trying to figure out how i want toki to deal w the college of winterhold ending considering how unprepared and unwilling they are to be tied down (at this point. in their old age who’s to say) and thus is inclined to run away screaming at the prospect of being the arch mage, if i decide to go with the canon route of “a psijic decides who’s the archmage”. however, the fact that everyone else is like Fine with it is hilarious to me, but needs some explanation, and the explanation my brain is coming up with is that toki made a VERY generous donation at some point that was a massive boost in reputation + for all everyone says they want to be archmage no one wants to deal with the responsibility of the ledgers and communications that goes into being a leader of an academic institution that mirabelle used to do all of. and no one wants to put their name on the letter explaining to the thalmor embassy that the “advisor” they sent is uhh no longer with them. so toki has to negotiate the title away
Historically, one of the most reliable sources of widespread banditry was rulers ramping up military recruitment for major wars, then cutting their soldiers loose afterwards without pay, leaving a bunch of heavily armed men with military experience floating around broke and homeless.
Knowing this, whenever someone jokingly refers to raccoons as "trash bandits", I get a vivid mental image of, like, a raccoon succession crisis leading to a raccoon civil war, the aftermath of which forced the former soldiers of the losing side (who are all raccoons) to take up the life of the raccoon outlaw.
Thinking a lot recently about the constant comparison of Oblivion to Skyrim, particularly claims that Oblivion is superior in every way strictly by virtue of quest length and the greater grandiosity of the organizations in Oblivion, and I think there's been a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually going on with Tamriel during the time period of Skyrim. Even though it's like...one of the core concepts of the main storyline.
Putting most of this under a cut for length, but I just...I think people misunderstand what's going on here. This is not a "One Game Good Other Game Bad" post, it's an analysis of a major, key difference in story basis between the two that I think gets lost in the (frankly asinine) argument about which is superior.
See, everything in Skyrim sucks. Every organization you can align yourself with is falling apart. Literally every single one.
That's the point.
To summarize:
The Companions (equivalent to the Fighters' Guild) are about a dozen strong, literally cursed, and their most beloved leader gets murdered very early in the storyline.
The College of Winterhold (equivalent to the Mages' Guild, not to the Arcane University) has seemingly only been saved from collapsing into the sea because a master of Restoration fused himself with the structure itself when the Sea of Ghosts tried to tear it down a little under a century ago and his presence is constantly physically "healing" the foundation.
The Thieves' Guild has lost the favor of every possible patron deity, having been outright cursed by Nocturnal after one of her Nightingales murdered another and stole the gift she offers her champion, while the boon that the organization's founder claimed from her in ages past (the cowl) is missing.
The Dark Brotherhood has been all but completely dismantled, the Night Mother's tomb in Bravil having been raided and struggling to persist without a Listener for over a decade; the bodies of the Night Mother's children have been lost and she's essentially being smuggled from region to region in an attempt to find a safe place to continue operations.
The Empire itself has been kneecapped, forced into a traumatic treaty by a fascist regime determined to strike the beliefs and culture of anyone not Altmer off the face of the planet; the Thalmor have gone so far as to torture and radicalize the figurehead leader of the Nords in order to use their own nationalism and superiority against the Empire, sparking a civil war that will further weaken the Empire and allow the Aldmerri Dominion to destroy it wholecloth.
This extends out into the rest of the world, too! We have confirmed existence of Hist-deaf Argonians. The Dunmer are floundering to recover after the quadruple-whammy that is the fall of the Triumverate, the destruction of Vivec City when Baar Dau finally made impact, the Red Year, and the Argonian uprising. The Bosmer are literally endangered due to habitat loss following a super-isolationist cultural shift due to wars with the Khajiit and Altmer. The Void Nights were devastating to Khajiit culture and population in ways that have yet to be fully explained.
The world is falling apart. Everything is dying.
And then Alduin shows up.
We all kind of talk about Alduin carrying on as World-Eater through the course of the Skyrim storyline like it's him being a piece of shit, since he'd started it ages ago and was just displaced in time to land on the Last Dragonborn's head in the Fourth Era, but I don't think that's the case.
Based on the state of things, I think Alduin arrived right on time. I think it's the end of the world. The only reason he "should" be stopped is because the Last Dragonborn has the capacity to stop the world from ending in a more down-to-earth sense than just defeating Alduin: they can't save everyone, but they can "fix" every single organization that's holding "the world" together.
They can align with the Imperials and keep the civil war from further crippling them, keeping the Empire from being too weak to push back against the Aldmerri Dominion.
They can save the College of Winterhold, the only group in the right place at the right time to stop the Eye of Magnus from opening, and in doing so make sure that the Psijics are able to put it somewhere nobody else can find it.
They can lead the Companions, cure the curse for those members who don't want to run with Hircine after death, which bolsters their spirits enough to keep doing what they can even when everyone else is trying to kill each other. A single neutral martial force in the middle of a civil war.
They can regain Nocturnal's trust for the Thieves' Guild, restore the Nightingales, and in doing so they can return the luck that was stolen from them as punishment for Mercer Frey's transgression. They can even reclaim the Crown of Barenziah and award the guild with a paragon to increase their newly-regained luck.
They can hear the Night Mother, becoming Listener for the Dark Brotherhood to restore the balancing force of Sithis in the world, purify the most broken Sanctuary the Brotherhood has ever had, and finish a story set into motion way back in the Third Era—Emperor Titus Mede II is murdered under the order of a Motierre, a descendant of a mark the Brotherhood specifically kept from dying during the Oblivion Crisis.
The Last Dragonborn can't do anything outside Skyrim—there's nothing they can do for the Argonians or the Bosmer or the Khajiit, and they can only do very little for the Dunmer via work in Solstheim—but they can work with every single guild or guild-adjacent group, strengthening the Empire to stand against the biggest threat to Tamrielic culture since the First Era, and in doing so they can make it so the world isn't ready for Alduin to eat it.
The Hero of Kvatch exists when Tamriel, and presumably Nirn as a whole is in the prime of its life, that's what makes the Oblivion Crisis such a big deal. This is a world that isn't ready to give up, it still has the strength to fight, it just needs someone standing at the head to direct it. The Last Dragonborn comes into the story when everything is falling apart and nothing really feels worthwhile, when it's hard to see why the world is worth saving. They have the chance to prove that there's still some life left here, that the world isn't too far gone to save—Alduin arrived right on time, it's the Last Dragonborn's job to change that.
I can see how coming from Oblivion to Skyrim would feel disappointing and hollow, but I'm pretty sure that's literally the point of the story.
Oblivion tells you the world is worth saving because it's got so much left to live for, even with the odds stacked so high against it. Skyrim asks you whether a world that's dying is still a world worth saving, and it's up to you to prove that it is.
curiousartemis replied to your post “so like, are we gonna talk about the fact that ulfric stormcloak is at…”
it’s hard to nail down a canon age for him; it’s anywhere from late 30s to mid-50s. He’d also be the same age, roundabouts, as Rikke, so it works both ways. Plus Tullius looks rather… elderly lol
late 30′s? nah fam.
ulfirc stormcloak drove the reachmen out of markarth in 4E 176, 25 years before the game starts in 4E 201. and this is after he served in the great war, which took place from 4E 171 to 4E 175.
we don’t know at which point specifically that ulfric was captured during the war, but we know from his dialogue that he signed up about as soon as word of the war reached him since he says he “couldn’t stand missing it.” additionally, considering legate rikke and galmar stone-fist are his old war buddies, it’s safe to say that he fought for most of, if not the entire war up until he was captured by the thalmor.
now let’s do some math to determine how old ulfric must be. according to the “letter from the steward” in the aretino residence, an orphan is released from the orphanage at age 16. we can easily use that as a benchmark for the age of adulthood in skyrim, and say that 16 is the minimum age for someone to join the imperial legion—it probably isn’t, but let’s give the benefit of the doubt here.
if ulfric joined up with the war effort at age 16, then he would have been age 20-21 when the war ended, and age 21-22 during the markath incident. since the markarth incident takes place 25 years before the start of the game, we can conclude that ulfric stormcloak is, at minimum, 46-47 years old.
Alessia, Pelinal, and Morihaus, a redo of a previous thing I did back in 2015. The detail is kinda lost here so it's hard to tell, but it was done entirely with stippling, no lines! (It took forever...) Happy Halloween!
After four years someone has finally managed to decipher two of the Mysterium Xarxes pages. The text was best shown in a trailer, but was so illegible that the UESP and TIL together only managed to get most of one page. LascaxInfoTech cracked it though, and we now know what it says.
Dunmer Hlaalu councilman Vares Veleth in Necrom, revived to attend court summons and resolve a minor land dispute between two of his great grandsons, both from different families.
Despite being displeased with his descendants' inability to settle affairs by themselves, he was notably cheerful, happy to drink sujamma one more time, and not in a hurry to return to his burial chamber, despite "generally preferring it to the tumultuous world of the living."
Accidentally gaslit my entire family by adding The Bannered Mare from the Skyrim soundtrack to my instrumental/new age christmas music playlist now they think it's an actual christmas song but "for some reason can never place the name of it"
People who never played Morrowind (understandable but sad) really miss out because in Skyrim, Solstheim gets introduced via DLC and its this weird place full of dark elves and gigantic bugs and Lovecraftian horrors and giant mushrooms and etc, but in Morrowind, you start out in the base game in the land of the dark elves and bugs and Lovecraftian horrors and mushrooms, until you get to the Morrowind DLC that introduces Solstheim at which point Solstheim is weird because then you have to take your plague-ridden messiah from the cramped and drug riddled streets of Sewertopia to the freak werewolf island where it constantly snows actual snow and not Accursed Volcano Ash and everything has proto Skyrim aesthetics.
Like what do you mean you have buildings that aren't made out of dead bugs. Where Are the Mushrooms. Why Are You White.
Oblivion Mage Guild: You want to join our guild? Okay, I want you to go all of the 7 mage guilds in all of Cyrodill and get a letter of recommendation from them.
Skyrim Mage Guild, when they see the player cast a dollar store spell at their front gate:
