i’m kind of begging some of you all to remember that history is written by the victors and tes lore is no exception.
this is going to be a kind of specific example but it’s what started this whole thing: we literally do not know the reason The Night of Tears happened. you know, the night that the indigenous Elves of Skyrim attacked the first human city, Saarthal, and then Ysgramor (who led the colonization of Skyrim) committed genocide against the Elves in retaliation.
there are two canonical speculations as to why the Night of Tears happened, but there is no definitive explanation. the following are from UESP:
Theory one: “[…]it is speculated that it was spurred by a discovery of something beneath the city of Saarthal, which prompted the elves to destroy the city to claim the power for themselves.” This is painting the following genocide by humans as righteous—they had to stop those greedy elves in their lust for power, who knows what they would have done! we had to stop them!
Theory two: “the elves feared that the humans' culture would surpass their own and so sought to drive the humans from their lands.” This speculation is proposed by Imperial scholars—again painting the following genocide as righteous, the elves were fearful of superior human culture! they destroyed the city in an act of jealousy! we had to genocide them because they wanted to kill us!
the humans who colonized Skyrim and committed genocide against the Snow Elves didn’t just accidentally lose the reason behind the Night of Tears. in my opinion, it was deliberate. the humans needed to frame what they did as necessary, they had to kill an entire racial group. the only remaining structures or physical evidence of the Snow Elves existing that we have are the Forgotten Vale, the Chantry of Auri-El, the Great Falmer Statue, and the stone slab in Markarth that shows they had a written language. aside from these four things (which were largely hidden with the exception of the stone), there is no other evidence of their architecture or lives on Skyrim—and what we do have proves that what they had built survived for thousands of years.
The only other source of information we have, is Gelebor. When asked about who the Snow Elves were, he responds: "We were once a wealthy and prosperous society that occupied a portion of Skyrim. Unfortunately, we were constantly at war with the Nords who claimed the land as their ancestral home." The Night of Tears couldn’t have happened out of nowhere like some would suggest. tensions were high and rising between Snow Elves and humans, something like the attack on Saarthal wasn’t even out of place if they were constantly at war with each other.
He also mentions that they had four other temples to their divines, which as we can see now are completely gone in the fourth era. this implies that the humans had purposefully gone out of their way to ensure that none of their culture survived. they needed to eradicate any trace of the Snow Elves to ensure that they had control of the narrative to justify their genocide.
this gets into the real crux of my annoyance, in that i’m so tired of seeing people downplaying the fact that Ahzidal aided in this entire genocide because his wife and child were killed during the Night of Tears, and sympathizing with him.
“#Ahzidal is my boy like on a personal level” “he was a man lost to his grief” “I just think that Ahzidal is a really tragic and truly well written character” “Ahzidal, aka the one that comes with his own suit of armor and pulled on the Elves the biggest reverse Uno card in the history of Tamriel.” “I respect Ahzidal and the lengths he went to avenge his family”
These are all genuine sentences that have been written, some of them said by people I knew. I literally copy and pasted them. listen, I am all for enjoying a villain, I’m a miraak blog for crying out loud, but it becomes a problem when you try and position the villain as having done nothing wrong, downplaying their actions because they’re struck with grief over the loss of their family. especially when the actions of said villain are aiding the colonization and literal genocide of an indigenous group.
“oh boo hoo my wife and child are dead” as if that justifies killing an entire group of people not at all responsible for whoever killed your family. Ahizdal’s actions weren’t simply avenging his family, if that were the case he would have stopped at specifically the person who killed them. Decimating an entire racial group is not a just vengeance 😭
Even IF the snow elves had razed Saarthal and killed every human residing there for no reason whatsoever, it does not justify a full-fledged retaliatory genocide in the slightest. Nothing justifies genocide.
