As I was playing modded Skyrim the other day I was remembering how at one time I thought how epic it would be if it was made into a movie. Definitely not not anymore. If made today, how do you think they would butcher it? Obviously the main character would be female and the Dunmer in Windhelm would be the focus of the story.
I still think it would be cool if a great fantasy author wrote a 12 book series about the history of Tamriel or a series on the adventures of past Dragonborns or Morrowind. So many possibilities
ESO has already started assfucking the lore on the racial front. A core feature of the TES races (and a deeply-embedded excuse for having races as a game mechanic) is that they can't hybridize - The mother's race determines the child's. This isn't just a biological reality either, it's a mythic one. The races are subdivisions of higher powers dating back to the creation of the mortal realm, and arguably from different realms entirely.
Then ESO decided a bunch of the NPCs were mixed race and that was that. The ESO lore is at least partially written by redditors (seriously), and they've had their panties in a bunch over the racial essentialism of the series for a decade now. It undermines basically all of the series' interesting metaphysics, but hey, at least a bunch of faggots don't think it's icky.
The part I love about the Elder Scrolls series is that it's unreliable as all fuck, and the wise writer leans into that heavily.
Supposedly, the Bretons are all descended from a human-free-use Elven society(no, I'm not kidding) that constantly bred with their human slaves to the point where the two hybridized, so it's... technically possible?
Unless it's all lies, of course. In the Elder Scrolls, we have atleast 3 different sources for where the general races of man could have come from. Fun fact, the Redguard aren't included in any of those tales and are instead invaders from another continent entirely...
I always point to the Bretons as a great example of how race is TES is so real that interbreeding can't create a new race. The Ayleids boned these manlets for centuries, and they're still manlets. Literally, they're still men, they have nothing in common with their Ayleid ancestors. In theory, I think the only way to actually create a new race is to use TES's equivalent of deep magic to "retcon" it into existence, similar to how Auriel was divided - Ethnogenesis as a ritual.
Well I’m glad I gave up on ESO years ago. They could’ve just started working on ES6 but they thought that was a better option
Is that also true of the human races? A redguard mating with a Nord or a Breton will result in a child showing traits of the mother alone? What about skin colour?
In most stories, humans are usually derived from a single group of individuals traveling and colonizing various areas of the world, and their regional differences are linked to adaptations to their surroundings. Warhammer is an example of that. Is TES' lore actually saying that there are clear ancestral and immutable distinctions between races of humans?
Almost always, yes, a Redguard mother and a Nord father would result in a Redguard child. The child obviously gets some traits from the father, which can include skin and hair, but the overall trend is towards the racial standard. There's a handful of exceptions, but they all predate the lore revamp in the Redguard/Battlespire/Morrowind era.
The Bretons are the clearest example of race essentialism in TES. The Ayleids almost certainly looked like Altmer (if they weren't just Altmer outright), and the Bretons were just tribals they took as slaves. They intermixed for generations, but all Breton are still short, still have round ears, and do not have yellow skin or sharp eyes.
To make a very long story very short, yes, the races you see in TES are all functionally distinct classes of life. It's unclear at what point the mannish precursor spirits became the races of men (and fundamentally unanswerable for reasons far too complex for a short answer), but they definitely do descend from distinct spiritual/mythic forces. If you dig deep enough, the Atmorans and Yokudans (Nords and Redguards) might literally be aliens not only to each other, but to Nirn as well.
I'm leaving a lot out here, but you get the picture.
I refuse to believe you're not making this up.
There's a Cyrod-Redguard (of course) NPC who complains that her Cyrod counterparts were trying to shove her into a "neat little box" or something to that effect. She was one of the big story NPCs whenever Elsweyr came out, I believe.
The most shocking thing to me is that they made her half-Cyrod, when they could have made her half-Nord and had her complain about Nord racism as a way to publicly humiliate Stormcloak fans. Probably a lack of intelligence rather than lack of vindictiveness. ESO writers aren't exactly winners of the genetic lottery.
I think Vivec is also referred to with neopronouns somewhere, but I can't find any reference to it now. Maybe it was removed, or maybe nobody played enough of the Morrowind expansion for anyone to notice. It's definitely a thing among the more faggy lore fans, though they try to keep it under wraps because Vivec being the god-tranny for representation makes trannies look like monsters.
It hadn't occurred to me until just now that troons would refer to Vivec with nonbinary they, but the UESP wiki hasn't been subverted so it must only be the really militant ones doing it.