skin is made from a dead race that can "NOPE" things into non-existence. Why the tribunal agreed to give it up, I dunno.
Skyrim only joined the Septims, the other iterations it was conquered.
also this is a humans-indigenous-to-tamriel thread so dont bring that Septim propaganda in here abt atmorans bringing in all the men.
Drewmora recently did a lore video on Tiber Septim/Talos where he pointed out that the whole "stormcloak"/Thu'um mythos surrounding him may have been a calculated lie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGdNhEVU13EBroseph is going to get hit with the "Aldmeri Dominion State Media" flair on YouTube.
From what I can tell most chuds that know about Elder Scrolls that I know about are either "Ulfric did nothing wrong Skyrim is for the Nords" :frothingfash: or they're "High Elf Master Race" fascists, or both, and don't see the contradiction ideologically.
In fact of those chuds the only ones that seem to dislike Altmer are ones that don't like how they're "ugly" until they're modded to be anime waifus. :pathetic:
the roman empire and the British empire allowed kings to remain as local administrators
Don't hundreds of years pass between games? I think that the Empire was a lot more coherent in the era of Morrowind, where the local authorities are allowed to exist but the Imperial garrison are clearly the real people in charge, but by the time of Skyrim they're losing wars and fighting amongst themselves and it may be a much more loose formation. Perhaps it started out as the Roman Empire but ended up as the HRE after many generations of the imperial bureaucracy stagnating and local warlords claiming more power and privileges for themselves.
Don’t hundreds of years pass between games?
ES1, ES2, ES3, and ES4 all take place easily within a single human lifetime.
Doesn't the Septim bloodline have some magical powers to keep Daedra at bay? Nobles and such would want a figurehead around for practical as well as symbolic reasons. This ended in Oblivion, leading to their decline.
Come Skyrim and Imperial nobles will hire Dark Brotherhood to assassinate an Emperor they dislike.
They were in decline during the second era due to Molag Bal invading Nirn, but that was before Tiber I believe. They were prominent before the second era due to them obliterating the elves of Cyroriil and establishing the Empire in the first place.
There were technically a couple of empires. You had the Allessian empire, the Reman empire, the Septim empire, the Mede empire, and a handful of interegnum empires in between each major dynasty/era.
But ya, the dragonfire covenant is a big reason you can point to for why the empire was relatively stable. Having the head god of your pantheon literally backing your government and in the process keeping the devils out, is damned good for legitimacy.
The Septims have the power to change the very environment around Cyrodil so that it was simultaneously always boring English countryside and not the cool Italian/jungle mix the of lore claimed. This is 100% cannon
Tiber Septim channeled all the power of the Numidium to make Cyrodiil's countryside easier to render on the Xbox 360.
Tiber Septum used his super powers to make sure Bethesda didn’t have a concept designer for oblivion
That's the neat part. It doesn't work :think-mark:
Just about every game takes place during times when the Empire of Tamriel is fractured, threatened, divided, or outright collapsed.
but how do we explain it having so much political authority, multiple times, without some kind of solid, explicable (fanon) economic basis and dynamic political leadership :think-about-it:
Because the magical powers of Akatosh, the eugenics-flavored yet still fractured over and over again imperial line descended from Alessia, and CHIM. :morshupls:
Yeah even as a demigod or whatever I imagine it would be hard to argue against a quirked up Tiber Septim busting it down Akatosh style while he's goated with the CHIM
Because the gods themselves demand that there be an emperor to maintain Tamriel and the Daedra and will create dragon breaks (periods of non cannon where the timeline splits) to make this happen. The White-Gold tower literally changed reality to make this happen and the universe is prone to creating empires that unify stuff enough to make games happen but not enough to be functioning.
At the same time we KNOW that at some point in the future of at least one time line the elves take over and begin enslaving all humans or never lost control because cyborg war crimes man Pelinal Whitestrake goes back in time to prevent that. Accidentally genociding huge swaths of people along the way (sometimes in ways that become a major imperial holiday, sometimes in ways that force people to cover it up)
Elder Scrolls lore is dumb and I am cursed with a lot of it.
i think i like gesturing more along lines of Holy Roman than normal roman, despite the aesthetic.
firstly its high fantasy so feudalism is the economic system. there are takes that characterize late Roman economics as feudal, but i personally am a Peter Brown follower so the romans weren't really doing feudalism till the 6-7th century. and even then weren't quite doing it (this will upset the romanogenesis crowd)
and while that fills in some blanks im still quite confused on the divisions of powers, legal system, political organization... most everything really
I feel like Elder Scrolls Lore is what you'd get if Tolkien got a massive head injury just prior to writing LOTR and had to explain all of his world and details in a single day to the jedi council from the prequels, they wrote it down and then a bunch of hippies passed it down as oral history for 12 years.
You forgot the part where you make Tolkien a libertarian and feed him A LOT of ketamine.
A good portion of the lore is just Terence McKenna‘s theories and ideas (fractal based time periods, novelty theory, the Dwemer, and argonians are direct references) while the other huge chunk is from Kirkbride‘a theology degree and using weird unique ideas from a lot of religions that he thought would be fun ( the cosmology is based on Roman beliefs for example, CHIM is based on I beleive Jainism, etc)
Thank you so much for introducing me to a new fun crank to research.
I am now being guided by the zero time wave to the point of infinite novelty in which the monad will manifest beyond it's physis reflection.
May you inevitably end up meming that we are in a parallels time phase post 2012 like so many people who read him do lol
I dunno, the Empire feels very generic tbh. When you look at them, it's basically heavily inspired in Rome (CRINGE) maybe to appeal to "Retvrn to Tradition" white ass g*mers, they added the East Empire Trading Company because it had to be somewhat different than Rome, so in the end it's just another cringe element added into the mix: the british.
It could be worse still, but it feels very lazy. They just repurposed Rome into this fantasy world that has a lot of other vague elements.
It was cooler before oblivion, aka before :todd: watched LotR and retconned Cyrodil from a SE asian-ish jungle to incredibly generic western high fantasy through omg CHIM :so-true:, with a lot of Imperial culture changing along with it. There are still hints of that more interesting version like with the Blades though
It was like if Rome and China were fused into a single political formation, burned to the ground in the name of generic XBox 360 grass and forgettable western european medieval aesthetics.
They brought back some of the Morrowind-esque characteristics of the Empire for Skyrim but it just felt so forced and out of place seeing non-Nords in armor without pants or sleeves patrolling an icy area in Haafingar like it was nothing. I actually would have preferred the somewhat unique Legion armor from Oblivion instead.
Pretty minor as far as instances of Bethesda's bad post-Morrowind worldbuilding go but still noticeable.
it is lazy, but they ain't even clever enough that they're consciously appealing to romeaboos (more than enough discordant elements to throw them off)
What if Rome, but the equivalent of the praetorian guard used katanas?
That was actually pretty interesting, tbf. To the point where 15 yo me actually bothered to look up the lore as to why this contrast existed in the first place.
(Only to go down the rabbit hole over the Akaviri and associated parts of lore)
