i am curious about one thing regarding your like talos posts. how do you think the existence of long-lived races like elves plays into the propaganda aspect, considering a lot of elves alive in skyrim were also alive in oblivion? i always found it odd that tes timelines seemed based on like, human lifetimes and shit considering the fact that it’s established elves can live to be like a thousand. would like to hear your thoughts on that ^^
yeah i think i elaborated on that in a couple of posts but i cant find it
so yeah i think a massive facet of the development of the thalmor is living/recent memory of tiber septim’s siege on summerset, and in general most of the stuff you see thats anti-talos is actually a result of people who lived thru his reign refusing to accept this man as a god BECAUSE of what he did and who he was rather than solely “humans stinky”.
the thalmor are a nationalist group that coopted that anger and trauma, but to most commoners the hatred for tiber septim + talos is due to just . living memory.
(headcanon:) so because like half of tamriel’s population at least have a parent or grandparent who lived thru tiber septim (if not they themselves), talos worship is extremely unpopular outside of cyrodiil and imperial cult dominated areas, and almost unheard of to the west (especially summerset isles).
uriel septim vi in particular is canon characterized as heavily religious and aggressive in his use of missionaries with a vested interest in destabilizing local religions and replacing them with the imperial cult, which hes doing in morrowind and presumably attempting in other predominantly elvish regions,part of which might be desperately trying to get them to accept talos.
so bc of all this when news comes out from the imperial city like “hey you see how the oblivion crisis just ended? thats actually because there was secretly another member of the septim bloodline who was a devoted and enthusiastic priest of the Holy Imperial Faith and he became an avatar of akatosh and saved you all”. and a lot of people buy it but a lot of people are very reasonably like “yeah right”, seeing this as the empire trying to save face and regain control of its populace (which it is).
the thalmor then are able to capitalize on this by being like “remember that monster tiber septim? some of you were there when he sieged our capital. most of you at least have older relatives that were there, or who died. remember how they tried to tell us he was a god? theyre doing it again.” so then people are very responsive to the thalmor’s claim that THEY ended the crisis, because genuinely its more believable than the empires septim savior story (which is definitely being exaggerated and used as propaganda). etc
