I'm done messing around with sidequests and I want to do the two main campaing questlines, but neither side seems like it has any compelling reason to join it.
Playing as a Dunmer because that's the only race I ever play in ES.
The outwardly stated goal of the Aldmeri Dominion is the extermination of all non-elves, and the only political entity on Tamriel capable of stopping them is the Empire. The Empire has problems, but they aren't trying to do a continent wide Holocaust and Skyrim needs to stand with them
This was always my take too. The Aldmeri are actively trying to destroy reality itself and the Stormcloaks are a bunch of racist chuds trying to Make Skyrim Great Again by dividing the only real opposition to aforementioned omnicide over a pointless civil war. The fact that Ulfric was tortured by the Aldmeri, wound up to be Big Mad :tm: at the empire, and then let loose by the Aldmeri pretty much proves that the high elves wanted him to do it in the first place.
The empire is shit, but a somewhat egalitarian empire is significantly better than apocalypse.
Which is why the Empire completely capitulated and allowed its citizens to be dragged off to camps for their beliefs?
And Hammerfell literally won a war against them without Imperial support lol
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Although the Empire won the last major battles of the war, it was exhausted and knew it was time to fold
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The Dominion was also heavily depleted (the Empire destroyed its 3 main armies in the last battle) and thus Hammerfell was able to fight off the elves (i think the in game history book remarks that the leader of the Legion in Hammerfell discharged most Redguard legionarries ahead of the final campaign so they could defend their homeland, so Hammerfell still had a decently large and equipped army to oppose the elves
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this is slander! the Aldmeri dominion only wishes to guide and correct the wayward races of man & mer who have strayed from the proper worship of the gods!
My understanding was that they didn't so much want to exterminate men as unmake reality because they believe the world is a prison keeping us from being reunited with our divine families, enslaving us to the rules of a universe we never chose.
Now granted when that happens, men will simply evaporate away because they aren't descended from the aforementioned gods, but a lack of divine heritage on your part does not constitute a crisis on mine.
The Skyrim Civil War is accidentally a very astute depiction of the struggle between Republican national bourgeoise and their openly racist, nationalist followers who tend to be poor, and the Democrat international bourgeoise, who are shiny and uphold the law and are literally Nazi puppets
Anyway the Civil War sucks, you're not missing anything if you skip it. It's just a bunch of battles that you can't lose, each quest line is a carbon copy of the other and the story doesn't really develop in an interesting way
You can just ignore it, you'll get a quest where you have to get them agree to a ceasefire, but apart from that, it doesn't affect the main quest.
do you want the literal empire, or the cartoonishly racist nationalists?
I'm a dumbass who knows very little about Chinese/Taiwanese politics, could I ask in what way the Kuomintang are racist? It's not an accusation I've heard before, and google doesn't bring up much other than specific accusations against Han Kuo-yu
I'm a dumbass too, not an expert, but they did have fascists in their ranks among other things
They both have their cons, but I always play as a dark elf, so I'd never join the Stormcloaks who's like all racists. Also cause I don't like betraying the Jarl of Whiterun. Regardless both the quests are very similar no matter who you choose.
The Stormcloaks are paradoxically meritocratic racist xenophobes (ie if you are argonian or dunmer or w/e but help them theyre cool with you, ie like the Legion in New Vegas if you're female).
However I've seen a very intriguing argument in their favor that the Empire is clearly moribund and rotten and should be allowed to die so a more vigorous young force take its place and drive history forward. A big strength of this argument is that an Aspect of Tiber Septim himself appears as a minor curiosity in Morrowwind and makes a similar argument.
Wulf: "The Emperor is getting old. Don't know how much longer he'll hang on. So is the whole Empire, for that matter. Getting old, that is. The Emperor and the legions have held the Empire together for hundreds of years. It's been a good thing, by and large. But maybe it's time for a change. Time for something young and new. What? No idea. Because I'm old. Old dog doesn't get new ideas. But maybe young folks like you should try some new ideas. I don't know. Could be messy. But change is never pretty."
meritocratic
citation needed. Ulfric stormcloak is a fucking failson. Gets captured in the first 5 minutes, failed his stupid Markarth adventure, would've been captured in Solitude if that guard did their job, allows the bloody East Empire company to continue their use of Windhelm's port.... I could go on
I'm basing it on the player character's experience. You can rise very high with the Stormcloaks no matter your background if you single-handedly help them win the war, which implies a level of meritocracy.
They also IIRC promote their officers from the enlisted ranks
Like fuck's sake they're a feudal society so "meritocratic" is always in a limited sense when used in this context.
the player's experience is a complete aberration & only portrayed that way cause bethezda had no stomach for actually exploring an unjust society. there's not a single non-nord in the entire stormcloak army sans the player. an argonian or khajiit wouldn't even be let inside Windhelm to join up. In FNV your female legion aligned courier was locked out of the arena & disrespected all the time, at least.
It's true that these sorts of stories inherently suffer from the medium of video games, where the player has to be "free" to explore every available path
it's foolish design too, everyone thinks vampire the masquerade is richer for having different available things depending on vampire races
Generally speaking I find the Imperial march of, well the Imperials to be nothing but a massive money laundering scheme, that of which the Jarls who support the Imperials all state when pressed on the matter, it's about that coin, that trade, the "unified empire" shit. The Thalmor also blow donkey dick for no real reason other than to be evil.
Then you have the stormcloaks, who I basically support to on virtually all issues, except for the racism. That being said you can always assassinate those who throw slurs at you so that's how I compensate for my lack of morals.
I usually avoid the civil war questline but if you stuck a gun to my head I'd choose the Stormcloaks.
-7DeadlyFetishes
The Thalmor aren't just evil for no reason. They're actively pursuing ending reality so they can return to being the Et'Ada, instead of their disgraced mortal forms.
The reason they see themselves are racially superior is because they are descended from gods whereas man are a creation of Lorkhan, both of which live on his created plane of Mundus.
If you're playing Dunmer you have to go anti-Imperial. Those wretches ploughed Morrowind's holy temple island for resources and imposed their religion on its people. Then the moment there was a foreign threat (Oblivion Crisis) they pulled all their troops out and left most of its provinces for dead.
You can say Nords are racist or whatever but there's only one side that actively sends people to camps if they win the war and it isn't the Nationalists. It's the Imperials who gave up and capitulated to fascists because they were scared their homelands might get hurt too much. There's a reason the Empire lost Elsweyr, Hammerfell, Valenwood, Black Marsh and Morrowind. They're feckless Imperials who only care about Cyrodiil and what it can gain from the provinces.
Ignore them both and chase bunnies and harvest gourds with the springgans
The Stormcloaks are very racist but their lands are being occupied by a foreign empire. You can either see them as wounded nationalists who want to disengage their society from an otherwise benevolent empire ruled by people they consider racial inferiors or you can see them as a national liberation struggle.
Nah, the Nords are genocidal settler-colonizers who are trying to create a white ethnostate. Critical support for the Forsworn and, uh, the Falmer.
collecting falmer ears and forsworn hearts for alchemy
:side-eye-2:
Nords are climate refugees who sought a new land and were genocided by the Falmer who were worried by their high birthrates.
Read up on the Night of Tears.
Don't start a race war with a giant warrior race then tbh. The Falmer attacked first and without reason. The Atmorans paid back in kind. They simply lost the genocidal war that they started. Sucks they ended with up a destroyed culture but the same happened to the Ayleids when they fucked around with humans too much as well.
The true destruction came by the hands of the Dwemer in the end anyway.
The Reach doesn't really factor in until years later either. It's not even an Old Hold. That's certainly less acceptable.
They had to leave Atmora because of civil wars and eventually the entire region freezing over. Atmora is no longer habitable.
What were the Atmorans meant to do? It isn't nice what happened but when the enemy has shown they're perfectly accepting of wiping you from the face of the continent (that you can't leave) then what are your options? They started a war with the goal of genocide.
They absolutely were expansionist later on but the Saarthal incident is not one of those occasions.
Why did they have to kill every last man, woman and child to get the Eye of Magnus? How strange.
If you thought there was an entire civilisation out there that wanted you dead what would you do?
The Redguards killed Bretons and Orcs to claim Hammerfell. It was not uninhabited. Hell, the Redguards themselves have flattened Orsinium several times as well.
The Atmorans were living alongside the Falmer and then the Falmer just killed them all. They didn't reason, they didn't warn, they just slaughtered.
The timeline is literally: settle Saarthal, get killed by elves, come back, kill all the elves. It's as simple as that. How were the Atmorans to know otherwise? It was literally a genocidal power grab by the Falmer who underestimated the Atmorans, just as the Ayleids underestimated the Nedes.
You are literally victim blaming. The idea that the Atmorans provoked the attack is conjecture and only appears in post-Merethic Era Elven accounts with no concrete sources backing it up. It's literally just Elven supremacy propaganda based on nothing but that the dead must have done something to deserve it.
If the Atmorans were motivated by genocide then why was their first settlement a peacefully created one? The attacks only came after the Falmer slaughtered them all bar Ysgramor and his sons. It was instigated by the Falmer.
And you really can't draw real life parallels with Zionism here. For all we know it's entirely possible that the Atmorans were given life on the Throat of the World through Kyne's Breath. Most of the races of Tamriel have some kind of mythological creation and the Atmorans are no different.
I mean there IS a national liberation struggle going on but it's the Forsworn...on the other hand, the literal empire.
on the third hand, supporting the stormcloaks means playing into the hands of the thalmor in weakening the empire
The Empire was founded by a Nord, they're not being colonized
you can see them as a national liberation struggle
if you ignore their treatment of literally everyone who isn't a nord
Both sides suck a lot but I tend to favor the Stormcloaks. I’m much more empathetic to a national liberation of a people that’s being round up and put in concentration camps for their religious beliefs than I am towards an empire that helps perpetuate the concentration camps. The Stormcloaks biggest fault is their racism which honestly in the context of the elder scrolls really isn’t that bad. Its nothing unique to the Stormcloaks; the Imperial citizens in Oblivion were pretty racist towards Khajit and Argonians IIRC, and Dark Elves were gigantic xenophobes in Morrowind as well. Also people in the Elder Scrolls universe are not racist the way humans are racist to other humans for minor differences in skin color or shit like that. They’re racist (idek if you can call it that) towards completely separate biological species. It doesn’t make it much better but IMO we shouldn’t think of Nords being racist towards Dark Elves as the same thing as Anglo Texans being racist towards Hispanic people.
