Good, now make it gayer!
What about a politician who sexually harasses an employee and making that employee read their erotic interspecies fan fiction.
In short, exactly how it was and how it should be.
Woke basically applies to the bigots just realizing and getting worked up by things that had existed for decades. Either they’ve been dozing off for decades or have been “woken” up to it by propaganda with political undertones, and neither speaks highly of their mental faculties.
Although the thing about The Elder Scrolls in general is that it doesn’t hand hold you, so you are free to be a racist bigot and not realize it. They don’t force realization onto the player, you can happily adopt and become a tool of the point they are trying to criticize, you can willfully remain as ignorant as you would be in real life. In contrast to Starfield, where all companions are like the borg, of one mind telling you or nudging you into what you should have actually done.
I think what the image is trying to say is no one gives a shit that plays elder scrolls about this sorta thing because it’s a Fantasy game. No one needs to boot up a video game to be reminded how unfair and shitty our world is. We go to the game and escape that ( hopefully).
It’s not like fiction (including Fantasy) is often used as a means to do social commentary. ^^`
No, you go to the game to play a power fantasy regardless of how unfair and shitty that fantasy world clearly is because of how your status or your skills help you surpass it. The Elder Scrolls goes that extra step to give you the choice to contribute or fight that unfair and shitty to such an extent that people mod it in when the choice is not given, and the player does not even have to be aware of it.
People play videogames for the control, replayability, and often the narrative (which honestly was never The Elder Scroll’s strength), not necessarily to escape the world’s problems, problems which some games embrace. At a more basic level, games just need to provide gameplay and a player just needs to explore it.
There’s no shortage of games where you play as a jackass in a shitty unfair world. GTA comes to mind.
I wish all representation was done as well as when it was done out of creative choice rather than trying to win progressiveness points
It’s kinda weird to try to include representation without it feeling shoe horned. The world of TES (of any fictional world) is entirely hand-created. There are no accidents, all of it is intentional.
This means that, no matter how it’s done, any character deviating from the “norm” was consciously chosen to be so. These things that need representation (disabilities, gender identity, sexuality, race, etc) are all things people don’t get to choose, so there’s an inherent disconnect between the hand crafted world choosing to include diversity, and the real world necessarily having diversity because of chaos.
Following this thread, there’s never been a case of inclusivity, or exclusivity, that isn’t shoehorned in. It’s always been entirely the will of the author to include or exclude these representations. With that in mind, I think it’s only a good thing to see more diverse authors bringing more diverse worlds and characters into existence.
That’s kind of a weird argument. I always took “shoe-horned” to imply that it is pressed into something by force where it doesn’t quite fit. So, in my mind just because something is intentional doesn’t mean it is shoe-horned.
Creative works always come from the authors lived experiences. The reason why we often find representation of minorities missing in media, is because these minorities don’t get to work on them. If there would be more diverse teams working on something we would naturally see more of their diverse experiences represented.
However, for this to be the case a lot would have to change in our society. It is way easier to just keep things more or less as they were and let people without minority experiences write and add minority characters. These, in turn, feel off, feel shoe-horned in, because they aren’t based off of lived experiences. They are just there to check a box.
Conversely, the reason why it feels like we used to have better (though less) diverse representations in media is because these actually came from people who had these experiences.
I’m still taking that over no representation at all 🤷♀️
Seriously though, representation as a background noise is - imho - one of the most potent tools for normalisation.
And the persons who did good representation haven’t disappeared. They’re still doing the lord’s work.
Specifying a ‘racist conservative’ is redundant.
We just got the Canadian Future Party, and even though I’m pretty left leaning (both financially and socially), it gives me some faith for conservatives here.
The Canadian Future Party (CFP; French: Parti avenir canadien, PAC) is a minor federal political party in Canada that was officially launched in 2024. It describes itself as being politically centrist, campaigning on a fiscally conservative and socially liberal platform.
That made me audibly groan, along with this:
- Allowing the private sector to take a larger role in society with government oversight
- Simplifying the tax code to close loopholes in cooperation with the provinces and territories
- Ending corporate subsidies and supply management where a return on investment cannot be delivered
I’m happy to be proven wrong, but this seems like a recipe for laissez-faire capitalism that will eventually end in a collective shrug, a few golden parachutes, and a recession. Canada does not need more centrism.
Their platform made me roll my eyes a bit, the only fiscal conservative that makes sense is when you tax billionaires out of existence. Fiscal conservatism that taxes the poor and doesn’t give them benefits is more neocon bullshit
Translation:
Allowing the private sector to take a larger role in society with government oversight
Privatise profits, socialise losses
Simplifying the tax code to close loopholes in cooperation with the provinces and territories
Lower overall taxes, austerity
Ending corporate subsidies and supply management where a return on investment cannot be delivered
End climate-protecting subsidies
Point #3 also includes closing government owned entities like the post office.
Right, and I also forgot privatising things like water and then let them shut off water for poor people who cannot pay like in Chile.
thank you for translating these from corpo
I’d buy that
Todd Howard wants to know your location
But how many times and on how many platforms?
All of them
Small correction but pelinal was a time traveling cyborg, but being gay is close
According to MK, he was written to be gay, but higher-ups had him make his relationship with Huna ambiguous.
Huna dies at the hands of the Ayleids
Pelinal goes on what is arguably the greatest slaughter ever perpetrated by one single being in the full history of the gd universe, culminating in not just the overthrow but freaking extinction of the Ayleid race
“They were just good friends”
History will say they were roommates
Great. Now you’re just making me rewatch allinall’s animated video of Pelinal’s slaughter for the 30th time: https://youtu.be/E5ix0_W-ouI?si=-2mGt8TDnU5wbwGO
Haha, that video was precisely what inspired my post. You can FEEL the unbridled wrath emanating from him.
Also: REMAAAAAAAN!
Achilles and Patroclus: “That’s our boy”
Isn’t all Daedric Prince genderless? They just assume the form they like, some are just a pile of tentacle.
In a literal sense, yes. But they present themselves as male or female usually. So it’s still appropriate to refer to Boethia as “genderfluid” because they send to switch it up.
I guess that makes most of them gendered but sexless? I mean, sexless in a biological sense, particularly given that they’re not biological beings, but it’s also funny to imply that Vaermina simply never gets laid
It is assumed that a daedric prince can become a female with fully functional female anatomy, should they choose.
They’re literally all-powerful gods that reign over their own worlds that are quite possibly the same size as, if not bigger than Nirn. They don’t play by our rules. I don’t think we can apply our conventions of sex and biology to them lol.
As I said: they can be whatever the fuck they want.
They’re literally all-powerful gods that reign over their own worlds
Kind of but not really. Their “worlds” are just their true bodies. They are all-powerful in the sense that you are all-powerful compared to the bacteria living in your gut, which is to say that they’re not really. They have entirely finite power even within and over their own domains.
See: the Champion of Cyrodiil (in addition to teams of entirely normal people) invading Dagon’s Oblivion gates and shutting them down. An all-powerful god would simply vaporize you the moment you tried to oppose him in his domain. Or forcibly convert you into a warrior of his armies. Or instantly transform all your bones into breadsticks and laugh as you cronched into a pile on the floor–but don’t worry, he decided not to give you permission to die. Enjoy being a breadcrumb puddle.
that are quite possibly the same size as, if not bigger than Nirn.
Kind of a misunderstanding of the cosmology. Nirn is a finite round planet floating in (something equivalent to) space. The planes of Oblivion are infinite planes forced into the rough appearance of round planets by mortals whose minds can’t comprehend infinity. They’re not comparable to Nirn because they aren’t even a similar type of cosmic structure, they only appear similar through the very limited eyes of mortals.
I don’t think we can apply our conventions of sex and biology to them lol.
This is definitely true though. I’m personally in the school of thought that Daedric Princes aren’t really people the way that, for example, the Tribunal’s components are, or for a real world example the way the Greek gods are. The Daedric Princes are concepts personified, or maybe even concepts forced into an anthropomorphic shape by uncomprehending mortal eyes, the same way the Planes of Oblivion will appear like finite round planets from afar.
Mehrunes Dagon isn’t, I would argue, a guy who likes to destroy things. Mehrunes Dagon is destruction. He’s not a bad guy because he’s not a guy at all. Mehrunes Dagon enacts destruction and change the same way a hurricane does–not purposefully, not with malice, not even consciously in the same way a human can. Mehrunes Dagon simply, the same way you or I breathe, destroys.
That isn’t to say that they are all the concept of their spheres. Hypothetically destroying Mehrunes Dagon wouldn’t remove the concept of destruction from the universe. But Mehrunes Dagon is the being representing–made of, perhaps–that concept as it exists in the foundation of the universe.
The universe which I might add is a song, dreamt by the unimaginable and inconceivable higher-dimensional godhead. But that’s a topic for nerds nerdier than I.
You sure have Fudged Muppets in the past
No I’m just a nerd who reads a lot
I actually can’t stand fudgemuppet, dude takes 40 mins to say what could (and should) be said in 5
As an ES lore noob, I quite enjoyed their videos a few years back. I guess they could have shortened their videos a lot but explaining all the interconnectedness between characters and events and stuff I liked a lot.
Do you just read wikis or are there actually books to read about TES lore?
Hey, that’s funny, that’s verbatim what I say about trans folks too!
Well, at least the last bit, although I’m not ruling out the former on a case by case basis.
Let’s hear it for badly written caricatures of racists that are so over-the-top that they allow real racists to say to themselves “I’m not actually a racist, because I’m not extreme as this flimsy caricature of a racist, which is what racists are really like.”
I hate the idea that we have to write more well-developed racists just to get racists to recognize that they’re, you know, fucking racist, but god damn it, it needs to happen. Skryim is just one of many offenders, video games alone are just one of many offenders as well. Really its the whole US media landscape that has nothing but flimsy, weak caricatures of racists. I personally think these weak caricatures are part and parcel to why it’s hard to get racists to have self-reflection because we’re not actually doing the hard work of writing realistic racist characters who don’t start so extreme. Becoming a virulently violent racist takes time and doesn’t happen overnight, and those events that lead to it fall under the umbrella of what’s often called “character development.”
/end unrelated rant
Write a well rounded racist character and you get racists rooting for that character. Racists will never self reflect when they see a well written racist character. It’s like how there are men who don’t see that the characters in Fight Club and Joker are bad people, and rather see themselves in them.
like the cops who identify with punisher, they’re literally not getting it.
Worth noting that whenever the subject comes up, people will defend the Stormcloaks, praising Ulfric’s fight for the province’s right to self-govern and-
Wait.
Bro, same for Star Trek
“They would have made it woke” is the dumbest fuckin attitude to take
I have been mistaken in this case
Sounds like you gotta brush up on your elder scrolls lore my dude. You completely missed the joke that TES was always “woke”.
I suspected but you never know
My bad
Dude, you gotta check out elder scrolls lore, it’s fucking wild. The world runs on clockwork, vivec gave molag bal sloppy toppy while his toppy was sloppy (he was headless), the lizards lick trees to become argonians which are wifi-enabled (the Hist trees can remotely control argonians, which meant shit got real during the Oblivion Crisis and Mehrunes Dagon, a fucking daedric prince pissed himself in fear when he tried to invade the Black Marsh), there are like, 72 1/2 forms of khajiit, it’s heavily suggested that the elder scrolls is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game…
Also, every race in the elder scrolls has had a space program. The khajiit space program was literally just them standing on each other’s shoulders to reach space.
Oh yeah. And the dragon breaks. When time and space just kinda fuck up and every possible outcome happens at the same time before settling onto a single thread (in-universe explanation for why there’s one canon ending to each game despite players being able to get other endings; each game takes place during a dragon break).
The mental image I have of the Argonians all turnt on hist sap, invading Oblivion, making Daedra Lords piss themselves, and closing their own gates, makes me happy.
That’s almost literally how it went down, except the Argonians weren’t tripping, the Hist trees are literally psychic and recalled all the Hist-born Argonians to the Black Marsh. They somehow knew the Oblivion Crisis was about to occur, and recalled every single Hist-born Argonian in Tamriel so that they’d be waiting at the gates the moment they appeared.
The Hist trees are also speculated to be the oldest living beings on Tamriel, if not Nirn entirely.
The Hist trees recognize Sithis as the OG creator. (If I understand correctly) To put it another way, while other races worship Aedra and/or Daedra, the Hist trees basically worship the void itself.
The Hist-born Argonians are able to use a wholly unique form of magic called Hist-magic which operates under its own, separate rules. This scares the elves.
Sloppy toppy while his toppy was sloppy is an inspired use of the English language. You deserve an honorary degree
Also, every race in the elder scrolls has had a space program. The khajiit space program was literally just them standing on each other’s shoulders to reach space.
Are there any pictures of this? I can’t stop laughing at the image in my head. This is phenomenal world building.
Sadly, afaik, there are no official images of it. As Skua noted, it’s not exactly canon, but to my knowledge there isn’t actually anything that contradicts it. As such, I think most lore nerds take it as fact. Also because, as Skua said, it’s way more interesting for the Khajiit to have had a space program where they stood on each other’s shoulders than not.
Also, Bethesda has severely neglected the Argonians and Khajiit, so people take whatever Argonian or Khajiit lore they can get. I think they’re “too furry” for Bethesda or something.
Admittedly, a Black Marsh TES would be difficult to do without it being an Argonian-only spin-off because, iirc, Argonians violently eject anyone trying to enter the marsh.
Meanwhile, a game set in Elsweyr would require a lot of effort due to all the different skeletons and character models they’d have to create. They’d probably double or triple the number of character models simply due to all the different forms of Khajiit (there are 17 forms, ranging from having the appearance of a basic house cat to being almost identical to Mer (elves) or Men (Redguard, imperial, etc)), with significantly more work if they tried to make them all playable with full armor sets.
the marsh is also near impossible to live in unless you are argonian
There might be fan art, but I doubt there’s anything official. Besides how little attention anything Elsweyr generally gets (even the first ESO expansion into Elsweyr mostly had the khajiit as secondary characters), it originated in an unofficial source. Michael Kirkbride (a lead writer for Morrowind and several other important bits of Elder Scrolls stuff) wrote The Pocket Guide to the Empire, 2nd Edition with the input of community members. The Pocket Guide 1st edition came with the manual of Redguard, and the 3rd edition came with Oblivion. The 3rd edition contains a few references to the 2nd edition, which at the time had not actually been written, so Kirkbride decided to fill the gap. The relevant section, with explanatory notes from me that you can ignore if you know that stuff already, is:
So Mane ^1 saw that Khajiit was fighting itself more than usual and donned the hairs of his many littermates and his clan and his guards until he could bear no more and then palanquin-raced throughout the lands to repeat these words: “Woah-ho now, mad cat. You fight and fight but if you will give Mane just one moment, he will show something far better, for the Mane has had many hours and fine sugar to think this over. Come now, Palatiit ^2 ; come now, Ne Quiniit ^3 . Together, just this once, Khajiit will stand tall as Alkosh ^4 , cat upon cat upon cat. And in doing so, it will climb to the moon as it has been told so many times.”
Khajiit saw reason in these words and so it climbed and climbed, cat upon cat, for a hundred days. Much sugar ^5 was brought there to support the climbers and in the end Khajiit climbed high, so very high that it was in fact closer to Jo’Segunda ^6 than to Nirni ^7 below. At that moment, little Alfiq ^8 fell upwards and from there on Khajiit helped Khajiit up, which was down, until all were gathered there. This is where Khajiit intends to stay from now on, for who could know strife when walking sugar and not sand?
1 - The Mane is the religious leader of the khajiit 2 - Pa’alatiin, or Pellitine, is the southern half of Elsweyr. Elsweyr is the region that the khajiit are from, and had only recently been united when the 2nd edition was written in-universe 3 - Ne Quin’al or Anequine is the northern half of Elsweyr 4 - Alkosh is the khajiiti interpretation or version of the god of time and top god of most pantheons, generally known as Akatosh to the empire and therefore in most game material 5 - Moon sugar is a narcotic with great religious significance in khajiiti society. If you’ve come across skooma in the games, it is the heroin to moon sugar’s opium 6 - Jo’Segunda, or Secunda, is one of the two moons 7 - Nirni, or Nirn, is the planet that Tamriel and the games are set on 8 - An alfiq is a type of khajiit that physically resembles a housecat but which is every bit as sapient as any other khajiit. You can actually meet several in ESO, but sadly cannot play as one. The Legends card “Frazzled Alfiq” is probably my all time favourite piece of official Elder Scrolls art
Anyway Kirkbride’s unofficial stuff is not “canon”, for whatever that’s worth, but due to his significance to the setting and the fact that his writing is usually interesting, people often accept it as such. The story does not end there, though! The developers of ESO have a series called Loremaster’s Archive, which is an in-character lore Q&A series. In “Moon Bishop Hunal Answers Your Questions”, someone asked about the “cat upon cat” story.
“Our scribes are currently working on the transcription of the ‘Ri’datta-ssabavezi.’ In this story, your people are climbing ‘cat upon cat’ and finally reach Jone, where they founded something called ‘Lleswer.’ But we failed to understand the meaning of this. Some at the Guild suggest it has to be taken literally, but it seems impossible. Am I right?” – Iszara the Restless, Singer of the Scenarist Guild
Moon Bishop Hunal says, “It is the nature of myth to be true and yet at the same time mere allegory. Are you ‘right’? In this context, the question is without meaning. But do not be offended, hairless one. Many stories are puzzles with more than one solution.”
So, canon? Maybe, maybe not. But it got a nod, and people like it.
Damn, and I thought I knew my TES lore.
it’s heavily suggested that the elder scrolls is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game
I distinctly recall a conversation I had on reddit in which I irritated several Fallout fans by insisting that the Elder Scrolls is simply Europe in the world of Fallout and that the Chinese stealth suits were 100% chameleon enchanted gear from TES IV
If you want more post-apocalyptic fantasy, Mistborn and Stormlight Archive book series both technically fit
I miss TrueSTL
So like, are you saying the fascists aren’t bad guys?
No they didn’t?
If I’m not getting whooshed from you playing the act:
The joke is that everything in the meme is already in the established TES canon. But capital G Gamers™ (which I hate that those assholes made that word negative), being media illiterate and being “anti woke”, often don’t see what their loved games contain, even if they complain about those things.
Whoops I got wooooshed
I’ve never played Skyrim lol
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