on "maormer" and their origins in māori racial stereotypes
kia ora (hello/good health), i made a post about this a few years back, but i feel the need to update it. this isn't a dig at anyone with maormer ocs, just a post acknowledging racism in the elder scrolls regarding maormer.
basically, a concerning number of people don't know that maormer are based off of māori people, despite it being in the name. we understand that the races in the elder scrolls are heavily based off of real-world races and maormer is a very poignant example for this. like, in this post i point out a depiction of a sacred entity is traced into tes:o for an example of how blatant it is, so if the name isn't enough to convince you, keep reading.
māori are indigenous polynesians with a rich culture, known for our woodwork and carving, weaving, and tā moko (sacred tattooing), among other things. we have a deep respect for the ocean as voyagers.
we fought off pākehā (white colonisers) for quite awhile and thus got treated as uniquely vicious, warhungry, and violent. we did not stigmatise sex, so we were seen as overtly crude and predatory. during the musket wars/genocide, certain iwi (tribes) sided with pākehā and took other māori as slaves. while we had the concept of slavery pre-colonisation, it looked very different to modern day slavery and the slavery practiced by these iwi was taken directly from european influence, not traditional māori customs.
meanwhile, maormer are a race of vicious, tall/large slavers who pillage the mainland, the good people of tamriel. they have "intricate tattoos". they are said to have potentially been a cross between aldmer and the "bestial tribes of pyandonea", implying that there are not only other tribes in pyandonea that are racialised as primitive and inhuman, but that maormer had sex with these "bestial" beings, which is a bit. eugh. they also interbreed with sea giants to make even larger inhuman brutes. there are multiple depictions and theories in the in-game lore that imply maormer are less "human" than the other elf races.
they have "breeding pits" which is not elaborated on but feels pointed at māori displays of open sexuality. māori considered sex just... another thing to do. you would walk past two (or more) people having sex in public, say "oh, they're busy" and go on your way. "breeding pits" is not only dehumanising but weirdly pointed, like i said.
pyandonea and polynesia have the same number of letters. they both even start with a p, lol. pyandonea is described as a tropical jungle, off limits to anyone not indigenous to the continent as the land itself is shielded by a cloud of fog and the flora is known to sink ships. polynesia is a grouping that refers to multiple islands in the pacific, most of which are tropical (māori in particular had to adapt to a uniquely cold climate! we still had vast jungles, however). this reads to me as a continuation of the common trope that land (especially jungles) is something inherently hostile to outsiders (and thus must be tamed by the coloniser; both the land and its savage peoples).
they carve serpent totems that are quite easily proven as directly traced from a specific taniwha drawing from aotearoa:
taniwha represent many things and have many appearances but are generally depicted as serpents, to be clear.
there are a few good maormer but they're the outliers, most of the race is controlled by an evil godking who is analogous to a tohunga. a tohunga is a person skilled in something but is commonly translated to mean "priest" or even "wizard" as they hold sacred knowledge regarding "magic" for lack of a better word. maormer use serpent magic and tame sea serpents in a way analogous to many taniwha stories.
they have several gods including "mother sea" although it is unknown whether or not they're talking about an entity or the ocean itself. there were at least some maormer that followed hermaeus mora and/or molag bal. māori (and all polynesians) revered the ocean and treated it as a living entity. i think it's interesting that the only gods spoken of apart from mother sea are Bad and Evil.
they have weird propaganda pieces implying they're "the chosen people of aldmeris" (see: the book with the same name in tes:o) and that they have pure blood compared to "mongrel" races. māori had a very common theory applied to them, that we were aryan. (and thus related to white people, which means white people are also Technically indigenous to aotearoa, which means they can landgrab. bit of a leap in logic ay). we also are inherently a "mixed" race as we were so heavily colonised by pākehā that all of us now have some form of pākehā blood in us. there is no such thing as a pure blooded māori, not that it matters.
most of their attacks are described as "utter failures" which is fascinating as māori, the race they're based on, were quite proficient at driving off other people. it's like "this race of vicious polynesian stand-ins is Actually terrible at combat despite their constant attacks on the mainland! they can Never succeed!" it feels odd.
there's more that i'll potentially get into in another post, but i hope this was at least educating for some people. if anyone has questions, feel free to ask and i'll get to them!
I return with another new tes oc <333 his name's Ondas.
this time he's a maormer swordsman, swashbuckler, and rogue, who's incredibly charming and a bit of a man-whore /aff LMAO
he's meant to act, at least mostly, as a sort of rival and opposite to Kazrah when he's living in hammerfell - though he's originally from pyandonea.
alt versions below (INCLUDING CENSORED NUDITY AT THE END)
alt verions without his cape (and/or shirt)
material labelling on his sword and jewellery
censored nudity version (yes he has a sea serpent next to his "sea serpent" I didn't think about the placement until I was like half way done drawing it LMAO)
Here's a small change of pace: how about a Mid-March Mermaid! Well, not technically a mermaid, more like a Maormer variant that stemmed from a string of inside jokes in a Discord VC.
This is SK, aka Sardine Kite! They're a subrace of Maormer that I completely made up in order to have TES mermaids. They're based on a flying fish, if it wasn't obvious.
SK's name comes from two separate jokes, the first being that my reference picture looked a bit too much like a Sardine, and the second being that all their fins made them look a bit like a Kite; therefore, SK!
Please excuse the poorer image quality, unfortunately my better phone broke, and now I'm on my much older backup, so my high-quality pictures of my art are things of the past. Hopefully, I can get a newer phone soon.
wheeee oc time. yes i draw my tes characters in casual tanktops. Who Caare. anyway
my oc, tūī! ia is a maormer (or māormer as i prefer to spell it. my race reclamation as a māori lol) hailing from pyandonea originally before stowing away and exploring tamriel as a whole.
just quickly but in my storyline, i heavily rewrite pyandonea to be more like real-world polynesia. the lore surrounding pyandonea and māormer is highly racist and based off of stereotypes against māori people. i have an older post on this linked here.
i reclaim this aspect of tes and rewrite māormer to be much more remniscient of real-world māori and other polynesians :) i also change their paler skintone to be shades of darker blues and greens as i'm really not a fan of the whole "grey/pale white skin" thing for a number of reasons i won't get into here as they fall more into māori and indigenous politics, lol.
i see pyandonea as a broken up continent of islands, each corresponding roughly to real-world polynesian islands and peoples. māormer (or maormer, by more racist scholars) is the name for the entire group of pyandoneans, but this is a name imposed on them as a whole in tamriel's weird ass quest to categorise every race; each major cultural group of pyandoneans identify as their own racial groups. (think the forsworn considering themselves their own race despite colonial tamrielic forces seeing them as bretons)
anyway, onto the lore:
ia gets bitten by a vampire in valenwood while crossing through (hence the marks on tana chest/neck - this lines up with the irl tūī bird's white tufts on their chests, marking them as cowards in a certain traditional māori story that i choose to incorporate into tana lore. which ia is just like Lmfao That's Probably An Omen Lol Uh Oh Hope I'm Not A Coward. it's not but it fucks with tana head a bit), heads to cyrodill, and gets kidnapped and tortured by bandits.
ia eventually escapes after some heavy trauma and tries to leave into skyrim, gets caught crossing the border (and plays out the start-of-skyrim cutscene lol), finds out ia is dragonborn, the main plot of skyrim happens, ia gets mauled by a werewolf during this and finds out that tana dragonborn blood (that's tana best theory, anyway) allows ia to become both a vampire and a werewolf Because Life Isn't Hard Enough Already, and eventually goes absolutely fucking batshit from the heavy pressure of both being extraordinarily traumatised with no outlet as well as The Saviour Of Humanity And The World.
ia ends up meeting an eventual lover on the way named wamasu. they're a naga saxhleel and they get along as they're both not from skyrim and come from heavily misunderstood racial groups. they have a pretty fucking solid love hate relationship, both are incredibly toxic to each other (there's no abuse, it's pretty mutual lmfao. ia calls them some incredibly demeaning shit to piss them off and resorts to threats instead of any form of healthy disagreement. and gets a hand to the face for it and a sore ego) and they occasionally split from each other for awhile but end up finding each other and sticking together.
ia plays out the main skyrim plot and kills alduin, before pissing off Literally Every Aedra by stealing a bone from the whale bridge in sovngarde right after alduin is killed so as to carve it into a patu parāoa (a māori weapon made from whalebone that carries a lot of prestige). ia also makes deals with multiple daedra. becomes a cannibal under namira.
(Yes i am aware of the implications of making a māori character a cannibal but hear me out: i am māori and i think it's kinda funny for ia to be like "idk it's my culture lol, i'm just practicing culture 😏 problem solved" while literally Actively not from any of the iwi/tribes that practice cannibalism, while also practicing under a tamrielic god and not any form of pyandonean practice anyway. ia is a bad person, i can't overstate this, ia is Coping Badly with this reasoning and pissing off ana pyandonean gods as well as the tamrielic gods ia refuses to follow)
ia also has very uncontrolled lycanthropy and kills a LOT of people. this weighs on ia and waking up to find dozens of people dead around ia one too many times leads to some major fucking trauma that gets "processed" by just kind of becoming a horrible cunt.
post-alduin tūī and wamasu both explore dungeons, wamasu "secretly" (tūī knows) trying to work towards godhood and "secretly" (tūī also knows and plays dumb to receive information from wamasu) is using tūī for this purpose. it's why they even got to know ia in the first place, they heard news of a dragonborn and thought "alright i gotta take advantage of this" and headed from the outskirts of black marsh to skyrim. they are perfect for each other <3
anyway. ia gets killed by wamasu in a fit of paranoia about attaining said godhood (tūī wanting literally no aspect of godhood, btw.) and then wama manages to zero sum fairly soon after, leaving tūī alone entirely. due to ana actions (flirting with daedra and stealing the whalebone + generally being incredibly disrespectful to the gods in ana later years), none of the gods want ia, even akatosh doesn't want that part of his soul back, and the political mess of "who gets to claim ia" from the daedra on top of that means the daedra And the aedra just decide to kinda... drop ia. ia stays as a ghost in the cave ia died in for the rest of eternity, having nobody but the occasional adventurer to talk to and tana corpse (and even that turns to dust eventually). ia remains there until the next cycle.
