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
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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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
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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.
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