the worst part of summer is that people get sooo comfortable expressing their disgust at having to see other people’s bodies. they’re always complaining about wrinkly old men at the nude hot springs or fat women in bikinis at the beach. I hate that shit. if you’re not capable of being normal about bodies you personally don’t find attractive, just turn your head to look at something else! and if you’re not smart enough to do that, then at least do the rest of us the courtesy of suffering in silence, because we don’t wanna hear your weird comments. thanks.
Last month, @blue-dartwing asked me on discord my thoughts on Miraak, specially:
Did you choose to take the Skaal's history word-for-word? Did he really torture a load of people and do all that stuff?
Some of this is partially related to my take on his name/title that I broach in the oneshot The Shape of a Name. So, let's ask:
How much of the Skaal's history of Miraak is true?
word count: 962
So, I don’t take the Skaal’s history of Miraak word-for-word, but I also don’t think their stories are baseless. To me, the most interesting answer is somewhere in the middle: the Skaal preserve a real historical wound, but not necessarily a clean historical record.
Miraak’s story is over 4000, maybe even 5000, years old by the time the Last Dragonborn reaches Solstheim. That’s an enormous span of time for any history to survive intact, especially one passed down through oral tradition, cultural trauma, ruins, enemy propaganda, and religious memory. The Skaal likely know the emotional truth of Miraak: he was dangerous, he was cruel, his temple was a place of suffering, and his rebellion brought devastation. But that doesn’t mean every specific horror found in his temple can be cleanly laid at his personal feet.
Frea’s dialogue even leaves room for uncertainty. When she sees the torture chamber, she does not actually know who was kept there, when they suffered, or whether it was done in service to the dragons or for Miraak’s own purposes. She’s reacting to a place of horror and trying to understand it through the stories she’s inherited. That doesn’t make her foolish or dishonest, just human. She’s standing in a ruin full of evidence, but evidence without context can become myth very quickly.
For my interpretation of Miraak, I do think he did terrible things. He was a Dragon Priest. He held power in a system built on worship, fear, obedience, punishment, and control. Even before his rebellion, he would have been part of the Dragon Cult’s machinery. He would have enforced doctrine. He would have chosen who was permitted to speak, who was silenced, who was corrected, and who was made an example of. In that sense, Miraak’s cruelty was real.
But I don’t see him as someone who tortured people purely for enjoyment. That kind of indulgent sadism feels too crude for him. He’s more ‘frightening’ to me as someone who once understood cruelty as a function of power: pain as correction, fear as discipline, bodies as messages. Obedience as something that could be shaped, forced, and then dressed up as devotion.
That distinction absolutely doesn’t absolve him. If anything, it makes the horror colder.
It’s easy to imagine the Dragon Cult using him as an ideological weapon before he ever turned against them. Even the meaning of his name/title supports that idea: “Miraak” means “Allegiance Guide,” it’s not simply a personal name, but a role imposed on him by the Cult. He was shaped into someone who could guide devotion, interpret divine will, and make obedience look holy. The Cult did not name him to honour him. They named him to use him.
When he eventually rebelled, I think that same learned cruelty turned against his former masters. The remains displayed in his temple don’t need to mean he was torturing random innocents for pleasure. They may have been Dragon Cultists, rival priests, loyalists, spies, or symbols of the old order. Displaying them would have been political, sacrilegious, and deliberately provocative. It would have said: your gods cannot protect you. Your priesthood is meat. The old hierarchy is dead.
That sounds a lot closer to Miraak for me.
Not gleeful. Not careless. Intentional.
The torture chambers themselves could also have a layered history. Some may predate Miraak’s rebellion and belong to the Dragon Cult’s original use of the temple. Some may have been used during Miraak’s revolt against captured loyalists or dissenters. Some may have been repurposed by his later cultists after his disappearance into Apocrypha and when he was resurfacing in the 4th Era. By the time the Last Dragonborn sees the temple, it may not be one single historical moment preserved in stone. It may be a palimpsest of cruelty: dragon rule, Miraak’s rebellion, later cult activity, and Skaal memory all stacked on top of one another.
That’s why I don’t think the question should be answered with a simple yes or no.
Did Miraak torture people? Probably, or at least he ordered it, permitted it, or benefited from it. Did he display corpses as trophies or warnings? Very likely. Did he participate in a brutal religious-political system before turning against it? Absolutely. But did he personally commit every atrocity the Skaal attribute to him, exactly as their stories remember it? I very much doubt it.
The Skaal version is not a neutral record — it’s a scar in their history of the island.
And the Dragon Cult would have had every reason to make Miraak’s rebellion sound like nothing more than monstrous arrogance. They wouldn’t preserve him as a complicated figure: a priest shaped by their own cruelty, who then used that cruelty against them. They would remember him as a traitor, heretic, and would-be tyrant. Over thousands of years, that version could easily harden into “Miraak was evil, Miraak tortured people, Miraak tried to claim Solstheim, and the dragons attempted to destroy him for it.”
The truth, I think, is uglier and more complicated.
Miraak’s not innocent. The stories didn’t come from nowhere. But they are also not a perfect transcript of what happened. He was cruel, ambitious, and willing to use suffering as a tool. He was also the product of a cult that taught him cruelty before he ever turned that cruelty back upon it.
So, did he do “all that stuff”?
Some of it, yes. Enough that the horror is real.
But not all of it cleanly. Not all of it simply. And not for the reasons history would prefer to remember.
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
2087
