The basis of the "myth" of the Cyrodilic Empire and its actual material reality has always been that of an enslaved people liberating themselves from thier oppressors. The foundational figure of the first Empire, St. Alessia, represents both the mythic liberation of men (as opposed to elves) as well as the material liberation of the needic peoples from the alyieds. Beyond this, the modern iterations of the Empire is not uncritically praised by the game (far from it), and as far as fantasy is concerned, it has pretty good politics and philosophy, subverting many of the traditional reactionary fantasy tropes on race and the importance of "myth". Yes I am a huge fucking nerd.
Also, the idea of "race" as we understand it in the elder scrolls universe is not just making race theory into a real thing. The "races" of men are all known to be, in universe, as the same race, who share a material and mythical origin as the wandering elnafae and who's existence is defined by its opposition to mer, both materially and mythicly. Mer are defined by thier belief that mortality, existence as we know it, is a mistake to be overcome by returning to thier past divinity. Thus, with the exception of the chimer, who are shown to be reactionary, in different ways, mer are.... Who am I talking to.... Nobody fucking cares.... God I'm so lonely....
To be fair the Redguards aren't from Atmora, they came from Yokuda. So they don't quite share the same history as the Cyrods, Nords, and Bretons.
Hell, they're possibly even from a previous incarnation of reality.
You have to remember that all the continents were once one and that the men we see diverging on atmora, yakuda, and akavir, all began as wandering elnafae before thw breaking of the world.
I mean I guess it’s cool and edgy to hate things that people like without giving any good reason. Appropriating the aesthetics of leftism to score gamer points is also really rad! Keep up the good work alienating people from the community.
I mean the whole Tolkien is racist thing is kind of a red herring. Tolkien was writing from a strictly medievalist perspective with a strong basis in European myth. The orcs=POC thing is fundamentally misunderstanding the novels. Tolkien depicted the sentient creatures in his world as part of a divine chain of being similar to how medieval Europeans viewed the world. The orcs are evil because they were created by Morgoth, they’re essentially demons. There is no “orc race” to be racist against. The fact that they are depicted as “dark” is more due to the Christian symbolism that is so prevalent in Tolkien’s writing. The idea of race as we understand it doesn’t exist in LOTR, just as it didn’t exist during medieval times. The dark skinned men fighting on sauron’s side in the war of the ring are explicitly said to not be inherently evil, just under the influence of sauron’s literal mind control. In fact there is no “race” of men depicted as inherently evil. Remember that every “race” of men is meant to be proto European and the Easterlings and Haradrim, if we’re looking at the actual text, strictly are not analogues for Africans or asians. The kings of Gondor themselves were descended from the numenoreans who were depicted as being superior to other men due to their closeness to the elves, (which are never depicted as “white people”), yet were corrupted by Sauron, turning to evil and having their civilization destroyed. Nevermind the fact that Tolkien himself directly addressed these criticisms of his writing and strongly dismissed any implication that LOTR contained racialist allegory, the writing speaks for itself. So yes Tolkien is racist if you deliberately misunderstand the perspective and intention of his work.
The idea of race as we understand it doesn’t exist in LOTR, just as it didn’t exist during medieval times
Tolkein himself was firmly in a racist society and there's nothing i know of to indicate he acknowledged concepts of race weren't immutable constructs. his contemporaries in history academia would be going off about teutonic races and asiatics---how we think of history in regards to race was constructed post-Tolkien, or at least after he'd written the books.
Beyond this, you can make a convincing argument all that preoccupation with blood & lineage and the reduction of pure pedigree (numenoreans / elves) through miscegenation is clear racial framing.
I think a certain amount of racism was present in the lord of the rings, but far less than the average book at the time. For this reason, I give Tolkien a pass. However, most Tolkien-esque works are less complex and thought out, so anything that could be racism does become racism. For example, the elves, which are in Tolkien's work a very complex people with links to nature and the gods and thier own failures and successes, are just idealized br*tish people in Tokien-esque works. The same is true for every one of his races. Goblins are greedy and have large facial features, but become explicitly anti-semetic in Terf lady's works. Orcs have somewhat sou-east asian traits, mostly because that is the opposite of European beauty standard when Tolkien wrote, but look African in a certain RPG. The movies don't always help, and the fact that we see derivatives from derivatives makes this even worse.
morrowind at least had pretty explicit anti-imperial and anti-racist themes
the empire was really only unambiguously The Good Guys in Oblivion and a handful of times historically, and even then a lot of the in-game lore is like “yeah, like, Talos is cool NOW but you should have seen him when he was three mortals in a trench coat, what absolute bastards”
Its felation of Empire
is it tho? monarchy is part-and-parcel to the setting, depiction =/= fetishization
That's kind of deliberate though. Redguard definitely presents the Empire as imperialist invaders, the philosophical foundation of all three Empires is basically Alessian anti-elf genocide, it was literally built on the murder, death, and betrayal of the people who co-operated to found it, and a lot of it being "Good" is because Imperial aligned people have repeatedly rewritten the fabric of time of elide away any awkward things. Talos himself in Morrowind states it's time for the Empire to die.
That doesn't mean the other factions are good, though. Aldmeri literally want to destroy the world, Bosmeri want to eat people, Dunmeri have based gods but stole and murderered their way to power and are hardcore slavers. Dwemer literally were trying to reformat the hard drives of creation and replace it with them.Nords are the Worst, Bretons make their Forsaken cousins look like angels
Pretty much everyone in the Elder Scrolls is a giant raging douchebag...except the Argonians (and to a lesser extent Kajihit and Orcs) which ARE presented as mostly good in the subtext.
i dont think it does. they're hardly heroes in morrowind or skyrim, and i wouldnt say oblivion plots onto a political analysis very well. and they're the baddies in that Redguard game.
lauds empire and imperialism as overwhelmingly good
I really don't think it does this but I've only played Morrowind and newer.
race science built into the fabric of the universe
All fantasy is fascist, unironically agree.
It's the subtle stuff in Cyrodiil:
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Almost all the city guard (i.e. police who arrest people for the most minor of infractions) and all of the imperial legionnaires are Imperials
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Leyawiin is the city with the most prominent beastfolk population, and has a clear racial problem (especially with the hidden torture chamber). Bravil also has a prominent beastfolk population and is a cesspit.
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There are disposition modifiers for race, though they're not that significant for the player (You're the Hero of Kvatch, so you might be subjected to "one of the good ones" treatment). They do affect NPC conversations though (e.g. the infamous "Breton trash" greeting)
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The only non-Imperial count is a dunmer in cheydinhal. The rest of the nobility point out their disdain for dunmer in rumors. There are also other rumors revealing prejudice against dunmer and orsimer. By the way, Chedydinhal has a prominent Dunmer population and is rather seedy. Dark brotherhood, Orc Skooma gang, corrupt guard. The cities with a particularly strong non-human presence are more fucked up.
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The Blades are incompetent shits who failed to protect Uriel and don't aid you for most of the game. I'm also not sure they're like the CIA. They're a cross between bodyguards and an intelligence body that specifically serves the Dragonborn emperor and not the empire.
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There is a racialized class divide. Beastfolk seem to be disproportionately poorer on the whole. All the highwaymen are khajiit (turning to crime due to bad economic prospects?)
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When guards have their radiant conversations the criminals they talk about are almost exclusively khajiit or argonians (or a wizard of an unspecified race)
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Speaking of criminals, there are almost no Imperial bandits (if there are indeed any). It's always non-imperial races.
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The Arcane university, the heart of Magical learning and administration in Cyrodiil, has almost no beastfolk.
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Factions are relatively diverse, but faction leadership/upper levels are disproportionately staffed by humans (especially Imperials and Bretons) and elves (mostly altmer or maybe a bosmer. Dunmer are unlikely). Exemption might be the fighters' guild, but maybe only because a dunmer is truly running the show, rather than a human (which is usually the case).
I'm sure there's other stuff.
Isn't that the point though? You're not meant to look at those things and go 'ah, good.' Like in Skyrim, Windhelm is a racist shithole. You can just kill most of the racists.
Yeah. My point is that if you look deeper there are definitely systemic issues and such. Dunno where that "race-blind Cyrodiil" thing comes from. Or maybe it's appropriate, since real-life "race blindness" is almost always a farce.
Also I've already thought of a few more examples lol. People being shocked at the Count of Skingrad having an Orc butler. People mocking Orcs for having a social club. People being incredulous that a Bosmer would specialize in Heavy Armor.
In Skyrim there's a famous chef called the Gourmet who keeps his identity a secret because he is an Orc. Most of the people you meet are sure that they must be a Breton.
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Any game that doesn't have you building a communist utopia is garbage and should be thrown out. This is why C&C red alert 1 and 2 are the best games ever.
The series has great lore, but yeah most of the games designers are baby brained, so when they handle concepts and ideas that are cool then end up having 40% of characters screaming "Skyrim is fer da Nords!" without any critical analysis of just how racist that is or examining the genocide of the Falmer, or how the Dwemer or the first king of the Nords existed and what they did.
The games could be so much better, especially politically and plot wise, but they are fun. Bethesda is just a bad developer in that respect. The best writing tends to focus around the more blatantly eccentric parts of the setting like Daedra and Dark Brotherhood, because you really cant be generic with those and have to write them from alien perspectives.
Did you ever go to Windhelm? The first thing you see when you walk in is a bunch of Nords being racist to a Dark Elf. The game practically hits you over the head with a warhammer that says "nationalism and racism come from the same place."
But the game does not tell you that either of those things is bad. In fact, games need to do more than just tell or show you moral truths, they need to actually create gameplay around those concepts, nothing a Bethesda dev is even remotely capable of.
Why does the media have to tell you that it's bad? Can't you just work it out for yourself like an adult? lol
Even explicitly pro-X things have been consistently misinterpreted by idiot g*mers. Literally, any themes at all are wasted on them.
They are a legitimate option. There are two sides to the civil war and you can join both of them, with all their pros and cons. The game lets you choose whether you want to pick a side in the war, or just ignore it entirely which is entirely possible to do.
And yeah, they'll let you join them if you show yourself to be willing to follow and accept their customs. They're not a genocidal racist faction, they're just an incredibly nationalistic one. One that believes the Empire has been slowly erasing Nordic culture and that their ban on Talos worship was the final straw.
If you asked everyone you can in the game why they support either side then you'll probably get several different answers. Since you can't really sit and debate a video game character in any meaningful sense this mostly gets pushed into the real world where to this day, where we're nearly at the 10 year anniversary of the game, people are still discussing the Skyrim Civil War within lore spaces.
Do you side with the brave freedom fighters, pushing out an empire that doesn't care about their customs? Or are you bringing stability and order to fight against a larger foe, while putting down a nationalistic insurrection?
Hell, my last character simply joined the Stormcloaks because he's an anti-Empire Dunmer and no more thought went into it than that. He saw the way the Empire treated Morrowind during the Oblivion Crisis and everything after and wants its power reduced.
New Vegas has a trite "anarchist" option that involves no say with the people who actually live in the area. You only win because there happens to be a big robot army that can allow you to do so. There's no real public support from anyone you can actually get except a few comments here or there where people say "I'd like to be independent" but then are offered no say in how that occurs. You basically just slide yourself into a coup that was already happening.
No such option in Skyrim exists. You'd literally have to make an entire questline based on building up support for your new regime. You'd need soldiers, a place to quarter them, money to outfit them, people willing to take over from Jarls etc. What kind of new faction are you? Do you also decide that? At that point, you're making a whole new game.
The reality of that moment in time is that there are two warring factions, pick one or pick none. Anything else is wish fulfillment not based on the realities of game development, nor the created reality of the world. Even mods that try and do this are basically just gimmicks that don't really do anything politically heavy at all. They just let you execute random people and let you access anyone's inventory.
Why does the game have to have a perfect amazing "good side" in order to be good politically? Why can't things like this just be telling a story, a story that has people who do unsavoury things for what they believe is a righteous cause? Isn't that literally all of history anyway?
Morrowind is a story about defeating an ancient evil that will eventually take over and destroy the Empire. But, the only reason you're sent to fulfill the prophecy is that it will topple the Tribunal and give the Empire stronger leverage over the province because their leadership is no longer divine. Does that mean the game supports subterfuge in the name of Imperialism?
I don't know what you want from the game. Like, I'm sorry Bethesda didn't make a Communist revolution simulator. I'm sorry you can't have a one-hour debate with your in-game scholarly pals about the civil war. I'm sorry your Rorikstead commune didn't work out.
Religious freedom which was been shut down by the Imperials, hence the hostility. And by which mechanism are you expelling the two most powerful military factions in Skyrim at once?
Why can't both be bad? That's why you can ignore the war, and not pick a side.
Even at the end of the Stormcloak questline it's shown that Ulfric seems to enjoy the prospect of being a High King a lot more than Nordic freedom, in private anyway. At the end of the Imperial questline several of the Talos worshipping characters you can find in the game are disappeared and presumably imprisoned, tortured, and killed. If the Stormcloaks win then several shrines to Talos are added to the game when they were missing before, the opposite is true of the Imperial questline.
A LOT of stuff involving the civil war and postgame was cut. Much of your criticism seems to be about moments or choices that didn't exist, but should have. Which is fair and does fall upon the final product, however it was not for lack of trying or interest that much of it was cut or unfulfilling. And the idea of being able to just push out the extremes of both factions feels to easy. You are stuck with incredible powers, but none the less being a single person, in a medieval civil war. It's like being placed in the hundred years war and expecting them to let you get rid of the most obsessive French and English warmongers. No you are gonna have to choose, if nothing else for the sake of beating Alduin. The flaws of both sides cannot be dealt with because they are to fundamental and to entrenched in the fervor of civil war by the time the game starts.
Except its not just a matter of might. The Dragonborn has to deal with Dragonborn stuff, and needs the help of an established power. A political and social conflict is not going to just be resolved like that. We saw how much they needed allies in the story, to the point of having to pull of a truce in the civil war itself.
And every other threat? The Thalmor? If the dragonborn is going to be the big damn hero, they need to have a coherent government existing around them, but are not exactly gonna form a new kingdom or organize a new form of governance.
And I am saying this as someone who would much rather play a Dragonborn who supports the Forsworn. I think the conflict not wrapping up neatly is fine, both endings leave you with cases of "yeah these guys are bastards to", and there doesn't have to be a resolution to that. You have all this martial strength, but that does not equate to political power
but theres a boatload of interesting politics in morrowind that came out in 2001
Why does a game have to tell you these things are bad? One of the things I always like about TES is that it gives you pages and pages of lore, biased lore, contradictory lore, and then lets you decide for yourself.
You could read several accounts of the Atmoran-Falmer war and still not have anything close to the real events. History becomes distorted rewritten, reinterpreted, or outright fabricated in the world of The Elder Scrolls.
Morrowind portrays slavery as a fact of life. Morrowind has slaves, it has slaveholders and it has abolitionists and liberators. You learn that slavery is held in Morrowind as a right granted by the Empire due to their agreement with the Tribunal, the Living Gods. You can even dabble in some slavery yourself if you choose to do so. My last character was a heavy abolitionist and killed many slavers and freed many slaves. Even my Redoran Stronghold was home to some freed slaves that I protected.
We need a TES game focusing on Black Marsh because Argonians are the best
Also critical support to Sheogorath for hurling a rock that fucked a society of slavers and helped the Argonians get their revenge
Eh, I wouldn't be too happy about that. The Argonians were (and still are, as far as we know) led by an ultrareactionary regime that went through the trouble of summoning a flying monster city just to wipe out an Argonian city for being too chummy with other races.
The poltical situation could change drastically, a lot of stuff happened between Oblivion and Skyrim
Also while the extreme xenophobia is nuts from the Argonian POV they've had a long history of being enslaved and mistreated. Their hostility towards outsiders would not be unexpected.
But mostly it's because Argonians are cool lizard people. And Argonian males are kinda hot.
Yeah, Lizard Juche should be put into context. Plus, it's nice that the Dunmer get a taste of humble pie after suffering through all of that smug NPC chitchat in Morrowind.
Counter-point: Morrowind and Daggerfall. Oblivion is worth it for some questlines alone.
Oblivion is great. It's very cheesy but in a uniquely charming (and kind of hilarious) way. I find it fun/entertaining/enjoyable and honestly that's the only thing that matters to me.
Oh absolutely. I meant that Oblivion's strength, aside from unintentionally hilarious animations, is in its questlines, with some exceptions (lolfightersguild). Contrast that with Skyrim.
Dude should retire. He has more talent as an artist than a merc, tbh.
Morrowind was amazing (and catching up on the recent Unity port of Daggerfall was really cool)
I don't care about Skyrim or Oblivion much though
