Historians wake up every morning, wash their faces, sharpen their quills, and spend the guild recommended twenty minutes cussing out Akatosh before they begin their day.

I do love the concept of Dragon Breaks tho. They reinforce the idea that Nirn is fragile and badly designed. Half the backers pulled out mid-project and the hole they ripped in the firmament is now referred to as the sun. Magicka leaks through from Aetherius which was apparently not part of the design documents. The planets are the corpse-bodies of the gods who made themselves static and unchanging to form the governing laws of reality. The Aedra all died in the act of creating Nirn, but not really, because what does death even mean for an eternal embodied concept? so they’re surprisingly sprightly for dead people. The Daedra sit outside all of this utterly enraptured by concepts like “mortality” and “change” that they cannot understand or really experience. Their refusal to participate denied them Time, Growth, and Change. Their perfect chaos is static and leaden, and so they covet reality. If you understand the rules of time, history, causality, you can dance with the universe and change them. Nirn is The Arena, a place of constant struggle and conflict, and the battlefield includes not just the basins of Nibenay or the Ashlands of Morrowind but time, space, death, magic, and endless possible futures. Nirn is collapsed in to an endless cycle of cycles which only the wisest can perceive and seek to escape. Beings from ancient Kalpas lurk in the strange places of the world, demi-gods, monsters, things that should not be possible.

It’s all delightfully weird. Once you dig under the skin the world is nothing like Tolkien. In Tolkien the conflict between Elves and Men grew from the Edain coveting the immortality of the Eldar. In Nirn Men and Mer have been in eternal conflict (except it’s not nearly that simple) because the Mer (or at least the high Thalmor) view Nirn as a prison that ripped them away from their nature as immortal primal spirits, while Men view Nirn as the gift of Lorkhan Doom Drum and a crucible for attaining transcendence. Except only nerds think it’s that simple. And if anyone break dances hard enough on the towers that pin dead creation in place they can change the rules entirely. Everything and anything is possible, but be careful or you might rip down the whole edifice.

Idk, I deeply love it. The setting and weirdness underlying the setting has been very important to me. Concepts like turning the wheel on it’s side, of love being an act of self-annihilating violence, of CHIM being a state of self-awareness of one’ ephemerality but illogically asserting one’s reality and identity in the face of that ephemerality have all helped me get through a whole lot of shit over the years.

Plus I just love the idea that the gods are divided in to Aedra, “Our Ancestors”, and Daedra, “Not our ancestors” and the Dunmer (the dark elves, except “Dark” refers to their dour, sour, or sullen mood rather than their dark skin) decided “Fuck that we’re going to hang out with our cool wine aunts Azura, Boethia, and Mephala y’all have fun with your dork ancestors while we learn how to have secret murder sex.”

Honestly it just finally crystalized for me why that quote has always pissed me off when redditors hold it up as some sort of deep philosophical statement when it is, at best, a cheap rehashing of the also-hacky Clockwork Orange theme of being made to be good vs choosing to be good, and I had to articulate it while it was fresh in my mind.