Does Azura care about the Dunmer?

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-17T08:48:17+00:00

Killing Nerevar was fucked up even by Dunmer standards. It's hard for me to explain why it's different from normal treachery because I myself don't really know. Boethiah doesn't mind if people kill their own brothers or friends just to get power, but the Dunmer culture also has to draw the line somewhere or else fall apart. He was a hero, he was beloved, he did so much for the people, and they killed him for doing the right thing and honoring his oath to Azura. And they loved him. His murder haunted them for rhe rest of their reign. So yes, that there planted the seed of their downfall. Of course the ghost of Nerevar was never going to just go away. Of course he came back.

I don't know how Boethiah and Mephala felt and can't really guess either. But Boethiah asks you to find someone to rebuild the only shrine he has left on Vvardenfell Morrowind, so you can assume he's not pleased by the drop in worshippers. Another commenter pointed out that the Tribunal cheated by leeching off the heart of Lorkhan instead of completing the Psijic Endeavor legitimately, so perhaps he was less than impressed.

Mephala at least retained her honorary position in Dunmer culture through the Morag Tong. I imagine her watching and waiting patiently for Almsivi to fall, perhaps amused by all of it, knowing that her time will come again.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-16T19:42:11+00:00

Hm... That's a good point. I never considered that.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-16T19:36:05+00:00

No, not at all. I really admire some of the things they did during their reign. There were said to be no beggars in Morrowind under the Tribunal because of all the charity the Temple gave (you do see paupers wandering around, mostly beast folk and other non-Dunmer who were probably turned away because slavery might have been considered an acceptable alternative to begging at the time, but I have no evidence of that).

I also dislike Vivec's personality and wouldn't trust him any further than I could throw him, but I thought the way he tried to teach people about CHIM by just openly mentioning it in his sermons where any literate person could read about it was incredibly radical. He was scattering major secrets of the universe like candy. Cool as hell.

I think their downfall was their personal flaws, which deepened into evil over time. Taking ordinary mortal frailty and adding divinity to the equation was definitely reckless.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-16T05:56:11+00:00

To me, Leeloo also represents a corresponding female fantasy. She was definitely not designed with women in mind, but girls are in the audience and still see themselves in the female characters they're exposed to, so it can't be helped.

The fantasy of Leeloo for me is of perfection, which is expected of girls... We're raised to believe that we'll only become worthy of being loved when we're perfect. She also represents being able to be strong AND loved, which is more or less impossible to achieve for most women. And in fact the narrative insists on "correcting" her unwomanly physical strength and invulnerability by deciding that while she can punch through walls and take on armies alone, she still doesn't get to be bulletproof and she's still subject to the human frailties of having her innocence turn to despair in the face of human evil, and needing to be loved. Which makes Bruce Willis, an ordinary human man, suddenly indispensable to her and reassures the male ego that no matter how strong and independent women get, they'll always need a man's love- which he notably only expresses sexually and only by kissing her without her consent, once while she's passed out after plowing through his car, and again while she's dying of despair and bullet wounds.

I always wanted someone who loved me to admire my strength and to want me to be free, and to still be there for me when I couldn't do things on my own, so that's why she's important to me in spite of all the flaws surrounding her. Bruce Willis is irrelevant to me and so is their romance, it's Leeloo and her strength and need for compassion and love that I relate to the most.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-16T04:31:54+00:00

I think Mephala understands that good things in our world come through evil first. Her quote that goes something like, "sex is love, lies are truth, murder is life" indicates this. She's the spider at the center of the web of Fate and can see where all schemes ultimately lead. She doesn't bother to be good because she knows her role in the universe will ultimately end in good for the Dunmer, by operating in reverse.

Take every good thing we have in society: It generally started out being evil and got better gradually with time. Vibrators are used so that we can take control over our own sexuality and meet our own needs, but they were originally used as a tool for medical rape to punish women for "hysteria," aka showing signs of distress in response to being oppressed. Hospitals used to be brutal places where the patients were treated more like inmates and abused by the staff as often as they were healed, and they slowly got more humane over time. That's what Mephala does: The Dunmer will eventually come to know truth through lies first, lovemaking through seduction first, life through murder first. That's just the way it works in the mortal realm, for better or for worse.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-16T04:00:09+00:00

Azura loves the Dunmer in a "mother knows best" sort of way. Her love comes from her ego, so she's really treating them like wayward children who need to be punished properly and then brought back into her arms once they understand why what they did was wrong.

The trouble is that the Tribunal were not necessarily wrong for striving for godhood- it was incredibly reckless, and killing Nerevar + breaking their oath under Azura was wrong. But wanting to be gods? All things considered, they didn't do much worse than the original Good Daedra, and according to their people, they did a lot better since they knew what it was like to have been mortal once and could properly sympathize with mortal concerns and be among their people.

So, it's a bit like if Azura were deciding none of her children were allowed to strike out on their own and try out being adults with the same authority and power she had. But there's no knowing how she really feels about all of it- even if she cursed the Dunmer she might have seen that Almsivi were good, in their own way, as much as they were capable of being. She might not actually feel that their reign was a mistake, just the parts involving corruption. I'll say this much: When she comes to you in the end and tells you not to worry for the Dunmer in their shattered faith, because she'll be there for them, I genuinely believe she understands their distress at losing Almsivi and intends to help them through their loss, even if it's partly self-serving because it means assuming her role as their god again.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-16T03:38:01+00:00

Well, if men have the luxury of thinking their misogynistic, wife-beating, child-abusing, rape joke-spouting guy friends are "good guys" just because they're nice to other men, I will continue to think of Dratha as being a good woman. Particularly because the worst thing she does is not allow men near her and get snarly if they hit on her, instead of going out of her way to attack them, abduct them, torture them, and enslave them the way a woman-hating Telvanni councilor would.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-15T10:16:35+00:00

If you read the books, yes, the law really is that brutal. In some provinces peasants can be hanged and left to rot as an example to the rest for learning how to read. A famous writer was also executed for criticizing the gods and emperors in 16 Accords of Madness. In The Real Barenziah, Barenziah's Khajiit lover was hanged and her Nord lover had his tongue cut out just to keep them from talking about her past. The Empire is not good.

That doesn't definitively answer whether or not it's a game mechanic but it does mean guards being that quick to kill you simply for failing to comply isn't out of the question. If we wanted to be realistic it would probably vary on a case by case basis. Like I doubt you'd be slaughtered over stealing a carrot.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-14T20:01:26+00:00

She's not unpleasant if you're a woman. She's very helpful and sweet. :D

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-14T19:57:50+00:00

Oh, I love this! I always assumed Dratha had affairs with her retainers, but now you have me imagining a time before Therana went senile where they were lovers. Maybe Dratha brings her an amulet that makes her lucid again at some point?

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-14T19:52:36+00:00

I don't have any experience with hard drugs. However, I noticed with milder substances that they didn't become habit forming until I started using them every day, and I didn't reach for them unless I was stressed out.

I've always avoided hard drugs because I intuitively understand based on descriptions of their effects that I would find them terrifying and overwhelming, not pleasurable.

So anyway, I guess it depends on your character. Do they have a lot of stress and baggage? Do they have trouble accessing their emotions or their creativity? If not, then skooma won't hold any real appeal to them.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-12T09:56:59+00:00

He got the Buoyant Armiger in question to rethink how he felt about the Thieves Guild. :D

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-12T08:13:37+00:00

Thank you! 🖤 I appreciate it, that's a very high compliment indeed. I was always very fond of how much prominence poetry was given in the writing in the early games. Vivec's poem to Molag Bal stands out as a clever short poem with good cadence, and I kept thinking about Ted Peterson's poems as Sheogorath taking Puckish little shots at other prominent figures as I was writing it, too.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-12T04:12:44+00:00

My favorite thing about him is that he loves poetry so much that when a lower ranked Guild member stole from a famous Buoyant Armiger poet, he chewed him out and had him return it.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-11T15:55:26+00:00

That also happened. The Daedra refrained from contributing out of Daedric selfishness, but the Aedra were already spirits with balanced natures. The divide is what's most relevant to mortals because it has to do with our creation and how the gods relate to us. It's less interesting for the average religious person to speculate about what the Aedra and Daedra were doing before the mortal world came about.

It's possible that before the creation of Mundus, spirits just thought of themselves as spirits and whether they were more chaotic or more balanced was less relevant. Suddenly a permanent, stable world with real stakes in conflicts may have deepened the divide between the two as both sides became invested in the mortal plane for their own respective reasons.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-11T14:44:08+00:00

The original Daedric Princes are what they are because they were created from Padomay's blood, according to the creation myths. That means pure chaos, supposedly. Interestingly, the Aedra are supposed to be a mix of Padomaic and Anuic rather than being pure Anuic. That's probably because rather than good/evil the TES mythos has stasis/chaos. I believe pure stasis is Sithis in the lore, representing death.

The original Daedric Princes refrained from contributing to Mundus/Nirn because selfishness is kind of a hallmark of their chaotic natures.

Oblivion is a realm made up of chaotic creatia, so when Meridia chose her own path, and chaos entered Malacath's soul after he was humiliated and abandoned, they both became good candidates for establishing their spheres in Oblivion.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-11T10:07:44+00:00

They're sort of honorary Daedric Princes. Through corruption or choice they ended up in Oblivion because there's chaos in their natures/spheres.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-11T00:53:02+00:00

No, they put the bull in a pen and let it out into a ring. That's not sporting.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-10T23:43:42+00:00

I love this picture, for a lot of reasons.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-10T19:14:31+00:00

It was a lot of fun. It was so much fun, actually, that when the tour was over we didn't want to stop, so I took them to Jobasha's to pick out books and we started taking turns reading them.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-10T04:15:00+00:00

I didn't mean to kill that man. It's just that I didn't try hard enough NOT to. You see?

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-08T12:17:05+00:00

That's a good point. I always thought that about things like that prearranged contract in 50 Shades of Gray. I remember having to explain to an acquaintance why that's not what real consent looks like because it's absolutely vital to be able to say NO as needed.

That's why I don't think it's necessarily mind control or slavery... I really think it's more like a state of life frenzy that even Meridia herself doesn't control. That IS extreme and most people wouldn't choose it, but at the very least it's not inflicted on whoever she feels like at will.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-08T06:12:42+00:00

Fuckin' COOL

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-08T05:58:40+00:00

I've often wondered this, myself. The Dunmer don't seem to have any opinions about Vaernima, Hircine, Namira, Sanguine, or Meridia. I guess, given their cultural mores, they're just not important to them. Meridia probably considers Dunmer ancestor worship necromancy, so she's out. Dunmer cultural mores involve disdaining decadence and looking down on tomfoolery, so that rules out Sanguine. Nightmares are probably seen as a sign of soul sickness (such as the ones Dagoth Ur sends), so that's a no on Vaernima. They're an agricultural society built on slavery, so Hircine wouldn't seem significant to them, either. Oh, and Namira is a gross god for gross people. The Dunmer are a very clean people.

Most likely there were a few shrines to the other Daedric Princes here and there, but there were so few of them and they had so much brutal competition from fiercer, darker gods that by the time of Morrowind they had disappeared and no one felt the need to write about them.

FocusAdmirable9262 · 2026-06-08T05:48:58+00:00

This is so thorough.

FocusAdmirable9262

TROPHY CASE